Building Time into Your Calendar to Think

I heard the CEO of a Fortune 50 company speak about what the organization expects of senior leaders.  One of the points he made was that once you move to an executive role, you are expected to be able to dig into deep issues that will affect the organization both in the short term and the long term.  His next comment struck home: “You MUST make time in your calendar to think.  That  is what the organization expects of you. If you simply move from event to event, you are doing yourself and your organization a disservice.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in that I am guilty time to time of moving from one meeting to the next, scheduling them back to back and not making the time to do my homework to dig into the issue.  Mabel Miguel talks about a possible solution  to make time to think:

Use your commute time to think through a knotty problem.  Do the same if you are on a relatively short business trip (3 hours or less). Turn off the radio or iPod and simply think. Decreasing the white noise and clutter that swirls around inside your head is an effective way to get some clarity, focus, and attention.

I’ll suggest another solution.  Make an appointment with yourself to prep before going into a meeting.  Build the time into your calendar and hold that time as being as important as an appointment with another person.  Use this time to dig into the issues and come up with ideas to resolve the challenge.  I’ll wager you’ll be more effective and your organization will reap the benefits as well.

What is strategy?

During a session with a group of senior leaders, we had a roundtable discussion of strategy, defining  strategy without jargon, and some key points of strategy.  After a fair amount of discussion,  we outlined the following key points:

1. Strategy is not the sole domain of those high in the organization.
2. Strategy is not code for “important” or “complex”.
3. Strategy must look outside the organization first to see what is needed (whether in the marketplace or with people with whom you interact).  You don’t want to be known as a terrific typewriter repair expert.
4. Strategy is an emergent pattern in a stream of decisions. (Thanks Atul!)
5. The focus for senior leaders is understanding drivers of performance, how performance drivers change over time, and how you react to those changes.
6. Strategy and strategic thinking  is  important at all levels of the organization.
7. Your biggest determinant of strategy is where you place resources.

 

 

6 Keys for Every Leader

Had a chance to hear a senior leader address a group of high potential senior leaders today.  This senior leader spent time talking about six keys that every senior person should keep in mind.  They are three pairs of characteristics:

1. Creativity and Problem Solving:  Creativity is not the exclusive domain of the artistic among us.  Creativity is the ability sets of information and put them together in different ways.  Problem Solving is the capability to get things done.  One nugget:  Vision without execution is hallucination.

2- Leadership and Management: Leadership is all about people.  Management is all about processes.  Leadership is about change and management is about process improvement.

3-Speak well and Write well:  Pay attention to some of the great public speakers. Watch what they do with their hands, their voice cadence, their postures, gestures, and how they use silence.  Learn to write with active voice.  Many word processing applications have a reading index that you can use to ensure that your writing is clear and crisp.

 

Many thanks to the participants who made this session as  valuable as it was!

All the best,

Chris

Every Leader Sells (Ideas) part 2

I was re-reading some notes this week and ran across this nugget from Steve Jones, former Dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School.

In selling your ideas, craft your message, distill it to a  bumper sticker or headline, then go 2 levels down and hear what the story is-see if message is consistent with what you are saying.  Expect your team to do same with their groups 2 levels down.

Craft, Distill, Drop 2 Levels, Assess

Good bumper sticker, Steve.

All the best,

Chris

Every Senior Leader Sells (Ideas)

During a recent seminar with an organization’s top leaders, the COO outlined how critical it was that the senior leaders engage with their direct reports, their peers, and with those they work with externally.  He also noted at the beginning of his talk that he wanted to be sure to talk about a particular topic.  He spent time on the prepared talk and then transitioned into a key initiative that he had been talking about repeatedly in other venues.  I’ve been privileged to have the chance to hear him speak to different groups and he always makes time to talk about a particular topic.  What grabbed my attention was:

1-how he talked about the issue using a single PowerPoint slide that had only 4 words and a picture.

2-how consistent he has been with the message he was sharing

3-how he distilled his talking points that could be summarized in a bumper sticker that our grandparents could understand, and

4-how it appeared that he had never tired of this particular topic, even though I know he has talked about this topic repeatedly, even to the same audience.

I had the chance to chat with him and through that conversation, I learned once again that every senior leader is a sales person.  We sell ideas.  We influence others through our words and our deeds.  He noted that he has made these same remarks to similar audiences and laughed when I asked him whether it was redundant when he was sharing the same message over and over again.  He responded with “You have to get tired of hearing your same message.  Once you have said your remarks 50 times, it starts to sink in  to your leadership team that this is really important to you and that you have to move this up on your priority list.  The most effective way I can do that is to say the same message, over and over again, in every venue, with every chance I get.”

Good advice.

Chris

Trust

This past week, I re-read some of David Maister’s work.  I’ve never met Dr. Maister, but his work is very impressive.

One comment he mentioned that struck me was how trust was a blend of Credibility+Reliability+Empathy/Self Interest.

Credibility comes from technical or domain knowledge-you “know your stuff”

Reliability comes from delivering what you say you will deliver on time.

Empathy comes from being a good listener

The self interest part essentially means that you will put other interests above your own and put your clients’ needs before yours.

Pretty good advice for any sort of leader, whether in a public institution, a nonprofit, or in the commercial sector.

Chris

Your T.O.P. Ten for the Week

In my work with executives,  I continue to be astounded at the sheer volume of “Stuff” that comes across their desk or in their email folder.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the Whack-A-Mole phenomenon where you simply try to triage things as they come up. At the end of the day, you end up tired, frustrated, and more than a little cross that you didn’t get done what you wanted to get done.

I’ve taken an idea I learned from Barry Zweibel and adapted it to my use.  Barry’s idea is the idea of the T.O. P. Two. The concept is that you generally can accomplish only two items of substance during a day.  T.O. P. stands for Top Overriding Priorities.  You get those two things done before you end the day no matter what.

My adaptation is to move it to a T.O.P. Ten list. Here’s why-I might not be able to get closure on one of my items during that particular day, so I’ve listed the top ten things I need to accomplish for the week.  If I can’t work on one, I work on another. Ten is about the upper limit I can handle without getting overloaded with not prioritizing.  I look at my different major responsibilities and determine the most important action for that area of responsibility and write it down.

I also then write these top ten things on a 3×5 index card that I carry with me for the week. The 3×5 card has just enough lines on it to allow me to put each item on one line, thus keeping me from writing a doctoral dissertation.

How to Keep Your Teachers Excited about Teaching?

(Cross posted at LeaderTalk, March 16, 2009)

Like all of you, North Carolinians are faced with significant budget shortfalls.  Our state and local leaders are doing their absolute best to balance the budget while not significantly impacting the classroom. Part of the budget cuts being discussed across the state focuses upon eliminating costs that do not directly impact the classroom. Professional  development is one of those that is a fairly common cut.  Professional development is used in many ways; among them including to sharpen and upgrade skills, provide crucial training for new initiatives,  develop and deepen the talent, renew licensure/credentialing, and to revitalize and renew the passion of teachers and school leaders. Yet, if the stark choice is eliminating professional development for a year to save teaching positions, it is an easy call.  Save the teaching position.

I don’t think there is any way around it-we have to find ways other than simply conferences and face to face workshops and seminars to keep teachers excited about the  teaching and learning process in these chaotic times.  It is also critical that we find ways for school executives and leaders to renew themselves as well.  This is even more crucial now.  A colleague, Ben Rosen, was quoted in the local paper that an important tool is to find more ways to tell workers about changes inside and outside the organization.  As Ben notes, “Insecurity is such a killer of morale.  It’s important …to give employees timely and complete information.  The more uncertain times are, the more rumors pop up.”

I’m posing my question for this post as a way for us collectively to find ways to keep teachers (and school leaders) excited about what we do and how we help make a difference to the young people to whom parents have entrusted their children.  How are you keeping your teachers and yourselves excited and focused upon teaching and learning OR supporting those whose focus is teaching, learning, and student success?

Best regards,
Chris

Three Keys of Leadership

Last week, I had the opportunity to hear General Gordon Sullivan, the former Army Chief of Staff, talk about leadership.  GEN Sullivan wrote a book a few years ago entitled, Hope Is Not A Strategy.

GEN Sullivan suggested that there are three interlinked (and equal size) circles of leadership-managing complexity and processes, building teams, and creating a future.

Managing complexity and processes includes operations-the daily work that becomes increasingly complex and challenging. How do you do more with less, what do you cut in this austere environment?

Building teams-you cannot do it alone.  The more you become a leader, the more you have to spend time with others to create teams that can leverage your ideas and strategy for the next 12-24 months.

Creating a future-what do you see the students, teachers, and families in your school doing in the next 24 months?  Think specifically about what you want to see these groups doing and saying (concrete and behavioral) in the short term future, then map backwards to today. What do you need to be doing, seeing, and saying to all of these different groups.

So, my question is:

“What do you do to specifically ensure that you focus upon all three of these circles?  How do you stay balanced between all three?

Your Listen/Talk Ratio

Next time you have a meeting, you might want to check to see how much you are talking vs. asking questions.  Most meetings have one of 3 purposes:

1. To disseminate information
2. To give a status update on projects or initiatives
3. To look at possibilities for solving an issue or a problem.

If you are having a meeting on #1, try to send that information in an email or memo.  No need to have a meeting simply to deliver a verbal memo.

If you are having a meeting on #2, sit back and let others actually deliver the update and ask questions if you need clarification (unless YOU are the one delivering the update…if so, refer to #1 above)

If you have a meeting on #3, practice some muzzle management.  Stifle your tendency to give your opinion as the leader unless you need to give some parameters on the solution space for the problem.

 

Think of your time in a meeting as a ratio for listen/talk.  Hopefully, that ratio increases as you get more comfortable.  As one wise man notes, “when the boss says, ‘ I think’, the thinking stops.”  (Thanks Harry)