Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

business coach

Three-Direction Checklist for Leadership Effectiveness

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Three-Direction Checklist for Leadership Effectiveness
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Your role requires that you lead. You may be in charge of a team, a greater area of responsibility, or even an enterprise.

Yet, if you think your job is to simply lead those who report to you, think again.

You need to manage up, down, and sideways.

Why?

Because strong team leadership is not enough to support the enterprise effectively. Research continues to prove this as we examine what works – and what doesn’t – to align culture, increase business impact, and frankly, to ensure your career success.

Effective leadership means that you need to be able to develop trust, forge shared accountability, and strengthen your influence at every level in the organization.

How do you do this? By managing this up, down, and across.

Here’s a quick checklist – can you identify where you need to strengthen your leadership in managing?

Managing Up

Are you aligned with your leader’s agenda? As you work with your CEO, your board, or other leader, are you focusing on strategic issues and demonstrating financial results? Or does your own agenda distract from these key areas, wasting time, energy, money, and brainpower?

Many a seasoned leader has fallen into complacency with what works for their particular team. In doing so, their ability to see the larger picture diminishes. If you find yourself in the latter situation, you will want to acquire or revive your company-wide lens to connect your role and your team’s charge to the organizational agenda.

Managing Down

Have you aligned your reports’ work to the agenda of the company? Or have the growing demands placed on your area strayed from the larger agenda? When I first begin work with a company in growth mode, I frequently discover that teams may be working on things that have little to do with the current company agenda.

Shifting priorities at the top means close communication at all levels to share this so that all are supporting the enterprise in their focus, responsibilities, and assigned work. When was the last time you re-examined your reports’ roles, assigned projects, and accompanying goals and deadlines, to make sure these align with the company’s direction and focus?

Managing Across

Have you aligned with your colleagues, both intra- and inter-team, so that you support shared accountability and success? Or are you shooting virtual arrows at your colleagues and their teams because they are holding you back or interfering with your ability to deliver?

The lion’s share of productivity problems in an organization result from a lack of commitment and ability to solve problems between teams. Forging strong ties and agreeing to keep communication channels open for this are key to keeping employees engaged and motivated, and your customer’s journey an excellent one.

Where do you stand as you review these three areas? What is the one thing you can do now to move forward in this area so that you can capture greater success?

Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions

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Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions
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Do you ever feel as though your team has the potential for better decision-making power, but it’s just not happening?

Are you and your team stuck in autopilot and missing out on sharpening your creative edge?

What can you do when you need to help your team make better decisions?

Help them to up their game through shifting their mental, emotional, and physical space.

Shifting Mental Space

You will need to pull your team members out of auto mode. Decisions are made two ways: the first is automatic, instinctive and emotional; and the second is deliberate, slow, and logical. Teams, like individuals, can hit a comfort level in their performance and slide into autopilot when making decisions. This is dangerous, because sliding into autopilot does not require our full attention and this means drifting into limited, biased thinking and missing some pretty important stuff.

When I work with teams to sharpen their competitive edge, I often find that they are stuck because of biased thinking. This is not unusual – we all have biases. These biases are formed by making sense of our world so that we can navigate with a feeling of safety and security. But these biases also get in the way of our best thinking – our out-of-the-box, creative, innovative thinking – that allows us to develop a competitive edge.

What is a tip-off that your team suffers from biased thinking? Language.

Statements like, “That won’t work because…” or “We’ve always done it that way…” “We just don’t have the workforce/budget/green light/(fill in the blank with your own) to be able to do that…”

A simple shift in language may be all you need begin stepping into better thinking. Instead of asking the question, “What should we do?” ask the question, “What could we do?”

What if the limiter did not exist? What if the budget problem was not there? Step outside the box for a moment and start brainstorming. Then, only when you have come up with the “what,” do you back into the “how.” Ask the question, “How might we accomplish this with a limited workforce? Other?” Get creative.

Shifting Emotional Space

Personal agendas and turf issues may interfere with best team thinking. However, once your team is in “brainstorming mode,” its members will be less likely to call themselves out on any personal agendas they have which are holding the team back from its best decisions. A case in point is with a recent client’s top executive team that could not seem to arrive at a decision regarding how to proceed with plant expansion. Arguments for over-extension, no budget, and other deterrents kept coming up in conversation.

Finally, I asked the following question: “If these things were not an issue, what would you need in order to feel comfortable about expanding?”

Mumbling somewhat, two of the executives questioned who would be overseeing the process and the new plant. Then one finally said, “Well, it doesn’t feel good knowing that this might pare down my area of responsibility. If that happens, my career track will slow down tremendously.” The other executive nodded in agreement. And there it was – the real issue. The fear of losing political ground and potential for greater leadership was getting in the way.

I’m happy to say that we figured out that situation to everyone’s ultimate satisfaction. But how do you get in front of this kind of scenario so that it doesn’t slow down or interfere with the group’s best decision-making?

Ask the following at the beginning of the process: “What are the concerns each of you has that we will need to take into account as we explore options?” And give time for each of them to explore their thoughts with the rest of the group. This will uncover limiters that even they didn’t know they had until given the opportunity to reflect. Once you have everyone’s feedback, you’ll want to let them know that if they will just face into some out-of-the-box thinking with you, you’ll then make every effort to make the decision a win-win for everyone.

Shifting Physical Space

Take your team out of the office. Get them into a different physical environment.

Let’s face it – it’s tough to change ways of thinking overnight, and you will need to incorporate the approaches I’ve outlined above over time to realize greatest gains. Meanwhile, work calls and decisions must be made now. To get your team members to begin thinking more creatively and with greater attention, get them out of the office and their work attire.

Book a space at the beach, mountains, or other location that removes them from “office think.” Start your time by asking each of them how life is right now, whether they are renovating a home, planning a vacation… In other words, connect on a personal level before business. Then, frame the meeting with a fun exercise to foreshadow creative decision-making before you get into the meat of the meeting.

One exercise for this that I like a lot is Karl Duncker’s Candle Problem exercise. Duncker was a psychologist who developed this exercise in the first part of the 20th century to test functional fixedness and cognitive bias.

Subjects are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches, and asked to fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table below. Because the objects are so familiar, this makes it difficult for the subjects to think past using them in abnormal ways.

If you would like to learn more, and discover the solution, see this YouTube video or this short Wikipedia write-up that explains it.

The next time you and your team have some important decision-making at hand, try these three shifts, and let me know how this worked for you.

Ten Character Indicators

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Ten Character Indicators
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“How you do one thing is how you do everything.” ~ Madeline Albright

Thirty years ago, a business owner named Dave found himself in a critical position. A key employee had been found embezzling, and the company faced a $1 Mil shortfall. To Dave’s business, this was the difference between surviving and sinking.

After examining his options, he felt the only thing he could do was to sell the business or find a partner who would invest money to help stabilize the company. As luck would have it, he found a man named Ed who owned quite a few businesses similar to his, and who was willing to become a partner with Dave to save the enterprise’s future.

One day, as they were finalizing terms of the partnership, Dave and Ed went to lunch.

During the meal, something happened that should have tipped Dave off about Ed’s character. But he ignored it. He was desperate for funds and reasoned that the incident had nothing to do with how Ed would conduct himself in business. And because he chose to ignore this incident, it wound up quietly hurting Dave for the next 30 years.

What was the tip-off to Ed’s character during that fateful lunch?

When it was time to settle the $48 food bill, Ed offered to pay. The server brought change from Ed’s two $20 bills and the men left for their cars. As Dan and Ed stepped into the parking lot, Ed chuckled as he folded his money into his wallet.

“That gal needs to pay more attention,” Ed said. “Instead of giving me $2 change, she gave me a $1 bill and one of my $20 bills.”

“Ed – that’s obviously a mistake on her part! You’re going to return it, right?” asked Dan.

“Are you kidding?” said Ed. “If someone is going to be that careless, it’s money for me and a good lesson for them.”

Dave felt terrible. He went home and wrote an apology letter to the restaurant. Without disclosing who the offender was, he enclosed a $20 bill as repayment.

The next week, Dave and Ed signed partnership papers. Ed contributed the agreed-upon cash infusion to the business and thus saved it. He brought in a managing administrator to manage the company as agreed. Over the next 30 years, Dave enjoyed residual income from the business without having to manage it, and Ed’s appointed administrator operated as per Ed’s directives.

One day, Ed fell terminally ill, and Dave was called in by a key executive to talk about the future of the company and the partnership interests. As Dave and the executive went over opportunities, it slowly came to light that the business was charging Dave a disproportionately higher amount for expenses in facilities, upkeep, and business development for 30 years. The amount of money that should come to him as profit was staggering. Dave felt physically sick. These funds could have made a great difference to him and his family over the 3 decades that had passed, but he was now a weary 87-year-old widower with little energy left to fight the battle.

It was then that he thought back to that first lunch with Ed and heard his words, “If someone is going to be that careless, it’s money for me and a good lesson for them.”

The fact is, character does matter. Madeline Albright’s quote “How you do one thing is how you do everything,” rings true.

Now, most of you reading here will quickly say that you would have given back the $20 on the spot. I am confident that you would have done so. But no matter how honest you are, might there be other areas in your personal conduct or ways of doing that need fine-tuning?

Character does matter.

Here is a list of 10 common character flaws that have significant repercussions in life and work.

  1. Are you punctual and thus respectful of others and your time together, or are you perpetually late, signaling to others that they are just “not that important”?
  2. Do you respect good boundaries with others, or do you tend to blur the lines to the point where you become entangled in problems that aren’t yours?
  3. Are you careful as you commit to others, or do you tend to overpromise and under-deliver or default?
  4. Do you seek always to understand first, or are you prone to snap judgments before you investigate fully?
  5. Are you respectfully honest when asked for feedback, or do you gloss over the truth as you seek to please others?
  6. Are you open to constructive criticism, or do you take a defensive stance as you find excuses for the behavior in question?
  7. Do you seek to reconcile or release undesirable stress in healthy ways, or do you tend to carry resentment around like a boulder, compromising your relationships (and your health)?
  8. Are you quick to support others when they are a topic of gossip, or do you jump on the injurious bandwagon with the crowd?
  9. Are you respectful of what’s yours and what is company property, or do you find yourself taking home a few pens or empty file folders for your own use, because you tell yourself “it really doesn’t matter.”
  10. Do you operate from a place of generosity, or do you race to get that proverbial front parking spot before the other person does?

Can you think of others? What is the one area that you would like to work on that will make a difference to your life and to those around you?

Taking Your Manifesto to Work

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Taking Your Manifesto to Work

Part III of Making Your Leadership Work

Is your leadership only in your head? You should be taking your manifesto to work.

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: anything that sounds great in theory, but doesn’t teach you how to use it.

This is especially true of leadership. There’s a lot of “feel good” stuff out there and heady theory about what leadership is, who you ought to be, and how it should work.

But what do you do with this?

Unless you can apply your knowledge practically, on the job, knowledge is not power, contrary to the old adage. You just walk around thinking about it and living off the warm and fuzzy feelings that thinking about leading can generate.

You and your leadership will just sit in your head.

How do you fix this?

You learn how to make the powerful connections that put your knowledge to work.

The power in possessing knowledge is always the same, whether it’s learning how to lead or perfecting your backstroke in the swimming pool.

You have to practice. You actually have to take your knowledge and apply it to learn how to master it.

So when it comes to your leadership manifesto – your beliefs as to who you are as leader, what is important, and how you intend to act on these beliefs, there’s a big hole.

And it’s taking your manifesto to work – seeing how it can make significant change.

How do you do that?

Well, first you must have developed your leadership manifesto. If you haven’t crafted your manifesto, click here.

And then, you need to put your manifesto to work by defining the impact it can make on the enterprise. This powerful visioning will serve as your inspiration for all you do.

To do this, you’ll need a piece of paper and pen or pencil. And then…

  • Position the paper so that it is in “landscape” mode.
  • Draw lines to make three columns on the paper.
  • Across the top, your column headers will be (left to right): “Manifesto Statement,” “The Enterprise,” and “The Transformation”
  • In the left-hand column, under the heading “Manifesto Statement,” list out the key statements from your manifesto.
  • Across from each statement in the “Manifesto Statement” column, and under the heading “The Enterprise,” write how the enterprise can be positively affected because of the statement.
  • Example: If your manifesto statement reads, “Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart,” then across from that, your statement about how it can affect the enterprise might be, “We have created a culture that cares and is involved.”
  • Across from each statement in the middle column, “The Enterprise,” list the resulting transformation in “The Transformation” column. “My employees are more creative and engagement, resulting in a superior product.”

Here it is so that you can see the relationship between your leadership manifesto and how you can impact the enterprise.

 

Manifesto Statement The Enterprise Transformation
Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. We have created a culture that cares and is involved. Our employees are more creative and engaged, resulting in a superior product.

 

Continue with each statement from your manifesto until you have exhausted the list. As you review your paper, congratulate yourself. You have just outlined the impact that your unique leadership can have on the enterprise – and the world.

Once you have defined the unique impact you can make with your leadership, you will identify those strategies that will best support this intended impact, and then, the actions necessary to effectuate them.

How will you put your leadership manifesto to work?

How to Create Your Leadership Manifesto

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 How to Create Your Leadership Manifesto

Part II of Making Your Leadership Work

Does your leadership count, or are you just the next “suit in a seat” in a succession of many?

If you want to make a significant impact on the world around you, you need to take a stand.

It’s time to revisit your leadership manifesto.

Don’t have one? It’s time to craft yours.

A manifesto is a declaration of principles that include your:

  • Intentions – what actions you intend to take
  • Key beliefs – your stance on things
  • Vision – the world as you wish to see it

There are a few reasons formulating your leadership manifesto is important.

It’s a formidable exercise in authenticity.

Authoring your manifesto forces you to identify your most important beliefs – a “stop and think” exercise for most of us. Then, it requires that you create a powerful vision in response to these beliefs, and to outline your intentions about how to create the change. If you think about it, this is a formidable exercise in stating who you are and what is important to you above all.

It brings focus to your work.

Your manifesto brings tremendous focus, helping you to reflect on what aligns – and what does not – in your work and life.

It helps you to stay the course in turbulent times.

Your manifesto serves as a GPS, supporting your ability to move toward your vision, even in the midst of significant challenges.

Ready to craft your leadership manifesto? Sit in a quiet place and reflect on the questions below. Many executives with whom I work go through these questions twice. During the first round, they answer the questions in the context of life; during the second round, they relate it to the workplace.

  1. I believe in ____
  2. I want to live in a world where ____
  3. Here is what I know for sure: _____
  4. The one problem I want to solve during my life _____
  5. The changes the world will see as a result ______
  6. What is at stake here is ______
  7. I will show the world ____

As you review your answers, what becomes clear for you? And what, in your life and work, needs to change?