Posts tagged leadership

Volunteer Leadership

Business Coaching Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius Performance Measurement Promotion Tuesday Stuff Tips

Want to be a great leader…learn to lead volunteers.

In 1992, a mentor of mine, in the Air Force, got me involved in a volunteer leadership role with a professional military organization.

I completely failed in the position.

But, I didn’t quit. I stuck with that organization as an active leader through 2008 (my retirement). In fact, I’m still a life member and assist other leaders now and again.

When I started out as a volunteer leader, I knew nothing about volunteering or leadership — I was just a young junior enlisted member.

What I learned … unimaginable.

Today, I run two nonprofit organizations that my wife and I founded. We keep them small and serve niche needs in our community.

It’s our way we give back constantly to our community. Better than giving to a faceless charity with zero control on how your money and efforts are spent, huh?

Want to learn how to lead?

Lead volunteers.

Want to learn how to lead an organization.

Become a volunteer leader of a nonprofit.

The perfect place to start is Toastmasters International. Their nonprofit program has a leadership and speaking tracks that teaches you how to be a great leader.

What have been your volunteer experiences?

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants
#leadership #volunteering

Being the Leader

Business Coaching Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius Stuff Thoughtful Thursday

Pre-COVID Boss to Employee: I’m in charge. I have all the answers. I don’t need to discuss the situation with you.

Post-COVID Boss to Employee: I’m in charge. I don’t have all the answers. I need to discuss the situation with you.

What are the top leadership lessons that we’ve learned in this crisis?

Is it best to be open, up front, honest, and vulnerable with your employees?

Do you tell them that cash flow is struggling, sales have dropped, and no one is buying?

Do you let them know you don’t know what to do and that you’re concerned about layoffs or going out of business?

Do you protect your employees and don’t tell them any of your concerns — it’s better this way?

These are thoughts every leader faces at some point. But how do they respond and what’s the pros and cons of each?

It’s easy to tell someone how they should act, but it’s a totally different thing when you have to do the acting.

What are your thoughts?

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants
#leadership

Leadership After COVID-19

Business Coaching Business Consulting Change Management In Your Face Friday Leadership Meandering Genius Performance Measurement Strategic Communication Strategic Planning

How will your leadership  behaviors change after COVID-19?

I’ve seen some pretty sad displays of business leadership during this crisis.

Governments hiding the truth. Business owners forsaking their people.

By now, most have seen the story of Chili’s in the Atlanta airport, where they had all their workers come in to clean the store and then laid them all off directly afterwards.

As a leader, have you taken a hard look at yourself in the mirror and witnessed how your behavior had changed in this crisis? Are you self-aware?

Jobless claims soared to 3.2M.

This week, I heard of a business leader moving all their sales staff from partial salary to 100% commission. This in a company that can’t sell anything right now. Might as well lay everyone off.

Then I’ve seen leaders that eliminated their entire salary and all the executives took a pay cut.

Some companies have cut all salaries in half during this crisis to keep everyone on staff and protect their jobs.

While others have used this as a way to eliminate people they wanted gone from their company all along.

Imagine what people will look for in a leader after this crisis? Especially at a time where companies will be hiring in the droves.

#success #incubator #business #coaching #consultants

Leadership Development

Business Coaching Business Consulting In Your Face Friday Leadership Meandering Genius Strategic Planning

Leadership is not easy! True leadership that is! Anyone can be put into a leadership position, but few are good leaders.

Although there are natural leaders that are born and do great without effort, most must train and develop leadership muscles because it is not a natural talent or skill.

Sending someone to a leadership conference once a year is not developing leaders…you’re wasting money. Invest in your leaders with a complete leadership development program that is consistent, tailored and focused.

Organizational Myopia, in siloed organizations, starts with leaders that do not know what to look for or how to solve it. Step one is to read the book!

How’s your leadership development program?

Coach vs Consultant

Business Coaching Business Consulting Innovation Leadership Meandering Genius Organizational Commitment Performance Measurement Process Improvement Promotion Tuesday Strategic Communication Strategic Planning

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a Personal and Professional Business Coach and Consultant.

But isn’t a Coach and Consultant essentially the same thing? I don’t believe so.

If you know who Tony Robbins is, you’ll appreciate his breakdown:
https://www.tonyrobbins.com/coaching/coaching-vs-consulting/?gclid=CjwKCAjwiN_mBRBBEiwA9N-e_r9iYZdJVc4U2jQgJDs5KXqGQZ_dbrTFKCCX6FRZ0iD0CiNanUYsQBoCIl8QAvD_BwE

However, here is my simple definition of differences…

A Coach guides and advises you on taking action to solve problems, overcome obstacles, and achieve success.

A Consultant takes the action for you.

It boils down to two things: Capacity and Capability. Capacity means that you have the time and resources to take the action yourself. Capability means that you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to take the action yourself.

You coach someone when they have the Capacity and Capability. When they don’t have one of the two, you step in as a Consultant.

Developing the Leader Within

A Lesson from Life in Leadership

Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius 3 Comments

Here is the perfect lesson in leadership. Not to be political, but to share a point. Clearly, if the results were different, I’m wondering if the actions would have been any different. However, this was a poignant lesson in leadership just the same.

Election night thousands of Clinton supporters waited for hours throughout the day. They stood and watched, all exuberant when the initial polling reports came in. They stood and watched as the numbers started coming in. They stood and watched as the expected New England states started flipping for Clinton. They stood and watched as critical swing states like Ohio and Florida were lost. They stood and waited for their leader.

They stood and waited for something that never came!

Behind the scenes, Clinton was calling Trump to concede, while on stage she had sent her Campaign Manager, John Podesta, address her supporters. “Go home,” he said, “we’re not done yet.”

Yes…yes, you are. 

The moment the leader fails to be a leader and abdicates their responsibility to another is the moment the leader stops becoming a leader. 

By sending Podesta to address (and lie) to her thousands of supporters, she has shown that this is all about her and not about them. A servant leader would have empathized with her people and would have known that they needed her to speak.
Instead, she called, conceded, and went home to bed. The next day she called a press conference at 10 am, but didn’t speak until almost noon. This time it was only to staff, aides, and cameras. Worse yet, the loss was blamed, through veiled statements, on a system designed to keep a woman from the Oval Office. 

This was the best display of poor leadership, demonstrated at the highest levels. What to learn from this:

1. If you lose, something fails, it breaks, etc., get out there and address your people. Be transparent and provide them closure.

2. You’re in charge. Accept the blame and move on. Blaming anything and everything else on the failure might make you feel better about yourself, but it robs you of control of the situation. Taking ownership, means taking control and that’s what your people want to see–it provides hope, not defeat.

Please take a lesson from this and not be like this.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2016/11/9/13572218/clinton-concession-speech-not-speaking?client=ms-android-att-us

Mentor or Coach

Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius 2 Comments

Over lunch a couple of days ago, we were discussing the subject of mentors and coaches and started to highlight the difference in the roles. Sometimes people can seemlessly operate in both roles at once, so the roles do not seem distinctly different, but they are.

We discussed a few items that seem to differentiate the two roles:

One of the items was Blind Spots. Coaching is designed to identify blind spots, where mentorship is more designed to overcome blind spots once identified. Sometimes the coach can guide the coachee in ways to overcome the blind spot, while in other situations they might recommend they obtain training or a mentor.

Another item was Proximity. Coaches are generally involved with what they are coaching you on, whereas a mentor is someone you mostly meet with to discuss things with. Coaches tend to actively participate in the thing they are coaching you on so they can witness your actions and provide advice and direction if improvement is needed.

Another item was Selection and Appointment. Although some organizations have more formal mentorship programs, generally coaching relationships are formal and assigned for a specific reason. Mentors are normally sought out to discuss and close a gap.

When we were discussing the subject, we discussed two different types of coaches–Lean Six Sigma and Executive. Both of these are very specific roles where an individual is involved with what is going on in a coachee’s life. In Lean Six Sigma, for example, the coach is engaged with every step of a coachee’s project,  guiding them in the application of the skills they should have learned already. If the coach recognizes that the coachee has difficulty in running meetings or presentations, they might suggest that the coachee obtain additional training in those areas. If the coach notices that the coachee has trouble with time management, they might suggest establishing a mentorship relationship with someone that they know is particularly good at time management. If the coach is good at time management, they might quickly switch into that mentor role, but this is outside of the original coaching arrangement.

This is why people often see coaches and mentors as the same thing–they can cover more areas than what they are specifically coaching for. In the case of an executive coach, the coach might be able to provide all kinds of advice and assistance on leadership and employee motivation. However, they probably would suggest the executive have a mentor if the coachee is trying to learn how to navigate the company’s culture toward promotion.

When you think about the roles, this should help you better delineate what each does and which you need.

The Employee Engagement Discussion

Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius Organizational Commitment

For the last ten years, businesses have focused on employee engagement and its cost to businesses. Pretty much any report or study on engagement points out that about 70% of employees in the U.S. are not engaged at work and it is costing businesses approximately $500 billion a year.

Unfortunately, this employee-focused issue has not changed since before the 1950s when the emphasis was on employee satisfaction.  In the 1980s, the emphasis turned to organizational commitment.  The business issue; however, has not changed since researchers started studying and quantifying the situation more than 70 years ago.

There are a few major companies out there that have found some success in this arena and have become the poster childs for how they treat their employees.  Like in everything else, many companies think if they simply do the same visible things that they will be successful and their survey results will go up.

Speaking of survey results; when it comes to this topic, this is another important aspect. The purpose of surveying employees on their engagement (or whatever employee-focused thing) is to quantify how employees feel about the organization. Many companies do not even measure this, which tells someone a lot about how much they care about the issue. A good deal others use the survey results to target specific things in the organization to raise the score. This is a failed approach to employee improvement.  Surveys are for the purpose of providing a gauge of how engaged your employees are, not specifically a roadmap to improvement.

When you look at this issue from the business’ point of view, they do not really care if the employee is satisfied or engaged at work. They just know that if the employee is not, they are not operating as well as they should. What organizations want is employees committed to the organization–organizational commitment.

Employees, on the other hand, do not care about being committed. What they want is to be satisfied with their job–employee satisfaction.

The concept of “being engaged” is a deeper subject that most companies and employees simply do not understand. Employee satisfaction represents how employees feel about the things they can measure in their job. Organizational commitment is a result of satisfied and engaged employees and is measured from the business’ point of view.  But engagement is something entirely different.

Each of these three terms: satisfaction, commitment, and engagement, work together in business. Each one is important and should be the focus of employee and organizational wellbeing.

From a satisfaction point of view, employees are focused on the tangible things that they can measure at work.  Things such as the security of their position, comusurate pay and benefits with their role in comparison to others, recognition and rewards, opportunity for advancement, the company dress code, etc.

From an organizational commitment perspective, there are three factors that exist: employee, leadership, and organization. Employees must be present and they must be dedicated to work. If the company does not have any employees, then who will be committed to the organization? If the employees are lazy and not interested in working hard–just want to get paid–then they will not be committed. If there is no effective leadership to provide a vision and goals, or reward and recognize employees, then commitment cannot occur. The organization might have people in leadership positions, but they might not be leaders. Lastly, the organization must not just exist, but it needs to be an organization worth being committed to. If your organization does not have a strong purpose, vision, and culture, employees find difficulty being committed to it.

Engagement is the term that confuses managers the most. The reason is, because it is really based on how employees feel about their job.  This is difficult for companies to manage to, so most resort to single items scored low on a survey. Employee satisfaction was easy to manage to because, like the employee, the company could see, touch, and measure it. What confuses engagement even further is that many of the surveys out there include questions related to commitment and satisfaction as part of the engagement equation.

Employees are engaged by three things at work. These three things are communication, development, and quality. These things are not obvious to organizations and usually are some of the major problem areas many companies have. Open and honest communication builds relationships and trust with leadership and between employees. Most organizations stuggle with communication (internal and external).  Development is more than having classes available or a training budget that no one uses. Development is about actively challenging employees to grow and helping them with the challenge. It is about assisting them to become something better and stronger then they were when they started with the company. Quality is a recognition of doing good work, that employees around you are doing good work, and that the management focuses on quality work.  If the company does not care, cuts corners, and puts out a shoddy product just to make more money, the employees will be the first to know it.

So, the discussion needs to turn from one of engagement to one of organizational and employee wellbeing. All things, satisfaction, commitment, and engagement should be evaluated to establish a baseline and then to measure effective improvement. For each category, the right things need to occur versus focusing only on statements and scores on a survey. Only then will wellbeing occur.

Bad Leadership is Becoming an Epidemic

Business Consulting Leadership Meandering Genius Organizational Commitment Performance Measurement Process Improvement Strategic Communication Strategic Planning 2 Comments

It might be me, but the more I look around, the more I am finding bad leadership. Specifically leadership apathy and leaders that lack accountability. “It’s good enough” leaders and leaders who are “just getting by.”

“Why are we seeing this,” I ask myself?

Bad leaders hire and promote bad people. Bad Leadership isn’t just destroying corporate America, but they are doing it at a record pace and doing it way into the future.

These leadership charlatans are building armies of apathy to follow in their footsteps. If you are someone that gets things done, you are kept in a position to get things done because bad leaders don’t want you–you threaten them.

No wonder more than 70% of employees are disengaged at work. Who wouldn’t be with such a sorry leadership outlook.

Often, we talk about the qualities and actions of good leadership, but I think it is important that we learn to spot bad leadership. Here are the top ten results of bad leadership:

1. The realm under the leader has little if no strategy or plan to inspire and drive people. Literally there is no vision, the purpose of the business is primarily focused on making money, becoming bigger, and taking care of itself. Any goals are developed to ensure each subordinate leader can justify their position in the strategic plan and do little to overcome barriers to a future vision. Any vision and goals are such low targets that they in most cases have already been attained.

2.  Program accountability is slowly eroding and nothing is done about it (i.e., deadlines are missed, people not qualified are in positions, reports are misleading, etc.). Expectation barely exists in the organization because targets, rules, and requirements are ignored. Organizations like audit, risk, and compliance are seen as the enemy and kept away from the organization. When there is a finding from one of these organizations, the leaders spends all resources to make it go away and cover it up, but does little to nothing to solve the root causes that created the issue in the first place.

3.  There is a complete lack of organizational performance and process management and accountability. No one knows deeper than monthly what they are doing from a measurement perspective and there is a complete lack of process focus. Everyone simply does their own thing and what little process documentation is lodged tightly in the heads of the employees and passed down like tribal knowledge. Knowledge systems are busting at the seems with senseless information without any organization. Variance across processes run rampant and unchecked.

4.  There is a significant lack of communication both internally and externally. What communication that is occuring lacks any direction or strategic intent. The leadership doesn’t even know who their stakeholders are to communicate to. The term customer is used, but they are a faceless entity that nothing is really known about. Specifications for work are all internally created and bear no resemblance to competition or what customers actually want. In some cases, the customer is seen and portrayed as the enemy.

5.  The organizational structure looks like a Christmas tree and is broken into functional and operational departments that are so siloed that the company looks like an island chain. There is little communication and less cooperation across departments. Each silo is only focused on what they do for themselves, they see everyone else as a competitor for money and manpower, and they simply throw work over the wall versus work in an end-to-end process.

6.  Education and training opportunities might exist, but there is no plan or strategy to develop employees and leaders. The activity, if it happens at all, is chaotic and clearly broken. Employees mainly spend resources to gain skill through training so they can leave the company.

7.  Operational effectiveness, based in things like defect counting, process timing, first pass yield, on time delivery, customer satisfaction, etc. is barely looked at (if at all) and nothing of substance is done about it.

8.  Leaders across the organization focus on tactical operations, ignore problems, lack methodical problem solving, micromanage work, and have little vision at work.

9.  Good, hard working employees are consistently overlooked for promotion opportunities and are kept “getting the work done.”  The great employees have either turned apathetic in the workplace, are looking for other opportunities, or have already left.

10.  Almost all the leadership and management below a bad leader looks the same. The problems above spread to every corner what that leader controls. Bad leaders conspire with other bad leaders to corrupt the entire organization because this eliminates the need for accountability. Soon, the disease has spread to the highest level executives and even possibly the president or CEO. The leadership ranks become bloated with high-paid executives who do little and hold no one accountable to organizational values.

These companies are like the undead. The disease has corrupted the body so badly that it doesn’t even realize it’s dead. It just keeps operating and destroying everything in its path. This mindless company lumber on making money in spite of itself and it decays and starts to collapse. Yet, the bad leadership are so unaware of the situation that they can’t even fathom there is a problem.

Bad leadership is running rampant in corporate America and the undead companies are lumbering across the landscape. Is there nothing that can be done?

Are TV Shows Destroying Our Ability to Trust?

Business Consulting Leadership Organizational Commitment 1 Comment

television-0829f2bf70If anyone knows me, you probably know that I don’t watch television.  I find that TV is a time waster.  However, I do tend to watch movies on Cable and Netflix and recently, in a need to decompress, my wife and I have been watching a few different TV shows.  Last night my wife made a very interesting revelation.  She said, “After watching these shows, I think I’m growing to not trust anyone anymore.”

After some thought and a review of what we’ve been watching, she’s right.  The four shows that we’ve absorbed are The Agents of Shield, Arrow, Continuum (she’s watched this, I haven’t), and Merlin.  In all of these television shows, there are lying and conniving characters right in your midst.  No one tells the truth and everyone is living out separate lives on the screen.

Now, I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I did, and many people do.  Think about this influence.  Are all TV shows the same–they live out a drama of a series of lies and deceits where the characters are all hiding something sinister from the rest of the characters?  Think about this influence in our youth…

This is what we’re taught.  Life is full of half truths and no one…not even yourself can be trusted.  Then they enter the work world, where everyone is lying…everyone is living a secret life.  Think about our ability as employees to trust when we grew up in this environment.  The constant digital bombardment of “this is the way it is” from television shows.  In work today, the need and importance for trust is paramount.  Authors and consultants make millions off the concept, yet all the while, our environment is destroying your ability to trust.

Are we fighting a war that we have already lost?  I trust that you’ll think about this.