Promises We Make
This is the sixth in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
The forth promise is I will forgive you when you hurt me. There can be no lasting peace in any relationship without the power of forgiveness. This is even more critical when someone has come to us and sincerely apologized they are asking without saying it will you please forgive me.
The fifth promise is I will live with hope and believe the best. Relationships are messy and there are always going to be times when people do or say things that upset us. It is at that precise moment that we have a critical choice to make about how we process what we are hearing. The bottom line is we will either choose to believe the best about the other person or we will assume the worst.
The sixth promise is I will not manipulate change in you. This deals with our core motivation when we interact with other people. If our goal in sharing with this person is to only tell them what they are doing wrong and why they should be the one to change then we are manipulating.
We must first assume personal responsibility for whatever percentage of the problem is our responsibility by admitting it and giving a sincere apology. Then and only then are we ready to talk to the person about what they did in a way that will really try to help them to move forward as well.
It is very easy to see what other people are doing wrong and sometimes almost impossible to see the blind spots in our own lives. When people first see our humility then they will be open to our advice.
The Winning Attitude
Lou Holtz the famous football coach once said, “Ability is what you’re capable of doing, motivation determines what you do and attitude determines how well you do it.” We have heard all our lives how important a role our attitude plays in everything we do every day.
In John Maxwell’s book The Winning Attitude he says that it is absolutely your key to personal success. His list several key principles about how attitude impacts every part of our lives:
1. Our attitude determines our approach to life
2. Our attitude determines our relationships with people
3. Often our attitude is the only difference between success and failure
4. Our attitude at the beginning of a task will affect its outcome more than anything else
5. Our attitude can turn our problems into blessings
6. Our attitude can give us an uncommonly positive perspective
Maintaing the proper perspective is probably the most important one for me. We are all going to encounter problems and setbacks in our lives. It is very important to remember when you are going through difficult times not to focus on what you have lost but what you still have to be thankful for all around you. When you choose to see the glass for the way it is more than half full it will give you the perspective you need to deal with all the other issues.
I found the following to be very helpful about What is an attitude?
It is the “advance man” of our true selves
Its roots are inward but its fruit is outward
It is our best friend or our worst enemy
It is more honest and more consistent that our words
It is an outward look based on past experiences
It is a thing which draws people to us or repels them away
It is never content until it is expressed
It is the librarian of our past
It is the speaker of our present
It is the prophet of our future
Practicing Feedforward
Almost every serious organization uses some form of feedback to evaluate the performance of their top leadership team. This usually works best in a 360 type environment where the person receives feedback from superiors, peers and subordinates as well.
The concept of feedforward was developed by Marshall Goldsmith in his best seller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There about how to coach senior executives. He encourages every leader to identify core behaviors that need to change through feedback. Then apologize for your mistake and commit to change that character quality in the future.
The primary way he recommends to accomplish this is through the four disciplines in feedforward:
1. Identify Target Behavior—choose the one behavior that your colleagues have told you about that you consider to be at the top of your list for change. The number one issue among the thousands of people he has worked with is to be a better listener.
2. Enlist Accountability Partners—the key here is to secure a personal commitment from as many people as possible to help you in this particular area. This should include family members as well as various levels of people within the organization where you work. They will all commit to help you focus on this one specific area and help you with ongoing feedback.
3. Solicit Specific Suggestions—ask everyone in your accountability circle for at least two suggestions that might help you achieve a positive change in your selected behavior. The key ground rule here is that there should be no mention of mistakes in the past but every comment is about the future.
4. Practice Active Listening—take appropriate notes if necessary but make sure you are really listening to each and every suggestion to the point that you can put it into practice. Also it is very important regardless of the quality of the input to be sure to graciously thank everyone involved who will take the time and emotional risk of telling you what you really need to hear.
Level Five Leaders
In my opinion the best organizational leadership book that has been written is Good to Great by Jim Collins. It proves beyond any doubt some things we have always know about effective leadership but he discovers some key principles that fly in the face of everything we have been taught in the past.
One thing that is really not new but clearly prioritized in his book is the importance of character in the life of any leader. Character ensures that the motives of the leader are always focused on what is best for the people they are leading and not for themselves.
The most significant myth that this book destroys about great leaders is that they all must be very outgoing cheerleader type personalities and that they have to lead with an authoritarian dictatorial style to be effective.
According to Collins, “Level 5 leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”
This personality type should never be mistaken for laid back soft leaders who don’t have the strength to make the hard calls. As a matter of fact they combine humility with an incredible strong will to make sure the right things are getting done. If they have to they would fire their mother if that is what was necessary for the long term benefit of the organization.
They also give credit to others when things are going well and when they are not they assume personal responsibility. This combination of personal humility and professional will make for the type of leader anyone would want to follow.
Crisis Management
Every individual and organization at some point in time will face a crisis and the way they respond will determine if the situation potentially becomes fatal or they experience a complete and total recovery. I have learned a lot from personal experience on this subject over the years and probably the most important lesson is to be incredibly proactive and not stick your head in the sand and hope it will get better.
In Jack Welch’s great book Winning he gives some great advice on how he dealt with crisis situations at G.E. These are his five guiding assumptions:
1. The problem is worse than it appears—No matter how hard you might wish and pray; very few crises start small and stay that way. The vast majority are bigger in scope than you could ever imagine with that first phone call and they will last longer and get more ugly.
2. There are no secrets in the world, and everyone will eventually find out everything—Information that you try to shut down will eventually get out, and as it travels, it will certainly morph, twist and darken. The only way to prevent that is to expose the problem yourself and tell the truth.
3. You and your organization’s handling of the crisis will be portrayed in the worst possible light—The very nature of a crisis means that you and your organization will be portrayed in a light so negative you won’t even recognize yourself. Don’t hunker down. Along with disclosing the full extent of your problem you have got to stand up and define your position before someone else does for you.
4. There will be changes in processes and people—Crisis requires change. Sometimes a process fix is enough. Usually not because the people affected by the crisis demand that someone be held responsible.
5. The organization will survive, ultimately stronger for what happened—There is not a crisis you cannot learn from, even though you hate every one of them. After a crisis is over the tendency is to put it away in a drawer. Don’t, teach its lessons every chance you get.
Six Ways To Make Emotional Deposits
We are all familiar with the metaphor of making emotional deposits and taking withdrawals from another person both personally and professionally. When you end up taking more than you give to another person you end up with a negative balance and believe me there are serious fees and late charges involved.
Stephen Covey in his great book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People gives us six ways that we can make sure we are making deposits on a consistent basis with another person:
1. Understanding the Individual—really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual.
2. Attending to the Little Things—the little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies, little unkindness’s, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things.
3. Keeping Commitments—keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal. In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through.
4. Clarifying Expectations—the cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals. That’s why it’s so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out on the table.
5. Showing Personal Integrity—personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits. One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present because that builds trust with those who are.
6. Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal—when we make withdrawals from the Emotional Bank Account, we need to apologize and we need to do in sincerely. Great deposits come in the sincere words we share with the people we have hurt.
Promises We Make
This is the fifth in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
The forth promise is I will forgive you when you hurt me. There can be no lasting peace in any relationship without the power of forgiveness. This is even more critical when someone has come to us and sincerely apologized they are asking without saying it will you please forgive me.
The fifth promise is I will live with hope and believe the best. Relationships are messy and there are always going to be times when people do or say things that upset us. It is at that precise moment that we have a critical choice to make about how we process what we are hearing.
The motive behind the message a person is communicating is extremely important. Most of the time it will not be immediately apparent what their motive is but every time we bring our own presuppositions and expectations into each conversation.
The bottom line is we will either choose to believe the best about the other person or we will assume the worst. When we assume the worst we will walk away hurt or even bitter. When we assume the best regardless of what they say and how upset they are we can give them a pass because we trust their heart.
What’s Next?
This phrase became the mantra on the award winning series The West Wing. After every serious issue that had to be dealt with not matter how long the conversation or difficult the task the president would always ask what’s next?
That is a very good question that all of us have to answer each and every day regardless of whether we realize it or not. Inherent within the question is the intention to find the most important things on our must do list and place them at the top.
Most of us allocate a considerable amount of time to plan our weeks and certainly each individual day with pre-determined goals and priorities. However in today’s wired culture we are constantly receiving new information throughout the day that must be processed.
David Allen is recognized as one of the nation’s leading experts on time management and personal productivity. In his book Getting Things Done he list four key criteria about processing new information that help him to answer the what’s next question:
1. Context—A few actions can be done anywhere but most require a specific location or having some productivity tool at hand, such as a phone or a computer. These are the first factors that limit your choices about what you can do in the moment.
2. Time available—When do you have to do something else? Having a meeting in five minutes would prevent doing many actions that require more time.
3. Energy available—How much energy do you have? Some actions you have to do require a reservoir of fresh, creative mental energy while others need more physical horsepower.
4. Priority—Given your context, time, and energy available, what actions will give you the highest payoff? This is where you need to access your intuition and begin to rely on your judgment call in the moment.
Law Of The Inner Circle
This by far is one of the most important principles identified by John Maxwell in the realm of leadership. The simple definition of the law is that a leader’s potential is determined by those closest to them.
As any organization continues to grow the leader cannot continue to spend equal time with every person on staff because of time constraints alone. This means that eventually the majority of a leader’s time will be need to be spent with the top 20% of their leadership team.
It is a proven leadership principle that they in turn will produce at least 80% of the desired results because of the scope of their impact throughout the entire organization. The leader is incredibly dependent upon this inner circle because they are responsible for providing the best information possible upward for decision making and they are also responsible for the downward execution of all planning.
Leaders of large organizations should still spend some time managing by walking around and maintain some personal contact with all levels of staff. However the purpose of this interaction is for personal encouragement and visibility and not for problem solving and day to day decision making. The leader can be involved to some degree with everyone but they must invest themselves only in the inner circle because they are the key to continued growth and outstanding performance.
Rinsing Your Cottage Cheese
There were many profound conclusions reached by Jim Collins research team that were documented in his bestselling book Good to Great. The principle of rinsing your cottage cheese received a small amount of space in the book but may be one of the key principles that separate those organizations who merely survive in this economy and those who thrive.
This analogy comes from a disciplined world-class athlete named Dave Scott, who won the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon six times. Even though he had a training schedule that would burn at least 5,000 calories per day he would still rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off.
From a business planning model this represents the last 10 percent of work that most people are not willing to do or even know exists to make their project or program the best it possibly could be. Most people are willing to settle for 75-90% effort and feel that should really represent the best they can produce.
Sometimes the last 10% represents seemingly little things like a spot on the carpet or windows that have not been cleaned. However that can be the very thing that a customer will notice and come to the conclusion that if you do not care about those areas what else are you not doing to be your best that they cannot see.
Collins writes, “Everyone would like to be the best, but most organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be the best at and the will to do whatever it takes to turn that potential into reality.” Bottom line they lack the character and the discipline to rinse their cottage cheese.
Dan Greer
My Web Sites
Corporate
Non-Profit