Why Innovative Leadership Can Help You Surmount Challenges

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Innovative LeadershipToday’s post is by Maureen Metcalf – a thoughtLEADERS instructor and author of The Innovative Leadership Fieldbook.  You can learn more about her at the end of this post.  Here’s Maureen:

Are your leadership actions impeding innovation?  Are your change initiatives successfully implemented and delivering the benefits you expected?  How is YOUR behavior impacting their ability to delivery results?

Many traditional leaders spend more time perfecting their golf swings than they do improving their ability to lead in this current environment.  The most successful leaders continue to improve their leadership skills including the level of self-knowledge and introspection that provides a feedback loop for ongoing improvement.

Innovative leadership is the type of leadership that allows already successful leaders to raise the bar on their performance and the performance of their organizations.

An innovative leader is defined as someone who consistently delivers results using the following:

  • Strategic leadership that inspires individual goals and organizations vision and cultures;
  • Tactical leadership that influences an individual’s actions and the organizations systems and processes.
  • Holistic Leadership that aligns all key dimensions:  Individual, culture, action and systems.

While others differentiate leadership from management this definition includes both because, to fully implement innovative change, the organizational leaders need to both set the strategy and be sufficiently involved in the tactics to ensure innovation and changes happen.  This does not mean micro managing – it means an awareness and involvement in all elements of the innovation and change process. This includes continually growing and evolving leadership capacity and actions, leading and implementing culture and system changes within the organization.

Let’s look at an example of a leader who faced a change she had not previously faced in her business.

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Coaches Aren’t Just for Athletes

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Brian AhearnToday’s guest post is written by Brian Ahearn. Brian’s one of the most knowledgeable guys I know on the subject of influencing people (which is why he’s been a guest here before). Enjoy!

I think you’ll agree with this statement; no athlete can reach their full potential without a great coach.

When you think of some of the greatest athletes quite often they’re synonymous with their coach. Michael Jordan had Phil Jackson, Tiger Woods started with Butch Harmon, and Mary Lou Retton worked with Bella Karolyi. None of them would have attained the greatness they did without the guidance and feedback from their coaches.

Why is it in business we think we can reach our full potential without coaching? Great leaders are not just visionaries, they coach. They help their people develop so they can succeed in their role and get ready for the opportunities that may come down the pike. Over the years I’ve heard many reasons and have listed a few of the most common below:

  • I’ve never been coached before and I think I’m doing just fine.
  • Business is different than athletics.
  • I know more about [fill in the blank] than my manager.

I’d like to debunk these myths and hopefully persuade you that business people need coaching every bit as much as athletes if they want to excel.

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How you can avoid becoming the next Rupert Murdoch

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Robert JonesToday’s guest post is by Robert Jones of the PenPoint Group.  You can read more about him at the end of the post.  Here’s Robert:

Sometimes on the tennis or volleyball court, I’ll get a shooting pain in my left knee that forces me to stop and bandage up. When my opponents ask what’s wrong, I always give the same reply: “Old soccer injury.”

That answer is 100% accurate – even if it’s not 100% complete. I did tear my ligaments playing soccer and spent weeks hobbling around on crutches. What I don’t normally tell people is exactly how it happened.

I was in the 6th grade, playing fullback, while my friend Todd was in the goal. My team was dominating, so there was very little action at our end of the field, and Todd and I had plenty of time to discuss our favorite episode of “Batman.”

Suddenly one of my teammates yelled “Shot! Shot!” From the corner of my eye, I saw the incoming ball, so I sprinted full-speed in the same direction – and ran smack into the corner of the aluminum goalpost.

Clearly, the full story is much less sexy than the condensed version.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about full disclosure as I watch the unfolding scandal over phone hacking in the U.K. The news media are supposed to be the champions of truth, yet some reporters and editors were clearly telling the “sexy” stories that sold newspapers while withholding one very important fact – that they had obtained their information illegally.

What’s the result of all this? Read more

How to be More Purposeful in Your Leadership

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Michelle BradenToday’s guest post is by Michelle Braden, CEO of MSBCoach. Join me in welcoming her to the blog.

Are leaders made or are leaders born? This is an ongoing question that often triggers interesting conversations and debate. One thing is for sure, leadership is a journey and something that is continuous process.

I personally believe leaders are “made” through learning, experiences, successes, failures and choices. You are not just “born” a leader, although personalities, temperaments, upbringing, and cultural norms all play a part in what makes you who you are.

Leaders come in all styles and approaches, and thank goodness we do not have a “cookie-cutter” leadership format that is exactly what “works” in leadership. We can and should find patterns and leadership styles to learn from and look up to yet, in the end, we have to own and develop our own leadership style.

Your leadership style is formulated through your leadership journey and everyone’s is different. Your style emerges out of a combination of your past and current experiences (both personal and professional), how your values and judgments emerge from these events and your personality.

We also know from Gallup’s research on strengths that your brain is “wired” for certain potential strengths/talents that are there from birth. The difference between becoming a poor, good or great leader is based more on how you respond and learn from your experiences, as opposed to the experiences making or breaking you as a leader.

Even though nature and your experiences have both shaped and influenced your personal leadership style, one thing I feel sure of is that you will not be successful in your leadership unless you create a purposeful plan. For anything to be consistently successful requires intent.

For example, in order to take care of your body, your home, your car, and your relationships, you must give intentional attention to the success. If you don’t, things can fall apart. Your leadership is not any different.

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The Troops Know but Does the Boss?

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Bob HerboldToday’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

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Bud to Boss Book CoverToday’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

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Great Leaders Get Regular Reality Checks

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The Good Among the GreatToday’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:

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4 Failure Lessons You Should Learn from Google

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Google FAILToday’s guest blogger is Tim Eyre. He’s a loyal reader of the blog and when he teed up a topic for me to write about, I turned the tables and asked him to write about the topic himself! You can read more about Tim at the end of the post.

Google must be the world’s failure leader.

But how can that be, when Google is widely known as the world’s most successful search engine? How can that be, when Google has become such a powerful corporation that some people worry about the privacy implications of letting Google handle their email, keep their credit card information in an online shopping profile, monitor and forward their newsfeed subscriptions, and keep tabs on all their searches?

Google’s power has become so notorious that The Onion regularly targets the search giant for its parodies. “We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, teased a recent Onion front page story, “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.” Is that the Google I want to crown as the king of failure?

Yes, yes, and yes. You too can (and should) learn to fail like Google.

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

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Heidi Grant HalvorsonToday’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.

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4 Tips for Handling Overwork and Overwhelm

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No DramaToday’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:

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Preventing a Leadership Crash from Overcorrecting

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Michelle BradenToday’s guest post is by Michelle Braden, CEO of MSBCoach. Join me in welcoming her to the blog.

Often when I read a book I find myself thinking, “Some of that was strong food for thought and some of it was a little too much for me.” When that happens, I try focusing on what is relevant so there is still a meaningful take-away rather than disregarding the entire book. Authors write to their personal extreme passion, and it’s good to remember that you do not have to agree with everything that is being said to learn something.

Leaders are very similar. We lead out of our own personal passions and values. Whether or not we are always conscious of them, they are present in our leadership. These passions and values are very close cousins to our “hot buttons.”

When our hot buttons are pushed, we can have a tendency to overreact or overcorrect the situation just as an author may over-write to make their point. I find that overreacting or overcorrecting frequently generates results opposite of what is really expected or desired.

Allow me to illustrate…

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Building Leadership Resilience

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Human Silhouette and 4 Aspects of ResilienceI’m excited to bring you some thoughts from Maureen Metcalf today. I’m shutting up now so I can go work on my book One Piece of Paper (get your copy by CLICKING HERE). Here’s Maureen:

In leadership terms, we define Resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of multiple changes while continuing to persevere toward strategic goals. In our very dynamic work environment, leaders must build their resilience and they must also help their employees become more resilient.

As a leader, you actually become different based on the changing environment. Most people, after a period of adjustment, bounce back to their previous level of happiness no matter what happens to them. This seems hard to believe but had been proven true (and if you’re curious about how resilient you are, you can take a quick online assessment by CLICKING HERE).

Think about someone you have worked with that you respected but they did not navigate challenge well? How does the undesirable behavior impact you and your ability to function? Here is a story of one of my clients.

I worked with a very talented woman who, when under pressure tended to get sick because she did not have a system to manage the stress. Additionally, she berated her staff regularly causing them to become disengaged. She would obsess about what others had done and over a short time be out sick. She was very unhappy in her job, more unhappy than was reasonable based on her situation.

The good news is over time she developed stronger coping skills and she has a much greater capacity to manage the same level of stress. Some of the things she did were: work out regularly, start meditating, begin a regular practice of reflecting on her behaviors and thoughts at the end of each day, and build stronger relationships with her boss, her colleagues and her subordinates. All of these activities contributed to improved physical health and also greatly improved her ability to motivate her team and produce higher quality work and enjoy working with their leader again.

We break resilience into four primary categories:
– Maintain Physical Wellbeing
– Direct Mental Perspective
– Fulfill Life Purpose While Living Your Values
– Harness the Power of Connection

Each of these categories is interlinked with the others. It is hard to think clearly if you are physically unhealthy and so on. As you think of yourself as a leader, it is important to remember that maintaining personal resilience is as important as building other business or organizational skills.

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