The Leadership Traits of Recession-Proof Leaders – Part 2

The Leadership Traits of Recession-Proof Leaders – Part 2  (click her for Part 1)

Phase 1   Begin with YOULeaders Meeting during Recession

  • Take this issue seriously, very seriously.  Become informed about what your employees are going through.  Understand the nature of the challenge you face as the leader of distressed employees and the impact of this on their productivity and the company’s profit.
  • Get in touch with your own emotions and the impact the events of the past months have had on you personally – emotionally, physically, behaviorally and cognitively.
  • Create a picture of the kind of leader you would like to become, understanding that the leader you have been up to now is no longer good enough.  What leadership behaviors will you need to abandon and what new behaviors will you need to acquire?  What about your communication skills?  How will these need to be improved to be relevant to the current environment? 
  • Obtain  feedback from others around you– but choose people who will tell you the truth, not what you want to hear.  Leadership Assestment Review

  • Find the best program or person who can assist you in updating your skills and become the leader you want to become.   Try Sandy Gluckman

Phase 2    Formulate and Work the New Corporate Dream Continue reading The Leadership Traits of Recession-Proof Leaders – Part 2

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Building Spirited Business Teams Part 5

Make Profitable Decisions

In the first four articles of this series of seven, I put forward a proposition that there are two types of business teams.  Teams with spirit and teams without spirit.  Business teams with spirit are winners.  Teams without spirit are losers.  Athletics provide a helpful illustration of the way in which I use the word ‘spirit’ or ‘spirited.’ When we apply the word ‘spirit’ to a team (or an individual) we are saying that they demonstrate behaviours that indicate life force energy, such as being feisty, courageous, energetic, funny, determined, curious, genuine, collaborative and focused.

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Building Business Teams Part 4

In the first three articles of this series of seven, I put forward a proposition that there are two types of business teams.  Teams that have spirit and teams that don’t.  Business teams with spirit are winners.  Teams without spirit are losers.   The previous three articles each addressed one of the seven characteristics of winning business teams with spirit:

  • Have an Inspiring  Shared Vision
  • Think  and Act as a Team
  • Demonstrate Courage in Words and Action
  • The fourth characteristic of winning business teams is that they know how to use 1+1=3, out-the-box thinking.

1+1=3 thinking

It is obvious that in order to see the vast possibilities and opportunities available to them business teams will need the ability to create a broader view of whatever issue they are discussing.  I call this 1+1=3 thinking.  And to think more broadly they will need the ability to break the mould of their traditional thinking.  Swatch is a great example of this.  They were getting beaten up by their Japanese competitors and had to do something different to survive.  They challenged the traditional way of thinking and combined Swiss watch making skills with Italian fashion design and then they borrowed plastic engineering skills from LEGO.  The result was exceptional growth and revenue.  How were they able to think in this extremely lateral way?   What holds so many business teams back from thinking outside the box even when something that has become outdated?

Our EGO Gets in the Way

It is our ego that gets in our way. Our defensive egos find it very hard to challenge the status quo, to think creatively and to come up with an innovative solution.   This is because our ego only lets us hear half of the story and half of the facts – it filters what it wants us to hear.  In addition, our ego is self-protective and self-righteous.  So when our ego has control we don’t invite dialogue.  Our ego does not  enjoy having it’s assumptions challenged and is not interested in points of view that do not support its own.   Instead our ego causes us to spend huge amounts of energy justifying, intellectualizing and rationalizing our position.  With ego as our driver we don’t believe we need to change or that there is anything else we need to know.  This gives us a lopsided and limited worldview.

Effects of EGO

The multiplicative effect of ego thinking is best illustrated by this equation:   ½  x ½  = ¼.
This means that ½ the story x ½ the facts = ¼ the perceived possibilities= uninspired decisions = uninspired performance. This equation describes a team that continues to beat the same old drum, sometimes faster, sometimes louder, and while they do this they miss seeing new possibilities that would take them powerfully into the future.

Corporate Examples

Coca Cola is a perfect example of ½  x ½  = ¼ thinking. They missed some of the most important beverage trends in the past 20 years. They were late going into fruit flavored teas – Snapple did this first; late going into sports drinks – Gatorade did this first; late going into designer water – Nestle is No.1 in the world in that business; late going into new age beverages  and still trying to catch up to companies such as Red Bull.

Teams With Spirit

Teams who have spirit encourage 1+1=3 out-the-box thinking by using a process that is based on 7 spirited behaviours. They:

  • Study other companies, in any industry, that have successfully taken thought beyond that where it has been before and applied 1+1=3 thinking, such as Southwest Airlines, Apple iTunes, Starbucks, Virgin, amongst others.  Study their leaders too.
  • When discussing an issue, brainstorm and list the following: 
    • What traditional assumptions are we currently using in our thinking about this issue?   In other words they ask themselves what thoughts and beliefs do we hold that keeps us stuck with ½  x ½  = ¼ reductionist thinking?
  • They brainstorm the following question: 
    • What if we rejected each of these assumptions?  What would we do differently?
    • Encourage dialogue and debate amongst the team.  And make a list of all the suggestions, ideas and insights that emerge from this dialogue.
  • Suspend judgment – ask many questions so that you understand each person’s point of view clearly, but don’t ask questions to prove why it cannot be done.
  • Integrate as many of the ideas as possible that emerged in the brainstorm, creating a integrative solution or plan that would be described as ‘fundamentally different.’
  • Have the courage to communicate and execute this with passion.

Look for the fifth article in this series:  Building Spirited Business Teams: Making Profitable Decisions

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The Leadership Traits of Recession-Proof Leaders

Leadership Traits of Recession-Proof-Leaders – Part 1

Financial MeltdownThe sudden and unprecedented financial meltdown of 2008 has left its mark on the psyche of the nation. Millions of people are showing physical, emotional and behavioral signs of shock. Employees are coming to work with huge levels of anxiety and fear, they have seen their neighbors, colleagues, spouses and family members lose their jobs. They are frightened, insecure and anxious beyond description. Their world feels very unsafe.  They have lost confidence in their leaders and in their institutions. Many are taking medication for sleeplessness and stress. The reality is that people in this condition cannot deliver superior performance. And organizations need superior performance more than ever before.

I would suggest that the very first step of action for all corporate leaders, at all levels, is the renewal of the spirit of your employees (and yourself) so that you have the capability to build a sustainable organization.  This means that you will need to acquire leadership traits and skills that are more relevant to the current difficult climate.  These skills are not the kind of skills you will find on the curriculum of any normal leadership development programs.  Nor are they simply improved management skills but rather behavior and communication skills focused on how to lead a traumatized workforce – what to do and say to employees who are hurting and how to move them swiftly through this fear and anxiety so that they can deliver significantly increased productivity, reduced operational costs, increased innovation and enhanced revenue.  Yesterday’s leadership style will not suffice.

Allow me to share a story.

Nelson Mandela and South Africa

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Leadership Trait to Avoid: Letting Your Ego Conduct the Meeting

Ego Taking Control

So there I am in a meeting room with George and five members of his team.  George had invited me to sit in on a meeting and evaluate what was happening.  He said that the team was stuck; that they were completely unable to pull in the same direction.  As their leader, accountable for their performance, Fred was at his wits end.

What I saw was in the next hour was something that I had seen countless times, in countless meeting rooms, literally around the globe.   And, as always, it saddened me.  I saw how George’s ego began to run the meeting.   And the more he did this, the more the team members shut down and lost their winning spirit.  I know that George does not do this deliberately – he is a great guy!  He just does not understand that the enthusiastic, spirited, focused, determined, accountable behaviors he wants his team to demonstrate are the very same behaviors his ego crushes.

I know that George is unaware of the demeaning language his ego uses, and of how patronizing and self-righteous he sounds.   He would probably be surprised to know that the reason why his team is stuck and their meetings are a frustrating waste of time, is that his ego is switching his team off.  I know that George really wants to succeed and yet his ego is sabotaging him.

I thought to myself, ‘what a great opportunity George has here!  If he would be willing to recognize when his ego shows up and learns how to manage this, he can, quickly and easily, revolutionize his leadership style and his team’s performance’.

The Ego Bug

I came out of my daydream and noticed that everyone had caught the ego bug!  The more switched off the team was becoming, the more judgmental and closed-minded and self-righteous George became – which then caused the team to become even more defensive.   The interesting thing is that George had hand-picked every person in the room for their intelligence, their educational achievements and their technical experience.  And yet, in the next sixty minutes I watched as the ego game neutralized the powerhouse of combined intelligence that existed in this team.   They were wasting their time and talent on being defensive, engaging in avoidance and denial, trying to squelch the bad feelings they experienced, and working hard to hide how vulnerable they really feel.  While they were doing this, they were unable to think and dialogue intelligently and innovatively.  While their ego was in the driver’s seat, their genius was in the passenger seat.

So let me describe what I saw. Perhaps you will recognize some of these behaviours. 

The scene plays out as follows. The first point on the agenda is a potentially sensitive issue. Everybody knows that there is an elephant in the room but no-one is prepared to address it.  The matter is intellectualized and rationalized and distorted out of all shape.   They move to the next point on the agenda to everyone’s relief, although the issue has not been dealt with and everyone knows it will return.

Not much later, someone in the room takes personal offense at something that was said and defensively and sarcastically rejects the contrasting viewpoints that have been expressed.   Another team member uses the tactic of becoming territorial and playing the blame game – it’s their fault that he was unable to deliver on time!

By this time, the dynamics in the room leave each member of the team with a personal choice – either I show some spirit and challenge what is going on here, or I play it safe and  withdraw.  In this scenario the team members decided it is safer to withdraw.  I watch as they visibly shut down, become minimally involved, participate only when absolutely necessary, go through the motions, and show little connection to the organization’s goals or to each other. The energy in the room plummets.  Negative emotions hang thickly in the air.

Distracted and Unfocused

The team has become distracted and unfocused in their thinking.   Few new insights are brought into the mix.  George either doesn’t pick up on the fact that people have withdrawn; or he does, and prefers to ignore this.

George and the team leave the meeting with a poorly thought-out solution, based on unquestioned fundamental assumptions and outdated perspectives. There has been no change in perceptions, attitude, behaviors, tactics or strategies.  In addition they leave with unresolved differences and the mistrust that this breeds.

Feedback for Managing Ego

I knew I had to give George feedback and show him how to manage his ego.  (See my book, Who’s in the Driver’s Seat: Using Spirit to Lead Successfully).  My challenge was to be able to find a way to do this without George’s ego becoming defensive and resisting what I had to say.  I knew that if he could remain open enough to listening to me, he could choose to make some changes to his behavior and his communications that would enhance his life and the lives of his team.

I walked to George’s office thinking about the fact that companies spend so much time and money recruiting top talent and then they proceed to squash their spirit and compromise their talents by allowing leaders and managers who cannot manage their own egos, to manage their people.

Just look at these incredible statistics showing the cost of organizational ego!

  • 53% of business people estimate that ego costs their company six to 15 percent of annual revenue.
  • At 6% the annual cost of ego would impact the revenue of an average Fortune 500 company by $1.1 billion.
  • 63% of businesspeople say that ego negatively impacts work performance on an hourly or daily  basis

I knocked on George’s door.  ‘Come in’ he called.  As I walked in he said, ‘Did you see that!  They just don’t get it!   If it were not for them I could make great things happen.”

Check the Signs of Ego of Your Team:

  • Behaving defensively.
  • Acting in denial about critical issues
  • Avoiding healthy confrontation (the elephant in the room)
  • Pulling in different directions.
  • Resisting change
  • High levels of stress and anxiety
  • Low in energy and enthusiasm tuck with only one reality – not open to different perspectives
  • Slow to make and implement decisions
  • Pretending to be a team but acting as individuals.
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