Wise leaders initiate their listening process by asking a lot of questions. The most important question they teach others to ask is “why”? Why do we do things this way? Why does this process matter in the first place? Why did it take so long for someone to ask why?

At its best, leadership becomes a dialogue between about how to continually improve processes and policies to better accomplish a shared purpose. Effective leaders ensure that learning to ask the right questions is a responsibility widely distributed throughout the organization.

Effective leaders expect to be questioned by their people. They teach their people the value of questioning leaders because they learned it themselves as followers. Only interdependent followers can become interdependent leaders that encourage partnership.

If you want leaders skilled in the ability to be questioned, you have to recruit, equip, and encourage questionable followers.

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

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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

When I was around 18, I worked as a shift manager at McDonald’s Corporation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. One of the assistant managers that helped me get promoted and then trained me was a man named Don Griffin. I admired Don because he cared about the work that he did and he cared about me and the rest of his employees. He was also very focused on producing results for the company. Don had a huge influence on my work ethic and basic management philosophy.

Over the years, I’ve never forgotten Don telling me “Performance talks, bullshit walks.” I could count on hearing it every time I tried to give Don an excuse for poor performance. That simple concept still influences how I interpret almost every interaction I have with people in my various work related roles.

I’m OK with folks dropping the ball and making occasional mistakes, and I’m OK with people not delivering as promised from time to time. We all do it – including me. But I have a very low tolerance for folks that won’t accept responsibility for their mistakes. I’ve never known anyone commit to fixing a problem without first admitting “I screwed up.”

Don still lives in the Tulsa area, and he and his wife have a son named Bret.

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

I’d really appreciate your help with a survey I am conducting! Click here to learn more about participating.

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I first heard of “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins To Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Bob Sutton’s blog, where he called it “a masterpiece every manager should own.” I got my copy of the book free from the publicist. I don’t think it is a masterpiece, but I do think it is the most important evidence-based management book I’ve read this year; consequently, I do think every manager should strongly consider moving this book to the top of their reading list.

The book focuses on something the authors call the inner work life effect: “people do better work when they are happy, have positive views of the organization and its people, and are motivated primarily by the work itself.” (p, 47). They go so far as to claim their research shows “as inner work life goes, so goes the company.” (p. 3). That’s a bold claim that I’m not sure is supported by the data in their one study; however, I do believe it is supported numerous related studies on employee attitudes, emotions, motivation, and performance published in leading peer-reviewed journals over the last 30 years.

The book also highlights the power of events that are part of every workday. The power of events is great news for us as managers, because we can take planned, systemic action to control events that impact the inner work lives of our employees. Here are the main points that the book explains in detail (pp 8-9):

1. The types of events – what we call the key three – stand out as particularly potent forces supporting inner work life, in this order: progress in meaningful work; catalysts (events that directly help people work); and nourishers (interpersonal events that uplift people doing the work).

2. The primacy of progress among the key three influences on inner work life is that we call the progress principle: of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.

3. The negative forms – or absence of – the key three events powerfully undermine inner work life: setbacks in the work, inhibitors (events that directly hinder project work); and toxins (interpersonal events that undermine the people doing the work).

4. Negative events are more powerful than positive events, all else being equal.

5. Even seemingly mundane events – such as small wins and minor setbacks – can exert potent influence on inner work life.

The authors admit that their research does not establish causality – which is very difficult to accomplish. “Were all of these inner work life changes caused by daily progress and setbacks, or might some of them have caused progress or setbacks in the first place? There is no way of knowing from the numerical data alone.” (p. 79).

I love the concept of catalysts: events that support progress and positive inner work life. The authors identified seven consistently effective catalysts (pp 104-105): 1) Set clear goals; 2) Allow autonomy; 3) Provide resources; 4) Give enough time, but not too much; 5) Help with the work; 6) Learn from problems and successes; and 7) Allow ideas to flow. Please note these ideas are not new - they can be found in one form or another in most contemporary approaches to leadership and are evidence-based.

The book also provides a very helpful daily progress checklist that you can use to review your daily managerial actions and plan for the next day. I think it is brilliant. I concur with the authors when they state:

The aim of the checklist is managing for meaningful progress, because that is your real job inside the organization. This may require a significant mind-shift. Business schools, business books, and managers themselves usually conceptualize management as managing organizations or managing people. But if you focus on daily progress in meaningful work, managing people and the entire organization will become much more feasible. (pp. 174-175).

This book is packed with both sound philosophy and evidence-based advice. Anyone and everyone can benefit by reading this book, because “whatever your level in your organization, even if you lead only by your work as a good colleague, you bear some responsibility for the inner work lives of the people around you…you can become a better contributor to the climate and success of your organization. (p. 181).

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I have the honor of speaking today at the EcSell Summit in Atlanta. I am the last speaker on the last day of the meeting, so my role is not just to provide some new learning but also to help folks bring together the learning from the previous day and think about how they will apply it when they return to work. My first point will be that if as a result of attending the conference you don’t find yourself doing something different to help your team improve it’s performance, then don’t return to this or any other conference. If you spend two days at a professional conference and don’t learn anything new, you need to confront the reason why, and I would suggest that looking in the mirror is the place to start.

Here are some of the other points I hope to make:

1. How is the wrong question. Work hard to understand why things work, especially why your team and it’s customers behave in certain ways. Understanding why affords you the opportunity to create competitive advantage rather than competitive parity.
2. For most businesses, growth through excellence should be the top priority. If your business is not growing, it’s probably dying. If you are not growing personally, you are probably decaying as well.
3. Your people are the key to the growth of your business. You are the key to the growth of your people. If you refuse to change and grow as a leader, you will constrain the growth of your people and likewise the growth of your business.
4. Your ability to learn faster than your competitors is your core performance technology.
5. Help your folks become interdependent partners with you at work. Help them become better at working autonomously and asking for and accepting help when they need it. Give them a reason to perform with passion and care about what they do and who they do it for and with.
6. Be REAL in all your relationships with people. Assume responsibility, invite others to share their expectations of you, make accountability start with a look in the mirror, and never stop learning and growing.

I hope during my time today I am able to change a few minds about the value of partnering with others at work to create a more healthy, responsible work environment where everyone can thrive.

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Autonomy Enables The Helpful To Perform

If you ask someone to make an exception for you, make sure it’s because you are delivering exceptional performance. If a policy, procedure, or rule is impeding your ability to perform, help team members succeed, or impress customers, then it’s your responsibility to suggest viable solutions and expect an exception.

photo credit: Fields of View

Never ask for or accept an exception for any reason other than exceptional performance. Reversion to the mean is the reward for those that believe they are entitled to exceptions.

The only reason people so routinely ask for exceptions is that they’ve learned either directly or vicariously that almost any personal inconvenience can be justified as an exceptional circumstance. A culture of exceptions is bad for the reputation and performance of your organization, and that’s bad for your career. It’s deceptively easy to become part of the mediocre mass of folks that put daily pressure on leaders to lower standards to their own lackluster levels of comfort.

I have tremendous respect for people that can say in a matter-of-fact way “I dropped the ball on that one, but it’s my bad, I know what I did wrong, and I’ll try very hard to keep it from happening again.” Falling short does not make the sincere quest for excellence any less virtuous. Setting high standards for yourself and refusing to make excuses when you struggle to meet those standards guarantees you will be exceptional, because the majority of your peers have compared themselves among themselves and would rather ask for exceptions than assume full personal responsibility when things don’t go exactly the way they want.

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

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My daughter played in her first volleyball game of the season the other night. This is her senior year, and she a captain on the team, so she wants to have a good year. Her team won a hard fought match, but my daughter was disappointed with her performance. Her serving, passing, and defense was consistent, but she struggled with hitting. Her hitting started strong, but she got blocked a few times in a row early on and from that point on her hitting game changed.

She held back.

I told her the next time she gets a shot blocked she needs to come right back and hit it at the same girl even harder, and to continue to do so until she forces that person to make an error or miss a block. Her opponent needs to learn quickly that she has no intention of quitting or holding back. She needs to transfer the doubt from her head into her opponent’s head. If that tactic does not work and she gets taken out of the game, it won’t be for lack of effort.

The summer before I started my doctoral studies at Oklahoma State University, I was in Oklahoma on business and took the time to travel to Stillwater to try to meet some of the faculty in the program. I met briefly with Raj Basu, the only professor in the office at the time of my visit.

Raj told me he had recommended that I NOT be accepted into the Ph.D. program because he felt my GMAT scores were too low. He did me a huge favor by being brutally honest with me. I left Stillwater that day discouraged, but I returned in the fall determined. In every class I took, I looked around the room on the first day and told myself that every one of the other students were probably smarter than me, but not a single one of them was going to work harder than me. It was grit, not intelligence that got me through the program.

Grit is like a muscle – it can be developed with consistent and focused effort. But if you don’t use it, you can lose it.

Don’t hold back. You can’t win every time, but don’t lose for lack of effort. Learn from your mistakes and get back in the game more determined than ever.

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

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Is meekness a desirable quality in a leader? I’m trying to wrap my brain around that question, and the hard part is defining what meekness is and what it is not.

This question is void of meaning unless you recognize leadership as an influence relationship. Leadership arises from the dynamic interaction of two or more people using their available sources of power (e.g. referent, expert, position, reward, coercive) to affect purpose-driven, real changes.

Borrowing from John Dickson’s thoughts on humility, I’m going to define meekness as a response to power directed at you by another that considers the good of others before yourself. The meek leader first absorbs as much of the power directed at him or her as possible, dissipates whatever will not benefit the group, and then responds with purposeful foresight. Meek leaders are systems thinkers – they carefully consider the “big picture” of all their actions and reactions.

Meekness is not weakness. Meekness emanates from a position of power as an intentional response to produce a positive affect in others.  Over time the bold, counterintuitive nature of meekness fundamentally redefines the interpersonal interaction of those in close relationship.

Fearlessness is the paradox of meekness. Meek leaders never cower from the responsibility of right response.

Meekness is not humility. Dickson sees humility as the active use of power and influence for the good of others. Humility is something that I initiate and direct toward you; meekness is my response to your initiatives directed at me. Meekness and humility are full siblings, and sometimes rivals. Humility should mature faster than meekness simply because most of us will find more opportunities to practice humility; however, the development of meekness will always constrain our ability to lead with humility.

Like all virtuous leadership characteristics, meekness is a learned discipline. We are all born unique, but not meek. Strong meekness, like wisdom, is rare and remarkable. Strong meekness is very prudent.

Is meekness a desirable quality in a leader? I think so. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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I purchased and read “Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries” by Peter Sims because Bob Sutton gave it a glowing review at his website. As usual, Bob was right. I did not love it as much as Bob, but I liked it enough to recommend it to you.

The main point of the book is the power of experimental innovation. Experimental innovators don’t begin with a few big brilliant ideas. Instead, they discover what they should do via a series of “little bets” and small wins.

Learning by doing and having fun in the process are cornerstones of the experimental innovation process. This is nothing new. But he also highlights the importance of immersion, which I think people would be wise to pay a lot more attention to:

Take the time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up. (p. 14).

When you understand why people do the things they do you have the ability to create unique solutions that force others to try to copy what you are doing. If you don’t understand how and why things work, the best you can ever hope to achieve is strategic parity.

I don’t normally like business books with lots of stories, and this one has lots of stories. But Sims does a very good job of telling a few interesting stories that support his main points quite well. I loved his story in Chapter 6 of how Muhammad Yunus immersed himself in the problem of poverty in Bangladesh and ultimately formulated the microfinance solution.

By absorbing poverty from the worm’s eye view, asking lots of questions, and being open to changing his assumptions, Yunus could understand what he could not from a bird’s eye view. (p. 102).

If you have entrepreneurial aspirations, you should read this book. Even if you don’t think you want to be an entrepreneur someday, if your success as a leader requires enabling your people to continually produce creative insights and innovative solutions, I’m betting you will find this book worth your time.

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There is a difference between employees not speaking up at work because they don’t have anything to say about a specific issue and not speaking up because they fear the consequences of expressing their ideas. Managerial behavior can signal employees that it is unwise to speak up. But even when managers hold positive beliefs about the value of employee voice that manifest in encouraging behavior towards employees, some employees will still be reticent to share information they believe is risky.

The Academy of Management Journal recently published an extremely well done study by James Detert and Amy Edmondson (full citation below) that examined employee taken-for-granted beliefs about when and why speaking up at work is risky or inappropriate.  The authors found that “sometimes unwillingness to speak up is not experienced as intense, discrete fear but rather as a sense of inappropriateness; voice seems risky because it seems wrong or out of place.” (p. 481).

Through a series of four separate studies, they identified the following five beliefs employees can hold about authority figures that can cause them to exhibit self-protective silence:

1.     Negative career consequences of voice: e.g. if you want advancement opportunities in today’s world, you have to be careful about pointing out needs for improvement to those in charge

2.     Don’t embarrass the boss in public: e.g. you should always pass your ideas for improvement by the boss in private first, before you speak up publicly at work.

3.     Don’t bypass the boss upward: e.g. loyalty to your boss means you don’t speak up about problems in front of his or her boss.

4.     Need solid data or solutions (to speak up): e.g. unless you have clear solutions, you shouldn’t speak up about problems.

5.     Presumed target identification: e.g. it is not good to question the way things are done because those who have developed the routines are likely to take it personally.

This research is important because it shows that the boss is not always to blame for organizational silence. Individuals arrive at work with a set of implicit theories about work and authority figures that they learned via past direct and vicarious experiences. The authors conclude “managers appear saddled not only by their own actual behaviors inhibiting voice but also by subordinate beliefs about managers.” (p. 484).

If you want employee voice to become an operational priority, you are going to have to make changes to your selection, training, evaluation, reward, and promotion systems. My advice is to make employee voice an expected, measured, and rewarded behavior. Hire employees that can demonstrate a proven record of coming forward with specific suggestions and solutions at their previous jobs. Never promote to a position of management an employee that in addition to mastering the performance expectations of their assigned job did not also attempt to partner with managers to improve that job.

If you discover you have a manager that stifles employee voice, help them with training but don’t promote them again until they demonstrate that they understand how to encourage employee voice. If you discover you’ve hired an employee with strong self-protective beliefs about the safety of silence, help them engage in behavior at work that directly and specifically challenges those beliefs; otherwise, “it is unlikely that they will revise, set aside, or develop new implicit theories related to speaking up.” (p. 465).

Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comment section below!

Full citation: Detert, J.R. & Edmondson, A.C. (2011). Implicit Voice Theories: Taken-For-Granted Rules of Self-Censorship at Work. Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3): 461-488.

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