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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The third category of events that affect inner work life are nourishers, which are events that support the person doing the work. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer identify four categories of nourishers in their book “The Progress Principle” (pp. 131-133):

1.     Respect: Implicit or explicit expressions of another person’s value. Basic civility signifies respect and incivility disrespect.

2.     Encouragement: Help others find the ability to work through challenges, setbacks, and fears to accomplish meaningful goals

3.     Emotional Support: Validating emotions, including calming fears and reducing frustrations.

4.     Affiliation: Developing bonds of trust, appreciation, support, and cooperation among co-workers.

“The primary way in which nourishers fuel inner work life is by infusing the work with greater meaning” (p. 131). Unfortunately, Amabile and Kramer found that in their research that toxins were overwhelmingly more present than nourishers. They conclude by reflecting on the work of Peter Drucker, and state:

In Drucker’s view, a manager’s job is to serve employees by ensuring that their needs for challenging work and satisfying work lives are fulfilled. Leading by serving does not mean abdicationg responsibility. But it does require a wholly different mind-set toward management – focusing not on traditional control of subordinates, but on contribution to real work progress by the organizations’ members. (p. 155).

Hold yourself accountable for providing nourishment factors to those you work with. If you wait for this to come from top management, you might be waiting a long time. Your everyday words and actions toward those you work with matter and can make a long-term difference in the climate of your organization. Choose to be nourishing rather than toxic.

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

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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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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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The fall semester starts today. I am teaching my regular organizational behavior class to MBA students, and for the first time ever I’m teaching a version of that same course entirely online in our new Executive MBA program.  I’m also teaching my first semester long course in personal branding to undergraduate students (I’ve been teaching this in the summer only for several years). I taught a version of that class for the first time in the spring to MBA students.

I’ve offered advice to students in two previous posts that you can find by clicking here and here. My new piece of advice is this: set high standards for yourself.

Don’t compare yourself to others. That is a recipe for complacency and mediocrity. Don’t set your standards based on explicit requirements, with a goal of doing just enough work to “pass”. When you get feedback that your effort was not good enough, you will be very unhappy. Instead of seeing yourself as the source of your own discomfort and displeasure, you will probably find someone else to blame (e.g. me).

Expect more than the norm from yourself and you simply won’t have anything to worry about – ever. External standards and expectations become irrelevant when you operate above them.

I framed this post as advice for student success, but setting high personal standards is a recipe for success in all aspects of work and life. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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I’ve never lived in a world, or worked in an organization, that was void of rules. Rules can be a drag, but they can also serve as a very functional guide to productive behavior. Rules should always be purposeful, behavioral, very specific, and kept to an absolute minimum.

Rules should always represent minimum, reasonable standards of expected behavior, not stretch effort. For people with an internal locus of control that focus on group goals and hold themselves accountable to high standards of performance and conduct, rules are irrelevant. Good rules are only an issue for those that make bad choices.

Always stand behind, but never hide behind, your rules. Rules should be continually evaluated for their value and ability to serve the purpose. Eliminate or change a rule the moment it ceases to enable your people to work together more effectively. Rules are only as stupid as the people that use them as excuses to avoid improving systems.

Whatever you do, never bend the rules. If you make an exception to the rules for one person, you will send a discouraging message to the rest of your folks. If you bend a rule for one person, your standards and expectations will become ambiguous to everyone else. Bending a rule will teach people that you are willing to play favorites, unwilling to take the heat when the pressure is on, and unable to see the ethical gaps of your own behavior. If a rule no longer works for the group, change it.

Your behavior as a leader should teach people that “rule” is an innocuous four letter word. 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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The topic of tonight’s #leadfromwithin chat on Twitter was foresight. The hour long discussion was led by Lolly Daskal and Greg Waddell, and hundreds participated.

I talk about foresight in my MBA classes on Organizational Behavior as part of our class discussion of leadership. I share with my students this quote about foresight from Robert K. Greenleaf’s 1977 book:

This is the central ethic of leadership.  The failure (or refusal) to foresee may be viewed as an ethical failure, because a serious ethical compromise today (when the usual judgment on ethical inadequacy is made) is sometimes the result of a failure to make the effort at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act. The action we label unacceptable in the present moment is often really one of no choice. (Greenleaf, 1977, emphasis added)

Foresight is a learned habit, not a mystical gift that only a few oracles possess. Foresight is the discipline of systematically thinking through the unintended consequences of every decision you make. It requires the wisdom to purposefully surround yourself with people that you know won’t always see things the way you do and will have the courage to challenge you when they disagree. It requires the humility to admit publicly when you failed to foresee an unintended consequence of a decision and the grit to continually learn from your mistakes. Foresight demands real accountability and integrity.

Leaders that are more intent on telling than on listening care about themselves more than they care about you. I’ve learned from experience that foresight is not a high priority for leaders lost in the fog of their own hubris.

As the central ethic of leadership, leaders covet the development of foresight for the benefit of those they’ve been given the privilege to lead.  Leaders that fail to assume responsibility for developing the discipline of foresight will eventually forfeit the moral authority to lead.

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

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