Leadership Talk: What’s not being said

By chipscholz | Published: September 2, 2010

Let’s get real about what leading people in organization is really like. Let’s be truthful and open about what goes on in the inner and upper offices… Political gamesmanship is here to stay. It’s a stable part of leadership practices.

Can we handle reality? Or are we like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth!”

From a psychological standpoint, we prefer our leaders to be like movie stars and elected officials — idealized versions of who we want to be.

We talk about servant leaders, leading from the heart, and visionary leaders. We fail to discuss misuse of power, self-centeredness, political gamesmanship, favoritism, ego, competitive fire or manipulation — the unspoken leadership taboos.

So, how can we do a better job of identifying, developing, becoming and coaching leaders? It’s time to tackle these taboos up close and personal. I recommend a book on this topic by Anthony F. Smith, The Taboos of Leadership. Read More »

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Leadership Talk: Why Leadership Is Messy

By chipscholz | Published: August 31, 2010

Considering the challenges of top management teams it’s a wonder people still want to become leaders. Of course, along with promotion comes the salary, the perks and the prestige.

Whenever I am coaching in organizations, I am privy to the challenges, the debates, the failures and the stress that goes along with leading people.

Leadership is messy. It’s like a contact sport, where people get hurt. Resentments escalate and lead to sabotage and misuse of power.

Which leads me to believe that leadership is not for everyone, nor should it be.

On the other hand, if up-and-coming leaders see only strife and misery among top executives, they will be motivated to climb the promotional ladder for only one reason: money and power.

To quote Anthony F. Smith, author of The Taboos of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007): “There are many, many perks and responsibilities to leadership; without an in-depth, brutally honest, and well-rounded understanding of what the job entails, how can any young person with high potential know whether he or she even wants to play the game?”

Unfortunately, leadership is still poorly understood. Despite the billions of dollars spent on leadership development around the world, and despite the plethora of business books and CEO stories published every year, we can be naive about what really goes on in the upper offices. Read More »

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4 Steps to Leadership Clarity

By chipscholz | Published: August 27, 2010

Alan Weber is one of the best business journalists around. As an award-winning editor, author and columnist, he launched Fast Company, the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history.

He is coauthor of three business-related books, including most recently, Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self. It’s full of nuggets of wisdom that can easily be applied by managers and leaders.

He attributes most of what he’s learned about leadership to four leadership experts, all  of whom I’ve read and studied extensively.

Here’s Weber’s summary of how to put leadership lessons to work for you: Read More »

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Leadership: More Signal, Less Noise

By chipscholz | Published: August 24, 2010

What’s the right way to think about leadership today? Put another way, what’s the organizational  problem that leadership needs to solve?

That’s a great question asked by Alan Weber in his neat little book Rules of Thumb. Weber reminds us  that every year, Fortune magazine published a cover story naming “the ten toughest bosses in America.” More recently the macho leader has given way to the decisive CEO, who isn’t just tough, but the smartest guy in the room.

And now, the tough guy with all the answers is getting smarter, as leaders begin to recognize that smart talented people who make up great companies are unwilling to work for a jerk. Not that there aren’t plenty of jerks still in charge.

A Gallup survey reports that 25% of workers would fire their boss if they could. So what personifies the ideal boss, if it’s not the smartest, or the toughest, or the most charismatic?

Getting back to Rules of Thumb and the wisdom that Alan Weber shares, the answer is that leaders need to provide more signal and less noise. As he explains, leaders need to provide more meaning, not more information. Read More »

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Leading Change: Argument + Story

By chipscholz | Published: August 19, 2010

How do leaders in organizations lead people to new behaviors? How do they convince people to change?

If we were bees working in a hive to make honey, leading teams would be far simpler. A dance around the hive, a wiggle here, a waggle there, and we would motivate workers to go get the food source and “Show me the honey!”

There are two distinctive modes of thought that our brains use to construct reality:

  1. Abstract thinking – a well-formed argument
  2. Narrative thinking – a good story

These two can be used to convince make a decision, and they are both necessary in order to lead people to change. A good argument convinces us of truth. A good story shows us specifics of how the proposed change plays out in real life. Read More »

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Changing Minds: How Honeybees Lead Teams

By chipscholz | Published: August 17, 2010

Have you ever observed yourself changing your mind about something? What makes you decide to reverse direction? It’s worth thinking about and finding out what triggers you, no?

The way you’ve experienced your own reversals can inform you about how others change their minds.

Here’s a story about honeybees I find fascinating. It’s from Stephen Denning’s book, The Secret Language of Leadership.

People change their minds in three ways:

  1. By experience
  2. By observation
  3. By symbolic learning

So do honeybees. They follow the same three learning patterns as human beings.

1. Bees learn by experience. A single bee will visit different flowers and if there is reward, it will make more visits to that type of flower for most of the day.

2. Bees learn by observation. Scientists have shown that bees will enter a simple maze with a choice of two paths. One path, which leads to food, is marked with a particular color at the entrance and along the way. The other path, the one not leading to food, is marked with a different color. The bees will learn to choose the correct path and update their knowledge when there is a change.

3. Bees also learn by symbolic communication. That is, they can communicate what they’ve learned about a source of food and tell other bees. They do so by doing the waggle-dance. The nectar-laden bee returns to the honeycomb and does a dance in a circular pattern, then crosses the circle in a zigzag or waggle motion.

This was first observed by Aristotle in his History of Animals in 330 B.C., and more recently by Karl von Frisch. Von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his work showing that the runs and turns of the dance were correlated to the distance and direction of the food source from the hive.

A bee returning to the hive lets the others know where to go to find good food.

Pretty amazing when you think about it. Human beings don’t have to go through the waggle dance to communicate learning. We have language. We have strong, emotional language.

The impact of an idea communicated symbolically is never as powerful as direct experience. But we don’t have to actually experience real-life events to learn from them.

The tragedy of 9/11 changed the way people viewed terrorism, in the same way that Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed the way that the US viewed the threat of Japan and the ongoing World War. The economic crises of these past few years is causing us to change our minds about the appropriate use of regulations.

We can communicate through the power of stories to get people to change their minds. What stories have made an impact in your life, causing you to change your mind, your career, your direction? It’s worth thinking about, no?

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Coaching Change: Use Negative Stories in a Good Way

By chipscholz | Published: August 13, 2010

Social scientists have shown us that negative messages are what gets people’s attention. Bad is stronger than good, when it comes to getting people to listen.

But without being a fear-monger or doomsayer, how can we effectively use negativity to encourage change?

I’m a big believer in the power of stories for getting people to want to change. Whenever I’m delivering a keynote, or just coaching groups, I find I get people’s interests when I’m telling stories.

Here are a couple of suggestions that combine the power of negativity with stories, without being too gloomy.

  1. Tell a story about the audience’s problems (“These problems are serious…”)
  2. Talk about the likely trajectory of the problem (“These problems are getting worse, and here’s what’s likely to happen if this continues…” Read More »
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The Real Reason Fear Won’t Motivate

By chipscholz | Published: August 11, 2010

There’s a danger in using fear to motivate people.

When you present a “burning platform” story to spur your people into action, there are inherent risks. People may jump into action, but will it be the right action? Will it be purposeful?

Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don’t look like burning-platform situations. Yet we still want people to buckle down and execute a hard, well-defined game plan.

John Kotter writes about this in A Sense of Urgency. Fear creates anxiety and anger. And this leads to frenetic activity that is more distracting than useful.

When people are driven to act by fear rather than desire – the action isn’t motivated by any personal determination to move in a direction to win. It’s not action designed to create real results for long term success. It’s simply action, frenetic action, designed to diminish the fear and anxiety.

There’s no question that negative emotions are motivating. But they are also constricting. They narrow our focus. Fear will get us to take fast specific action designed to – news flash! – reduce the feelings of fear and anxiety.

Negative emotions will help us avoid risks and confront problems. But the quest to take our organization to the next level, that is, to execute a brilliant strategy, design quality customer experiences, and to improve team performance and the bottom line… well, that requires more than avoiding risks and problem solving. Read More »

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Positive Illusions and the Need to Change

By chipscholz | Published: August 9, 2010

Before you can convince people to move in a new direction, they need to see themselves needing to change, they have to see that they need to improve.

That should be easy enough for leaders to do, except for one great big brain flaw: most people see themselves in a positive light. That would seem  to be a good thing, except our wonderful egos work overtime and create totally delusional positive illusions:

  • Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average
  • A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others
  • 94 percent of college professors report doing above-average work
  • The majority of people think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer
  • Most people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments
  • Ask a room full of physicians how many graduated in the top 10 percent of their class, and 90 percent will  raise their hands…

We are terrible self-evaluators. While a degree of self-confidence, even a dose of denial, can be productive and in that sense healthy, faulty self-assessment can lead to inertia and unwillingness to change.

Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change initiatives. To get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing, we have to be brutally honest with ourselves.

There are three types of positive illusions:

  1. The above-average effect
  2. The illusion of control
  3. Optimism bias

Read More »

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Business Presentations: Show Don’t Tell

By chipscholz | Published: August 6, 2010

Sometimes you need a little drama to evoke a desire to change. Without it, business presentations are dry as toast.

I’m not a big fan of reality TV shows that pit one person against the other in cut-throat competitions. The producers encourage participants to be brutal with each other, and exaggerate every little personality difference. It’s like watching a car accident – ugly but fascinating.

I am a big fan, however, of what makes people sit up and pay attention. Quite frankly, I think most speakers, most business presentations, could use a little more drama. It’s not simply because of the boredom factor either.

When you can “show-don’t-tell,” you make change more likely to happen. Dramatic “shows” reach into our emotional brains in a way that a Powerpoint slide with Excel graphs can never do.

Here’s a story that illustrates a perfect example of how drama makes change happen.

According to Switch, the book about change by Chip and Dan Heath, there are three basic ways to help ensure that the change you are trying to make in your company actually sticks.

  1. You direct the rational mind (largely by reducing ambiguity about specifically what kind of change is needed)
  2. You motivate the emotional brain (often by finding things that trigger people’s visceral response to a need for change) Read More »
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