In any given situation we face, we can make three decisions, Yes, No and Not Right Now. A good energy management technique – for yourself and especially for your team is to choose from these three and give “maybe” very limited room in your repertoire. If you’re going to use “maybe”, qualify it with exactly what needs to change in order to receive a Yes or No, and then put it on the Not Right Now list.

This may seem too black and white for some decision-makers. It was for me for a long time. Stuff in the grey zone was hard for me to say “no” to at all, but as I became more aware of where my energy was going on these kinds of issues, I watched the “maybes” drain me, distract me and – worse – run my team in circles trying to get a Yes or No out of me.

 A Practical Approach

I recently watched a client of mine go through the circle-running routine. She wasn’t indecisive, far from it. She wanted desperately to make some decisions but the information simply wasn’t present; the situation hadn’t fully shaken out yet and her staff and negotiating partners needed more time to sort through their issues on several projects. She knew it was too soon to decide and yet struggled to not think about it all the time, worrying, asking for updates and not focusing on the things she could do something about. With my support, she created a Personal Parking Lot List for all the “Not Right Now’s” where she could put all the stuff that wasn’t ready for a decision. She put a note on her calendar to revisit the list every Friday over her morning cup of coffee and decide what, if anything, was ready to be promoted to the staff meeting agenda the following Monday. This simple trick helped her focus her energy.

Life Sized Indecision

I’ve noticed lately that a number of clients and friends are also facing this kind of indecision on a larger scale – like what to do with their careers and lives. Should they pursue one career direction or another? Should they go back to school or get another job? I faced a pretty big decision like this last year too, whether to team up with a colleague or stay on my own? Here’s what I learned from that experience, which I’m passing on as advice to everyone in similar circumstances: don’t decide until the best option chooses you, or you have no other choice.

Making an affirmative decision not to decide until the answer is clear often allows stuff to sort itself out and makes the decision much easier when the time is right. The challenge is to be content as the sorting out happens, especially as you take action to keep all options developing to the point of clarity.

Indecision is not the same as inaction.

This isn’t easy unless you have some trust in the process and in yourself. Trust is a powerful energy manager. Give it a try.

Photo Credit: Natalia Buckley

Most leadership books and gurus will tell you that leaders are learners and full of curiosity. Sometimes, this penchant can get you into trouble and – as many entrepreneurs learn the hard way – lead you traipsing off after some little bright shiny thing, letting your business languish. This kind of curiosity is the not good kind. But the good kind of curiosity takes you deeper, not far afield. It digs you into the root cause of the problem you need to fix – for your customers with a product, for your employees with an operational issue or for your investors for a financial issue.

How does one focus their curiosity to get to the bottom of the problem where the gold lies?

The 5 Whys

There’s no sure fire answer to this question because many lines of inquiry can be dead ends, but I like the way Eric Ries explains the 5 Whys in this short video.

The 5 Whys are designed to narrow down the problem space until the underlying issue is discovered. This can be a phenomenal strategy for finding the pony and learning what good thing your conversational adversary is advocating during an argument.  And the 5 Whys are also a great leadership skill for learning to draw out the best from your employee base.

5 Strategies for Surfacing the 5 Whys

When I interviewed Patricia Koopersmith about her experience transitioning into executive leadership, I was struck by her awareness of how holding back her own opinion until she’d dug more deeply into what her staff thought made her a smarter leader. She recognized all the new information she was able to bring to solving problems when she asked them why they thought something was out of whack. Thinking about her comments and the experience of other clients, I have compiled 5 strategies for asking the 5 whys:

1. Don’t ask yourself the first why, ask someone else.
2. Ask a third person the second why.
3. Pursue the third-fifth why’s in conversation.
4. Ask a completely new person the first why – repeat.
5. Do listen, intently.

Managers ask the 5 Whys to solve problems. Leaders use these techniques to help other’s solve problems, foster collaboration and get smarter.

Leadership is a journey. Take it with other people.

No Judgment

When you’re in a RIGHT vs. RIGHT dialog, there’s no judgment about what’s right and what’s wrong, the whole focus on the conversation is about which “right” is the “best right” for any particular situation.

For example, in my last training one gentleman was in IT support for the Air Force and he was used to discussions with officers that frequently turned contentious. His clients wanted “the impossible” to support “the mission” and he felt like he was always in the position of having to tell them they were wrong. When he understood RIGHT vs. RIGHT, he was able to see how he could honor their loyalty to the mission and give them choices that supported the mission – and the budget – without having to make them “wrong.” His smile was great as he talked with eagerness about how he was going to take this idea back and work with it.

Digging Out From Right vs. Wrong

Many of us struggle to understand how to get unstuck in the right vs. wrong arguments we find ourselves in sometimes, which is why I’ve started telling Ronald Reagan’s pony joke to help us “get it.” Here’s the joke:

Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. Trying to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Yet instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to all fours, and began digging.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked.

“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

The key to The Pony Joke is that the optimist who knows there is a RIGHT vs. RIGHT discussion to be had doesn’t stop at the surface of the conversation, where it looks like the other person must be wrong. The optimist leader looks deeply at the other person’s motivations – asking questions if s/he has to – to find the RIGHT motivation (the pony) in the other person’s perspective and bring it to the surface of the conversation. They also look deeply at their own position, and articulate the most powerful “right” for which they are advocating.

This is important for a couple of reasons. By finding your own, deep “right”, you articulate your point more clearly. When you find the other person’s deep, right you discover that sometimes they aren’t even aware of their own motivations. When you can voice it for them, they often become less strident because they understand their own position more clearly and – importantly – because they know you understand it too. And sometimes you’ll discover you’ve both found the same pony and are really in agreement.

Once you’ve found the pony (or ponies) and brought it to the surface of the conversation, the dialog almost always becomes more powerful. This is an excellent skill for any leader and a critical one for anyone trying to change a corporate culture and achieve buy-in and enrollment from others. To learn more about RIGHT vs. RIGHT and many other powerful principles of leadership, purchase THE PRIMES and you’ll be one of the first to receive the second printing with 14 new concepts in it (ships early April).

Someone once gave me the greatest complement. She said, “Since you’re my mentor I think you can help me with this.” Until that moment I had no idea I was her mentor! From that day forward, I started paying more attention to my interactions with her, being more clear explaining my thinking, being more conscious of giving her explicit feedback. And something else happened in the process – I became more conscious of my own leadership style and began to improve it.

Almost ten years later, this young woman has been promoted a few times and is now a strong part of my network – helping me at least as much as I ever helped her. Thank goodness I woke up and started mentoring her!

 Self-Awareness Is An Awesome Leadership Skill

The first reason to mentor is somewhat selfish. If you read the leadership literature, you’ll see that being a life-long learner is a critical skill, but the best insights don’t come from books. Watching how effective your leadership style is and adjusting your behavior to achieve maximum results is the real work here. This requires self-awareness and feedback. But how many employees are really giving you good feedback? Most are careful to the point of silence about giving the boss insight into his or her own behavior, and most of them aren’t that skilled at giving feedback anyway (this is something they’re learning from you).

A mentee is someone you know is looking to you for help, and you can easily ask them how helpful you’re being. Elicit additional questions from them to help you gauge how clearly you communicate. Watch the results they achieve following your advice (or not) and learn from that experience how you can improve your guidance. Ask them for feedback directly as well. In developing a relationship where open discussion is welcome, they are likely to respect you enough to tell you what they really think so you can see yourself through other eyes. No need to feel vulnerable to their opinion, they’ve already chosen you as their mentor!

Watching how a mentee takes in your insights and works with them will also give you deep insight into the value of what you know. Things you take for granted have great value to someone with less experience working to improve their business and leadership skills. Mentees are a great way to learn to appreciate your own wisdom and knowledge. In appreciating it you can pass it on to even more people more consciously.

Finally, your mentees will teach you things they know that you don’t. Sometimes this has to do with their age group, but often it’s more personal than that. Having someone who trusts you share their worldview with you can be a gift that will help your broaden your perspective, and being a life-long learner this is a handy dynamic!

 There’s No Other Way For Them To Learn How To Succeed At Your Level

The second reason is not selfish at all. Just like hiring managers often complain that kids out of college don’t know how to function in a professional setting, some executives also complain that there is so little promotable talent “out there.” I don’t believe this is ever the case, but I do believe that helping people understand what an executive needs to do isn’t something you learn in books or even through osmosis. The problems the executive team takes on are simply different than those newer managers struggle with. Executives worry about more strategic issues and their functional expertise often takes a backseat to their ability to make decisions and create opportunities. Since this is a fundamentally different process than “doing the work” in a functional area of expertise, the best way for budding execs to learn these skills is from the people currently in the job.

One woman said it this way, “I have an MBA and studied strategic business issues theoretically, but going for the C-suite I’d never hired anyone for the position even close to what I was being promoted into. I needed people to help me understand how a COO really succeeds so I could develop my skills and interview appropriately.”

Basically, they don’t teach the skills that separate the leaders from the doers in business school, and to the extent that they do your employees still need to become life-long learners and internalize the lessons that will make them successful. When you mentor, you guide them farther along this journey and in the process help create the class of leaders who will make your job easier and ultimately succeed you.

Good for you. Good for them. Win-win.

What’s your experience with mentoring? Have you noticed the benefits of having a mentee? What else can you tell people considering taking on more (or some) mentees?

Someone recently asked me for my secret to making a good hire and attracting talented employees. I had to admit that I’ve never considered myself particularly skilled at hiring, even though I’ve made some stellar hires – if I do say so myself – so I had to dig deep for some executive coaching advice. But it came pretty quickly.

If you want to hire very talented people, BE talented. If you want to hire go-getters and innovators, BE go-getting and innovative. If you want people to think outside the box, don’t sit in your box.

Why? People like to work with and for people they like and aspire to be like. And these are qualities that many people can talk about but only those who really get it can demonstrate enthusiasm for. When you are like this and others know it, they will send you the best and the brightest.

One other piece of advice: Deliberately look for people smarter than you and who you can learn from. One of my first bosses said it this way: “A people hire A+ people. B people hire C people.” You get a threefer when you hire above your own talent level. You get smarter, your team gets more done and you look like a smart boss for knowing how to put your ego aside and go for talent. So even if you think you’re an A- everyone else thinks you’re an A. Other talented people will notice.

Are you the manager and leader you’d want to work for? What’s your best hiring story? Know someone who’s got potential and needs to build on their internal power to become top talent? Help them get some skillz.

A while back I read a blog post by a soon-to-be-entrepreneur who sounded so excited about his new adventure that I didn’t have the heart to write this post in response until after he’d launched. Who was I to burst his bubble?

And the last thing I wanted to do was burst his bubble. After a decade on my own, I’ve learned that this optimism is a critical personal power and key to entrepreneurial business success, but it’s much more than that. It’s the secret to any leader’s mastery of innovation.

Stay optimistic – but not for the reasons you think

It’s true that as an entrepreneur (and leader of anything meaningful) you’re going to have dark days when your biggest client says “we really love you and would like to keep you on, but ___ (fill-in-the-blank).” Even if you don’t have a mortgage and kids, your heart will clutch a little because you have things you do need to spend money on – to grow your business, hire people to do things you don’t want to do anymore so you can grow the business, treat someone nice so you can move closer to that mortgage and kids, have fun etc.

Having a positive attitude when this happens helps on many levels, including keeping you from wanting to impulsively jump off a bridge sometimes, but I’ve come to learn that it works on deep and subtle levels that you can literally build into your business plan. See, back in the day no one taught me that we create our reality, and because of this our attitude is power and power can make real things happen in the world – including business. We hear it as “success breeds success” and “fake it till you make it” but that sounds so inauthentic. Many entrepreneurs go into business for themselves because they don’t want to fake it anymore. So here’s an authenticity-reinforcing way to think about optimism.

A positive attitude isn’t faking it if you truly believe that the Universe won’t let you down in the long run, for example when a new, better client walks in the door the day (or month) after the old one dropped you. Positivity will keep you from unconsciously (or consciously) signaling to the new prospect that business isn’t doing so well. And most importantly, positivity will ensure that you are looking for that next opportunity. We don’t find what we’re not looking for, and more importantly we do find what we’re looking for, so look for the bright side and learn to see it.

I recently found this awesome video on the power of positive psychology that talks about its business benefits better than I can. Watch Shawn and be prepared to laugh, he’s funny! (click to play)

Writing a positive attitude into the business plan – as innovation!

My business pedigree includes Fortune 10 behemoths and VC-hungry internet startups, so I know a thing or two about writing a business plan. The way positivity normally shows up in a business plan is in wildly overblown projections. Here’s the dirty little secret that many funders have probably figured out by now and that entrepreneurs experience all the time: you start out making the numbers big to make the spreadsheet work. On paper, suddenly, you have a business! But when you start inching down the numbers towards “reality” you get into the “why would anyone ever fund this?” zone and have to stop at the point that things are still pretty rosy and overblown. From the past-to-be looking into the future-to-be you have no choice but to do this because you don’t know where to schedule into the pro forma the “luck event”. You don’t know where to put in the “big innovation” that will come to you in the shower after you lose the big customer and finally figure out why so you can fix it. It’s impossible to know the happy results of innovation in your crystal ball.

But what you can do, is build in that attitude and practice of optimistic innovation, learning, luck-leveraging leadership style into your business from day one. And the cool thing is that you don’t need to be an entrepreneur to do this. You do it as a leader. The way to build it into the business plan, however, is to practice it, document the results and when you present your business plan, put your style and historical success at leading innovatively into your pitch. Go ahead and admit that the plan is optimistic. Run a worst-and-best case scenario and present the range so your funders understand their risk and opportunity. But pitch yourself, your success and the results of your optimism.

This is how the big guys do it. Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field is an adaptation of this principle. This is also the business philosophy and practice that successful serial entrepreneur and big thinker Eric Ries talks about in The Lean Startup. My point is that “thinking positive” more than a entrepreneurial survival tactic, it’s a leadership innovation strategy. And best of all it’s how we change the world.

 He makes the point that this kind of change management and culture change may not come from on top, but brew up at the grassroots level. I believe for such innovation to be sustained, it comes from both grassroots courage to innovate AND top line courage to stimulate and build on innovations that work out. This is how we change the world – one innovation at a time.

Don’t think you can do it? Bet you can. Make a bubble within which you can act and then break a pattern and see what results. Here’s a sample prescription:

1. Get some co-conspirators (e.g., three people on your customer service team).
2. Put a boundary around the experiment (e.g., one day a week for 3 months).
3. Put a big hairy problem on the table (e.g., inability to satisfy customer type X).
4. Get out of the way.
5. Be ready for success and failure.
6. Turn every failure into a learning that leads to success.
7. Repeat.

What patterns can you break this week?

How do you measure leadership? It’s an odd question, isn’t it? Leadership is inherently challenging to even describe because it’s a quality of being human. Psychologists and Change Management Consultants find ways to measure everything and I’m sure they have some metrics for this. However, my Google research on this subject reinforced my experience that most people’s take on measuring leadership is really one of two things: 1) measuring management metrics (e.g., did revenue go up?) Or 2) measuring behaviors, absent their impact.

Leaders Do Both

So here’s a little leadership coaching on how I think about measuring leadership. Leadership is the ability to get things done and change the world, i.e., leave the world better off than when you started. So it’s not enough to get stuff done, and it’s not enough to sit on a mountaintop sending out good vibes.

Here’s how you know you’re leading:

• Revenues go up, and so do employee and customer satisfaction numbers.
• Your team is more productive with less stress.
• Things don’t go as planned, but they go just fine and everyone’s happy with the results.
• You make both qualitative and quantitative impacts on people’s lives.

Get the point? Leaders accomplish both/and goals and intentions, not either/or. As a bonus, this is often the secret of innovation too!

How To Measure Both

If you work for a big company that measures stuff, make sure you’re measuring the both/and, and even more importantly, make sure you’re correlating the two. Make this part of your goals statement. Set your intention on both, and when you achieve it make sure everyone knows that it’s possible and who benefited. (If you make it a bragging all about you thing, they will discount the both/and as good luck and you want them to take on this challenge themselves, so make sure they believe it’s possible!)

Even if you work for a big company, but especially if you don’t, start keeping track of the both/ands that matter most to you, personally. Being self-aware is a critical leadership skill, so be it!

• Keep a little pad of paper by your desk and make a hash mark for your interactions with staff, vendors and customers that go well and poorly.
• Track improvement in staff productivity related to how you coached them.
• Track how many of your intentions you set and then achieved.
• Track your angry/frustrated moments and set your intention for them to go down.
• Track the favors you call in from your network and the ones you ask for.

Remember, your job isn’t to be pissed off, frustrated and angry. Your job is to get things done and change the world. The more energy you spend on being upset means you’re putting less energy into doing the job as leader. So above all else, make sure those pissed off, frustrated and angry hash marks go down!

How do you measure leadership?

Sure, sometimes you’re the lucky recipient of spontaneous innovation, but according to business gurus, consistently good innovators actually have strategies for leveraging luck (the good and the bad) when it trips across their paths.

In “Great by Choice” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have unearthed a fabulous idea they’re calling Return on Luck, and we all have something to learn from this concept.

Luck Happens

There is power in recognizing reality, even when you can’t explain it.

The first brilliance of Return on Luck is that the researchers noticed it at all. Luck holds a position in business school lexicon somewhere near “magic,” i.e., somewhere near the bottom. But Collins and Morten recognized that just because it’s not predictable doesn’t mean it’s not real – or a function of business success.

After what sounds like exhaustive analysis on whether successful companies are luckier than others (they’re not), whether luck is a rare occurrence (it’s not) and whether luck is quantifiable (it is), they discovered that the luck itself wasn’t the interesting phenomenon.

It is a companies’ response to a “luck event” that matters.

Luck, A Change Management Ally

When you’re thirsty it doesn’t matter if the glass is half empty or half full.

It turns out that the most successful companies accepted that good and bad luck occurs naturally and – rather than moaning, crowing or treating luck as an anomaly – they consistently asked themselves, “how can we turn this to our advantage?” The answer to that question often turned out to be a huge win for them regardless of the type of luck they experienced. Collins and Hansen cite the example of how Progressive Insurance used a bad luck event (a political referendum that dealt them a huge financial blow) to catalyze a massive change effort that overhauled the company.

This makes sense, doesn’t it? When we look at luck’s patterns, even randomness is ok once we’ve accepted the reality that a luck event changes the rules and – for a brief period at least – the appetite, need and desire for larger change has increased. If part of your leadership strategy is change, this is great news.

The research proves that, more often than not, those who don’t waste luck live to reap its return.

This last year blogging here on Reclaiming Leadership has been fun and fascinating. Along the way I found myself speaking to and with wonderful, powerful women. And I’ve also been having fun blogging on women’s web sites, like Blogher, The Glass Hammer, Success in the City and Owning Pink. But I wanted to have a place of my own to speak to women about the trends I see from reading the leadership research that many women – heads down in their career – don’t get a chance to see. So I’m starting a new leadership and professional development blog and website for powerful, high-achieving women.

Here’s my opening play: The Woman Effect (1:48 min video).

Thanks for all of you who have friended, followed, commented, discussed and debated with me over the last year. I’ve never had so much professional fun in my life and it’s only getting better!

In a recent leadership development workshop I ran, one woman bravely spoke her truth about the reality of the toxic corporate culture they all worked in. It was dysfunctional. Managers were petty and their pettiness was only overshadowed by the pettiness of the leaders above them. All these great ideas we were generating in the training – all this great energy – how could they keep it alive when everyone went back to their regularly scheduled work life the next day?

Enter, Reality

I welcomed this dissolution of the kumbaya moment, because acknowledging the reality of a situation – warts and all – is a critical step to claiming our own personal power to deal with it. (Reality, that is. Not warts.) In addition to giving me a chance for a short pep talk, I also jumped on this opportunity to demonstrate to these rising leaders how, even within the larger culture, they had the personal power to create their own little “culture bubbles,” with different agreements within their sphere of control on what would and wouldn’t be tolerated. (Chris McGoff has a wonderful and actionable definition of culture as the line between what a group does and doesn’t tolerate. Check out his PRIME, CULTURE

Together we developed some cultural bubble definitions that could survive within the larger, more toxic culture. And then we had an illuminating conversation. I asked them to choose the single most important principle (chosen from The PRIMES , universal principles of group dynamics) to promote into the toxic culture in order to change it. The results were conclusive: INTEGRITY  got 13 votes and the next most popular on the list only got four votes. The group believed that INTEGRITY had a better chance – beating out its closest competitor by more than 400% – to impact the culture for the better.

An (Anti) Poison Pill?

It got me thinking about culture-making projects I’ve worked on where everyone accepts defeat at the outset, because “Cultural change is impossible. Toxicity wins.” These projects stand in stark contrast to the situations where culture change happens spontaneously when new leadership comes in and – just changes it.

I believe it’s true. I believe that a value and practice as simple and strong as INTEGRITY could actually become an antidote to toxicity in corporate cultures. I believe it because I’ve seen it work and it invariably works best (but not only) from the top down. When toxic cultures bubble from the bottom up, it’s because leadership allows it to happen; but truly healthy cultures can only flow from the top down. Leadership shoulders the responsibility for being this kind of change and being the change is not the same as modeling it. When you model an attitude, it’s as though you’re wearing a jacket, which everyone including you knows you can take off when the door closes. Cultural change only happens when behavior is consistent behind and in front of closed doors.

So what chance does a single principle have to “infect” an entire culture for the better? With enthusiasm like a 400% greater popularity index, INTEGRITY is a leading contender for a simple antidote to cultural toxicity.

If It Was Easy….

So why hasn’t anyone invented this little red pill yet? The reasons are numerous, of course, but I would say that it comes down to a simplistic understanding of what integrity actually is. When I do PRIMES Leadership Development trainings  –  I always ask people what integrity means to them. People consistently use the definition we use: do what you say you’ll do. So simple. The reality of life makes following this little six word maxim challenging, of course, but primarily because we’re so used to saying what others want us to say, regardless of what is actually doable. If you know your boss wants to hear that you’ll make it back for the 3pm staff meeting when your client meeting wraps up across town at 2:45, how often do you just say, “sure boss, see you there!” and just show up late? How often does s/he let you get away with it because it’s what they want to hear?

Living in integrity has other benefits too. It buffs up your personal brand and helps you live in alignment with your higher self. Literally, you have nothing to lose. Working in integrity isn’t so hard if you give yourself permission to:

• Be precise about what you commit to based on factors under your control (e.g., I’ll leave the client’s office no later than 2:50 and come straight back to the meeting.)
• Be the first to recognize your own breaches of integrity (they will happen!)
• Be consistent so that others come to believe your word is your action.
• Let go of the guilt that you can’t do everything you or everyone else wants you to and enjoy the fact that you’re living in integrity!

Try it. Create your own little “culture bubble” of integrity. Teach your team to do the same. The higher up you are, the broader impact you can have. Go ahead, be the antidote. I dare you!

How do you feel about self-promotion? Take the survey  (Hurry! Survey closes on January 27!)

Sometimes we have to accept the reality that innovation can’t always be planned,  but when we find a pattern to help us increase the likelihood of spontaneity – why not try to learn it and bake it into the corporate culture?

In their new book “Great by Choice,” Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have identified some of these patterns. One I loved was “Zoom In Zoom Out” that describes how executives at innovative companies “Zoom Out” to take a strategic view of the situation before “Zooming In” to take action when the ground shifts under their feet. But they don’t just get all zoomy for the fun of it; they look for a specific data point when they Zoom Out, which is how much time do we have not to act before our risk profile changes? This designated time parameter then becomes the de facto boundary of our tactical response, allowing more strategic actions if more time is available and less if it’s not.

How Come Doctors Get All The Protocols?

I love the specificity of this observation, which makes it prescriptive. “Zooming Out” isn’t just about “getting perspective,” it’s about developing a protocol, which can be trained and integrated into the corporate culture to be followed in specific circumstances. When things shift fast, Zoom Out to determine how much time you have to act before your risk profile changes. Then Zoom back In to work with the time boundaries you’ve got. Wouldn’t this be a great leadership development tool to train all your up-and-comers?

I used to work in a company where volatile public relations realities were periodically a factor. Our office had a ringed corridor and several of us used to “walk the ring” at least once before responding to emergency press calls during certain delicate periods. I think we were “Zooming Out” and didn’t really realize it. When “walking the ring,” became a cultural phenomenon, everyone learned to respect and offer to help the walker. I’m sure as a result we made better decisions.

Do you have experience Zooming In and Zooming Out? Have you seen how evaluating your time parameters leads to better decision-making?

How does self-promotion help (or hurt?) your career? Take the survey

Sometimes true wisdom hides behind sensational headlines. I often think this when I read gender wars articles; you know, the ones that toss the sexes in the ring?

Here’s my latest beef: Women need to self-promote to make more money. (Forbes Woman , Catalyst Inc.)

So apparently women suck at self-promotion. Is that the deepest wisdom here?

I’m not arguing the data, but rather the interpretation.

True Leadership is Gender Neutral

I’m a champion of women in business,  but my gender lens is screwed on a little funny. See, I start with the premise that people (men and women) who want to change the world have to advance to positions of power and influence to have the greatest impact. To have a meaningful impact when they get there, they need to work out their own “stuff” and claim their personal power along the way. So anything that helps them do that, including learning to toot their own horn so they can advance and gain greater scope of responsibility – is great.

Women aren’t alone, by the way. IT professionals including CIOs – a notoriously male dominated sector – apparently suffer from the same discomfort with self-promotion.

Why should women have a chip on their shoulder about this? Because of equal pay? The study itself says that women can close this gap themselves by learning this leadership skill, so dump the chip and speak up, Ladies.

True Leadership Challenges Us To Claim Our Power

The fact that some people, many of whom are women, find self-promotion culturally and emotionally uncomfortable is simply an indicator that owning our accomplishments is an area where all leaders must learn to claim personal power.

Coaching Tip: Don’t want to be a braggart? Then don’t be. Learn to own your success without bragging.

This question – about self-promotion, how it helps us and what we’re comfortable with – intrigues me so much that I’m fielding a survey on the subject through the end of January. Take the survey here (you can request copy of the results for free when it’s published).

Consensus means different things to different people. Be brave. Do Your Job.

Don’t take the ”easy” path.

The word consensus is based on the Latin word “consent,” which according to Dictionary.com means “to be in agreement.” Most people take this into the absolute realm and interpret consensus to mean, “everyone agrees with everything.”

Bad idea. Executive Coaching tip: people are designed at the molecular level NOT to agree on everything. So why set yourself up for the tyranny of the minority?

Leader, Do Your Job

If you’re a leader trying to get everyone to agree with you, you’ll end up optimizing for the squeakiest wheel instead of doing your job, which is to involve those who have a stake in the issue and then shoulder the burden, risk and opportunity of decision to move things forward. The inability to use consensus to manage conflict is particularly debilitating in change management initiatives.

There are three primary reasons leaders don’t do this and struggle (usually in vain) to get everyone to agree:

• They think the “easy way” is to avoid conflict by getting 100% agreement up front, but avoiding initial disagreement usually leads to “subversive agreement” and ensures conflict and confusion down the line when differences re-emerge and muck up your efforts to actually produce something.
• They’re afraid to take risks to achieve opportunity, falling prey to management-by-CYA.
• They never learned how to manage a workable definition of consensus to management conflict up front and thus become skilled at mitigating the risks of achieving opportunity.

A Workable Definition of Consensus

I learned the workable definition of consensus early on in my career when I was an international government affairs rep for big tech. The long and short of my job was to advocate my company and industry’s position to government regulators, policy makers, legislators and negotiators around the globe. Here’s what I noticed, the negotiators were masters of achieving workable consensus, and everyone else in government pretty much sucked at it.

Why? Because the negotiators were on the hook to produce something. They set deadlines to force agreement (or not) and to give their stakeholders a reason to reach workable consensus if it was reachable. I spent many a late night in a little room with other industry reps over cold pizza crusts waiting for the lead trade negotiator to come in with “the final” deal for us to weigh in on. At 11:35pm facing a 12am deadline, do you know what consensus looks like? It looks like what people can live with – most people, not all people – the most important people, not all people. [Sidenote: I didn’t work for “the most important people” so I learned this lesson too, if you want to win, align yourself (if you can) with the most important people.]

Does this make all leaders negotiators? Well, I’m not sure I’d go that far, but when your decision affects many stakeholders, fostering a negotiations mindset is a good idea because at the end of the day the decisions you make that have important-people-buy-in are going to be easier to implement. Implementation is messy enough; don’t increase your risks of disaster by sloppy consensus mismanagement up front.

Although I’ve seen this definition of consensus in action through the years many times, it wasn’t until I saw Chris McGoff’s CONSENSUS PRIME that the simplicity of it struck me. I think every leader should be schooled in CONSENSUS, which states:

• The process must be explicit, rational and fair.
• Participants must be treated well and their inputs must be heard.
• Participants can live with and commit to the outcome.

(Watch Chris explain this concept in his 2.5 minute video.)

Empower Your Team With Workable Consensus

Recently I’ve been reminded – not just of the power of workable consensus – but of the powerlessness that the “easy” Latin definition of 100% agreement can foster. Several government agencies recently brought me in to provide leadership development training to mid-level government management teams. I presented the CONSENSUS PRIME and shoulders slumped all over the room. This happened consistently across agencies. “Why the long faces?” I asked, sure that would have welcomed workable consensus to help them manage so many conflicting priorities. “That’s the answer to our problems,” everyone said. “But can you teach it to our bosses?” (And they meant bosses all the way to the top.)

With some work, these mid-level managers did come to understand how they could make workable consensus effective for them even in the face of CYA-happy superiors, but the implications were clear. Until leaders are willing to accept the challenge of achieving workable consensus – being brave, taking risks and believing they’re on the hook to actually produce something – the CYA Latin definition of consensus will rule our culture and we’ll just keep passing the implementation mess on to our future.

This month when things are so crazy, I’m reminded that the holidays are a good opportunity to practice a leadership skill that I believe is #1 for anyone at any level: Integrity. The ability to do what you say and say what you’ll do is much more challenging than the simple words themselves. When you really commit to the principle of integrity, you think much harder about what you’re capable of doing within any given timeframe, you ration your most important resource – yourself – much more precisely, and you accept your own mistakes with more grace.

I gave a leadership development seminar last week and one mid-level manager, an attorney, stood up and declared that he credited his personal commitment to Integrity with his own career success. He went on to say that his office director had made a public commitment to this core principle as well and he’d witnessed the reputation of their office do a 180 over the course of the last 18 months. A simple little principle that pays off in deep and powerful ways for individuals and groups.

For an inspirational 2 – 3 min video on Integrity, watch Chris McGoff’s PRIME, INTEGRITY.

Integrity is a Cure for Holiday Stress

So here’s an executive coaching tip; there is no time when Integrity is more needed than at the holidays. The potential for distraction and falling out of Integrity is greater than ever. Stay fast to your principles. Say “yes” when you mean Yes and “no” when you mean No.  Be your word and watch the stress melt away.

There is no perfect solution to this challenging time of year – only your own.  And this is the test of true leaders, to internalize all the lessons “they” toss out at you about what it means to be a leader. It’s all “true” but it only makes you a powerful leader when you make it your own. Then it’s inside you. It’s yours. You’re In Power.

If it sometimes feels overwhelming, don’t despair. Know that you’re not alone and that the world will forgive you if you bail out on that one last party that was going to drive you mad or take you away from something truly important. Just be straight up about your intent and live by your word as you decide what you’ll do and what you won’t do.

Have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate, a peaceful time when the world shuts down for a few hours here and there and a Happy New Year ringing in 2012.

It seems pretty clear, from anecdotes like this and research conducted more recently, that a culture that encourages new ideas and open dialog breeds innovation, but human nature seems to work against us here. The research shows that due to “the boss effect” the higher up they go, the less bosses listen and (presumably because more messengers get shot), the more trepidation people have about speaking up.

Corporate cultures are so strong! What’s a leader to do?

Hire a fool.

While there are ways of shaping corporate culture intentionally, I loved O’Toole’s revival of an idea – again from the 80′s – he credited to a man named Verne Morland. Every King Lear needs a fool, “to challenge by jest and conundrum all that is sacred.”

Are Modern Change Agents Fools?

I’m skating on thin archetypal ice here, perhaps, but in the interests of levity and perspective maybe we can look at the ancient role of the fool for insight as to how leaders can insulate themselves from the “boss effect” and receive information they need, even when others are afraid to speak. The traditional fool was protected by the King, who forgave him his silliness and allowed him to live outside of court rules in order to see the things he could see that the King could not. The fool was tolerated as a useful ally, valued precisely because he spoke his truth.

In modern times I hope that we don’t have to ostracize those who play this role. After all, why would more people seek this role if the price was as high as the fool paid in ancient times? It seems barbaric to exact the price of personal pride and self-respect the old kings demanded of their fools.

Valuing the Modern Fool

There is a saying among change management consultants, “You can create change or take credit for it. Pick one.” Sadly this is many people’s experience for speaking up and helping those in power see meaningful alternatives. But as with all things, whether the change agent sacrifices credit is a choice by those in power. If you want advisors surrounding you who do not act like fools, best to reward them and give them credit when credit is due.

The question is, what kind of leader are you? The kind who values the fool or the kind that becomes one?

New research confirms that the more power(*) a manager or leader has, the more likely they are to ignore advice.

To some extent this makes sense. I mean, being rewarded with powerful positions means you must be doing something right, right? And if you’re doing something right, why not trust yourself and your decisions?

We can all see the fallacy in this logic taken too far. While trusting yourself is a good leadership skill and facilitates decisiveness, it can also contribute to the ego-centric leader’s sense of infallibility. This leads to all kinds of bad stuff, including bully bosses and just plain jerks.

Why It’s Not Just About Them

Here’s why you should care.

The price paid for these powerful people who ignore advice shows up in shareholder value. The Corporate Executive Board analyzed data over a ten year period and input from over 300,000 employees while studying something similar to powerful bosses willful ignorance. Their study showed that bosses and companies that didn’t ignore input and actually stimulated an open communications environment performed 5.8% better on average than those that didn’t. Bosses who ignore input or actively run around shooting messengers just aren’t as innovative and don’t produce as much for their shareholders.

This finding is reinforced by my own study of people’s experiences in speaking up to bosses and other powerful people. Turns out almost 50% of the 155 people I surveyed withhold their input from bosses most of the time.

Think of all those good ideas dying unspoken. This is too bad for the company, but it’s also too bad for you if you’re one of the ones staying silent. 72% of the respondents in my survey reported getting career advancement opportunities when they did speak up and managed to get the boss to listen. I know from personal experience, research and client work that when you know how to speak up effectively, you can definitely be part of the 72% who get ahead (learn more).

Why Not Take The Ignorance Perk?

But why work so hard? Maybe ignoring people is a way to get ahead? Um… maybe. I mean, it does seem to work for some of them. But then again, think how the mighty are falling these days (Ed Whitacre/GM, Tony Hayward/BP, Jon Corzine/MF Global). I can guarantee you that all these individuals had some right-thinking people in their contingent trying to save them from themselves. Ignoring the good counsel of others – and your own voice of conscious – is a risky business and the higher you go the farther you have to fall.

And if the research is right, a whole bunch of powerful people are out there risking a lot right now. Just think about how competitive you’ll be if you succeed by listening to the wisdom of others, adding it to the power of your own wisdom. Getting ahead and staying there is risky enough without taking this kind of stupidity risk, isn’t it?

So you want pass up the ignorance perk and choose to get ahead? Here’s a little executive coaching on what you can do:

• work on yourself to remain open to new ideas while you move up the ranks;
• mentor those below you not to let success shut them off to others’ input; and
• speak your truth to your own bosses, even if they don’t want to listen.

*”Power” in the context of this article, I believe, refers to what I call “external power.” External power – the authority to manipulate external resources – if fundamentally different than the ability to manipulate internal resources (watch the video on this page).

Note: I’m getting ready to launch a new website/blog on women’s leadership in the new year. I plan to continue blogging here on corporate culture, change management and leadership but I’m scaling back here to a few posts a month. If you want to receive an announcement of the new site launch, sign up for a launch announcement here or follow InPower Women on Facebook or LinkedIn, orTheWomanEffect on Twitter.

Breaking news for creative types: you’re not crazy. Your innovative ideas really are being ignored, downplayed, sidelined and squashed.

So says a study out of University of Pennsylvania Wharton, University of North Carolina and Cornell last year. Turns out that experiments turn up some disturbing findings for those of us hoping to spur innovation in our organizations: new ideas increase feelings of uncertainty and stimulate an anti-creativity bias. The anti-creativity bias causes people to unconsciously ignore the thing causing uncertainty – and your idea along with it.

Even more sadly, objective evidence in favor of your idea doesn’t really help it get through the anti-creative bias.

People just like to play it safe.

What To Do About It

Corporate culture is shaped by this safe-playing instinct. We know from experience that whining won’t help, but knowledge is power. So here are two strategies to use.

1. Don’t go out of your way to poke them in the uncertainty. Now that you know it’s their uncertainty that makes them want you and your idea to go away, be sensitive and emphasize things that reinforce a feeling of safety. A good way to do this easily is by highlighting boundaries around the issue (e.g., timeframes, maximum/minimums, scope etc.). Boundaries make people feel safe.
2. When you do poke them in the uncertainty, do it intentionally and strategically. Sometimes making them feel unsafe is precisely what you need to do to get their attention. But now that you know that doing so can work against you (remember when they guy in Jurassic Park succeeded in getting the T-Rex’s attention? – oops), plan to manage their uncertainty once you’ve got them listening. Use strategy #1 above, but also be ready to explicitly acknowledge the discomfort of uncertainty and move them into an explicit process as soon as they pay attention. Process makes people feel safe when they know what it is.

What this looks like

A skilled innovator can practice both of the above strategies in a single conversation. Here’s an example.

Don’t say: “Hey Bob, Sue’s got a great idea coming out of the innovation lab that will put the Division A’s main product line out to pasture!”

Do say: “Hey Bob, did you know that our 2012 numbers look pretty bad? Big problem in Division A’s projections. I know, (sympathetic) bonuses are looking shaky for another year, but Sue has an idea coming out of the innovation lab that we think can help. I’ll send you an invite to a meeting next Tuesday where we’ll start to vet it. We’ve got a meeting scheduled with the Board next month and this is on the fast track. Hope to see you there.”

The meeting on Tuesday can also be structured this way. Get their attention, create uncertainty and then use process and innovative ideas to move them back towards safety.

This is one of my favorite strategies for any meaningful strategic planning effort. Begin the strategic planning process with new information – new to most of the participants – that creates a sense of urgency to change. This gets their attention out of the gate, which is necessary because many people walk into the strategic planning process convinced nothing useful will happen. The first order of business with this new information is to knock them off their center (gently) so they have to open up to new information to get centered again. It also helps with teambuilding in the strategic context if you design the process to bring the group back to safety through team effort.

This is a process that has to be managed, but it will help you get innovations introduced in a meaningful context.

~~~~~~~Announcements~~~~~~~~~~

Get Ahead With Authenticity & Integrity: Speak Your Truth to Power. This eCourse will help you learn how to tell them off with skill, grace and a likelihood of reward. It’s entirely self-serve at your convenience. Why not spend some downtime over the holidays investing in a career skill no one teaches at leadership camp? Learn more & register.

Update: I’m getting ready to launch a new website/blog on women’s leadership in the new year. I plan to continue blogging here on corporate culture, change management and leadership but I’m scaling back this blog to a few posts a month. If you want to receive an announcement of the new site launch, sign up for launch announcement or follow InPower Women on Facebook or LinkedIn, orTheWomanEffect on Twitter. 

New Study:

Old Problem: Weak leaders think they lead by doing stuff.

At least that’s my interpretation of the study reported on Forbes last week by commentator Holly Green. While I generally agree with the Holly’s advice – have a vision/mission and share it, walk the walk, listen, foster teamwork etc… – I don’t think that gets to the heart of the problem.

The problem is that we think leadership is something you can do. It’s not. It’s something you are. And the only way to tap into the leader YOU are inside is to go there.

Be introspective. Know who you are. Understand your own unique power so you can use it effectively to accomplish what you set your business intention on. Be a scientist and experiment.

When you’ve got a handle on who you are, then you can do stuff that leads others by example and guidance. Then your actions have real power.

What does this look like in action?

• Pay attention to what you are thinking and how you are speaking – watch how others around you respond.
• Manage your thoughts and words carefully to create the kind of behavior in others you want based on what you put into the world.
• Watch what happens when you think and do X vs. Y and choose to do X or Y in the future – intentionally – based on that experience.
• Pay attention to what is a good expenditure of energy for you and what – by contrast – pays little dividend. Use your personal energy more wisely as the months pass.
• Keep experimenting.

The problem? Too few go spelunking in their insides to gain this perspective.

The solution? Dig deep inside yourself to master your own internal resources – your thoughts, your energy – to gain the personal power to master your external actions and become an amazing leader of teams, divisions and organizations.

I spent much of last week doing some of this work in team power-building training with mid-level government execs teaching them to look at power paradigms in groups and corporate culture – and how to shape them intentionally through their own behavior. We had a blast and I loved how the lightbulbs kept going off when they saw their own personal roles within the group more clearly. They loved it too. It can be done.

PS-Taking a break for Thanksgiving. I hope everyone has a relaxed holiday and uses this precious time – when few people expect you to return an email – for some introspection. Ask yourself – where does my personal leadership power come from? See what answers arise.

No, not right. After listening beneath the words of my friends and the media beginning to tell the stories of many men affected by this sad story (by which I don’t just mean Sandusky’s victims, but male victims of coach and priest abuse as well) I believe that the fallout from this tragedy is going to continue for some time.

And as sad as I am for the victims – the boys and men who experienced the abuse and those millions of others whose heroes have fallen recently – I’m glad our sports heroes are being exposed for the human beings they are. Why? Because we too easily accept that money and greed breed cynicism. The fall of Wall Street and political icons is something we’ve come to expect; but the fall of sports icons to something other than financial greed makes it impossible to ignore the simple fact that abuse of external power can happen everywhere and lead to greater harm than simple financial ruin.

My husband said a wise thing to me when we were discussing this recently, and it has vast implications for leaders and those of us in leadership development. He said, “When are we going to understand that there are no heroes? Only heroic deeds?”

The Myth of Paternalistic Leadership

As a culture, we cling to the paternalistic myth of leadership, that our leaders must be strong, brave, courageous and – perfect. They must always know the answers, be right, never show weakness and protect us from all manner of outside threat. In business, this means that the most successful leaders should thrive on conflict and competition, win or come back fighting to win in the end. We excuse a**hole behavior (e.g., Steve Jobs) to perpetuate this myth, and we penalize many up-and-coming leaders who value authenticity over braggadocio because they don’t live up to this image. And of course, many people succeed within this paternalistic culture following these rules so we can point to them and say “See? It works!”

But many people fail too, because the paternalistic myth isn’t real. Everyone is human and no one knows all the answers.

As our economy and institutions hang suspended in uncertainty and polarization, we continue to look for the hero white knight who will sweep in and save us.

Guess What, America? He Isn’t Coming.

While we wait for our hero, the world keeps falling apart. We look around and see our heroes tarnished and fallen. Our media culture crouches nearby waiting to take down the next one that pops up and we’re feel deserted by the hero when no one takes a stand. But really, who wants to be eaten alive in the media eye? So who’s left to save us?

Us.

This is what happens to children on the brink of growing up, when we see dad through the eyes of adult. Dad has always just been a human and had his foibles and weaknesses, but as kids we couldn’t see them because we needed to believe someone else’s power kept us safe until we were strong enough. He didn’t want to show his weaknesses to us because he thought we wouldn’t love and respect him. A perfect standoff until we take that last step, grow up, shoulder the responsibilities of leadership for ourselves and let dad off the perfection hook while holding him responsible for his actions.

A Call To Leaders Everywhere To Tap Their Internal Power

For those of us in business leadership and leadership development, the time is now to help our colleagues, mentees and organizations step into a new model of leadership. And no, as strongly as I champion women in leadership I don’t mean a maternalistic model. Yes, I believe that an integration of the feminine and masculine leadership characteristics is part of the solution, but it’s an integrated model that will get us out of this mess.

The challenge we face in our leadership culture is that we’ve put too much emphasis on the benefits of external power – money, authority and the ability to manipulate external resources. In doing so, we’ve underinvested in developing our understanding and ability to manage our internal resources – our thoughts, energy, actions – to lead change and transformation in a world that desperately needs it.

Think about how dad does it when he does it well. The more he accepts his weaknesses himself; the more he learns to manage them – not hide them – so his strengths help him do what needs to be done; the more he helps us understand as children how to manage our own unique strengths and weaknesses to be proud of who we are and effective at making good things happen in the world; then it’s easier for us to see his humanity as noble – even with his weaknesses – and learn to emulate him as we grow into adulthood. When he calls on his internal power to lead he makes it easier for us to transition through the (inevitable) disappointment of losing our heroic father and accept the strong, capable and fallible man who has supported us, kept bread on the table and brought us up to share the burden of leadership for the next generation.

Think this still sounds too perfect? Don’t. It happens every day. In millions of households and in millions of organizations lead by unsung men and women who don’t make the front page of Forbes or Sports Illustrated but who work to build their internal power to lead others to prosperity, failure and success.

You. Don’t Wait Any Longer.

If you’re one of these leaders who uses internal power effectively, I call on you now to step it up and show others what it means to use this internal power. Internal power isn’t brash, but it is strong and it can be vocal. Be explicit about what you’re doing and mentor those around you. Own your power by sharing it and recognizing it in others as well so they can own theirs too.

If you aspire to this kind of leadership, invest in developing your internal power to lead effectively. I’m investing in helping you, and you can start by learning to speak your truth to power effectively and well to get ahead in your career, accomplish meaningful things and live and lead in integrity.

Women, I Mean You Too

Ladies, this means you too. I’ve heard several women say in the wake of the Penn State debacle that if a woman had found Sandusky he never would have gotten away with it. I’m not so sure this is true. The male culture that covered up this travesty could easily have intimidated a woman into silence. However, I do feel confident in saying that if there had been more women involved in the Penn State culture, the coverup would never have happened. But this isn’t a men vs. women thing. Just as the paternalistic leadership style is failing us, we’re waking up to the fact that the maternalistic archetypes no longer serve us either. We can’t succeed and be what our businesses, families and culture needs us to be if we remain demure, shy and on the sidelines. We have what it takes to claim our 50% role in leadership and no hero is coming to sweep us onto his white horse and give us the Queen’s crown either.

All of us must step up and step In Power. Now.

A personal note. Kudos and gratitude once more to my husband’s leadership for making this transition into adulthood easy on my sons.

But as a species, business leaders could be a lot better at the emotional contracting we rely on much more frequently – with employees, superiors and peers – to move the project forward, file the quarterly report or just get through the day. Negotiating emotional agreements smoothly is a critical leadership skill for increasing productivity and reducing emotional angst in the workplace so it contributes to employee satisfaction, innovation and all the other good stuff we like to see at the office. It’s also very handy for managing that business partner once the legal process is complete and in that sense probably helps reduce overall legal fees!

So here’s a little free eCoaching to help you manage those difficult relationships at work – and hopefully it will help you keep your legal fees under control;)

Emotional Contracts Precede Paper Ones

We like to pretend sometimes that emotions have no place at the office, or that it’s “not our job” to worry about the emotional well being of our employees. (I once heard a manager say about a challenging employee, “That’s his therapist’s job, not mine!”)

But here’s the deal, if you have to deal with them, then you need to take responsibility for at least half of the emotions involved in your interaction – your half. And if your relationship – with a boss, employee, peer, customer, partner, vendor – isn’t going smoothly, or you want it to, you’re going to make more progress faster if you tackle the emotional contract before diving into the legal one.

Emotional Contracting 101

The good news is that emotional contracting isn’t that tough, especially if you’re used to negotiating business agreements. It’s the exact same skill set, just focused on internal contract terms instead of those you’ll find external – on paper.

One difference that matters, though, is that unlike business negotiations that start with an agreement to explore common ground, most emotional contracts aren’t written down, discussed or even surfaced, so don’t expect to find the place to start anywhere else but inside you and in the behaviors you and the other person exhibit when in each other’s presence. This means most emotional contracts need to be reverse engineered before they can be renegotiated. Here’s a quick guide to reverse engineering your emotional agreement with someone.

Jot yourself some notes about your relationship:

• What have I agreed to do and what do I expect in return?
• What do I think they agreed to do and what do they expect in return?
• Where am I not living up to this agreement?
• Where are they not living up to this agreement?
• What’s the gap and what’s the “emotional price” of the gap? (I.E., what problem does the gap create? It can come in hard business terms like disappointment in shoddy deliverables, emotional issues like feeling betrayed and everything in between.)

Piece of cake, right? Ok. Well, with some people it’s really tough, especially when there’s a lot of anger involved. But go ahead and go through the steps above to help dispel the anger and clarify for yourself why the emotions are there in the first place. A good leader understands and negotiates the emotional contracts around herself constantly.

Here’s what it looks like in action when a boss feels an employee isn’t responsive enough and too error prone.

Susan the VP of Customer Service asks Carol the Account Rep for a write-up on a customer complaint before calling the customer back after a scathing complaint email. Susan is upset when Carol doesn’t provide the write up until 5:30pm and it’s incomplete. Susan has to put off calling the customer until the next day, making her feel unresponsive.

This isn’t the first time Susan has been disappointed with Carol’s performance and she expects to end up in a fight if she expresses her dissatisfaction. This time before getting upset and angry with Carol directly, Susan reviews the emotional contract using the questions above and realizes that while she had agreed to contact the customer by the end of the day, she hadn’t made it clear to Carol that she needed the information back no later than 3pm to give her time to ask questions and play telephone tag. Even though Susan might expect Carol to have understood that, she admitted to herself she hadn’t been explicit about the deadline. However, Susan had expected a complete write up and it was clear reading the customer’s original complaint that Carol hadn’t provided all the relevant information. This left Susan feeling unsupported, exposed, disrespected and angry.

Opening Negotiations

Now that you think you know what the breach of contract is, it’s time to bring it up with the other person and open negotiations. Word of warning, though, don’t assume they have any idea what an emotional contract is. Part of leadership is doing the work and modeling it for others, so in this case, you can introduce them to the idea of emotional contracting by simply stating:

• What I agreed to do.
• What I thought they agreed to do.
• A request for confirmation that they see it the same way and if not, to express what they believe the agreement is.

When Susan addresses the issue with Carol the next day, she opened with an admission that she hadn’t been clear and promises to be more precise in the future with exactly what she needs and by when, thus thwarting much of Carol’s anger and surprise by opening with an apology. She asks Carol what she thought the task had been and whether she had been at all unclear about the request, and they discover Carol had been confused but didn’t ask for clarification. Susan shared with Carol that by not asking questions, Carol delivered something incomplete that left Susan feeling exposed when preparing to talk to the customer. The two agree that in the future, Susan will be clearer. Also, Carol agreed to ask for clarification when she needs it as well as confirmation from Susan that she feels prepared before the deadline.

Sure it might still be messy, but you’ll be surprised how often simply breaking it down like this will start to help you have a more productive conversation than the last one you had that was cloudy with emotion. In future posts we’ll look at how these relationship agreements can help sort out other difficult office phenomena like micromanaging, tyrannical behavior and disrespectful employees.

By the way, if you’re a mentor, this is an awesome skill to pass on to your mentee to help her deal with a challenging boss or difficult relationship at the office. Emotional contracting is a great way to manage a relationship from a position where you feel powerless to one where you’re squarely in your own power and it’s something we want all our aspiring leaders to know how to do in order to help shape our business cultures intentionally.

How good are you at negotiating emotions that get in the way of your business dealings? Got any personal tips and tricks that others can learn from? Leave them in comments!

A constant discussion topic among every professional woman I know – and no small number of men – used to be work-life balance. We judged ourselves and each other harshly when it came to our skill in balancing. In our 20’s it was secondary; in our 30’s it was a conundrum; and in our 40’s we made whatever adjustments were necessary and lived with the consequences as our careers developed and families expanded.

Most of us took on the leadership, entrepreneurial and volunteer challenges our choices left us with and succeeded. Somehow, most of us are still married and no one’s kids have gone to the dark side (though I suppose there is still time left;)

We survived and so did our families. This discussion is now old news.

“Balance” is a Misnomer

I admit that juggling a rich family life and professionally rewarding career can be a strain, but I don’t think of it as a balancing act any more. It’s just life. We live life the way we live it, and it is the sum total of all the choices we make along the way – at work, at home, on the commute and on our time off. This is how we stay in our power, by making these choices consciously.

Balancing implies you can favor one over the other, weigh one more heavily than the other, do one well and muddle through the other. I don’t know anyone who consciously chooses to sacrifice their family for their work or vise versa – we all just make choices.

Here’s some free business coaching:

You Can Have It All… Just Not All At Once… Or Can You?

Define “it” and “all” appropriately and IT is ALL yours right now. Your choice.

Once More, Women Lead the Way

This whole discussion started when women took on the burden of two jobs, and yet within two generations, the professions of house-husband, full-time dad and daddy blogger pop up on my radar all the time. Younger generations of men and women are defining happiness and success differently than my generation. Men and women of all ages now struggle with work-life “balance”, until they stop and realize that it’s just life. Women led the way but men are quickly catching up to the blended opportunity of working and living. And in this blend, there is great potential for success.

Success can mean anything you choose to make it. And if you can define it, you can achieve it.

What does this have to do with Leadership?

Leadership is many things, and prioritization of resources, setting of intentions and modeling good character happen to top the list of both employment and family leadership. The day I became a true leader in my family and in my career was the day I accepted responsibility for every decision I make. My life has been far from balanced ever since, but it has been incredibly rewarding, successful and full of love.

Still struggling with the balance?

Look at your next choice as simply a choice about what is in front of you now. Make your choice and move on to the next one. Feeling out of balance? Redefine success and factor that into your next choice. And the next one.

Don’t think it’s possible with your particular set of choices? I say baloney.

What say you?

I don’t buy that image of leader. To me, a leader is ANYONE who takes a stand and influences other people to cause the world to be better.

Leaders run corporations and PTAs; they have authority to make decisions and they rely on heart-felt pleas; they get big name recognition and nobody notices.

If you feel strongly about something, stand for it and cause the world to respond, you’re a leader in my book and I want you to succeed because you’re already changing the world just by being in it.

Take your responsibility seriously.

Stand for what you believe most passionately and learn how to be as effective as you can.

The future depends on your success.

We listed out the challenges Kathy was having and tried to decide if these were issues more challenging to women than men. We concluded that they really weren’t women’s issues but were more related to the “Leadership Stretch” that requires us to take on a broader perspective when we are ready to – or just have – jumped up a major level in management responsibility. We also agreed that it was possible men received help with these issues more regularly through mentoring than women did.

Here is what we identified Kathy was struggling with, and how Meg could help her.

Get a Grip on Magnitude

Meg was pulling her hair out watching Kathy prepare for a board presentation by micromanaging her staff to the decimal point when the overall message and theme of the presentation were still weak – two days from showtime!

Kathy didn’t have a sense of magnitude and where she should be spending her own energy. When you start your career as an individual contributor farther down the food chain – i.e.,  before you get promoted into leadership – you’re typically held accountable for details your superiors don’t have time or skills to manage. You’re rewarded for focusing on the weeds and then later on the trees. Quite often you spend years of your career wandering the forest without even realizing there are such things as oceans, plains and moonscapes. If the trees are all you know, you take them for granted and get fixated on the smaller stuff. But when you want to rise in the ranks, or survive a bit higher up, you’ve got to get a handle on the magnitude of challenges at ecosystem, forest, tree and weed level. Most importantly, you need to learn to spend most of your personal time at the higher levels. When you have a problem to solve, learn to rely on your staff –  i.e., delegate the trees and weeds to them – and manage the forest-as-ecosystem level issues. Good leaders understand the magnitude of each issue and problem they work on and allocate their time and energy accordingly.

Meg’s job was to help Kathy understand that her energy was needed on the higher level messaging issues and she needed to let go of the details she was no longer paid to spend all her time on.

Master the 80/20 Rule

Kathy struggled with tackling a big project that landed on her desk where she had an extremely short turnaround time. Meg had told her she didn’t expect perfection in the first client deliverable – knowing Kathy didn’t have time to get fully up to speed – but Kathy flailed around trying to decide where to start. Meg realized that if she’d understood the 80/20 rule, Kathy would have been in Meg’s office the next morning with the question, “What one thing can I do to knock this out of the park for the client? What about you?”

Focus on what matters most. No matter how complex the situation, there are only a few things that will actually make the big difference you’re seeking. The 80/20 rule traditionally refers to what customers care about. It goes something like “we spend our energy getting right the 20% that meets 80% of our customers’ needs” and the implication is that by meeting 80% of the customer’s needs you’ll gain their satisfaction. This approach isn’t necessarily enough if you’re in a precision environment that requires .99999 reliability, but even in those environments, if you become adept at sussing out the 20% that meets the 80% need, you quickly focus on what to do first, then second then third. It’s a good way to put the details – even the ones that matter – into immediate perspective so you can focus on what will give you the biggest bang for the buck.

Mastering this rule requires that we get better at thinking like our customer/audience/superior. Many of us find this challenging – not always having walked in their shoes. Those that master this skill, however, learn to ask good questions and find out.

Meg’s job was to help Kathy understand the 80% – and to help her see that it was her responsibility to ask about the customer and boss’ perspective until she felt like she understood what a home run looked like.

Delegate In a Project Planning Framework

Kathy struggled with pulling together an internal report on the accomplishments of her new group. She blasted out the detailed reporting requirements and final deadline to the whole team, but her people were confused on which part they needed to deliver when. Kathy was crestfallen since she’d taken time to spell out every detail and thought they would appreciate her thoroughness. Meg decided she needed to coach Kathy on how to lay out the high level deliverables, accountabilities and interim deadlines and let them bring the details to her in the time frames she gave out.

Even if your work has nothing to do with project management, there are a few tricks that project managers learn to do intuitively that will help you delegate. This approach can also help you anticipate where your projects are likely to go haywire so you can make sure they don’t. The key is understanding the critical path and its key dependencies, which becomes the focus your energies personally. If you’re a detail person, go ahead and list out everything that you know must happen in order for a project to be completed, but then go back over it with a highlighter and highlight the major tasks that can only happen in a certain order (this is the critical path). Choose the fewest most important ones that must happen correctly and on time and in that order. Even in complex projects, that “must do right and on time” list should be fairly short with lots of other subtasks feeding into them. You take accountability for the short list and manage your team to this short list of “must-do-right item, concentrating on looking for and helping them clear obstacles to the short list. This puts all those little subtasks into perspective so you can assign broader accountability to your team and help your team members manage them in light of their importance to the delivery of the overall process – a process you now understand at a higher level and own.

Meg’s job was to help Kathy develop the high level project approach and see that she learned how to do it on her own, focusing her energy on the big deliverables and holding her staff accountable to everything that contributed to them.

You’ll notice all of these issues relate to perspective and detail. Your perspective changes – about what issues are at stake, who will pay the price, and what your choices and resources are for approaching the challenge – as you move up the food chain. The main competency of managing “the stretch” is to recognize that your perspective must shift as you go higher and that your best strategy is to tackle this challenge proactively. Taking on the Leadership Stretch is a great way to position yourself for a promotion, to show you understand the broader perspective, and it’s a must-do once you’ve been promoted to demonstrate you can handle it.

It was interesting, by the way, that when we identified these things to help Kathy, Meg recognized she also still dealt with the same issues at the executive level – just another level higher. No matter how high you go, the stretch is there.

What’s your experience with the Leadership Stretch? Did I miss something else to help Meg and Kathy in the stretch between management levels?

*The real Meg has agreed to give her persona over to Everywoman Executive and will become the lightening rod for “typical workplace power vs. powerlessness issues” that women often face. These issues will be suggested by Meg, other women executives I know or meet or – you! What power and powerlessness issues would you like “Meg” to confront? If you’re an Everywoman Executive, what issues have you confronted and handled you’d like me to share with my readers? Contact me to speak to – or through – Meg! (“Kathy” will be a recurring theme too, as Meg helps her with your issues.)