Books – Page 58 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

How Saying “NO” Strengthens Your Strategy

July 18, 2011/5 Comments/in Books, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

We’ve already talked about what a strategic plan is (and isn’t) in our discussion: “strat plan isn’t ‘budget +10%.'” Hopefully now that you’ve got a direction mapped out and a list of initiatives you’re going to pursue, you’re ready for a little tactical strategic advice (yes that phrase is supposed to sound oxymoronic but it’s actually deliberate and accurate).

Repeat after me: “No.”

Try it again. This time with conviction: “NO.”

Strategy is inherently about saying “no.” It’s about the choices we make and the choices we don’t. I’ve seen plenty of strategies completely derailed due to an inability to say “no” to that incremental initiative that’s kind of “on strategy” but not really.

Good strategists are great at leading the thinking (and I believe leading the thinking is so critical to leadership that it has its own entire section in my book One Piece of Paper – click here to get your copy). As a leader, your job is to lead the thought processes and strategic efforts of your team. That requires you to invest time in thinking about your strategy.

The more effective you are at saying “no” to non-core work and singularly focusing your team on the end vision you’ve laid out, the higher the likelihood of you achieving your strategic goals. Not saying “no,” on the other hand, leads to dilution of your efforts and strategy by incrementalism (which is rarely effective).

Let’s walk this logical strategic dog, shall we? Take the following points as true:

You know where you want to end up and what your overarching strategy is
You have a finite amount of resources at your disposal.
You’ve defined the 3-5 most critical initiatives to help you achieve your goal.
There are a substantial number of “cool” opportunities you could pursue in addition to those 3-5 you’ve already identified.

The last point is where things get hairy.

The Troops Know but Does the Boss?

July 13, 2011/3 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is from Bob Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Corporation and author of What’s Holding You Back: 10 Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders (CLICK HERE to buy your copy). You can read more about Bob at the end of this post.

A recent article on www.ArmyTimes.com cited the fact that the U.S. Army is having a major problem retaining mid-ranking officers.

To find out the nature of the problem, the Army Research Institute did extensive surveys and found that for many of those leaving, a key reason was that their immediate supervisor was weak and many claimed that people were being promoted based on seniority; not on merit.

In commenting, Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey said “We’re promoting 95% of Captains to Major, and 93% of Majors to Lieutenant Colonel.” Basically everyone is being promoted, no matter what their performance happens to be. It is simply based on seniority. As Dempsey pointed out, “95% of Captains don’t deserve to be promoted to Major.” The surveys showed the troops knew this all along!

The fatal flaw in promoting based on seniority is your top performers realize they can’t make the progress they desire and deserve. It tells top performers that the organization does not care about excellence. Hence, they decide to leave to find a place where they can make the kind of contributions they want to make. Read more

3 Transitions You Must Make After Being Promoted

July 7, 2011/1 Comment/in Books, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is by Kevin Eikenberry, author of From Bud to Boss (CLICK HERE to go buy your copy). You can read more about Kevin at the end of the post. Here are his thoughts:

Congratulations. You’ve just been promoted. You are excited at the prospect.

If this will be your first leadership/supervisory role, you may be unclear, uncertain and anxious. Even if this isn’t your first leadership rodeo, you likely have a bit of concern about the transition (if not you are either blissfully ignorant or in denial).

And in either case you likely aren’t thinking about the full transition. In fact, in my experience people are at most thinking of two of the three challenges (and too often only one).

Which is why I wrote this post – to give all of us a sense of the triple threat of transition challenges, and more importantly, some brief suggestions for how to manage and overcome them once they are recognized.

Even if you aren’t personally in this transition, you likely know someone who is, or is struggling in a leadership role. If so, read on to see how you can help them – and consider forwarding it to them as well.

The Three Transition Challenges

Read more

Great Leaders Kick Up and Kiss Down

July 5, 2011/6 Comments/in Books, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

The following is an excerpt from the cutting room floor for my book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (CLICK HERE to buy it on presale). This story didn’t make it into the final version of the book but the lesson is a powerful one and I want to be sure to share it.

Great leaders reverse the conventional wisdom of kissing up to the boss and kicking down by beating up their teams. Great leaders kick up and kiss down.

Kick up, kiss down was taught to me by two bosses I had at different points in my career. The first boss lived it but never explained it. The second boss both explained it as well as lived it.

The basic premise of kick up, kiss down is a leader’s job is to keep “higher ups” mindful of how their decisions affect the leader’s people and give the higher ups a pointed kick when they have a negative impact on the team. The second part about kissing down reminds the leader to praise and encourage the team whenever the opportunity arises. It is obviously the opposite of the “kiss up, kick down” doctrine that can be alarmingly prevalent among managers.

A special leader showed me this approach to leadership early in my career. As a young lieutenant I made more than my fair share of mistakes. My commander expected all his junior officers to make these errors in judgment. He was forgiving of an error as long as you learned from that mistake. But just because he was forgiving did not mean word of those errors did not circulate among other officers in the battalion.

Most of the time the stories about the errors were quite humorous. They usually involved me getting lost, having fire extinguishers go off inside my vehicle, my driver forgetting to set the brake on the tank and it rolling backwards, getting my tank stuck in three feet of mud, or other such nonsense. There were times when my life was like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes. But I learned from every mistake. What was great about making all these mistakes was the way my commander handled them.

Your Leadership Isn’t as Predictable as You Think

June 27, 2011/0 Comments/in Books, Communications, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

You probably think you’re pretty predictable as a leader. Your team clearly knows your standards and expectations. They know how you’ll behave in pretty much any leadership situation. That predictability gives them comfort and makes them confident in your leadership.

Wrong.

I ask a poll question on SmartBrief on Leadership every week (and if you don’t subscribe to SmartBrief, you’re missing out so go sign up here now… go on… I’ll wait until you get back…). In two recent polls I asked readers how predictable they thought they were as leaders. The question was “How predictable is your leadership style?” in both cases.

When asked about their own style, people responded like this:

– My team always knows what to expect from me and how I lead. 29.15%

– Most of the time I’m predictable but I occasionally surprise people. 68.37%

– I’m mostly unpredictable and my team reacts to my shifts in style. 0.58%

– I’m completely unpredictable and my style is not clear to most others. 1.90%

When asked the same question about their bosses, people responded like this. For ease of doing math, I’ve included the variance between responses in the two polls in parentheses after the values:

Respect: It’s Time to Get Dirty

June 6, 2011/12 Comments/in Books, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

This is one of my all-time favorite stories. It even has full feature coverage in my upcoming book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (that’s the cover there on the left). You can even pre-order a copy of the book now and get a ridiculously large discount on Amazon (CLICK HERE TO BUY) or Barnes & Noble (CLICK HERE TO BUY). Not sure how long those discounts will last so… you know… Anyway, on to the important stuff.

My platoon was out in the field on training exercises. We had been out there for about two weeks so we all smelled kind of “ripe” at that point. One of the more senior officers in my battalion came to my unit’s area to see how things were going. This “gentleman” personified the term – he was an “officer’s officer” (versus being a “soldier’s officer” which we’ll explore in a moment).

He sauntered up to my 18 year old driver (a brand new buck private – the lowest ranking man in the Army) and said “Where’s Lieutenant Figliuolo?”

My driver pointed toward our tank. A pair of boots was sticking out from underneath the vehicle. The officer in question became irked. Then things got really interesting…

Great Leaders Get Regular Reality Checks

May 11, 2011/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is by Donald Van de Mark, author of The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People. You should go buy a copy of his book by CLICKING HERE. It’s good reading. Here’s Donald:

After over 20 years of interviewing some of the top business leaders in the world, I have learned that nimble business leadership requires acute reality recognition – the ability to accurately perceive the business climate in which your organization operates.

No less a business icon than Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, says that the one quality that he and Warren Buffett look for when hiring CEOs is “reality recognition.” Perceiving reality may seem like a pedestrian task but it’s not – for any of us. And when you’re at the top of an organization with hundreds of messages coming at you daily, practicing it takes daily discipline.

In my experience, the most realistic business leaders share key qualities. Andy Grove, cofounder of Intel, is one such case study. I interviewed Grove when he was CEO of the microprocessor giant. In the 1980s and early 1990s he bet his company on the rise of a device hardly anyone believed would become commonplace – the personal computer.

How did Grove come by this seemingly magical, predictive understanding of where the market was going, and how did he fortify himself to take the necessary risks to lead his company one step ahead of the future? Here are five tips I’ve learned from my interview with him:

Getting Your Risk-Averse Boss to Take a Chance On Your Ideas

April 20, 2011/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. You can read all about her at the end of the post. Here’s Heidi:

A good friend of mine, “Tom,” recently brought a product to his boss’s attention that would allow his company to take its social media efforts to a whole new level, and might significantly improve their image. It would be an industry first, and not entirely without risk, but with huge potential payoff.

After hearing his pitch, his boss asked, “Are any of our competitors using this?”

“No,” Tom replied, feeling that this was a strong selling point – a competitive edge.

“Well,” his boss responded, “then I don’t think we want to stick our necks out and be the first, do we?”

Huh?

Tom was disappointed, but not at all surprised. For every manager out there trying to encourage innovation, there seem to be ten standing squarely in the way of it. I spend a lot of time talking to people about motivation and growth, and everywhere I go, I hear complaints like:

I just can’t get my boss to take the risk.
There’s a huge opportunity here, and we’re missing it.
We just follow trends, we don’t ever create them.

It’s incredibly frustrating to know you have a real winner of an idea on your hands, something that could really shake things up, and not be able to get it past your Nervous Nelly of a boss. Not that the cautious, conservative approach doesn’t have its place – but ultimately an organization cannot grow without embracing some risk.

The recent recession has only made matters worse. People don’t want to rock the boat at a time when jobs are hard to find. Unfortunately, they forget that without organizational innovation and growth, no job is safe for long.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: when they make decisions, many managers focus much more on what they have to lose than what they might gain.

4 Tips for Handling Overwork and Overwhelm

March 30, 2011/4 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Guest Blogger /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest blogger is Marlene Chism, author of Stop Workplace Drama: Train Your Team to have No Complaints, No Excuses, and No Regrets(go buy a copy by clicking the link – there’s some great advice in there!). You can read more about her at the end of the post. Here’s Marlene…

Are you overwhelmed with a heavy workload only to get another unrealistic request from your boss? Is it really the workload, or could it be a communication problem?

Often the real challenge is developing the courage to tell ourselves and others the truth about what we can do. What we do to avoid a conflict, or dealing with someone’s disappointment is to offer something for which we are unprepared to deliver due to time constraints, abilities, or knowledge. Instead of making a promise you can’t keep, or keeping the promise but dropping another ball, what if you could just tell the truth, and still get the job done?

In my book, Stop Workplace Drama, the third principle is “tell yourself the truth.” Instead, much of the time we make agreements we can’t possibly keep, or we refuse to ask for what we want because, “I already know what he will say.” Or we simply play the victim and complain about how unfair life is, or we regretfully drop the ball because our stamina gives out before our will, then we give an excuse about why we dropped the ball.

This leads to ineffective communication between boss and employee and spreads negativity and drama. These four tips will help you to manage a heavy workload while improving workplace relationships:

Gutsy Leaders Know Top Talent Is Key

March 9, 2011/1 Comment/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest post is from Bob Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Corporation and author of What’s Holding You Back: 10 Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders (buy a copy now by clicking this link). You can read more about Bob at the end of this post.

In 1995, Canon was in deep trouble. The company had built up debt of $7.5 billion. Its many product divisions were described in the press as a bunch of warring, money-losing fiefdoms that plodded along year after year. For example, they still had an electric typewriter division, even though PC’s were making such devices obsolete. Nobody was making the tough decisions, resulting in the lack of a focused vision, bloated costs and minimal innovation.

Why do managers find it so difficult to make the tough decisions; often wimping out and simply protecting the status quo?

First of all, tough decisions have some very challenging characteristics. They typically don’t have an ideal solution. All the options have some negatives as well as positives. Additionally, there is a lack of data concerning the issue, and whatever decision you eventually make, you are going to disappoint some group of people. Lastly, such decisions demand a long term perspective, even though there may be a short term band-aid to make the whole thing go away for a while.

So… why do managers fail to provide gutsy leadership when faced with such decisions?

Great Leadership Resolutions for the New Year

December 27, 2010/0 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Communications, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

As you get ready for 2011, I know many of you are writing your New Year’s resolutions. I invite you to choose a few resolutions related to how you’ll lead your teams this coming year. To get you started, here are some fantastic leadership reminders to consider as you enter 2011. So as you’re writing your New Year’s resolutions, I invite you to try a few of these on for size and resolve to apply them to become a better leader.

Occasionally I’ll reach way back into the thoughtLEADERS Blog archives and bring you something you likely haven’t seen before (I mean, who has time to go root around in old content and find the gems?). This is one of those waybacks. Considering thousands of readers have subscribed to the blog since this was originally written, the posts are definitely new to you.

Since most of you are on holiday break this week you should have time to read through the below-listed principles and the stories behind them. I invite you to read one or two a day with your morning coffee.

Sure there are plenty of leadership books out there (and I’m lucky enough to have one of my own being published in 2011 – join our Facebook fan page here to learn more as that publication date approaches). The thing is, I haven’t come across many that are down to earth and practical in the advice they give. To that end, I see a problem and therefore I own it (one of the principles on the list). I’d like to offer the following basic principles as a perspective on some of the things it takes to be a genuine leader. Here goes:

5 Changes Go-To People Must Make to Keep Going

October 20, 2010/3 Comments/in Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Business Toolkit, Career, Guest Blogger, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Today’s guest blogger is Scott Eblin. You can read all about him at the end of the post and also learn about his great new book that just hit shelves. I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of it. Here’s Scott…

If you’re a high potential leader, there’s about a 98% chance that you’re thought of or view yourself as a “go-to person.” I know that number ‘s in the ballpark because I regularly ask audiences of high potential leaders, “How many of you have been referred to or think of yourself as a ‘go-to person?’” Usually, just about every hand in the room goes up. For example, in a webinar I conducted for Government Executive magazine, 98% of the 400 plus senior managers online answered yes to the “go-to” question in a flash poll.

And what do I mean by “go-to person”? As one leader explained it to me, “I’m the closer.” You either know the type or you are the type. Go to people are the ones who make sure the job gets done. If that means taking over, so be it. If that means staying up into the wee hours, so be it. Organizations reward go-to people because they can rely on them. They’re the kinds of folks who are designated as high potentials and are promoted into bigger and bigger jobs. Great stuff, right? Well, it is until it isn’t…