business leader

Three Ways Adversity Shapes Extraordinary Leadership

August 29, 2018 By Patti Cotton 1 Comment

No one consciously seeks adversity. Oddly, however, confronting fear and uncertainty is what shapes extraordinary leadership.

How can confronting the challenging and unpredictable cause leaders to go from good to great?

And why do some rise to make significant impact for the world around them, while others cause irreparable damage?

It is not the negative challenge that damages – it is the way you respond to it that can make or break your leadership and the impact you cause.

Here are three ways adversity can shape extraordinary leadership.

1. Adversity calls for the “whole leader” to face challenge.

Both your cognitive (competencies) and your emotional (character) skills are called to action as you try to make meaning of the situation and decide how you will respond to it.

Many a leader has fallen because either a character trait has compromised best actions, or a particular competency is not strong enough to execute what needs to be done. In which area do you need to strengthen your own leadership? To begin this self-examination, see How Much Do Others Trust You, which outlines key traits and skills required to build trust and meet challenges effectively.

2. Adversity demands that we bring our best to the front while under pressure.

This is easier said than done. The positive traits with which you regularly lead can quickly become exaggerated and damaging in adverse situations.

For example, under normal conditions, you may enjoy confidence in your opinions while remaining balanced and open to the perspectives of others. However, under pressure, this confidence may turn into a closed-minded dogmatism that does not allow you to consider other alternatives.

Understanding not only how to manage your strengths, but also your tendencies under pressure is important to bringing good responses to bad circumstances. If you are not sure where your own “pressure points” lie, ask a couple of trusted colleagues who have seen you work under pressure. The feedback you receive may make a great difference in your ability to meet the future most effectively.

3. Adversity requires that we learn to make meaning of the new and unexpected.

Our ability to meet difficult circumstances requires that we are able to make meaning of these, and to consider new approaches to solve them. “We cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them,” quipped Albert Einstein.

This is reflected as we look at Nelson Mandela’s life after his imprisonment of 27 years. The great civil rights leader and former South African president could have incited the country to civil war after being released. However, he saw that reconciliation – not retribution – was what would bring hope and healing to a divided nation. To do this, he had to make meaning of the injustices previously committed, look at a larger and new picture to consider his response, and develop the mindset and approach to meet the challenge.

Warren Bennis, leadership expert and author of On Becoming a Leader once said, “Until you make your life your own, you’re walking in borrowed clothes. Leaders, whatever their field, are made up as much of their experiences as their skills, like everyone else. Unlike everyone else, they use their experiences rather than being used by them.”

Given this, and the potential for you to make even more significant impact through your leadership, how will you choose to meet adversity?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Do You Suffer from Executive Isolation?

August 15, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Who is in your tribe?

It matters, if you want to remain effective and relevant as a leader.

If remaining so is important to you, you need a tribe that provides you with the nourishment you need to flourish. This tribe should fully support you in your endeavors. And it should also challenge when you do less than your best you so that you continue to strengthen your ability to lead.

Without this kind of tribe, leaders feel isolated and alone. They buy in to the false adage that “it’s lonely at the top.”

That stoicism will damage a leader’s ability to lead.

If this is you – if you are suffering from executive isolation – it is time to form your tribe.

Can you identify with any of the following?

60% of all leaders quietly admit they didn’t feel fully prepared for their new role, and that it was necessary to hide this in order to build credibility with others. They reported feeling lonely and unsure because of a lack of support. If this is you, remember to differentiate between your ability to lead and the fact that there is a learning curve to any new role
Leaders must make tough decisions that others might not understand, so they do not feel free to share these or discuss them with others. They have nowhere they can take this to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. If this is you, you are compromising your decision-making abilities and leadership effectiveness.
Leaders must hold a lot of confidential and/or sensitive information. This is stressful and burdensome, promoting a feeling of isolation. If this is you, the cost of this kind of stress can be far-reaching and hamper your ability to perform.
No leader has all the answers, but they seldom share this fact because they want their employees to have confidence in them and in the direction the company is headed. This is you, if you feel the need to keep significant thoughts and feelings to yourself.

Executive isolation – the dynamic that arises from the situations described above – is insidiously damaging to one’s leadership effectiveness.

A personal tribe for the leader is the solution.

Being part of a tribe where you can take your fears, doubts, and foibles, seems foreign to the person in power. How does that work for the person at the top? And what does it look like?

Here are the needed ingredients for a leader’s tribe (or for any tribe, for that matter!):

1. Nourishment

A leader’s tribe must provide nourishment in the form of healthy ways of relating, healthy connections, and deep and genuine bonds. Human connection is necessary to sustain life, and healthy human connection is necessary to support your highest and best.

2. Confidentiality

Respect for your situation and your stories is paramount. Feeling as though you can trust your tribe with all your “stuff” allows you to fully divulge what you need to without fear of compromise.

3. Support

Bringing deepest thoughts, fears, doubts, and aspirations can feel risky – yet every human being, no matter how accomplished, has them. Your vulnerability should be met by your tribe with genuine support so that you feel acknowledged, accepted, and able to confront where needed.

4. Challenge

Your tribe should love you where you are, and yet love you too much to allow you to stagnate there. You need to be challenged to grow, to smoothen rough edges, and to be called out when you are playing small. Frank feedback with love and respect is invaluable to your ability as leader to flourish and move successfully into the future.

5. Accountability

Your tribe should have your best interests in mind by holding you to your commitments. This is how true and lasting growth can best occur. If you do not have a source that provides this for you, the potential in you will go sadly untapped.

Leaders feel lonely and assume this is par for the course. Yet the right social connection with trusted tribe makes all the difference in how you can evoke continuous and honest growth in your ability to lead.

Who is in your tribe?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Three Ways Humility Can Make You a Better Leader

July 18, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

Rick Warren once said, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”

In a business world where ego has often been confused with strength and vision, proposing humility as a leadership trait has, in the past, been difficult to accept. Yet today, we realize that in order to lead well and make impact, bringing out the best in others by putting their interests and the interests of the company first is paramount.

This requires leaving your ego at the door.

Top-down leadership is, in fact, outdated and counterproductive. In the business world, we have witnessed terrible situations where this approach has gotten out of hand, and ego has given way to hurting many people on a large scale: Martin Wintercorn and the Volkswagen scandal, Hisao Tanaka of Toshiba, Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharamaceuticals… (For more about this, see my article “Beware of Hubris Syndrome.”)

Through these situations and many other lessons learned, leading with humility is paramount.

Today, even when a company’s organizational chart still resembles a pyramid, the roles and responsibilities throughout the enterprise call for leadership at every level.

Ownership and autonomy are fostered up, down, and sideways throughout the enterprise. Accountability is still king, but the difference now is that it is mutual. Shared decision-making is embraced. A culture where the people come first naturally produces best outcomes because it promotes in the workforce the feelings of trust, purpose, motivation, and engagement.

Since humility creates the type of environment that is needed for the organization of the future, we must intentionally incorporate it into leading. Being selfless with the larger agenda of leading an organization and primarily concerned with the well-being of the organization and the people in it is what works.

Here are three ways your own leadership can become even more impactful with humility.

1. Stop micromanaging, and empower your people.

Where are you hoarding a “top-down” attitude in your leadership?

Do you find yourself reticent to delegate because others might not do it as well as you? This is an indication that you are not empowering your team – and this means you are short-changing the company. I’ve coached many executives and business owners who fear letting go. If this is you, come up with a plan to mentor so that you can effectively support the present as well as the future.

2. Listen and learn to model personal growth.

Keep yourself on an honest and supportive growth journey by joining or forming a group of like-minded leaders who are willing to share, introspect, encourage, and hold each other accountable.

Be open to the ideas and perspectives of others in your company and receive feedback as a gift and not a criticism. Modeling your own growth allows others to embrace their own development opportunities and fosters a strong and productive learning culture.

3. Admit your mistakes and course-correct.

Are you avoiding having to deal with a poor strategic move? Perhaps you have hired a key individual who has turned out to be toxic. Or it may be that you have turned the company’s attention to a new initiative that is damaging its ability to deliver services or products to your current customers.

If you are sending out messages such as, “That’s just the way he is – just work as best you can,” or “Once we get through this, things should settle down,” you are modeling avoidance.

Instead, model accountability to them and the organization. Decide on a plan to course-correct, and implement it. Show your people that it is human to make mistakes – and that it is true leadership to deal with them and learn from them.

Humility is not being servile or weak.

It is being strong and confident enough to keep your focus on the bigger purpose and all that goes into making this a success. And that is true leadership.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

When Stakes Are High-How to Make Better Decisions

May 30, 2018 By Patti Cotton Leave a Comment

We are faced with thousands of micro-decisions daily…what to eat, where to park, whether to stop and get coffee…

Then, there are stop-and-reflect decisions that take more contemplation…where to go on vacation, how to juggle family time with a current big project, when to get that new car…

And finally, there are high-stakes decisions. Those “bet-the-company” decisions that require careful consideration, weighing impact to the immediate and future state of the enterprise.

In this last case, how do you decide what is gambling and what is calculated risk?

How do you make sure you have everything you need in order to take action – and how do you prepare for this?

Often, we base our decision-making on previous experience – ours and those of others – and what has worked in the past. Or we gather our executive team together because they embrace the vision and culture of the company, and we thus use the collective brain trust to come up with solutions we feel are best.

But there are dangers in using one or the other of these approaches by themselves, even though this is how most executives arrive at “bet-the-company” solutions. And unfortunately, making a wrong move might set your enterprise back significantly.

How do you make sure you have what you need in order to make a best decision for the company that will lower risk and maximize return?

Here is a checklist for good decision-making with some practical tips you can use right away.

1. Be sure your brain is functioning at top capacity.

Your days are filled with meetings, phone calls, and other interactions that require non-stop information download. However, your brain has little time to process all this so that you can integrate and use the information into situations where it would be helpful.

Be sure you take a minimum of two 10-minute breaks daily where you literally sit and do nothing, allowing your thoughts to wander. When you do this, you permit the brain to process what it has been fed so that it can apply the information.

2. Identify the real problem before coming up with options.

Be sure you separate issues from root causes.

For example, if you are weighing whether to reorganize, why are you doing so? And what is underneath that?

Get to the root cause to be sure you are addressing what really matters. For more, see my article on Toyoda’s 5 Whys.

3. Keep the bigger picture in mind.

Remind yourself of the vision and revisit your organizational goals and objectives before considering solutions. This will provide a solid framework of reference as you go into brainstorming mode.

I have seen many an enterprise run after a shiny object because the competition is doing so, without fully considering whether it makes sense for the vision, mission, values, and key objectives.

4. Be smart in gathering research.

You will want to consider best information and multiple perspectives. Identify best sources as you gather information, and develop a set of questions that shed light on lessons learned.

Play the devil’s advocate and include information that argues against popular practices.

And as you reach out to tap into the wisdom of others, involve only those key stake-holders/best thinkers that can put aside personal agendas and undue influence because of the personal relationship they share with you. Invite those who aren’t afraid to get creative and to think outside the box.

5. Shine light on your assumptions and biases.

Write these out so that you can ask yourself how much these are interfering with your best thinking. This will be especially helpful as you gather to brainstorm with others on the short list of potential solutions.

Articulating your assumptions and asking others to do the same as you meet together to discuss will help surface potential hidden roadblocks to bigger thinking.

When a company becomes focused on one magic answer, it can distort a greater perception of reality. If the executive team heads down this path with such a flawed mindset, it will become arrogant and defensive to other ideas outside of its own. This can eclipse answers that bring greater return on many levels.

6. Keep your eyes on the horizon as you weigh risks and impact to support short- and long-term goals.

If you find that you or your team become granular before completely assessing business impact at the organizational level, stop and regroup.

If people jump into problem-solving mode at division and individual levels, they may be inadvertently blocking a best answer. If you or a colleague begin making comments like, “We’d have to shut down the XYZ division if we did that, and this would cause a loss of LMNOP,” or, “Well, if we do that, James will quit and we don’t want to lose James!” then you need to table those.

Once you come up with answers providing best and greatest impact to the company as a whole, the next line of questioning involves examining what this would impact – and if there are alternative solutions to what seems apparent.

Further, you might find that you are allowing certain personalities or pet divisions to dictate strategy – a deathly path.

7. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of indecision.

Very often, the plethora of ideas that come to play can be overwhelming. Be careful not to allow the process to trail out too far.

Many a top executive has tabled a critical situation for so long that the costs associated with inaction have been irreparable. K-Mart, Borders, and other companies that decided to wait come to mind.

If you are in a first round of brainstorming discussions, collectively agree on a deadline by which you want to target a best solution. Reverse-engineer meeting times from there, and be sure you have someone track the discussion with notes so that you can drive a powerful agenda going forward each time.

And a last word…

Good decision-making requires that you rely on intuition and experience while remaining open to new ideas.
It asks that you involve people in the process who are not afraid to get creative while keeping the company’s best interests at the helm.
And It demands courage and fortitude to do the right thing once you have made your decision.

I’d be interested to hear about your current decision-making process and how it is working for you!

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.

Is Your Compassion Hurting You in the Workplace?

March 21, 2018 By Patti Cotton 1 Comment

Is your ability to have compassion for your colleagues hurting you?

Some of you have told me that when you show you care for others in the workplace, you become drained of energy. You discover you are the “go-to” person when problems arise or when people need a shoulder to cry on.

Others have told me it is hard to make tough decisions that could negatively affect others, and still feel compassionate.

If either of these situations hit close to home, don’t blame it on compassion.

Blame it on poor boundaries and a misunderstanding of what compassion really is.

Do you need to stop showing others you care? Not at all.

But when I talk about compassion in the workplace, a lot of people bristle and throw words like “soppy,” and “gutless” around.

“We had a ‘fluffy’ CEO,” said one manager. “Everyone loved him. But he could never make the tough decisions we needed in order to hold people accountable.”

Others roll their eyes and tell me that when they show compassion, an endless stream of needy people line up at the office door for counseling, advice, and a sympathetic ear.

“I’m absolutely spent,” said Jan. “People have so many problems and see me as a mentor. I can be there for them because I listen well and really care about the people here. But it seems like when one problem disappears, another arrives, and they are back at my door the next week with something else.”

However, compassion is anything but gutless or fluffy. And it is not being the “therapist on call.”

True compassion takes great courage to embody – and it’s vital to good leadership.

Compassion means to hold others with positive intent, to feel concern for their well-being.

It does not mean to be on call to fix others’ problems. And it doesn’t mean avoiding making the right decisions even though some may not like how it affects them. It simply means that you need to care about others and hold them in positive light.

So what does compassion really look like in the workplace? And how do you practice it?

Here is a quick checklist for you to sharpen your ability to show compassion and keep healthy boundaries:

1. When others bring you their problems, ask yourself the following:

a. Am I the right person to address this problem?

People may come to you because you have an ability to listen and sift through problems. However, the issue they bring to you might belong in another office. Is the problem of a work nature, and if so, who is the right decision-maker that can help them resolve it? Is the problem of a personal nature, and thus better discussed with those parties directly involved, or with a counselor? Begin to triage in this way so that you can redirect as appropriate.

b. Is the person bringing me the problem asking for help in solving it?

Sometimes, people just want a sympathetic ear. However, if you have someone who continues to come to you about a particular problem because you are good listener, you may want to ask them what they want to do about the situation. People can develop a chronic need for sympathy.

c. And finally, fixing others’ problems for them when they should be stretching their problem-solving skills doesn’t help them to grow.

Allow your employees and colleagues to “adult” by taking a coaching approach. Learn to ask them questions, such as, “How do you feel this should be handled? What possible solutions have you thought about?”

Then, if they are still stumped and you are the appropriate party to help them address the problem, help them to brainstorm with more possibilities, if needed.

2. Holding people accountable is compassionate and, you might say, the ultimate way to love others.

Confronting the tough stuff that holds your employees back will allow them to grow into more of their potential, be a greater contributor to their team, and thus support the enterprise more effectively. And that means that everybody wins.

3. Making tough decisions that may adversely affect some of your employees doesn’t mean you don’t care about them.

It means you ultimately care about everyone. Supporting a healthy enterprise provides good and meaningful work for the people who work there. Pleasing some people to the exclusion of the current and future health of the organization means hurting everyone.

Where in your practice of compassion do you need to recalibrate?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Patti Cotton

Patti Cotton reenergizes talented leaders and their teams to achieve fulfillment and extraordinary results. For more information on how Patti Cotton can help you and your organization, click here.