Traveling Light Blog

For a glimpse into a vacation very different from mine, you must check out Maureen Dowd’s journey through Saudi Arabia:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/08/maureen-dowd-201008

I was recently in a conversation with a client who joined a new company a few months ago. He observed that his team at the new company approached challenges and planning from a far more tactical perspective than the teams he had led elsewhere. Since he leads a team of leaders, of course, it is essential for him to improve the strategic skill set and to change their mindset accordingly.

The first and most effective technique is the investment hire.

There is really no equivalent to showing the rest of the team firsthand how a more strategic peer thinks and acts, day in and day out. This is someone who already has the strategic skill you want the rest of the team to develop, and who will demonstrate the skill and help to bring the others along.

Remember, though — it’s not an investment hire if you send this person off to work quietly and privately in isolation from the rest of your team. The investment hire should be someone who is willing and able to be a visible role model and who has demonstrated some talent for that role, not just someone who’s good at the job.

But what can you do until the investment hire is allocated, recruited, and on-boarded? This can take months, even over a year if your function is specialized and has high barriers to entry. While there is really nothing that compares to importing great talent, there are four alternatives to the investment hire that you can use to improve the strategic thinking of your team in the meantime:

1. Leverage account teams from your most strategic and forward-thinking partners and vendors. Get them in to meet with your people, to share how they’re thinking about the future, and to help them think more strategically about how to create, sell, build, and support your products and services.

2. Send your people to leading industry conferences to broaden their thinking. Attend with them to the extent that you can. Your conversations with them will help them build their skills at translating the best perspectives from the conference into solutions for your company.

3. Use the Z Problem Solving Model in your discussions to help develop their ability to analyze a complex situation from multiple perspectives before deciding on a course of action. This simple model ensures that the group explores relevant facts, possibilities, logical outcomes, and subjective factors, since by our very human nature we tend to overemphasize some of these aspects more than others. If you’d like a list of Z Problem Solving questions, drop me a line at lighten@selbygroup.com

4. While it shouldn’t be your first choice in the first month after your arrival, you may need to rotate some people off of the team if they can’t meet your expectations. Give everyone a fair shot at stepping up, but in most cases involving management team members, you should aim for 6 – 9 months and not let poor performers linger on the team for much longer than that. Often it is not an issue of the individual being a poor performer in general; it’s that the demands of the job have changed and it’s no longer a good fit for this particular role.

Improving the strategic thinking of your team is not an overnight process, but it can be done if you focus and invest.

I snapped a picture of this irresistible little dog, Louie, at the salon where I get my hair cut. Talk about a dog’s life! I hope you get a chance to chill out like Louie this weekend.

I’ve just learned I’m Member of the Month at The Society for the Advancement of Consulting.

SAC® is a global association of successful independent consultants founded in 2004. Check them out at www.consultingsociety.com. There are experienced consultants in every niche you could ever need to support the growth of your business.

Think back to when you first starting working in your profession. There was quite a bit of variance in the talent and intelligence of your many peers, wasn’t there?

Now that you’ve moved up the food chain, the variance isn’t so big. After a certain point, talent and intelligence alone won’t help you get ahead. It’s the mind game that counts. You can psych yourself up or psych yourself out.

One tool I’ve used with clients for many years is from the world of sports psychology. I first learned this tool from Dr. Roberta Kraus, a sports psychologist for the Olympics.

I’ve modified the approach just a bit over the years for pragmatic reasons. When you’re having trouble with a particular performance (say, you repeatedly clam up in important meetings) or you just want to improve a skill (like closing sales), give it a try.

There are five steps. I recommend that you do them all in the exact sequence given:

1. Pre-Performance: This is like a rehearsal. Go through the entire performance in your mind, as close to real time as you can get within the confines of your schedule.

2. Pre-Act:  Immediately before the performance, visualize the performance as if on fast forward

3. Performance

4. Post-Act:  Immediately after the performance, remember the performance as if on fast forward

5. Post-Performance:  Remember the performance more slowly, analyzing how you did and identifying any needed changes in your performance

To get the most value from the visualization process, try the following:

• Visualize yourself in the actual place where you will be performing.
• Imagine the entire situation with vividness and clarity.
• Imagine the feel of the action, what it would really be like to be in the situation right now.
• This is not an exercise in perfectly predicting the future – just take reasonable guesses about what will happen, what others will say and do, how they will respond, etc.
• Succeed mightily during the rehearsal. If you start to fail in the rehearsal, rewind and do the failing part over until you are successful.
• Take a few deep breaths before visualization and again before the performance to relax.  Unclench your fists, too.
• The night before the event and the morning of the event, relive your best previous performance. If you have not yet had a successful performance, relive a different successful performance that is in some way similar.

Now, get out there and knock their socks off!

Ever-witty client, Peter Shelton, a Berkeley-based estate planning and probate attorney, pinged me with the question, “Are you in the cab business?”

Peter had come across a now-defunct taxi service that still has the Selby Group phone number listed on their website. See for yourself: http://www.merchantcircle.com/blogs/Friendly.City.Express.Cab.510-595-3800.

Well, that explains why from time to time I get a phone call from someone looking for a cab.

Peter quipped about this unlikely combination of businesses as being like a Saturday Night Live skit, “Change Agent Taxi Driver.”

“You really HAVE to want to go to 5th and Main, or you’ll never get there. $2.50 please.”

In my post, Newly Minted MBA’s: Insider Tips from Coach Jennifer, I had a little fun turning three bad leadership habits into the acronym B.A.D. We all fall into these bad habits at one point or another, in one form or another. What matters is to monitor your leadership style, note if you’re starting to fall into one of the bad habits, and course-correct.

In this issue, although the acronym is a bit of a stretch, I’ve listed four good habits shared by the best leaders I happily count among my clients. It’s every bit as important to monitor how you’re doing with the good habits as it is to monitor how you’re doing with the bad habits.

Naturally, the four good habits spell G.O.O.D.:

“G” is for Generosity. It’s not as simple as just adopting a mindset, but many of the best leaders do have generosity as their starting point.

They look for ways to be generous with their people. While few leaders control every aspect of their employees’ compensation, the best leaders figure out what they can control and leverage it liberally.

A first-time manager, for example, will have no influence over the size and general allocation of annual salary increases, but can search for company-sponsored perks or employee award programs within the company and use them to recognize good work.

Regardless of your level, look for ways in which you can be generous and try a few of them, then add a few more. Be generous with your time, praise, and appreciation. For these, you don’t even need a company-approved budget.

Calibrate as you go. When generosity goes overboard, it can lead to a burnt-out leader who suddenly has nothing left to give, so be sure to be generous with yourself, too.

“O” is for Other-focused. I suppose I made that word up to fit into the acronym, but the habit is an important one. Great leaders are focused on others, on their needs, on balancing the differing (and sometime opposing) needs of all of the constituencies involved in a business. Weaker leaders are focused much more on themselves.

Much like generosity, this habit requires frequent calibrating. Particularly for the leader who is in the minority, it may need to be a nuanced balance.

For example, if the only woman in the room gives all of her attention to others, she might be seen as a great other-focused leader or she might be seen as more of a caregiver than a leader. If an introvert remains other-focused to the point of not speaking, he may be seen as a great other-focused leader, or he might be seen as a wallflower with little fight in him.

Read the room (or the voices or the tone of the email threads) as you focus on others, so that you can keep the other-focused orientation calibrated.

The second “O” is for Optimist. Nobody wants to follow a leader who’s taking them to a depressing destiny. Yet so many leaders were promoted into their positions in part because of their level-headed assessment of risk and return, along with the pragmatic skepticism that goes hand-in-hand with that skill set.

Yes, of course, keep your skills in level-headed assessment, but if you naturally lean in the direction of skepticism, doubt, and a more pessimistic outlook, be sure to temper this in your mindset and communication. People may respect the pessimistic leader, but they give their all to an optimistic one.

Finally, “D” stands for Decisive. The best leaders are decisive, setting direction and mobilizing resources to move in that direction. Of course, you can change direction, if necessary, but stalling on setting the direction, on making that decision and committing resources, is destructive (not the kind of “D” you want). Hope is not a plan. You must make the tough decisions, plan their execution, and go for it.

How are you doing in each of these G.O.O.D. habits?

Here’s my challenge to you this week: pick one habit and identify one thing you will do today to raise the bar for yourself in that area — just one focused action you will take. A little daily improvement will add up to dramatic improvement over a month, a quarter, and then a year. Plant the seeds now to reap the harvest then. And let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear your success story.

Did I mention that I won a writing award? Yes, I guess I did. Can you tell I’m excited about it? Really? You can? And I thought I was hiding my feelings so well.

The award is the 2010 APEX Award for Publishing Excellence in the category of Web Writing, and was the sole award given in this category this year.

The winning entry was my Special Report, Recession-Proof Your Career: How to Avoid the Three Massive Mistakes Made by Talented Leaders and Professionals.

I recently updated the content and serialized it for this ezine.If you missed the series, you can read the individual articles at www.jenniferselbylong.com or the original special report at http://www.selbygroup.com/whitepapers.html.

Earning the Master of Business Administration degree is a big accomplishment, but applying what you’ve learned requires a particular skill set and mindset.

In the 25 years that I’ve been working with and coaching leaders, I’ve seen a certain pattern of bad habits among MBA’s, habits that interfere with their ability to successfully transfer what they’ve learned in their classes into the work environment.

And it’s not just MBA’s who develop these bad habits, although they probably get the most teasing about it. Any leader can fall into bad habits that compromise effectiveness and minimize opportunities.

We might as well have some fun with this, so I’ve organized the three bad habits into a list you’ll never forget, because the list spells B.A.D.

“B” is for the bodies left behind as the vigorous and enthusiastic new leader charges ahead toward his or her business goal (otherwise known as getting your way). Leaders rarely realize when they are bulldozing over others, because they’re focused on the goal, not the people.

The problem with focusing all of your attention on the goal, of course, is that you need other people in order to achieve the goal. You’ll also need those darn people later to achieve other goals.

Unlike real dead bodies, these metaphorical dead bodies pose two very real problems. The first is that the ones who survive your steamrolling won’t want to work for you anymore. The best ones will have no trouble finding someone else to work for. They never do. The worst ones will hang around, since no one else wants them, and continue to do mediocre or poor work for you. So pretty soon, you’ll be all alone with the worst performers.

The second problem with steamrolling over people is that, well, they’re not really dead. After they pick themselves up and dust themselves off, some of them will be angry with you or harbor resentments, which, you have to admit, isn’t entirely unfair, is it?

Some of them will be strengthened by the experience and will use their strength to get back at you. Others will get promoted right over you and then watch out, because you’re about to become the next dead body.

It sort of puts this whole “achieving the goal at any cost” idea into a new light, doesn’t it?

Moving right along…

“A” is for analysis, analysis, analysis, and…more analysis.

An MBA program, like other types of business training, develops analytical thinking skills extremely well. Professors expect a level of analysis for every case study that likely exceeds both the available time and requirements of many of the routine problems you face at work.

Newly minted MBA’s are famous for analyzing business problems far more than is necessary, but they’re not alone in slipping into this bad habit.

While this won’t lead to your career demise in the same way that the “Dead Bodies” issue will, it won’t necessarily garner you much respect, either. Most people will either be amused at the sight of your exhaustive PowerPoint charts or they’ll just scratch their heads. But amused head scratching isn’t exactly the reaction you’re looking for, is it?

This is not to say that you should shelve all of the models you’ve learned, simply that you need to think of business analysis as something that’s best done on a sliding scale.

For each business challenge you face, take a little time to decide how much analysis the problem requires in order to come to a good decision.

First, consider how important the problem is to the business. Devote less brainpower to less important problems and more brainpower to more important problems.

Then consider how urgent the problem is. If it’s truly pressing, conduct a quick analysis to determine an expedient course of action. Then execute quickly, while beginning the more complex level of analysis that will help you prevent the problem from becoming so urgent again.

This will help you prioritize your time better and will prevent embarrassing, “Aw, isn’t that cute and oddly perplexing?” reactions to your flowcharts and diagrams.

Finally, “D” stands for Dense, as in demonstrating low emotional intelligence.

Remember all those people I mentioned earlier? The really scary thing is that being a leader has nothing to do with how good you are at personally doing much of anything. It’s about how effectively you can get 10, 100, 1000, or 100,000 people to be good at doing something well together.

In order to achieve that, you must capture their hearts, not just their minds. That’s where emotionally intelligent actions count, actions like listening and really hearing, negotiating, compromising, communicating with crispness and clarity, delaying gratification, and inspiring others.

So avoid the B.A.D. leadership habits and you’re half way there. In the next issue of Traveling Light, I’ll share the four good habits of the best leaders I count among my clients. Perhaps you can already guess what the acronym will be…

And, apropos of nothing, my new favorite word is thumbo. It’s what you get when you’re typing with your thumbs and press the wrong key.