Alice 2 Antarctica

Most of us love challenges. Some of us even like physical challenges. But when you can combine a challenge with a terrific cause - how good is that!

One of my friends from Melbourne (Dr) Sharyn Fitzgerald is a medical researcher by profession, a runner by passion, and a lovely and determined lady by nature.

Over the next few months she will run a marathon in the middle of Australia (Alice Springs) and in Antarctica. In fact, she will be the first Australian woman to complete a marathon in Antarctica.

She's doing it not just for the challenge, but to support a cause that she feels passionately and knows a lot about - the Centre for Indigenous Vascular and Diabetes Research.

PeopleTeamsLeaders Pty Ltd are really proud to be the first confirmed corporate sponsor of Alice 2 Antarctica. You can read more about Sharyn's efforts here and here. And of course, feel free to add your support to her very worthy efforts.

The Grass is Greener

I was working with some colleagues the other idea designing a leadership development program. One of them used a variant of that common expression - the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

His variation was terrific.

If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence - water your side.

I just love it.

What are you doing to water your side of the fence? What about fertilising? And while we're on the subject, how about some weeding too?

Story & Robert McKee

I've just spent a fascinating 3 day weekend attending a Robert McKee screenwriting seminar. McKee is a renowned American "talking head", theorist and lecturer on writing for films. His real emphasis is on the importance of story - structure, substance and style - hence the title of his long-running seminars Story.

The content across the three days was terrific. For current or budding writers, McKee's classical theory, illuminating examples and street cred are stimulating and inspiring.

However ...

A real challenge for me - and seemingly many other attendees both here in Australia and abroad - is that McKee is not that nice a bloke!

Big deal you might think.

But the downside is that his personality really does get in the way of his terrific content and experience. His diatribes against mobile phones, the French, anyone arriving late and even families detracts from his brilliance at dissecting, interpreting and teaching the intricacies of story telling.

Perhaps it's his performance background that drives him to deliver his 5 x 2 hour monologues each day for three days. No interaction is allowed, and woe betide anyone who does something to distract him.

And it's a bloody shame.

It really is.

His content and experience, coupled with a more facilitative and participative style, would improve his Story seminars out of sight. A bit less self-obsession or self-orientation might also make him a nicer bloke - that couldn't hurt.

It might also make him a little easier to work with in Hollywood. It came as only a small surprise that while he has had a number of screenplays optioned (or purchased), none have been made.

All that said, I definitely got my money's worth from the weekend. I received plenty of inspiration and a bucket load of practical tips that I can use in my writing.

But do you know anyone whose personality gets in the way of their gift of knowledge/experience?

Is your organisation like this?

There was a terrific short article in the current edition of the Australian Financial Review's Boss Magazine (page 18 of November 2008). The article quotes an email sent by an Executive departing GE Money's Australian Business. Here it is ...

Dear Co-Workers and Managers (whoops, 'LEADERS'), I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what a great and distinct pleasure it has been to type: 'Today is my last day'.

For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. Now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support.

In an age where miscommunication is all too common, you consistently impressed and inspired me with the sheer magnitude of your misinformation, ignorance and intolerance ... your demands were high and your patience short, but I take great solace in knowing that my work, as stated on my adhoc reviews, 'meets expectations'. That is the type of praise that sends a man home happy after a 10 hour day.

... If I could pass on any word of advice to the lower salary recipient (because it's good for this AAA+ rated company and their shareholders) in India or China who will soon be filling my position, it would be to cherish this experience because a job opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Some people absolutely love slogging 80 hour weeks and get a big sense of achievement whey they get a blanket thank - you - all email from the project manager or a movie voucher for two to thank you for 10 weekends in a row work.

Wow. Do you know any organisations or managers like this?

Innovation is hard work

Most of us would like to be more innovative right? More creative, better at improvising, ingenious and inventive. Not many people seem to strive for unimaginative or traditional any more. And a good thing too.

In the consulting and facilitating work that I do, often clients ask for an innovative approach. Sometimes this just means - we want all the good stuff, but delivered really cheaply! At other times they really do want some of the principles of leadership (and I do believe that leadership does have enduring principles) delivered in a way that will jazz the principles up and make them more accessible and memorable to a jaded audience.

Clearly I prefer one approach over the other. But what I enjoy most of all, is when an organisation wants to actually work on becoming more innovative.

My view is that there has been tons of rubbish written and said about innovation - hopefully this blog doesn't add to that virtual pile. Too often I hear things like:

• That's the job of the creative types.
• We don't have time to be innovative.
• We're going to wait until the creative juices start flowing.
• We're not smart enough to think of the 'next big thing'.
  

While those approaches may be partially valid some of the time, I am firmly of the belief that all of us can be more innovative by working at it. When time is critical, that should be a warning signal to us that innovation could be the factor that makes the critical difference. We can often do something to turn on the tap to get the juices flowing. Last, but by no means least, small and incremental innovations often do lead to the 'next big thing'.

Dr Lauchlan Mackinnon, an Australian researcher and consultant, has developed a useful model for thinking about how innovation works. I like it because it builds on the approach of Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher.

Mackinnon describes four stages of innovation - although in practical terms they may be more iterative than sequential. Mackinnon's four phases are:

• Conscious Activity: The hard work part. Writing down ideas, consciously thinking, calculating, researching, seeking opinions.
  
• Internalisation: Let the challenge go. If the conscious activity phase is associative, this phase is much more unconscious and disassociative.
  
• Stimulus of the New: Don't wait for the light to go off from the first two phases, do something to stimulate the current. Read a book not related to the topic. Talk to someone on the bus about it. Re-transcribe all your ideas in some different way using a mind map, a fishbone diagram etc.
  
• Validation: Check that it will work, and get it ready for implementation.

Sure, it would be great if we could just sit back and wait for the insight to hit us. That does work ... some of the time. But what can we do to give our imaginations and our creative juices some assistance?

I summary - we can work, and work hard on being innovative.

What a neighbour

A couple of weeks ago one of our neighbours died. Bill lived one street away from us and he was an extraordinary guy.

Bill must have been 80 or so, and he was an immensely popular piece of our neighbourhood fabric. Every weekday morning and afternoon - rain, hail or shine - Bill would sit at his front gate with his small dog in his lap and greet everyone that walked past. His timing was based on when the young children who lived in the neighbourhood would be walking to and from their local primary school. Bill and his pooch would happily greet them, have a bit of a chat, wish them well and then see them all again later that afternoon.

Whenever Bill missed a day of saying g'day, you knew something was wrong. It happened once last year. He missed a day or two and when he re-emerged there was no dog. Sadly his dog had died. But only a week or so later Bill and a new pup were back at the front gate and the world was back to normal again.

But a month or so ago I was walking home along Bill's street. It was just after 3pm and there was a huge crowd of children with some mums and dads milling on the footpath. From a 100 metres away I couldn't work out what was going on, but my rapid pace had to slow as I weaved my way amongst prams, trikes and assorted small people.

An icecream van ("Mr Whippy" in the local parlance) was parked on the street and the kids were queuing to get an icecream. I thought to myself: "If it was my kids, I'd dodge the crowds and take them somewhere else".

I didn't think much more about it until the following morning - a Saturday - when my wife and I took our dog for a walk. There was a cardboard sign in Bill's front yard letting everyone know that Bill had passed away earlier in the week.

It became clear then. All the children I had seen the previous day queuing for an iceacream from the van were lining up out the front of Bill's house. Bill's dying wish was that every child who had walked past his house should get a free icecream. What a way to be remembered.

How will you be remembered?

The Ibis and Change

As I ran through a park in Sydney last weekend on a training run, I spotted an Ibis standing on the edge of garbage bin. I had run about 25 km at this stage, so I figured that this would a great spot to have a stretch.

As I re-limbered my tired legs, I watched as the Ibis used its curved beak to lift out rubbish from the bin and drop it to the ground. What struck me was how adept this particular bird was at levering the tops off take-away food containers and the like, so that it could get at the contents.

I'm no ornithologist, but I'm also pretty sure that the diet of an Ibis doesn't generally include hamburgers, Beef and Blackbean or Red Bull.

Maybe it was the exercise endorphins that were coursing through my veins, but as I continued my running journey back across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and home, I thought about people and organisations that are like the Ibis.

What???

Long legged with curvy beaks?

Well, not really. But I do often see people and organisations that have not really adapted to new situations completely. They have made a few minor adjustments - the fiddling around the edges - but they haven't really committed to a change and made the almost evolutionary adjustments needed.

What do I mean?

I'm pretty sure that if you were going to design a bird (or any animal) to scavenge from left over human food, it wouldn't really look like the Ibis. This is not to say that the Ibis isn't reasonably effective at what I saw this one bird doing. Indeed, you could suggest that fishing trash from a bin is much easier than fishing worms, fish and other small creatures from shallow water that the Ibis regularly needs to do.

And that's just the point. Often we stop as individuals and organisations when we have made some of the adjustments necessary to be a little more effective and perhaps marginally more efficient. But is that enough? How would we look if we could start from scratch in designing our work or our lives? Would be different? Would we be better?

Are you an Ibis?

The paradoxes of leadership

Last Friday afternoon I was driving from Sydney to Canberra to visit my mother. I've always found road trips to be great opportunities for thinking and reflection, and on this particular trip I was doing some thinking about a presentation to a client organisation for this week. As I sifted through different ways to present some information, my mind kept pulling me back to the inherent contradictions and paradoxical nature of what it is to be a leader. Consider something like - To lead, one must first follow. I know, I know ... it's almost like haiku poetry!

It's almost a cliche or a truism when we say that we live and work in a world of complexity, ambiguity, contradiction and paradox. But even if it is a cliche, that makes it no less valid.

And here are some of the leadership paradoxes that I scribbled down in my notebook while taking a coffee break ...

Loose & Tight, Work & Play, Lead & Follow, Captain & Coach, Create & Conform, Clarity & Ambiguity, Competence & Commitment, Responsibility & Accountability, Centralised & Devolved, Structured & Unstructured, Innovate & Conform, Rational & Instinctive, Direct & Allow, Inspire & Coax, Teach & Learn, Results & Team, Individual & Team, Change & Consolidate, Conventional & Revolutionary, Doubt & Possibility, Experience & Naivety, Intellect & Emotion, Active & Passive, Like & Respect, Unity & Diversity, Clear & Fuzzy, External & Internal, Culture & Structure, Revolution & Evolution, Rigid & Flexible, Cause & Profit, Shareholder & Stakeholder, Objective & Subjective, Reflection & Action, Certainty & Doubt, Loyalty & Dissent, Honesty & Sensitivity, Passion & Professionalism, Long term & Short term, Decisive & Patient, Risk & Reward, Plan & Evolve, Conservative & Adventurous, Diversity & Homogeneity, Confidence & Humility, Competitive & Supportive, Classical & Rock and Roll, Thinking & Feeling, Me & Us, Now & Later, Egoism & Altruism, Responsibility & Entitlement, Private & Public.

Phew ...

I know that's a long list. But if you have just skimmed over it, go back and read through it again slowly.

Because one of the things that I have learned in more than 20 years of leadership experience, is that a critical job of leaders, at all levels, is being able to balance the seemingly dichotomous nature of paradoxes like those in my list.

But the complication is that you are rarely just reconciling one at a time. The very real complexity is that you must be able to comprehend and synthesise a range of these paradoxes for every task that you undertake, with every team in which you lead or work, and ... just to add some further challenge ... you need to be constantly adjusting your response to these paradoxes over time - because nothing stands still.

So what? How can we do this as leaders?

Daniel Goleman provides us with one useful model in his summary of six leadership styles. (If you haven't read his book written with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee entitled Primal Leadership: Learning to lead with Emotional Intelligence, you should.)

Goleman's six styles - Visonary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding leadership - suggest a range of approaches that can be taken, depending on the time, the task and the team. Leaders need to be able to utilise the appropriate style for the situation and their team. But more than that, they need to be able to comprehend one final paradox.

So what is the final leadership paradox?

Not only do leaders need to adapt their style, but a truly effective leader must also be able to recognise when the time comes for them to relinquish the leadership role and hand the reigns over to someone else. It's our haiku again - Leaders must also be followers.

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.