Tag Archives: Leadership

THREE BASIC TRUTHS ABOUT PEOPLE THAT BUSY LEADERS SHOULD NOT IGNORE

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Three Basic Truths About People That Busy Leaders Should Not Ignore

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Lately, I’ve been working with a company that’s about to make a big leap. They have a potentially world-changing product and are on the cusp of scaling up in a big way. It’s very exciting stuff.

Everyone from the CEO on down is super busy. There is a lot of work to do both internally and externally. With all the demands, time and attention is a scarcer resource than money.

That’s true for many of the leaders I work with. It can be really exciting when you’re running at a hundred miles per hour to get big things done. The challenge is that, in that kind of situation, it’s easy to lose sight of some basic truths about people that you just intuitively get when you’re not so absorbed by everything else you have to do.

Here, then, are three basic truths about people that busy leaders should not ignore:

People care about where you are and what you’re doing. – When you’re running hard, you’re likely to be in a lot of meetings and, possibly, on a lot of airplanes. You’re getting stuff done but it can feel to your team like you’re missing in action. Keep doing what you need to do but let them know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Set the context and tell the story. Nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of solid information, people make stuff up. That’s hardly ever helpful. Avoid that by letting your people know where you are, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

People want predictability.  – To do their best work, most people need some amount of predictability. They need to know what’s expected of them, what others are working on and how it all hangs together. This is especially true for leadership teams. They need an operating rhythm that ensures that they can stay well informed and in sync with each other. That requires regular and consistent communications. It can be hard to stick with the rhythm of that when you’re running flat out, but it needs to be a priority. Without the predictability of that kind of communication, your team will likely lose their way.

People will hardly ever speak up if you ask, “Are there any questions?” – How many times have you been in a town hall meeting (or, worse, leading one) when, after all the presentations, someone asks, “Are there any questions?” and the response is crickets. That’s because most people are never going to step up and ask the first question in front of a room. Again, that’s especially true when there is a lot going on and a lot of change. If you really want to know what people think (and you should), don’t ask, “Are there any questions?” Instead, ask “What are we missing?” or “What’s going on that we need to pay more attention to?” If you really want to grease the skids, pose one of those questions and then give people ten minutes to talk about it in small groups and then ask for some spokespeople from each group. You’ll almost certainly get better information that way.

So, be busy and get big stuff done. Just don’t ignore the basic truths about what people need while you’re doing it. Your team will be a lot more engaged and productive if you tend to what they need.

Sometimes, when you’re responsible for others, it’s your job to let them be unfair to you

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Sometimes, when you’re responsible for others, it’s your job to let them be unfair to you

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When I was an intern, in one of the first months of my residency, I walked into a patient room to see a child who was being admitted to the hospital. I had barely closed the door before the child’s mother started yelling at me. She was angry that they’d been waiting so long. She was angry because she felt like her child had been mishandled before admission. She was angry that he was in pain, and that no one had given him anything for it.

I was stunned. I had literally only learned about this patient five minutes before I had walked in the room. It had taken me only that amount of time to cross the hospital to see them. I started to defend myself, saying that it was unfair that she was angry at me. None of this was my fault.

This… did not defuse the situation. She lost it on me, screaming that we’d screwed up, that she was tired of being jerked around, and she wasn’t going to listen to excuses. I, being an idiot, tried to argue further. After all, she was blaming me for things I couldn’t control. Meanwhile, her child was in pain and crying in the bed.

I took a patient history as best I could, did a cursory exam, and left to place orders. Then I went to talk to my senior resident. I relayed to him about how ridiculous I thought it was that this mother treated me this way. I went on and on about how unfair it was. I said, “I try so hard to be a good doctor. I don’t understand why she was so unhappy with me.”

He said something which stuck with me, many years later. “She’s got a kid in the hospital, and you’re worried that she doesn’t like you?”

This poor woman was probably panicked out of her mind. She didn’t know what was wrong with her son. She felt like doctors had been screwing up left and right. Her child was crying, in pain, and she couldn’t make it go away. Of course she was angry; of course, she had to take it out on someone.

It was my job to be the receptacle for that anger. Over the course of my (limited) clinical practice, I have let countless parents yell at me. Almost every single time, I thought they were wrong on the facts, but I didn’t care. The only way I could help them was to let them get out their frustration. I’m a big boy. I’m a doctor. I can handle it.

This lesson has served me well as a parent, too. Many times, my children have been frustrated by school, by friends, or even by me or my wife. They snap. I could choose to fight with them, to prove to them that they’re wrong and I’m right. I could “win”. But I know I’ll lose in the end. Because sometimes people are just angry or upset, and they need to vent. I’m their dad. It’s my job. We’ll settle the facts at a later time. The world won’t end in the meantime because I “lost” an argument.

I’ve been watching a lot of news recently where people feel the need to fight. To respond. To be “right”. I don’t know who coined the phrase, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” but it’s a mantra in our house. I try very, very hard in my personal life to make it the latter.

When you hold the power, sometimes you have to let others unload on you. It’s the only way to help some people; it’s all they have left. If you can’t handle that, don’t ever put yourself in the position of being responsible for other people’s lives. This applies to more than just medicine, of course.

The Three Most Critical Issues for Today’s Board Directors

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https://www.kornferry.com/institute/three-critical-board-issues-nacd?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RNd1pUVXpPRGczWmpjeiIsInQiOiJQVlRySWxNSnNoVDNzT0JVeDM4ZkhxcXV4TkRBN1ZCUDBGMERFM1N5R0daSmJFTUhMbUErdDJsSWtRXC9GYmNkUHl0MXFrUFwvaGZwYmZVd2JpTzFGQUs4cWZaTWxzYWRrY2hoMnhQODhMVm5BMHNNZjJHajFDc0JIZk9VYTYzcVJlIn0%3D

During this week’s National Association of Corporate Directors summit in Washington, DC, there will be lots of time spent on shareholder activism, executive compensation, and several other key in-the-moment issues. But Jane Stevenson, Korn Ferry’s vice chairman of the firm’s Board & CEO Services practice, says that those issues overshadow three, considerably more existential issues modern board directors have to address. Before her own panel presentation, Stevenson laid out what she thinks board directors should have on their minds.

1. Risk Management: Figure out what’s an opportunity and what’s a threat.

In today’s global and active economy, the lines between competitive markets have never been blurrier.

is Amazon a consumer company, for example, since it sells everything from groceries to garage door openers? Or is it a technology company, since it owns and operates the legions of computer servers that make e-commerce—its own and others—possible? With all the crossover, it’s very difficult for board members to assess whether all the disruptions are accelerators to the organization’s growth, or roadblocks.

2. Talent Alignment: Close the gaps between strategy and talent.

This is a huge topic because of the rapid pace of change and needs of leadership with the onset of artificial intelligence and the changing nature of commerce, as our society potentially moves from an exchange of goods to a thought exchange. Typically, there is a good amount of lead time for any transformational innovation, but once it takes hold it tends to be exponential. Boards really need to be able to see around hairpin turns and to fly at a high enough elevation to anticipate appropriately.

Boards needs to step up in a different way and think with a different level of expansiveness, involvement and opportunity building. The day of boards just evaluating based on what’s happening today is not enough, it takes years to build those outcomes. It’s not just about identifying problems, but also about awareness. Boards need to ask the right questions (not just regulatory) that help to improve leadership. Boards need to look at the world and create a lens that the CEO would not have complete access to without the directors.

One way to think about it is: Do you have the right board to pick the next CEO? Do you have the right CEO in place to have the right leaders? Are the right leaders the ones to really define the right workforce of the future? How much of that workforce is human and how much of it is evolving into artificial intelligence and robots?

3. Information Overload: Everyone has information, learn how to connect the dots better.

Access to information used to be a huge cost for businesses. That has gone down enormously. Today, the real questions are: What does the information say? What does it mean? And how do we use it? Whole businesses are changing. The boards have to adapt. What boards have to do is to step up to a different kind of leadership, anticipating what will create value, how that impacts the organization, and evaluating if the right leadership is in place to make those pivotal operating decisions on a day-to-day basis. Boards of the future must look forward in a different way and think with a different level of expansiveness, involvement and opportunity building.

In the end, it all comes back to talent and succession, which are tightly aligned. Talent starts with the board and goes down to the lowest level of employees. It will take different kinds of thinking in the boardroom to effectively anticipate all of these issues. The need for diversity in the boardroom to do that effectively and anticipate things effectively has never been higher, not because it’s a do-good cause but because it will require nimbleness in thinking and diversity of perspectives to make that happen.

NEW QUESTIONS FOR LEADERSHIP TIPPING POINTS

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New Questions for Leadership Tipping Points

The opportunity and ability to step into a tipping point makes us feel responsible, powerful, and apprehensive.

Every decision both responds to and creates a tipping point.

New questions for leadership tipping points:

Ease:

The pursuit of ease makes you matter less.

Ease in small doses expands capacity, but in large doses destroys us.

  1. How might this decision challenge you in new ways?
  2. How might new challenges become personal growth points?

Please know that I’m not encouraging workaholism. However, making a difference requires getting your hands dirty.

Direction:

Every decision contributes to trajectory.

The consequence of decisions is real direction, not intended direction. You’re always heading somewhere.

  1. How does this decision reflect a “running toward” attitude, rather than running away?
  2. What are you running toward?

Long-term or short-term:

The appeal of short-term perspectives is immediate gratification, sometimes at the expense of long-term value.

Crisis requires short-term perspective. Put the fire out! But constant “crisis mode” sacrifices the future on the altar of urgency.

  1. How does making this decision reflect a long-term perspective?
  2. How does making this decision reflect a short-term perspective?

Relationships:

Life is relationships, nothing more, nothing less.

  1. What new relationships might result from making this decision?
  2. How does this decision impact current relationships?
  3. How might new relationships expand capacity and/or capability?

Service:

Tipping points include opportunities to both receive and give value.

  1. What new opportunities for service are available?
  2. How might your strengths find new expressions?

5 general questions:

  1. How does making this decision reflect a commitment to something greater?
  2. How are you expressing your best self?
  3. How are you expressing the self you hope to become?
  4. How much of this decision is motivated by fear?
  5. How much of this decision is motivated by dissatisfaction?

What questions might leaders ask when facing tipping points?