Leadership

What would you find if you began dissecting your corporate policies? Would you find that most rules and procedures were implemented to help better achieve mission? Or would you find multiple examples of policies that were written because of “that one time someone found a loophole and took advantage” or “this particular issue slipped through the cracks once and it resulted in a $100 mistake?”

Many policies are written with the right intention – we put procedures in place to protect ourselves and our organizations. However, just as often policies are written as a result of one-time incidents that exposed a potential liability in how we interact with the public. So, to protect us from the small minority of individuals who would abuse this opportunity, we construct pathways and build barriers that make these simple interactions more difficult for everyone involved. 

There’s a good chance if you look around you can find the policies that are ready to be revised (if not thrown out all together). Some telltale signs would be any policy that was implemented more than 10 years ago and hasn’t been reviewed since, any policy that requires more than 2 employee signatures to accomplish a simple transaction, or any policy that effects everyone you do business with and was implemented as the result of just a few isolated incidents of concern. 

Policies are critical aspects of our work as they guide and drive what we do. However, policies often frustrate those on the front line who feel blocked in and prevented from doing their work to the best of their ability. If we’re hiring right, it should be an easy decision to empower our team to act. Policing the exception only creates headaches for everyone involved. 

Takeaway

Identify a policy or procedure you put in place because you were burned once in the past. Is the new process worth it?  

Let me know in the comments below.

We’ve all been there – Sitting in a meeting where you know the decision makers aren’t listening. The choice was rubber stamped long ago, and leadership is slowly going through the motions and checking boxes as they move toward implementation. The meetings before the meeting took place, negotiations were made, and concessions took place. The current conversation is merely for show. 

The permeation of politics and hidden agendas causes significant concern for authentic leaders. We sit beside colleagues who are wearing masks. They say the right things and act the right way, all while already having made promises to others about how things would turn out. Even in the face of compelling evidence, their steadfast commitment to their view won’t waver. It’s irritating and aggravating. And it happens all the time. 

How would things look different if we called one another out in these moments? What would happen if we shed our masks and led naked?

Often, we see these moments of bias unfolding in real time and fail to act as we second guess whether we have the ability to call out the “elephant in the room.” An argument can be made that we not only have the ability to call this behavior out, we actually have the responsibility to do so. There is no grace in standing idly by and letting moments like this pass only to subsequently call the outcome (and by association, ourselves) a victim of circumstance. 

Takeaway

Are you alert for the masks blocking transparency for your team? Can you call them out? Are you yourself sometimes guilty of wearing a mask in your interactions? Can you take the vulnerable leap to lead naked?   

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

In watching organizational politics, it’s a pet peeve of mine to see participants in staff meetings who say nothing during the conversation, month after month. The low participation may be for any number of reasons – perhaps their context is so focused they don’t have perspective on the bigger-picture issues being discussed…perhaps self-esteem issues prevent them from believing in their own ideas enough to voice them…perhaps their ideas have been ignored in the past and they’re frustrated, thus making it the adult equivalent of “I’m taking my ball and going home.”

As I reflected on the dynamic, two leadership lessons jump out at me. First, if you have a seat at the table, use it. Non-participants have made a decision that their contributions don’t matter. They may be right. Or there may be any other number of factors in play that led to perceiving the situation as they have. Organizations that experience this would be better served, in the long run, by the non-participants finding the courage to voice his or her frustration and explore solutions other than simply opting out of participation moving forward. The conversation would be difficult, and likely at times uncomfortable, but it would move the organization to a healthier place. Organizations make a financial investment in their team. The return on this investment is the participation and active engagement by those individuals in pursuit of the mission. 

Second, I’m hard-pressed to believe the presiders of these meetings are unaware of what’s happening. As a leader, it’s important we keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening. Assuming the meeting had been organized with the appropriate personnel at the table, these non-participants’ experiences and ideas need to be included in the conversation. Still, these individual’s decision to disengage was unlikely tied to a one-time thing. This indicates that the facilitator either saw the emerging pattern and did not intervene because he didn’t know how or (and possibly worse!) didn’t care. Leadership requires the social grace to facilitate in ways that are comfortable and inclusive. When members feel excluded, the entire team pays a price. 

Takeaway

Do you have the right people at your meetings? Are they there for the right reasons? Are you paying attention to the verbal and nonverbal cues from team members who aren’t engaged?  

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Last year, I was approached by the executive director of Any Given Child and asked to consider participating in an upcoming fundraiser. Any Given Child is a regional nonprofit that routinely impresses me and has a habit of improving childrens’ lives through exposure to the arts, to participate in a fundraiser. (If you’re contemplating charitable gifts over the remainder of the year, I’d absolutely encourage you to consider this team!) Because I believed in the leadership team and the mission, I agreed to participate without hesitation. The event was a lip sync battle. Over the next few months we recruited a team, practiced, and got ready to do out best fake singing. Our performance was an adventure. And we lost…by a landslide. 

It’s easy to categorize the entire experience as a failure. I’m a competitive person. I want to win. I aspire to be the very best at the things I do. And in this case, we came up short. And we finished last. 

In the moment, it nevers feels good to finish last. But on reflection, I came back to my original purpose for agreeing to participate in the event – I believed in the leaders of the organization and I believed in their mission. We may not have raised more money than the others, but we raised important dollars that helped them do their work. And their mission of getting children exposed to the arts was advanced as I was able to take my own children and bring them past their own issues with stage fright and clunky choreography and get them excited to participate alongside us. So when I evaluate the experience against the intended purpose…when I think about the laughs we shared as we practiced and the time we spent together, it turns out the whole episode was a pretty big win.

As a leader, I often fear that my team will lose sight of purpose and mission. We risk forgetting why we are doing the work we do. If we took the time to establish a mission statement for every department, every committee, and every project we undertook, would we get a better sense of what we’re doing and how the pieces fit together? Would those we work with display stronger levels of buy-in and increase contribution? Could we, in looking at these statements as a batch, find even better ways to put our team members in their best position to succeed? Do focused mission statements at the project level allow employees to cut away from the “noise” and focus on the work that matters?

Takeaway

What would your team’s mission statements look like at the department, committee, and project level? Collectively, would they tell the right story and show the roadmap that supports the purpose of your organization as a whole? Would the simple act of developing the mission statement as new initiatives launch make a meaningful difference in the work that follows?  

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Some people don’t like me. There, I said it out loud. I’ve spent much of my career believing that if I could lead in just the right way, I could win the entire team over and get everyone to like me. I’d be deeply loved and respected and responsible for bridging the gap between where my organization was and where it wanted to be. When I knew I was giving everything I had to my team, and some colleagues openly didn’t like me, it drove me crazy. I’d try to dissect the reason why, try to adapt my style, try to kill them with kindness, try everything I could think of to “win them over.”  

Recently, I’ve come full circle with my thinking. There are so many facets involved in successfully leading a complex organization. Some, I do well. Others, I struggle with. But I’ve drawn a parallel in my leading to what I long ago learned about teaching. When I was a young teacher, I’d be lecturing to a group of 40. 25 of the students would be engaged and actively participating in the conversation. 10 would be mentally checking in and out over the course of the class. 3 would be absent. And the last 2 would be present, but actively disengaged from my teaching – they might be texting, or chatting with each other, or tweeting, or sleeping. I spent months agonizing about how to get these two students more involved in the course. I mean, they were invested, right? They’d gone through the effort of registering and paying tuition…why couldn’t I get them on board? What was I doing wrong? Over time, I tried different strategies to pull them into what we are doing. What I noticed has stuck with me ever since. As I tried different approaches, those two students remained actively uninterested in what was happening. However, several students who were in the original 25 who were active in class also seemed to be less engaged as my style was changing. Essentially, in an effort to draw the outliers in, I cost myself the partnership of some students who had been engaged all along. I could no longer obsess about getting these last two students involved, since I knew it was coming at the cost of giving the rest of the class my very best. 

So it is with leadership. I’ve spent time analyzing patterns of the different interactions I have with my colleagues. The primary distinction I’ve identified is the rapport I feel with others when our relationship is defined primarily as transactional or transformational. With transactional connections, we focus on task accomplishment. I may sign a time sheet, approve a purchase order, or suggest a professional development conference to attend. With transformational connections, there’s always more depth. We do transactional work, but also discuss where that individual wants to be in 5 years, what their favorite products and programs will look like, and how we can better work together to uplift those around us. 

In short, the transactional connections feel like business as usual. And the transformational ones inspire me to work harder and do what I can to continue to push change and challenge us to grow. In other words, to lead.

Takeaway

As a leader, are you engaging in more work that is transactional or transformational? Are your team members getting what they want when it comes to these interactions? Some connections come easier than others. Some team members desire just a transactional relationship with you. Others naturally develop a transformational one. Is there a third group – one that wants a transformational connection, but can’t figure out how to get there? 

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I’m a huge baseball fan. This has been true ever since I was a little boy. I remember season like 1993 when Darren Daulton (my favorite player of all time!) led the Fighting Phillies to the playoffs, only to ultimately lose the World Series to a walk off homerun by Joe Carter. But by then, my status as a fanatic was locked in. And I’ve followed the team closely ever since. I live out of market, so keeping up with the team presents challenges from time to time, but I find a way. 

Baseball is well-known for the use of statistics to define just about everything. What’s his batting average? What percentages of the hits he gives up are on the curveball? How many runs does he allow during day games in July when the temperature is above 80 and the team is wearing retro jerseys? One emerging statistic is called WAR, or wins above replacement. The premise of this statistic is to assign a value to how many additional wins your team has earned with you in the lineup than they would have with the next best available player. Essentially, is your presence making your team better, and (if so), to what measurable extent?

Listening to the ongoing discussion about WAR got me wondering what the leadership implications would be. Am I more, less, or equally valuable to the leader that would replace me?

To try to contextualize this, I imagined a position where I left the organization. I considered what a new appointee would do in her first 6 months on the job? What would she identify as priority areas? How passive or aggressive would she be in addressing lingering issues? Who would she look to for ideas and advice? What I found was that the answers came to me fairly easily. I knew exactly what she would do. So that left one other lingering question…why wasn’t I doing it?

Takeaway

Imagine you knew you’d be walking away from your current leadership opportunity, for good, in 6 months. In an effort to clean up loose ends, what key projects and personnel issues would you focus on between now and then? Then, sidestep the noise and get to work!

What are you getting to work on? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The summer before college, I took a temporary job with my dad’s company. I was part of their summer student program and was assigned to support the marketing department. I was so excited to spend the summer learning about corporate marketing and deciding whether this was a career path I would consider pursuing. When I arrived the first morning, my new boss took me to a work room in her department and showed me the largest ball of twine I’d ever seen. She proceeded to unwind about 6 inches worth of twine from the roll, cut it off, and staple the piece of rope to a half-sheet of paper sitting on the table next to it. She put the piece of paper into an envelope, sealed the envelope, and put a mailing label onto the envelope. She turned to me and said, “Think you can do this?” I said, “Sure!” And I did exactly what she had done. 120,000 times. 

Doing that 120,000 piece mailing gave me lots of time to think. Among the decisions I made were that (1) myths about the dangers of over-exposure to the glue on the back of envelopes are well founded, (2) I wasn’t meant to be a marketer, and (3) there had to be a way to add this project to my resume with a little extra pop. I believe I settled on two bullets under that summer work. The first “fastening engineer,” as I stapled the rope to the paper and the two became one. The second “nationwide materials distribution specialist,” since I sent those letters all over the nation. 

I’m not convinced that tagging myself a “fastening engineer” and a “nationwide materials placement specialist” opened up any new doors for me professionally, but I also knew it would be inauthentic to promote myself as having any real marketing experience. 

So many of the job ads I scan detail “experience wanted.” The expression appears across a wide range of jobs: “waitressing experience required,” “experience in a union environment required,” “experience with community college teaching required,” and even “experience putting lego kits together on the first try required.” So, I may have made that last one up, but you get the picture. 

Why do we pursue team members with experience? Sure, it gives them credibility and allows them to get up to speed with a shorter learning curve. However, these individuals often bring with them the baggage and scars associated with having done this work before, also. Maybe we’d be better served on occasion to post our recruitments with different language. Maybe we could try, “Innovative thinker with limited experience in this area wanted, with a willingness to learn quickly and ask important questions to help challenge established ways of thinking and push us to be better?” An approach like this might help us bring aboard the intentional disruptors to our team who help us get where we wish to be. 

Takeaway

As you fill your team, are you being “urgent” or “intentional?” Are you hiring for someone who will take off and hit the ground running, or someone who will need to learn how to excel in their role? If you look at the job requirements you’ve listed, why are they there? Is it the way you’ve always recruited, or do those skills actually make a difference that can’t be compensated for in a different way?  

Share your thoughts in the comments below.