New Year's Resolutions - Don't Do It!

Well it's that time again, and I hope that, for all of you that celebrate Christmas, you have had a terrific time ... perhaps even that Santa has been kind to you!

But as we settle into that post-Christmas period that (in Australia at least) seems to involve post-Christmas Sales, watching sport on TV or live, and visits to the beach, many of us are girding our loins for what lies just around the corner in the New Year.

You know how it works. With a nice buzz about you on New Year's Eve from a taste of sparkling wine or three, we tumble into that cliched thinking of what our New Year's resolutions will be.

DON'T DO IT!

I know that I am a big fan of goal-setting, but for 2008 why don't we try a slightly different approach?

Instead of setting yourself some outrageous goal in a time of befuddled thinking, try instead to think back on all your successes in 2007.

That's right. As you sip that celebratory beverage and wait for the fireworks to explode into the night sky, do some celebrating of your own. List all of your great moments from 2007 and take a moment to savour them, celebrate them and even toast them.

Why would you want to do this?

Simply because most people (an overwhelming percentage) are their own best and worst critics.

Don't believe me? Think back now on all the times you have chastised or castigated yourself for some failing over the past year. That time when you didn't deliver the best result at work you could ... when you slacked off in a workout ... when you put off some chore or task ... when you said the wrong thing to your partner/friend/parent etc.

Chances are that on each of these occasions when you were thinking about what didn't go so well, you spent a fair amount of time critically analysing yourself - and in most cases, this is probably a good thing. It's what hopefully prevents us from screwing the same things up again sometime in the future.

But the real issue is how often do we spend patting ourselves on the back? The research suggests not much time at all.

So go on. This New Year's Eve, toast those successes - little and large - from 2007. The time for setting goals will come soon enough. Bring the New Year in with a some well-earned celebrating.

Jazz and Leadership

I've been to two great concerts at the The Basement in Sydney in the last month. I've seen the Australian Jazz star James Morrison play with his quartet, and last Saturday night I went to a special Frank Sinatra show where we had a Big Band and four singers all belting out some great tunes. And it got me to thinking about how jazz music relates to leadership.

I've always been a big jazz fan, and I find that I am thinking more about the broader concepts of leadership as my life progresses. Now linking leadership and jazz is not new. Indeed, about 15 years ago or so I bought and read Max Depree's Leadership Jazz

But as I was sitting and listening to James Morrison, foot tapping away, one of the connections that fired for me, was how conceptually we often talk about the need for some things to be loose, and others tight.

For example, when we set ourselves or our organisation different goals to achieve, we will have some goals - generally the simple and short term ones - that can be very accurately defined, measured and targeted. But we will probably also have some goals that seem to defy a definition in the same way. At best we might be able to describe how they will look or feel when we get there. But they are kind of fuzzy.

These two categories of goals are good examples of some things that are tight and loose. They aren't good or bad because, in truth, we need both. But what is important for our loose goals is that we have some sense of where we are heading in all this fuzziness - and an organisation's vision or its culture may provide the necessary tightness that allows the looseness!

Let's have a think about how jazz music might shed some light on this.

Perhaps the strongest differentiator of jazz music from other musical forms is its improvisation component. When I was sitting back listening to the James Morrison quartet rip, swing and bop their way through their two sets, often the highlights were the solos performed by Morrison on the trumpet, trombone or piano; by his brother on the drums; by the bassist or the guitarist.

The point is that they didn't just make it up as they went along. Each performer's improvisation had to fit the structure of the tune in which it appeared. It had to be in the right key, the right tempo and, perhaps most importantly, it had to add that special something that had never been done before.

In that sense, the improvisation in jazz music is the loose part. But the loose part can't survive without the tight bit - the rest of the tune of which it is a component.

Jazz musicians get it. They know that they can't all improvise at the same time - that would be chaos, and it would sound like crap. While there may be a band leader, in a very real and practical sense, they all take it in turns to lead when they improvise. And while one member of the jazz team is center stage, the rest of the team are in the background providing the harmony and the rhythm.

If we think about it, it's not a bad way for all of our teams to work and to be led. At different times it will make sense for different people to take the lead. Sometimes - and more and more frequently - someone will have to improvise. But being able to do something that is totally new and improvisational is often best supported with the tightness provided by the rest of the team sticking to the tune.

Does your work team have jazz?

Picasso, practice and leadership

I've just returned from a fabulous holiday to ... guess where?

Apart from the obvious enjoyment that one gets from holidaying in exotic locations - quaffing croissants, fine French wine and massacring local languages - one of the real pleasures of holidays for me is the chance to put my mind in a more neutral mode and to discover new things.

There are many things to discover in France, and I was able to do more than my fair share. But one particular discovery still sticks in my mind. It was the visit my wife and I enjoyed to the Musee Picasso in Paris.

I would be the first to admit that I am not much of an art buff, but when you do visit Paris, it's hard not to be taken in by the Louvre, the Pompidou centre etc. But the Picasso museum, for me, meant a whole lot more.

There's been lots written and said about Pablo Picasso, but most of us probably just know scraps about his most famous works like Guernica, or his relationships with the many women in his life.

But what was most interesting to me, was seeing his many, many sketchbooks that were on display at the Musee. Throughout these sketch books, and also on many pieces of scrap paper and cardboard, are literally thousands of his practice drawings and studies. As you move from room to room in the Musee, you can sense how Picasso developed his interests, his focus and his skills. He could paint and draw in a natural way, but clearly that was not enough for him - he was attracted to some different artistic challenge. So over his 91 years, Picasso continued to develop his skills and his interests. (Want to see more?)

So how does the art of Pablo Picasso relate to leadership?

To me, the key link is how even the naturally gifted work on their skills to get even better. No one would dispute that Picasso was a naturally talented painter, sketch artist and sculptor. But his natural talent was not enough. He continued to work on his skills throughout his life. He experimented with different media, styles, models and approaches. And by doing this, he transformed the style of painting and sculpting that was popular at the time.

How often do we sit down and fill a sketch book with our ideas?

How often do we look at a situation, and then "paint" it dozens of different ways?

How often do we try a new style, a new medium or a new model?

The big question is, what can Pablo Picasso teach us about how to approach our leadership art?

Making Changes

As a consultant, performance coach and trainer, I am frequently asked if what I am doing with an organisation, an individual or a team will result in any real change. The answer is ... it depends!

And this is not just a flippant response.

Obviously organisations and individuals want the reassurance that the service they are paying for will result in a positive - and preferably measurable - outcome. That's great. I want the same thing too. There's nothing more frustrating for most of us than to feel as if nothing has changed when we complete a project.

So why does the answer depend, and what does it depend on?

Well let's remind ourselves that organisations and teams are comprised of people. Yep, I know this sounds obvious, but a lot of change management talk seems to ignore this inescapable fact.

So applying a people lense to change means that we can look at it from the perspective of some of the recent neurological research that has been conducted over the past 20 years or so. Now clearly I am no great expert in this field, but there has been plenty written about it over recent years. Indeed a lot of Daniel Goleman's work (our Emotional Intelligence guru) is based on the neurological research conducted by Joseph LeDoux.

Now we all know that making changes in our own lives is tough, and making changes in organisations can be even tougher. Some of you might even remember that piece of popular advice that it takes three weeks to break an old habit and three weeks to build a new one?

But what the neurological research has done, is provide us with a scientific basis for understanding why making change is so difficult.

Apparently our brains are constructed to quickly detect changes in our environment and unusual or different occurrences. The orbital cortex (sort of behind our eyes) generates these signals in our brain, and the orbital cortex is closely linked with the brain's fear circuitry - the amygdala.

These two sections of the brain (the amygdala and the orbital cortex) compete with the prefrontal cortex of our brain for attention (processing time and speed).

So what? Well it's the prefrontal cortex where our higher and more conscious cognitive processes occur.

When we are learning something new, we need our prefrontal cortex to be working hard.

Think about learning a new language, learning to drive, concentrating on developing your listening skills or whatever.

We need to consciously make the effort to master, think about and practise these skills. It's tiring too. Why?

Again the research has shown that using the prefrontal cortex uses more energy than using the part of the brain where our learned skills reside and can be enacted unconsciously (the basal ganglia).

So, what does this neurological research tell us about making changes?

It's going to take a conscious effort.
It's going to take more energy.
It's going to take some time before we can use the skills unsconsciously.
We will encounter some resistance within ourselves.

So, how do we begin to address these challenges?

The first point to note is that an individual, organisation or team will have to want to change. The coach, consultant or trainer cannot make the conscious effort or conduct all the practice that mastering the change will require. What we can do is provide the background knowledge, some scenarios for practice, and we can provide encouragement and positive feedback.

But probably the most important point to note is that an individual, organisation or team will need to arrive at their own solution. In other words, it has to be their plan. If they do that, then that desire to change is their own.

Questions

Asking lots of questions - and of course, coming up with the right answers is a real characteristic of problem solving and decision making. Coming up with the right questions to ask is often more difficult than finding the right answers. After all, there's no correct answer to the wrong question.

A guy I really admire for lots of reasons is my old high school friend Michael Stanier. It's not just that he's a mate of mine (although that is certainly part of it), it's much more about how he approaches his life and his work.

Michael's a business coach based out of Canada but working internationally. He's just released a web-based animated film called The 5 3/4 Questions You've Been Avoiding. Check it out and have a go at answering these questions for yourself.

My Birthday

I've just celebrated my fortieth birthday with some of my family and best friends at a pub in Melbourne. It was a terrific party as the photo will attest, but what really struck me was a billboard that I read early this week that said:

How old would you act if you didn't know how old you were?

So this got me to thinking. At first blush, it seemed to be saying something similar to the expression that was sometimes hurled at me as a child to ... act my age. But there's something else going on as well, isn't there? And it's also more complicated than the cliched expression that says ... you're only as old as you feel.

I don't know if it was just that I had turned 40 and was feeling perhaps a little more introspective, but the more I thought about this billboard, the more inspirational I found it.

Of course our upbringing, our educational opportunities, our luck, the friends we make, the jobs we have, they all impact on our lives to greater or lesser degrees. This conditioning goes a big way in shaping how we think about ourselves, and how others think about us. Age is but one component. But think about it, if you didn't know how old you were, how old would you act?

But it's more, so much more ...

If you didn't know how smart you were, how smart could you be? If you didn't know that you had failed before, how brave would you be that next time? If you didn't know how happy you were, how happy could you be? If you didn't know what your job was, what job would you do?

All of these questions have been important questions for me to answer at some point in my life. As I was thinking about this advertising billboard, it also provided a springboard for what I wanted to say to my friends and family who could come along to my birthday party.

The billboard reminded me of another quote that I had read somewhere that basically said that if we celebrated the anniversary of our death instead of the anniversary of our birth, how differently would we look at our lives?

Now, I've always been a big fan of wakes - it must be that Irish heritage that lurks a couple of generations ago. And it seems to me that wakes often provide the forum for everyone to remember someone's life, often the funny moments, over a few drinks. So I thought that a wake - turned on its head - would provide me with a wonderful opportunity to tell some stories about the people most close to me.

As I celebrated my birthday, I told a range of stories about funny moments in the lives of my friends and family and how what these friends and family members meant to me. We may not always get the chance to say those sorts of things to the people close to us, and I'm old enough now to realise that.

What would you say?

Happy Customers and Valentine's Day

My cousin, Belinda, owns and runs a small suburban florist shop in Melbourne, Australia. For the past couple of years I have helped out on the two busiest days of her business year - Valentine's Day and Mothers' Day.



Okay, I have no artistic ability at all in flower arrangement (Belinda has a fine arts degree), so I help out with the deliveries.

And, do you know what, it's one of the most enjoyable jobs I have ever had.

Imagine this ... Everyone you deal with during your workday is happy to see you. They smile. They blush. They thank you.

And do you know something else, it gets even better.

Because it's not that they're happy to see Belinda's (very) part time delivery driver.

And it's not just that they're happy with the product they get - but that is part of it.

It's because they are happy about the thought behind someone sending them some flowers.

Is all this happiness over-rated?

No way.

There's been a fair amount of research conducted on happiness (sounds like another terrific part-time job for me), and some of the benefits of being happy include:

* Living longer.
* Making more friends.
* Making more money.
* Feeling better.
* Being more creative.

My old school friend, Michael Stanier, a former Rhodes Scholar and Canadian Coach of the Year has more to say about the benefits of happiness and positive psychology here.

But every day isn't Valentine's Day with a van full of red roses, cuddly bears and balloons ... or is it?

Imagine how good it would be, if all of your interactions with your workmates, your clients and customers, your friends and loved ones were happy and positive ones.

Imagine also if we each gave something of ourselves to each of these interactions. I'm not talking about flowers. How about a smile? A word of praise? A hello? A joke?

Try it. Go on. I'll be trying to beat you to it!

Victim Mentality

Last night I attended a professional development session for executive coaches run by the Institute of Executive Coaching (Australia) , and one of the subjects that came up was working with counterparts or clients with a victim mentality.

I'm sure you've met someone like this. You might even do it yourself sometimes. When we see ourselves as the victims we are thinking and perhaps saying things like:

* It's not my fault.

* No one else gets it. They're all too stupid.

* Can you believe what she did to me?

* I'm sick and tired of...

* I'm always so busy I never have time for myself.

* Why does this always happen to me?

* That's the way it's always been around here.

* It's the system.

One of the interesting things that I see in my work, is that this sort of attitude also manifests itself in teams as well as individuals.

So, just what is a victim mentality?

It's often described as when someone is always blaming someone (or something else) for the bad things that happen to them. As it develops, it can become so extreme that the person begins to think that bad things always happen to them. They rarely, if ever, take responsibility for their own actions.

Seeing this sort of mentality in an individual or a team is a massive danger sign.

So, what can we do about it?

I always like to use an adaptation of Stephen Covey's Circles of Influence and Concern.

Sure, there are lots of things we are concerned about, but over which we have little control. But there are many things that we can influence, where we do have direct control.

Covey illustrated this by drawing two concentric circles - the larger circle he labelled the circle of concern, and the smaller circle inside this larger one, he labelled the circle of influence.

For example, I have a mortgage and I am always concerned about the speculation that the Reserve Bank will raise official interest rates, and that my bank will pass these on to me, increasing my monthly payments. I have no direct control over what the Reserve Bank or what my bank will do. So the official interest rates would be one issue that I could pencil into my large circle of concern.

But what do I control over my mortgage? Not the official interest rate certainly, but I can choose a fixed or variable rate. I can increase or decrease my monthly payments (within reason). I can increase the frequency of my payments. I have a number of choices about the actions I can take. So I could pencil these issues into my smaller circle of influence.

The point is, that I CHOOSE to do something. I can be proactive, or I can be reactive. It's my CHOICE. It's not the circumstances or the Reserve Bank that control that choice.

And this blog is not just about Ric's mortgage. We all have direct control over such critical things as our behaviour, our attitudes and our decisions. When we realise this, we can gradually begin to expand our circle of influence so that we begin to assert more control over those other things that concern us.

While we cannot always control the circumstance, we can control our response to it. We are responsible and accountable for that response. We have no one else to blame for it. It's not pop psychology. It works.

So, do you or your team choose to stay as victims, or do you choose a different response?

Corporate Pyschopath - or just a very naughty boss?

I frequently hear stories about bosses and managers yelling at their team, their advisers and probably at their loved ones too.

This stuns me.

It’s not just that this kind of behaviour is inappropriate in so many situations, it’s that it is downright ineffective. It’s dumb because it’s only in a tiny fraction of circumstances that team members or associates will respond to an invective filled diatribe.

In extreme cases, these people are often termed corporate psychopaths. But it's likely that the first seed of their extreme management behaviour was watered and even fertilised by the types of organisations in which we now find them.

There's been a lot written in recent years about corporate psychopaths. (See anything by Professor Emeritus Robert Hare from the University of British Columbia). These sociopaths are often manipulative, arrogant, callous, impatient, impulsive, unreliable and prone to fly into rages. They break promises, and take credit for the work of others and blame everyone else when things go wrong.

Does this sound like anyone you know? Someone you work with?

For organisations, this is dangerously infantile behaviour, so why are these corporate psychos drawn to the business world?

Well, perhaps not surprisingly but certainly a little perversely, business does value some of the traits that the corporate psycho brings. Some businesses want that mercenary attitude, the domineering approach, the ambition and the drive.

But what's the real cost?

The leadership style of these corporate psychopaths is really undeveloped and immature. In terms of emotional intelligence, they are neither self or socially aware. And this means that they are really constrained in their modes of operation. They switch rapidly from being overtly charming - even seductive, to bullying, ranting and threatening.

How do we deal with these people?

Here’s a useful measure of maturity. The Australian author, literary critic and social commentator Clive James suggests that “reality is the conquest of the self, not of the world”.

I think that this is a useful place to start. Sure, the emotions of certain situations are enough to push all of us over the edge ... occasionally. But if this is a standard way of leading or managing a team, something is drastically wrong. The manager has clearly lost control - certainly of themselves, probably of their team, and most likely the situation as well.

Self-control is a characteristic that is marked out as one of the key attributes of leaders with strong emotional intelligence. Flying into a rage when things don’t go your way, demeaning those around you or withdrawing into a near catatonic uncommunicative state are behaviours that we probably expect from small children - not our business and organisational leaders.

The corporate psycho or boss may get results for the firm in the short term, but it won't last. For the really intractable cases only professional psychological counselling will help, but perhaps the bigger issue is how all of us in our organisations respond to these sort of people. If we choose to do nothing, or just avoid or tolerate them, what kind of message does that send to the rest of our team? It's likely that we will get more of the same ...

Directive Leadership

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a PhD researcher doing some work comparing the leadership styles of Australians and Americans. She asked me if I had ever given a direct order while I was in the military.

I had to think pretty hard about that question. I had certainly given a number of direct orders on the parade ground, and in contexts similar to that - ie when controlling large groups of people in synchronised activities. But otherwise I have never had to use that phrase so beloved in the movies " ... that's a direct order".

The researcher told me that my recollections were pretty similar to many other Australian military leaders, but very different to those from an American military leader background. Why was this the case?

At the risk of over-simplification, let me try and explain it through the use of situational leadership.

Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard popularised the model of situational leadership in the 1960s. Even if you don't like the One Minute Manager series of books, you have to admire the skill of Blanchard and others in distilling some pretty complex skills down into readily understood - and therefore used - models.

One of the four basic leadership styles defined in situational leadership is the "Directive" style. This type of leadership style sees the leader providing specific instructions and then closely supervising the accomplishment of any task. It is the classic case of providing a direct order.

Of course this kind of leadership style is entirely appropriate ... in some situations, and with some teams. Unfortunately, in my experience, it is also frequently over-used. If your team are highly competent professionals, then constantly directing them is likely to get right up their noses pretty quickly. Similarly if they are highly committed and enthusiastic about their tasks, then the directive style is likely to quickly diminish that commitment.

Situational Leadership suggests that the leadership style must be relevant to the specific circumstance in which the leader is working. In other words, your leadership style must relate directly to the level of competence and commitment your team members exhibit. Directive leadership is only appropriate when the team has both low competence and low commitment, otherwise the coaching, supporting or delegating leadership styles will be much more effective.

From my experience, most of the teams in Australia that I have worked with are both competent and committed. Some of the military teams I have worked with have been exceptional in both areas. In these instances it's been much more important to engage the team members to take advantage of their experience, their professional skills, their initiative and their drive so that we could develop a collaborative plan. This quickly became "our" plan, not "my" plan, one where success and responsibility were shared.

That's part of the reason I have never had to emphasise a task by stating ... that's a direct order.

Setting goals - lots of them

I have always been a keen, if not terribly gifted, long distance runner. Of course one of the ultimate challenges for any runner is to complete a marathon. But, ask some runners and you soon learn that just completing a marathon isn’t enough.

12 years ago, I was told that the difference between a runner and a jogger was that a runner had broken the magical three hour mark for the marathon.

So 12 years ago I began my quest to become a real runner. There I was, in my prime of life in my late 20s, it shouldn’t be too difficult ...

I was running four or five days a week, playing and coaching in a soccer team, working on the personal staff of the Admiral in charge of our Navy, and participating in a pretty active social life. My previous best marathon time had been 3 hours 18 minutes or so run just a couple of years before. I now had my three hour goal. So I just had to go out and achieve it.

Does this sound familiar? Well, maybe not the marathoning bit, but what what about having a goal set and then achieving it?

I got close, don’t get me wrong - within four minutes of my goal in Sydney in 1996. That’s nearly good enough isn’t it? But the bloke that told me about the runner/jogger diarchy, simply raised one eyebrow, told me I’d done okay, but that I was still a jogger.

So what has my jogging (yep, still haven’t broken the three hour mark) got to do with leading, managing or teamwork?

My view is that goal-setting and management by objective are immensely powerful ways to lead teams, organisations and businesses - but, like lots of other things, it needs to be done properly.

There’s been plenty written and said about goal-setting, and of course the SMART acronym is a useful way to approach the setting of any goals. They must be (or have):

* Specific
* Measurable
* Attractive
* Realistic
* Timeframe

My three hour marathon goal met all those requirements, but I still fell agonisingly short. So what went wrong?

It took me a few years to realise it, and it wasn’t until I was the Commanding Officer of a large military unit and preparing some background information for my team for a discussion we were having during an annual planning session. In this context, many of our goals had been set by the General we all worked for back in Melbourne, but we obviously also had some other goals that we were setting ourselves. Some of the goals were very ambitious, and some were really quite long-term. How could I clearly articulate what we needed to do today to help achieve a goal that perhaps wouldn’t be realised for five or ten years?

Of course, part of the solution was to break each of the bigger, more ambitious or long term goals down into sub-goals or objectives that could be comprehended (and achieved) much more easily and in a more timely fashion.

Interestingly enough, just two weeks ago I bumped into one of my team from those days, and one of the first things he mentioned was how I had used a story about Tatiana Grigorieva (a very talented and glamorous Australian pole vaulter {http://www.tatiana.com.au/}) to explain how our Unit might structure our goals.

Back then I had suggested that it wasn't enough that Tatiana knew what the world pole vault record was. Breaking the world record might be her ultimate goal, but what were all the interim steps she needed to take? What were all the targets along the way she needed to hit? Perhaps some of them had to do with her weight training, her diet, what lead up competitions she would enter, etc.

This then became a very productive discussion on what our immediate goals (monthly) would be, what the 1, 2 and 5 year targets were, and most productively of all, it led us into developing a series of actions that we needed to take or develop in order to meet the ultimate goal.

So goal setting by itself is not enough. We need to develop a series of interim goals - signposts that mark the pathway we need to follow to reach our destination.

Oh, and I'm still chasing that elusive three hour marathon time. But my training plan for this year has a bunch of lead-up races, and training sessions that I am following. As of 20 May 2007 I'm on track after running 1 hour 26 minutes for the half marathon on the Great Ocean Road. Bring on the Gold Coast Marathon on 1 July 2007!

Made from Beer?

Catchy title huh? It's actually one of the advertising slogans for an Australian beer - Carlton Draught. (More about Carlton Draught?) And if you haven't seen the commercial based around Flashdance's signature tune, then check that out too.

But what has made from beer got to do with leadership or teambuilding?

As my bus trundled past a billboard with this slogan on it the other day, it got me to thinking about how many organisations could really describe themselves as being made from people. Yeah, I know; not as catchy as made from beer, but the same message is implied.

There's lots of fancy marketing and other gimmicks to promote the fermented amber liquid yeast product that is so popular here in Australia. And of course, the angle that the cunning Carlton marketers are taking is: fundamentally all we want is a beer that's ... made from beer. Everything else is secondary.

The same can be said for many organisations. Lots of fancy marketing to suggest that they're innovative, have super cool IT systems, bleeding edge architect-designed corporate headquarters, high-end manufacturing technologies and whatever. But fundamentally, they're made from people.

A few years ago I was giving a talk to a bunch of junior naval officers on what my expectations were of them out in the Fleet. Our Navy takes a great deal of pride in its ships, aircraft and other technology, and a lot of the questions I had got leading up to this talk were what were we doing about some new project, some new process or whatever? I used the title of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong's biography to emphasise my message. (More about Lance?)

Lance's biography is, of course, entitled It's not about the bike. This to me encapsulates a lot of what I was trying to say. Without doubt, Lance was the preeminent road racing cyclist of the last decade - perhaps ever. Yep, he had some amazing technology to ride, a terrific team around him. But those things were available to other riders, but they didn't have the same success. So there must have been something else.

To my audience of junior naval officers the point was, don't just concern yourselves with the technology, the tactics, the qualifications, etc. It's not just about that. It's about the poeople. It's about leading them. It's about working with them in teams - and everything that leading them and working with these teams entails. Everything starts with the people - for all organisations. It's not about bikes. Organisations are made from people.

Leadership and the X Factor

For as long as people have been studying and writing about leadership, the debate about whether leaders are born or made has existed. The adherents of the born leaders school often like to talk about some magical ingredient - some X Factor - that leaders have, and that the rest of us mere mortals simply don’t possess.

My view is that both sides of the debate are true. And I don’t find sitting on this fence too uncomfortable!

If you subscribe to the school of innate leadership, then it becomes just too easy to accept that you and others can do nothing about becoming a better leader. Sure, not all of us can become a truly great leader in the mold of [insert your favourite great leader here]. But I don’t look like Daniel Craig, play golf like Tiger Woods or sing like Luciano Pavarotti either! That element of greatness - the X Factor - if you like, does separate the great from the excellent and the good.

But the school of learned leadership also has its advocates, for the obvious reason that leadership can be taught. But here’s the critical thing - it must be learned, practiced and constantly developed too. I can’t imagine that Tiger Woods simply relies on his innate golfing abilities to be one of the world’s most successful golfers. Obviously he practices, and I bet that he also regularly works on something new in his game as well.

How are you going at working on your leadership skills?

I often begin a leadership workshop or training session by asking the attendees to give me a list of the top leadership traits. Every single time in these sessions, the people there get 95% or more of the most common leadership traits in about ten seconds flat.

So what? Does that make all them good leaders?

That’s the point isn’t it. It’s not the knowing, it’s the doing that’s important.

It’s not just having the theoretical knowledge of what leadership is all about, it’s doing something with that knowledge by practicing it.

Truman Capote, the great American author and creator of the so-called “non-fiction novel” made a very interesting comment to his biographer, Gerald Clarke, (Capote: A Biography http://www.geraldclarke.com/capote.htm) about what it takes to become a good writer.

You might want to think about Capote’s comment as it relates to being a good leader. Capote said:

To be a good writer and to stay on top is one of the most difficult balancing acts ever. Talent isn’t enough ... There has to be some extra X factor, some extra dimension, that has kept us [writers] going. Really successful people are like vampires: you can’t kill them unless you drive a stake through their hearts.

Talent isn’t enough!

Your knowledge, your boss’s knowledge, your teammate’s knowledge of leadership will never be enough. It probably never has been, and it certainly won’t be in the future. True success will come only to those who don’t just know it, they don’t just think it, they definitely don’t just talk about it ... they just do it.

Capote actually finished his comment about success as a writer by saying:

... the only one who can destroy a really strong and talented writer is himself.

If you aren’t refreshing, practicing or learning new leadership skills, are you destroying your own potential to be a strong and talented leader?

Change Symbols

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a potential client company about running some seminars for them on culture change. One of the things they asked me to think about was - what would be an appropriate symbol for their change program?

And this did get me to thinking ...

Why? Simply because dry logic only gets you so far with your prime change audience - the people. Logic and reason and facts and data are all important, of course, but not so inspiring or exciting.

So what would be an appropriate change symbol?

Lots of recent research internationally, and also in Australia, points to the importance of having a dedicated, and even a named change program. The Woolworth's Supermarket chain in Australia have 'Project Refresh' for example. (http://www.woolworthslimited.com.au/aboutus/ourhistory/index.asp)

We also often see new logos appear as part of a rebranding strategy - a frequent component of a change program. Think of any of the major Australian banks ... National Australia Bank is now "NAB", etc.

So, we might have a named change program. We might even have spent lots of dollars on a new logo. But how effective will they be in grabbing the attention of the various stakeholders during the change?

So what would work better? What would really grab someone's attention, inspire them, excite them?

My view is that this where the arts really come to the fore. Without doubt the detailed analysis, planning, decision-making, etc all needs to be done, but to capture our attention and excite us, there's nothing like a striking image, or a funky or uplifting tune. I'm not a big Rolling Stones fan, but how good was the Microsoft launch of Windows 95 with 'Start me Up'? And they made US$8million as well! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPFKnBYOSI)

But you don't have millions of dollars sitting around to spend on a change symbol right? What might work for you?

You've done a lot of the analysis and planning right? Somewhere, somebody has been able to outline the vision - what it's going to look like, feel like, be like if the change program is successful. If someone in your team can put that into words, can the team also think of a picture, an image, a scene from a movie or a song that sums up the journey or the destination? If they can, your team has uncovered a powerful tool that has the potential to excite and inspire your stakeholders. That image or that song will grab the stakeholders in the gut, as surely as the analysis will grab their heads.

So that gets us back to the photos at the start of the blog and below. They are images that I love. It's the Duomo (cathedral) of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Italy. (Thanks to http://www.freefoto.com)

Sure, there are lots of old churches that are beautiful across the world. But what is special to me about this Duomo is that it symbolises change so well.

While I was in Italy in September last year, I learnt a little about the restoration of their numerous monuments. Interestingly to me, there is constant debate about the validity of restoration work. Are the changes that are necessitated by the passing of time what the artists originally intended, etc?

This is why Florence's Duomo is so interesting. Because it was constructed over a long period of time, various artists, builders, supporters and labourers were involved with a constantly morphing vision of what the completed Duomo should be. Does that sound familiar to your organisation?

Construction was begun by the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. Numerous local artists continued to work on it during the following century and a half. But, the massive octagonal cupola that truly dominates both the church and the city was the proud achievement of Filippo Brunelleschi, master architect and sculptor and it wasn't started until 1420.

The cathedral of Florence itself had been begun in the Gothic style. But in 1366 the City of Florence, following the advice of certain painters and sculptors, decided that the Gothic should no longer be used and that all new work should follow Roman forms, including the now famous dome built at the east end of the nave.

A modern façade of the cathedral, executed by Emilio de Fabris in 1867-87 in the style of the Gothic Revival, has taken the place of one which was destroyed at the end of the 16th century.

When you see the Duomo today, you can see its Gothic nature, the towering Roman style dome, and the most recent neo Gothic facade.

What a wonderful symbol of change. Evolution not revolution. The engagement of many many workers in its construction and upkeep over centuries. And most importantly, the inspiration of countless visitors over time.

Your organisation could do worse than picking the Duomo as its change symbol.

Bad Bosses

Here's a headline ... there's a lot of bad bosses, managers and leaders in businesses and organisations worldwide.

Well, it's probably not such a headline. It doesn't surprise many of us really, does it?

Does it matter? Bad bosses can still get good results can't they?

It depends ...

Certainly it depends on what and how you measure good results. A bad boss may indeed be able to get some good business results - but not over time, and certainly not in the same organisation.

But the bottom line question is probably, will having good bosses in the business or organisation get better results?

Now, defining what a boss, a manager and a leader needs to do in a short blog is another challenge of brevity. But let's condense the role of a boss into two perhaps overly simplistic generalisations. For this blog's sake, let's assume that the role of a boss involves:

* managing tasks (the "technical" management skills: setting objectives, planning, implementing, controlling); and,
* managing people (the "relationship" management skills).

And let's make another assumption, that the business schools, universities and vocational training providers can do a reasonable job in training bosses in the first of these two roles - technical management.

So my question becomes, if a boss is good at managing people, does that mean that business results will improve?

An article in the Australian Financial Review on Friday 20 April 2007 (page 68) provides part of the answer. The title of the article? 'Staff flee bad bosses, not companies'. (http://www.afr.com/home/)

The article opens by stating:

The historically low unemployment rate that is making it difficult for all sectors to find quality candidates, especially among the small pool of accounting and finance professionals, should encourage organisations to focus on their internal culture'.

In an Australian context, not only is the labour market tight - particularly for young professionals, knowledge workers and specific trade qualified workers - demographics point to the fact that the labour market is only going to become even tighter. The implications should be obvious. Attracting talented workers will be challenging enough, retaining them in a work culture of bad bosses will be impossible.

The executive general manager of Chandler Macleod's Recruitment Solutions (http://www.chandlermacleod.com.au) discussed a recent survey in the Australian Financial Review article that found that a whopping 82% of workers resigned from their jobs because of bad bosses!

How do we get good bosses from bad bosses?

My perspective is that many organisations spend a lot of time either providing in-house training on the technical management and job requirements - or focusing on these skills at the recruitment stage. But, very little time is spent on developing or selecting for the relationship management skills.

To me it's clear. Leadership, team and emotional intelligence skills are critical if an organisation is going to develop its bosses. If the business chooses not to, then its increasingly valuable team members will almost certainly choose to work somewhere else.

What's your organisation choosing to do?

Learned Helplessness

I was watching my beloved football team (Richmond in the Australian Football League if you haven't seen an earlier blog on "Leaderful" Teams) last Friday night.

Well ... they remain beloved, but they are less than successful just at the moment ... but that's not so relevant.

While I was having my football supporter's heart broken again, I was really struck by the reactions of some of the opposition team (Collingwood) supporters sitting around me.

Remarkably enough, up to half time Richmond were leading comfortably. The reaction from the other team's supporters I found fascinating. Why? Largely because so many of them were young children or teenagers.

As their team slipped further behind in the game, their support turned rapidly into condemnation for ... yes, you might have guessed - the umpires.

Most sports fans hate getting beaten, but there can be a number of reasons why your team does get defeated. Here's just some:

* Your team's simply not good enough.
* The opposition are playing better than your team.
* The playing conditions (heat, rain, snow or whatever) don't suit your team.

Of course bad umpiring and refereeing do impact game day results. But, and it's a huge BUT ... it's pretty unlikely bad umpiring is the sole reason a team is being outplayed. Particularly in AFL where there are three field umpires, two goal umpires, two boundary umpires and a match referee. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe in collusion to that extent!

So what?

What does yelling frustrations at the umpires at a sporting contest have to do with your business or organisation?

It seems to me that blaming the umpire has become far too convenient an excuse to avoid looking at the real reasons for underperformance. And this is a real danger for any organisation. If we can't honestly appraise our own performance and that of our business team, then we have a real problem.

And unfortunately, it seems that this is far more common than it ought to be.

Let's put it into the context of "learned helplessness". Wikipedia provides a useful definition of learned helplessness being:

... a psychological condition in which a human or animal has learned to believe that it is helpless. It thinks that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result it will stay passive when the situation is unpleasant or harmful and damaging.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness)

Some of those Collingwood fans were seemingly approaching their team's (sadly for me - temporary) poor on-field performance from the perspective that they, and by inference, their team, were helpless to the fate of the umpires. There was no point doing anything.

Learned helplessness in organisations and businesses is even more dangerous. if this type of behaviour continues to be reinforced and is not actively addressed, it can become a dangerous part of the organisational culture.

Here's some common ways that learned helplessness can manifest itself in an organisation:

* Teams sit back and wait for the leaders or the executives to take action.
* Businesses blame regulators, governments, business cycles (or whatever) . They ignore the causes without taking action, instead whining about the symptoms.
* You hear workers saying things like "it's always been like this ... it's impossible to change ... our company is hopeless ... it will never change."

So what can we do about learned helplessness in organisations?

It's as simple and as challenging as having to unlearn that helplessness and relearn the ability to ask the tough questions and be optimistic.

Perhaps most importantly, it's getting the key leaders at all levels in an organisation to realise and communicate the truth of "We are the They". When some form of responsibility and accountability is reinstated, then the helplessness can be banished by focused action.

Luckily for the Collingwood supporters last Friday night, this is what their team and the coaching staff did. The players didn't blame the umpires. They worked out what needed to be done, took action, and unfortunately for the Richmond supporters, they succeeded!

"Leaderful" Teams

This weekend is the start of the Australian Football League (AFL) competition. In a couple of hours I am heading off to see my team the Richmond Tigers play (http://www.richmondfc.com.au/).

The start of the season is always a wonderful time. At that stage it seems that your team is potentially capable of anything. Every supporter of every team is convinced that this is “their year”. No one has won, and no one has lost. Ah ... the possibilities.

But from a leadership perspective, what I have found increasingly interesting over the past couple of years, is that clubs and coaches are no longer appointing just one captain and a vice-captain. Instead, they talk about the “leadership group” or “co-captains”.

Of course, leadership groups have always existed in all sporting teams, in businesses and in organisations. What’s interesting to me now is that this being formally acknowledged. I wonder why?

A well-known Australian - Ric Charlesworth (http://www.riccharlesworth.com/) (Australian representative hockey player, former Federal politician and coach of the Australian women’s hockey team that won the Gold Medal at the Sydney Olympics) wrote about creating “leaderful teams” in his book The Coach: Managing for Success. What did he mean by this?

Charlesworth’s theory, that he implemented in the undeniably successful women’s hockey team, is that there are a number of downsides of appointing a single team captain - just one leader. Not only does it put a lot of pressure on that one individual, but perhaps more importantly, it often means that the rest of the team tend to sit back and wait for the leader to tell them/show them what to do.

His alternative is to create a team atmosphere where everyone is a team leader - the so-called “leaderful team”. But Charlesworth doesn’t mean some anarcho-syndicalist commune! Instead, he argues that at different points in a game or in the life of a team, different team members with different strengths will assume the role of leader.

And that’s the evolution that we are seeing in AFL teams at the moment. There’s no longer one leader, there are many.

How does your work or sporting team do it? Does this approach make sense to you?

Optimism, laughter and leadership

I’m always intrigued by the answers I get when I ask people how many terrific leaders or managers they have had in their working lives. Invariably the answer is very low. Often none, and never more than two or three. But why is that?

Simply put, it’s bloody hard to be a terrific leader. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up the challenge of becoming one.

In fact, one of the very real ways that terrific leaders distinguish themselves from the masses is their sense of optimism, and their ability to infect others with those same feelings.
John Seely Brown, the Chief Scientist at Xerox, describes this ability eloquently:

The art of making an impact through people is the ability to pull people together, to attract colleagues to the work, to create the critical mass ...To communicate is not just a matter of pushing information at another person, it’s creating an experience, to engage their gut - and that’s an emotional skill. (www.creatingthe21stcentury.org/JSB.html)

An emotional skill? I have just been rereading Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee’s 2002 work Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with Emotional Intelligence (www.amazon.com/Primal-Leadership-Realizing-Emotional-Intelligence/dp/157851486X - 144k - 23 Mar 2007 -) and I was struck by their opening chapter as they argue that one of the most important roles of any leader is a “primal” role. That is, driving a team’s collective emotions in a positive direction and avoiding any “toxic” emotions.

Sounds a bit wishy washy doesn’t it? Certainly leaders have more sway over a team’s emotions than others. They tend to talk more, they have greater formal authority, and they are also often the team member who gets to frame the discussion.

I was really struck by a study that Goleman et al quoted that was run by Yale University School of Management in 1998. Not only did this study find that cheerfulness spreads more easily than depression (that’s got to be good news!), but upbeat moods increase cooperation, fairness and therefore business performance.

However, to me the most interesting thing of all was that these scientists also found that laughter was a terrific team performance barometer. Laughing together signals trust, comfort, empathy and a common view of the world.

About six weeks ago I caught up with about ten of my ex military mates for a very informal dinner and a few cold beers on a hot Melbourne evening. At work the next day I was struck by how sore my jaw muscles were. With my tetanus shots up to date I realised it was simply from spending so much of the previous evening laughing with my friends - a group that enjoys a strong sense of trust and a common view of the world.

So what? We probably all enjoy the company of our friends and a few laughs. How does optimism and laughter impact on the performance of a team, organisation or firm?

Psychologists regularly talk about “mirroring”. That is, how moods or emotions spread in a group of people through verbal and non-verbal signals in a relatively short period of time (less than 15 minutes). Ask yourself, who would you rather be working with, that touchy, cranky and domineering boss, or that optimistic and enthusiastic one? And that’s the first example of how optimism can positively impact your team performance. Optimistic people attract followers. Negative leaders repel them.

A second way in which optimism and laughter help is simply that by generating upbeat moods in teams, people view themselves, others and events more optimistically. This has been shown to enhance creativity and decision making skills.

Don’t believe me? Then take a look at a 2000 study in Administrative Science Quarterly (www.johnson.cornell.edu/publications/asq/) that looked at 62 Chief Executives and their leadership groups, comparing their energy, enthusiasm, determination, and emotional conflicts with their business results over time. The conclusion? The more positive the senior leadership team was, the more cooperatively they worked together and the better the business results.

So, think positively, enjoy a laugh and give off that vibe. Your team will thank you.