Iron Man, Personal Growth, and Leadership
Spoiler alert: If you plan to see “The Avengers”, you may want to hold off reading this. I’m about to describe a pivotal moment in the movie.
As you probably know by now, the story involves a group of flawed but powerful people (more or less) who have to find a way to work together to defeat a greedy, narcissistic demigod who is determined to own the earth and subjugate the human race – to “make them kneel,” because to Loki (the Norse god and villain), that is all humans are good for.
The metaphor for the debate about our current business and social climate is too easy – but that’s not what really struck me during this scene.
Loki is about to open a portal to Asgard to let in a marauding army of Frost Giants. The Avengers are struggling to figure out where he is so they can stop him. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) tries to reason it out, thinking of what Loki could be after – and describes Loki as a narcissistic, power-mad individual who wants to have his name plastered all over some monument to himself….and Stark stops cold, realizing that Loki is at the Stark Industries building - which has his name plastered all over it. And he realizes the irony (sorry). He looks in the mirror, and sees Loki looking back at him. He sees his enemy in himself. And then he knows how to win, and he ends up taking the biggest risk, not for himself, but on behalf of the world.
How many of us have the courage to look in that mirror? Or, having looked, can accept what we see? And further, once we see it, do something about it? That is personal, transformational change. Tony Stark did it in the movie, and Robert Downey Jr. did it in real life. Downey was written off, but had the courage to come back and has now exceeded even the best estimates of his potential that people were putting forward when he was down.
And he is not the only one. Our world is full of heroes, and stories of redemption, if we choose to look at them.
How Great Companies Build Great Leaders
By Michael Stafford & Jon Anastasio
Here are the introductory paragraphs from our article in the Spring edition of the Insights newsletter published by the Center for Leadership Formation, Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University. The full newsletter is here and our article starts on page 3. My colleague, Mike Stafford, is the Managing Member of Management Performance Solutions, LLC, and former SVP of Talent Management for Starbucks. The article is based on our learning from our own experience and what many of our colleagues have shared about what makes leadership learning stick.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Countless stories fill the news about the obvious and tangible financial and material impact of the recession. Home foreclosures, unemployment, and massive federal debt are serious impacts and need to continue to be addressed and quickly resolved.
However, the intangible negative consequences of the recession on employee engagement and the employee/employer contract have not received nearly as much popular attention. As the economy improves, there may be a high cost in employee loyalty and commitment, and organizations could possibly experience an exodus of top talent who have been waiting to leave until the job market strengthened. This is potentially bad news for company bench strength charts, as retaining your future leaders is a key element in building leadership continuity.
Even without a talent exodus, the forecasted need for leadership talent is high. Deloitte has just published the latest findings in their longitudinal study “Talent Edge 2020: Redrafting talent strategies for the uneven recovery.” They state: “Approximately one-third (30%) of executives surveyed ranked developing leaders and succession planning as today’s top talent priority—the highest of any response in the survey.” Yet, they also report “Corporate talent programs are falling short on performance and investment.”[1]
So what’s the answer?
The best companies do not change their stripes when things get tough. They commit to staying the course and maintain a positive culture and climate as they work through their financial and operational issues. They may cut activities, but they stay true to their foundational development values.
The Value of Leadership Learning: You’ll See It When You Believe It.
Do you believe the following about developing leaders?
• Leadership can be learned, and continuously improved over time.
• People continually grow and develop, personally and professionally, over their lifetimes.
• There are times our intentions do not match our actions, and the only way we know about that gap is through regular feedback.
• The gap matters.
In multiple organizations, I’ve heard:
• “Nope, leaders are born, not made, and you either have it or you don’t.”
• “Yes, but I want to see what my return will be on any development investment I make.”
The ROI demand is completely fair. Corporate leadership learning must be linked to strategy, it must be relevant to running the business, and it has to affect either revenue or cost.
But what kind of “return” would convince you to construct a leadership development capability that includes the right mix of experience, coaching, and learning events with accountability built into the process?
A colleague told me today that he and his company were able to put a development process in place that increased internal promotions by 50%. That meant hiring significantly fewer leaders from the outside, which saved big recruiting expenses.
The intangible benefit is obvious to many – it also avoided the cost of failure among external leadership hires, and the cultural damage that can be done by a bad fit.
Proof: noun, 1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.
– Dictonary.com
If you believe at your core that leadership can be learned, that people are learning organisms, and that interacting with others is a valuable learning process, then you will believe an ROI presentation that forecasts impact. If you do not believe it, the evidence will never be sufficient to convince you.
[Read more...]
Small Company Thinking
Cartoonist Hugh McLeod, a skillful and talented artist, author, and organizational thinker did a piece with the tag line: “A big company can choose to remember that it was once a small company.”
I thought, “So, why would they choose to remember that?” Here’s where I landed.
You can feel it when the intention shifts from profit as the natural result of serving the customer and running a great company to profit as the point and customers as market segments; from too small to take anything for granted to too big to fail.
In my opinion, if you’re not a good company for the employee, the customer will feel it. If you’re not a good company for the customer, you won’t be good for the shareholder for very long.
- Small company thinking focuses on the customer and the people who serve them.
- Big company thinking focuses on Wall Street.
You’ve got to find a way to do both.
[Read more...]
Didn’t See That Coming….
A week or so ago, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat wrote a great column on the Occupy Wall Street protests that revealed a response from government and private sector executives that I really wasn’t expecting:
Empathy.
The President, the Vice President, the Chairman of the Fed, even some corporate executives have been expressing understanding of how people feel and why they feel that way. I mean, this is outright active listening. And hearing it from Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner just warmed my humanistic, organizational development heart.
On the other hand, we have Tony Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” and Jeff Immelt’s 2010 comment (defending Goldman Sachs) that inferred people upset about unemployment and foreclosures are engaging in “misguided populism.”
All of which made me think about emotional intelligence, and the comment that Dr. Goleman makes in a virtual whisper that a high degree of emotional intelligence – a combination of self awareness and the ability to be aware of and show compassion for the needs and travails of others – may be a matter of maturity and development rather than skill.
Given that, in the case of President Obama and Vice President Biden, not much is changing despite the active listening and in the case of the CEOs, not much is changing with no pretense to actually listen, it makes me wonder if decades of human relations training, feedback, and coaching has done nothing more than install a veneer of EQ behavior – that fundamental, visceral change has yet to take place.
What do you think? Have we made progress or not? Any examples of true empathy vs. saying the right things?
Some Thoughts on the “70% Rule”
You know the formula – 70% of learning happens through experience, 20% through coaching and mentoring, and 10% through structured learning. The jury is in – whether it’s writing a strategic plan or learning to drive a car with a manual transmission, experience is ultimately what teaches us to excel.
But, we discover what to learn and the concepts and principles behind it through structured learning. And we learn to get better over time through coaching.
In the past, I’ve spent a fair amount of effort to stop training that was being used when coaching or experience would better serve the learning need. Now I find myself on the other side of the argument, defending structured learning as critical to building organizational capability when efficiency and productivity goals suggest it should be curtailed, and it feels somewhat familiar.
Remember Learning Organizations?
There was complete alignment on the idea that a great deal of information, knowledge, and experience lived in the minds of the workforce. Everyone agreed this resource could benefit the corporation if it could be captured and easily accessed by others, creating a new baseline from which to take thinking and innovation to new levels. Peter Senge and others brought systems thinking and dialogue tools into the mainstream conversation, and it looked like some banner years for innovation were ahead.
Thinking Like a Leader, Part Two
From Vision to Purpose
Generally, you can’t “do” a vision. It is the outcome of your effort over time. A vision is big, a picture in your mind of what it will look like, feel like, what the results will be when you get where you most want to go.
There is an apocryphal story about real estate developers resolving the issue of where to put the sidewalks connecting newly built complexes by planting grass, and waiting to see where the residents wear down the best paths among the buildings. This, of course, brings planning back to the question of purpose – what is a sidewalk for?
No matter how passionately a vision is held, it can be difficult to know where to start. You need something more tangible – some call it a mission, some call it a purpose, but it is a combination of what you need to accomplish to realize your vision and the reasons why. The “what” gives you direction and makes your task tangible and clear – we need walkways. The “why” tells you how to proceed – make it easy for people to get where they want to go.
If you are like most experienced professionals, there’s a lot you can do. The prerequisites are deciding what you should do – what’s most important – and answering the question – “In service to….what?”
[Read more...]
Strategic Relationship Management for HR
Here are a few highlights from my workshop at the Seattle SHRM conference in May, during which participants created an action plan to make the business case for a program or initiative they considered important for their company.
Last month, I had the opportunity to talk with about 80 HR professionals about “Strategic Relationship Management: the Power of Persuasion” at the Second Annual Strategic Conference of the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) Washington State Council.
Taking apart the title, we discussed the fact that everyone had at some point successfully created and executed on a strategy, plan, or initiative, had built and maintained successful relationships, and had persuaded someone of something.
The workshop focused on how to use those abilities in our leadership roles, and how to make a compelling business case for our most important people priorities.
Thinking Like a Leader, Part One
Sharing the Vision
A few years ago, I was in one of those philosophical discussions about leadership and management. Everyone was sharing their views of the ten things all great leaders do, and the traits that separate the best from the rest. Of course, everyone in the discussion had a different list of ten, and “the key traits” varied by, among other things, obvious behavioral evidence of psychological type.
Then a guy named Jim (a senior leader with a decades-long track record of outstanding results) provided a short, complete vision of leadership, saying “The best leaders teach you to see the way they see rather than telling you what to do.”
*crickets*
[Read more...]
The Bike Stays Up Today
*facedesk* Another baby boomer with a Harley metaphor? Didn’t Robert Pirsig do this a couple decades ago?
Yes. Kind of. (And you should re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)
But this isn’t a tale of mid-life epiphanies. This is about the simple technique I use to keep my butt in the saddle, which is a good theme to explore in the first blog post for a newly launched business.
