The other day I attended a webinar led by Al Switzler, co-author of the books Crucial Conversations and Influencer. During the webinar Al made this point about interacting with colleagues:

If your response to frustrating conversations is to increase the frequency of your key point or the volume of your delivery, but you don’t change the content of your message, then you will remain stuck in your current situation. 

This is especially true in a leader-follower dynamic. Think about someone you lead who you don’t see eye-to-eye with. Do you seem to be having the same tired old conversation again and again? Do you think that if you could just somehow make your point in a way that’s more appealing, then surely this person will see your point of view?

That’s not how it works.

In fact, I’d bet that each time you repeat this conversation, each of you gets more entrenched in your original position. It’s like being stuck in the mud— trying harder to release yourself from the muck only sinks you in deeper. It’s human nature. We hold on to our convictions—long past the time they are reasonable and even when factual information bears out our misguided thinking.

You can’t wear somebody down with the same argument that they’ve been consistently resisting over time. You need to try a different conversational approach.

When you find yourself mired in the same conversational pattern, try these questions to help get the conversation unstuck:

1. What has to happen in order for you to feel comfortable considering what I’m asking for?
2. What is it about my suggestion that seems unreasonable to you? How can we modify it to make it more palatable to you?
3. In what areas of this discussion do we agree?
4. What is your main concern about [topic being discussed]? If we could successfully address that concern, how likely would you be to move forward with this?
5. Here is where I see our commonalities [list them]. Here is where I see our differences on this topic [list them]. What can we do to bridge these differences?
6. Let’s list the pros and cons of our respective viewpoints and see if we can draw out the commonalities.
7. I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Would you please say that in a different way?

You’ll notice that all of these phrases are very open-ended. They invite conversation. Keep in mind that the goal of asking these questions is to understand the other person’s viewpoint, not to “sell” them on your viewpoint. If you return to persuading, then you’ve tossed yourself right back in the mud.

Getting a follower on board with your idea (or company policy, department paperwork, etc.) can be a lengthy process. Any response on your part that smacks of “because I said so” will only set you further back on the path. The next time you find yourself in a conversation that sounds oh-so-familiar, break out of the pattern and try a different conversational approach. You may just find yourself unstuck in no time.

Discussion question: what are some of your favorite phrases for getting people conversationally “unstuck”?

 photo credit: istockphoto.com © Daniel Kurz

For nearly two decades, management gurus have been heralding the death of the “command and control” mentality in Corporate America. Personally, I think it’s very much alive. Over a year ago, I wrote that the so-called “death” of command and control management is nothing but an urban legend.

Now, a recent article on the Forbes.com site breathes yet more life into this supposedly dying management philosophy.  The article’s main point was to question the relevance of “vanity” titles like Chief Diversity Officer in corporations.  As part of building the story’s premise, a marketing consultant is quoted as saying, “the only ‘C’s’ with ‘real’ power are the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer and, occasionally, Chief Operating Officer.”

I strongly disagree with that statement and decided to post a response on the character-based leadership site The Lead Change Group.  See my thoughts on leading from who you are, not with your title in Do CEO’s Really Have All the Power?

My friend Sally works for a company that holds monthly small-group “open forum” type meetings for cross-sections of various company departments. The purpose of these meetings is to promote cross-departmental communication.  Each month, leaders from different functions in the company moderate the discussion. In general, Sally enjoys the meetings, except for one aspect: they are too long. They often go on for what seems like days three hours.  

She says that if she could give the meeting leaders one piece of advice to improve the process it would be this:

“After the conversation hogs have all repeated themselves three times and even the meekest member of the group has spoken up, it’s time to WRAP. IT. UP.”

Good advice for any meeting, I’d say.

I give the leadership at Sally’s company credit. Their intent to improve communication across functions is laudable. Unfortunately, they’ve ascribed to the thinking that if one hour of cross-functional conversation is good, then surely two hours must be better and hey, three hours is best of all.

This is definitely a case where “more” does not equal “better”. When people begin to repeat themselves, it’s a sure sign that a meeting has run its course.

If you’re in charge of leading meetings, you’d do well to use Sally’s rule of thumb. Don’t wait for the fat lady to sing; listen carefully and close it down long before then.

Dan McCarthy from the blog Great Leadership has pulled together a year-end review of leadership blog posts from 2011. He asked contributors to the leadership development carnival to submit their favorite post of 2011. You can see the summary here, along with each blogger’s commentary on why it made the list.

Good leadership reading to start the year off right!

If your company conducts its performance appraisals on an annual calendar basis then the past month has likely had you knee-deep in the process. There’s an equally likely chance you are supposed to do a self-appraisal for your performance view as well. As a leader, do you dread this task because you’re so consumed with the process of getting your team’s reviews/IDP’s* done?

Here are six reasons people put off writing their self-appraisal and ideas for how to get “get the dread out” and get it done.

I don’t have time.

You’ve got the same 24 hours in a day that everybody else does. Rather than focusing on your lack of time, focus on why you’re putting off the task. Likely, the true explanation lies in one of the factors below. Check them out then form a game plan for getting some writing time on the calendar. It won’t get done until you make time to do it.

Our performance appraisal process is a joke.

There are those who say the current performance appraisal process is broken. There’s merit to that argument. As an organizational leader you have two choices: 1) Become a change agent and take up the gauntlet to help affect a positive, real improvement in the appraisal process in your company  2) Put on your big-kid pants and deal with it. Complaining about it is wasted breath.

My boss never gives me a performance review.

Yes, it’s frustrating when your boss isn’t setting a good example. Do you really want to follow suit? This is especially important if you are a leader of leaders. Decide you’ll be there for your team, even if you’re not getting the same courtesy from your boss.

Why bother? There’s a wage freeze.

C’mon, now, really? Look past the fact that there will be no money forthcoming during the appraisal process. Consider the reflection that you do during the self-appraisal as an investment in you— it’s your chance to get better at some aspect of your role. You can’t put a price tag on that.

I’ve been doing the same job for many years. It’s the same stuff, year after year.

This is a legitimate concern—to a point. Long-term, high-performing contributors do have to search harder to find something new to put on their IDP. But it can be done.  Eleanor Roosevelt said “Do one thing every day that scares you.” This is a great place to start on your quest for more interesting development plans. What one thing has been conveniently dropping off your professional-do list because it’s uncomfortable? Make this the year that it gets declared as a goal. Think of your sense of accomplishment when you complete that goal!

It’s been a rough year. I don’t really want to rehash it on paper.

Even top contributors have an off year. If you view it as a way to get it onto paper and into the history books, it may take some of the sting out of it. Even big project fiascos can teach us something, if we can just get past the downward pull of disappointment.

What other reasons are out there for a lack of interest in writing one’s self-appraisal? I’d love to hear them!

*Individual Development Plan. See Dan McCarthy’s fantastic primer on how to write an IDP at his blog Great Leadership.

photo courtesy istockphoto.com

I’ll be right up front on this book review: I know the author.

Art Petty and I are professionally acquainted; we’re fellow leadership bloggers and our paths sometime cross on consulting projects. I’m a huge fan of Art’s writing about leadership—he’s extremely pragmatic, yet self-effacing. You won’t find bombastic pontificating on his blog. What you will see are in-the-trenches observations that are written with a sly wink and a smile. So when I found out he was publishing a second* book, I asked for a review copy.

Art has years of experience in corporate senior leadership, where he tried out the suggestions he offers in his book. The new book, Leadership Caffeine, is a collection of more than 80 essays from Art’s blog Management Excellence.  

You might be thinking, “Why buy the book when I can read Art’s blog?”  Here’s why: it’s packaged differently than a blog and therefore allows you to tap into some inspiration and information at a moment’s notice. Art has arranged his vast wealth of knowledge into bite-sized nuggets that can be easily enjoyed as your time allows. Think of this book as a form of caffeine for your leadership development: infusing a little jolt when you’re feeling a lag in leadership energy.

The book is organized into 10 sections:

• Developing Yourself
• Politics, Bosses and Other Realities of Organizational Life
• The Leader and Decisions
• Problems? Trying Looking in the Mirror
• The Nimble Leader
• Surviving the Tough Days
• Building High Performance Teams
• Timeless and Priceless Leadership Advice
• In Pursuit of Greatness
• The Lighter Side of Leadership Caffeine

As you can see, this isn’t your typical leadership business book. Art’s writing style is conversational and infused with humor so that you hardly even know you’re learning something as you read. (Sneaky, huh?)

The book doesn’t need to be read start-to-finish. In fact, it’s more like a magazine in that you can flip through the table of contents, see what appeals to you and go directly to that essay. Each written piece finishes with Art’s trademark “The Bottom Line for Now” summary. For example, in the essay Your Leadership Character is Forged in Defeat the Bottom Line is,

“Laugh today and keep moving forward. There are lessons to be learned from stumbling while on the road to victory.”

Now that’s what I call a good cup of leadership joe.

*His first was as co-author of Practical Lessons in Leadership.

What do your organization’s workplace doorways signal to employees? Whether it’s the front door, the employee entrance, or the boss’s cubicle doorway, have you ever considered what happens in employees’ minds when they pass over their work threshold?

As a leader, you probably haven’t given it much thought, but consider this recently reported brain research* published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: people become forgetful when they pass through doorways.

Psychologist Dr. Gabriel Radvansky from the University of Notre Dame conducted memory research aimed at uncovering why humans often forget what they were doing when moving from one room to another. It turns out that passing through a doorway may somehow be involved in how our brain files away information. Dr. Radvansky theorizes that the door acts as an “event boundary” that may cause us to “lose our thought’ after we pass through the door.

Interesting.

Could that describe the phenomenon of perfectly responsible adults who walk through their workplace doorway and “forget” how to behave maturely? You know who I’m talking about—outside of work these folks hold positions of responsibility and authority: parent, committee chairperson, elder in their house of worship. But then, they walk through their office door and “POOF!” they seemingly have forgotten their adult capacities back at home. Is the brain’s storage system the culprit?

Of course, I’m taking liberties with this research. It’s not that people have forgotten how to behave like adults; it’s that they don’t believe they will be supported in their endeavors to be a grown-up. I firmly believe that the work environment shapes employee behavior. As Geary Rummler and Alan Brache wrote in their book, Improving Performance, “if you put a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.” And guess what? People in positions of leadership are in the best position to create a welcoming “system” that allows people to bring their full adult-ness to work.

This idea of an “event boundary” and the way employees perceive their world can be a useful reminder to those in management. Even though employees don’t really “forget” how to be responsible people when they cross their workplace entry, that door does signal something to them.

Give it some thought: What does your office door signal to your employees?

*Thanks to science writer Annie Murphy Paul on Twitter for tweeting this article.

photo credit: istockphoto.com

As I write this, it is four days prior to Black Friday, long considered the kick-off to the start of the retail industry’s crucial holiday shopping season.  Every year, Black Friday starts earlier. Now, Thanksgiving Day is the new Black Friday. Many retail chains have announced plans to open at some point on Thanksgiving Day to capitalize on gaining consumers’ paltry disposable income. The latest workplace issue surrounding this move comes from a Target employee who started a petition called “Save Thanksgiving” when he found out he was scheduled to work from 11 PM Thanksgiving Day until 4 AM Friday morning.

I began my career in retail, so I get it: retail work means long hours at not-so-fun times of the day. As a Human Resources manager, I recall the challenges of the make-or-break period from late November until December 24^th. Our entire management staff worked very hard to ensure our team members didn’t experience employee burnout.  Nobody loved the work hours, but it was the way the retail business operated.

Of course, back then we had some slack; employees could still expect to be home on Thanksgiving Day—all of it. We didn’t open at midnight in a desperate attempt to glean a few extra dollars at the expense of our employees’ precious few hours of time off. Now, it appears, even a national holiday is off the table for retail employees.

According to Target’s director of human resources for Northern region stores, “the decision to open at midnight Black Friday was not one we took lightly. As this is the busiest shopping day of the year, it is imperative that we be competitive.”  

So I wonder—just how much will the Target chain really come out ahead with this decision? Will the sales revenues generated offset the costs of operating the store? What about the hidden costs of resentful employees working unfamiliar non-standard shifts?  I think many consumers would be happy to wait a few hours so that employees can spend some time with their families. It may even glean the retail store some good will. And if they can’t (maybe they have to work starting at 3 AM for their retail employer) then they can hop online and shop Target.com.

I see this as a failure of leadership at the head of these large retail corporations. The executives could have taken a stand against Black Thanksgiving. They could have said, “We choose to honor the tradition of the Thanksgiving holiday and provide our employees with time off to enjoy time with their families.”

Instead, they’ve engaged in a game of “me, too” with their competition. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Over at the HBR Blog Network author Michael Schrage says that CEO’s should assign their top creative thinkers to fix up the organization’s most boring and ineffective processes. He says that this shift in thinking—putting the brightest employees on the “most trivial/scut work” projects will send a powerful signal to the organization: “Improving efficiency and effectiveness for the entire organization — for everybody — should be a top management and top talent priority, too.”

OK, I’m on board with the premise. But here’s where this idea could potentially break down: many of those “top talent” types that Schrage is talking about abhor the mundane. My experience tells me that many creative types aren’t wired for perfecting processes. Even if an executive could convince the high-performers of the project’s merits, the daily grind of ferreting out the inefficiencies of the process would probably drive most “idea people” insane.

For a “put your top talent on your worst business processes” strategy to work, a leader needs to understand that there are four basic project roles* that people enjoy. The key is, not all people enjoy the same roles in equal measure and not all people are equally good at all four roles. Here’s a rundown of the 4 roles every process improvement project needs:

Create – this role is about ideation. People who naturally “create” love coming up with ideas (some of them outlandish) and then handing these off to people who will organize their copious and somewhat random stuff into a workable solution.

Advance – creating connections is this role’s strength. A person who loves the role of “advancer” loves to bring people together, create coalitions and ensure that all stakeholders’ voices are heard.

Refine – think of this role as the “red pen” editor. People who naturally gravitate toward this role are able to take an existing idea and make it better. They can easily spot the gaps or inefficiencies in a process.

Execute – “Get ‘er done” is this role’s motto. Milestones and action plans are this role’s sweet spot. People who are skilled in execution can keep the project moving along, and will deliver on time and under budget.

Here’s my caution to a leader considering Schrage’s recommendation to put the “top talent” on clean-up duty for messy company processes: be sure that the talent you select not only can create, but can advance, refine and execute. Most likely, this is going to require a diverse project team, because most Creators love ideation but abhor refinement. Likewise, most Refiners love to edit the process, but find ideation tedious. And so on.

All of these roles must be fulfilled if an organization is to succeed in shedding what Schrage calls the “computational crap and digital detritus that inevitably occur when organizations try to keep going and growing fast.”

*Disclosure: These four roles are described in Inscape Publishing’s  self-assessment tool called Team Dimensions Profile. My consulting company SkillSource is an authorized independent distributor of Inscape professional development assessments. I’ve used this model to help project team leaders identify and select project team members to ensure that all 4 project roles are thoroughly represented for optimal team peformance.

Photocredit: istockphoto.com

Thinking of taking on a bigger leadership role, either inside your company or with a new one? Chances are you already know that getting a strong start is critical to your success. You may be surprised to know exactly just how early a start you need to get. According to authors George Bradt, Jayme Check and Jorge Pedraza – you should start your leadership transition before you even interview for the job. Now that’s what I call serious proactive measures.

The Book’s Premise

In their book The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your team and Get Immediate Results, the authors put forth the central premise of preparedness. In this revised, third edition the authors state “a new leader’s role begins as soon as that person is an acknowledged candidate for the job. Everything new leaders do and say will send powerful signals, starting well before they even walk in the door on Day One.” The authors mean what they say. Day One doesn’t even show up until Chapter 7.

The Rundown

In the first six chapters, the reader is given advice on how to:

• Find your leadership “voice” and chart your career path
• Interview for the job
• Conduct “due diligence” on the company, leadership role and team  
• Set up introductory meetings with key stakeholders prior to Day One
• Structure a pre-employment cascade of communications to set up a successful Day One.

Chapter 7 is devoted entirely to making Day One a highly productive and successful first day. It covers such far-reaching considerations as where to physically locate on Day One if you lead more than one geographical location, dress code considerations and a list of common first-day mistakes that leaders make.

Chapter 8 is a chapter on communication, covering both the types of communications modes to consider (teleconference, social media, face-to-face meetings, etc.) and the subtleties of storytelling and unspoken “signs and symbols” that a leader conveys.

Chapters 9 – 13 cover the nuts and bolts of a leader’s first 100 days:

• Embed a burning imperative
• Create key milestones to drive team performance
• Overinvest in early wins to build team confidence
• Get the right people in the right roles

My Take on the Book

One of the best aspects of the book is that it provides detailed timelines and worksheets, many of which are downloadable at onboarding-tools.com. Using the worksheets online is free, but you do have to register with your name, email address and a password to access the site.

The book cover touts this book as “a comprehensive onboarding strategy for leaders at every level.” I agree with the “comprehensive” label; this is indeed a very structured and detailed account of what a leader needs in order to make a successful transition either internally or externally into an organization. I have a difference of opinion on the “leaders at every level” aspect of the book cover. This is a book that would most benefit someone at a senior leader (think director level or above). Many of the suggestions the authors make would not be financially or physically practical for a front-line supervisor or mid-level manager.

The Upshot

This is definitely not “light” reading or for the seat-of-the-pants type person. But if you are serious about making a successful leadership transition and making a positive impact in your new leadership role, you’ll want to give this book a try.

Disclosure: I received a galley copy (pre-proof draft) of the book for the purposes of this review.