Month: August 2020

One my mentors in the past used code words with me.  He could say one word, and it would unroll a complex idea or question. 

For example, he would ask me periodically, “Pruning?”  which I knew expanded to “How goes the pruning process, so that you’re only working on the fruit-bearing work that matters most?

Want more tomatoes, apples, roses?  You have to prune.  At first it seems shockingly harsh.  Pinch off the suckers. Apples are only produced on new growth, so a pruned apple orchard looks like a hacked-off collection of stumpy, thick branches. Cut back the rosebushes to a fraction of their size.  I remember watching my grandfather cut back the roses near their farmhouse in Lumberport, West Virginia.  He saw my expression and said, “If you ask the roses, they don’t like to be pruned.”

If you don’t prune you might still have lots of leaves and branches, but you’ll have less of the valuable fruit.  Pruning focuses the energy of the plant on fruit-bearing stems and branches.

What’s in your workflow now which could be pruned?  What work creates pretty leaves and no lasting fruit?  What is the biggest and best fruit you should be producing?  What about the work done by your team, your organization?   If you’re having difficulty imagining what could be pruned, begin with this question: “What does my customer – the person who writes the check – value?” 

Note: Pruning is different than delegating work to someone else.  Don’t delegate non-value-add work to others just to get it off your list. 

I’m not one of these people who likes music playing all the time, nor do I have any musical talent whatsoever. 

Music with words makes it difficult for me to concentrate, though it’s great when I’m doing something that doesn’t take a lot of attention, like housework or exercise. 

I advocate either classical music (Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mozart especially; Brahms if I’m tense and need to relax) or good instrumental soundtracks to help with writing, problem-solving, and most forms of knowledge-work.  I’m particularly fond of the soundtracks from

Last of the Mohicans  (I used this on repeat for the big pushes on my last 2 books!)

The Lord of the Rings

The Mission

The Road to Perdition

A great source is YouTube.  Search for “study music” and “music for focus” and “ambient study music”) and you’ll find excellent videos that go for hours. 

The other benefit of playing these when working from home is that it masks noises from other activities in the house! 

Find what works for you and use it. 

Our beloved dog Watson has loads of terrier in his mixed genetics, so he’s consumed with all things rodent and rabbit on the ground and under the ground.  He has an instinctive intensity when he catches a whiff of something interesting.  Watson has often been so focused on an old rabbit scent that he doesn’t see the rabbit 8 feet upwind.   I’ve witnessed him oblivious to squirrels darting across the sidewalk just ahead because he’s head down trying to inhale a vole from its hole. 

This is not Watson, but this is a common scene on our morning walks:

People have these tendencies, too.  We can become intensely focused on one thing and miss the larger perspective, which includes both threats and opportunities. 

This becomes a leadership issue in several dimensions:

• Occasionally we must remind a person to sharpen their focus, rather than frequent task-switching and head-swiveling without delivering a result.  A sustained hard focus generates results.

• More often we need to help people to change their focal point, to look up and out.  There’s a larger world of information.  There may be a new priority for their focused attention.  Leaders should frequently use the opportunity to help people connect immediate work with grand purposes.

• Good leaders arrange for their subordinates to do more of the focused work, and spend more time in situational awareness and anticipating the next thing.  They don’t do someone’s work for them, apart from extraordinary circumstances.  That energy is better spent by leaders to expand the radius of their watch-zone.

In practical business situations, leadership is a both-and challenge of selectively focusing while maintaining a soft focus situational awareness, and more dedicated time in larger picture view.  I’ve coached myself and others to book time on their calendars, weekly and monthly, for the explicit purpose for looking up and out.   Want to move faster? Increase the frequency of those times.

There’s an old saying about the critical decision meeting:  “If you’re not at that table, you’re on the menu.”

If you can, be at the table – if not in person, at least with well-articulated ideas and reputation known to the people in the room. 

Your interactions and deliverables are deposits in your credibility account.  Consciously build up a healthy balance. 

My observation is that strong skills are a big factor in personnel decisions.  Leaders want results.  However, interpersonal behaviors can be the deciding factor.  A skilled asshole is still an asshole that people aren’t thrilled to have around. 

My coal-mining grandfather told me when I was a boy, “It’s a small world.  Remember that before you piss in somebody’s corn flakes.”

It takes wisdom to know how to disagree, how to push for a different agenda, how to stand for what is best and right, and not leave a lasting negative impression.  A big part of this is avoiding an issue becoming personal.  Challenge ideas and plans without demeaning people.  As Oprah says, “They will never forget how you made them feel.” 

Our organizations confer titles upon us:

Chief ____. 

Senior ______. 

Director of ______.

 ____ Manager

____ Associate

Etc.

I often say to work colleagues, “Thanks for your professionalism” out of a desire to see professionalism be our high standard.

What title do you take for yourself?  Especially, what’s your REAL means of contributing?

It may depend on context.  Most of us have multiple roles – parent, spouse, chief lawn mower or garbage-taker-outer, etc., but these aren’t always titles.

Megan Macedo writes: “[N]aming ourselves and our work is an important, powerful part of the whole process. I am a firm believer that we must first and foremost use the language that means something to us, before we ever think about how the outside world may understand – or misunderstand – it. But I do not claim it to be an easy thing to do.”

Accept the mantle of title(s) conferred on you as a leader, but don’t let that be the only possible name for yourself.  Those titles will evaporate into history long before you do.

Leaders wish these two fantasies were true:

• Everything will be happy-happy-joy-joy while I’m the leader
• Every challenge withers in the face of “being authentic”

When I see a young leader acting as though the organization owes them a happy experience, all the time, the most charitable thought I muster is “They haven’t been doing this very long.”

I suspect all of you reading this understand the truth.  The world is complex.  People are complex. Organizational dynamics and business models are complex.  Therefore, it’s hard. 

But we hear so much today about “being authentic” that I want to speak to another framing of it.

Authenticity matters, at least 80% of the time.  It’s something people expect (though they often willingly misinterpret clever acting for authenticity).  I advocate truthfulness over lies, genuine expressions over manipulative acting, and serving others over using power for selfish exploitation.

Yet there are situations where reaching the objective requires a different approach.  You cannot be fully transparent; you must selectively adopt a posture which drives the direction.  You must have steely courage that does not waver in the face of opposition, confusion, weariness, and frustration. 

When is this necessary?  Circumstances like these:

• Leading an organization through a very significant change, big enough that not everyone can make the transition
• Effectively dealing with a peer who won’t be satisfied with anything less than your destruction
• Fending off a competitor or usurper
• Executing a large budget cut
• Letting poor performers go
• Executing a strategic direction you didn’t pick and don’t favor
• When you realize you are not the right person in your role

Perhaps the best characterization of this is the Chinese phrase, “Thick face, black heart.”  These are odd words.  What does this mean? It has nothing to do with skin density, and black heart does not mean “evil” in this context.  This is a good translation:

Opaqueness to the outside world, plus

Deep resolve to see it through

That opaqueness might be deceit and subterfuge (especially in times of war) but in most organizations it’s enough that you consistently wear your warrior face.  Don’t allow people to creep inside.  Don’t be swayed by “friends” or cajolers.  Let people wonder what’s going on in your head, but don’t tell them.

Once your objective is fixed, the resolve to see it through is essential.  You can’t quit partway, no matter how tempting.  The resolve is your fuel to push past all resistance.  There is no plan B.

This “Thick face, black heart” concept is a good description of a 1800’s surgeon who knows the shattered leg needs to be amputated, and finishes sawing through the bone even as the patient is screaming. 

“Thick face, black heart” is not appropriate all the time.  It’s a strategic posture which can be abused, and abusive.  But it is an important strategy in the leader’s toolbox. 

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Personal note – Several of my critics point to my emphasis on Western Civilization (the synthesis of ideas from Athens and Jerusalem).  What few people know is how deeply I studied Asian philosophy in high school and college.  The librarians at the Carnegie library in Parkersburg WV had to bring in books from other libraries because they didn’t have the treatises on Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu Vedic texts that I requested, and biographies of Asian leaders.  I practiced Taoism for several years, which helped take the edge off my ferocious anger.  I won’t say that I plumbed the depths of Asian philosophy but do have a reasonable grounding.

Our leadership development “pipeline” is weaker than it needs to be.  I believe each of you has potential – not only to become a stronger, more effective leader yourself, but to teach and develop other leaders. 

In fact, I can assure you that you will hit plateaus in your own development as leaders until you pour into others. 

What holds you back from this work?  Fear, most likely, a set of fears that swamp your logic.  You simply don’t feel adequate.  You don’t know who.  You don’t know how.  No one ever told you that you’d be developing new leaders.

We can be hard on ourselves.  Fears are fueled by our own leadership faults, imperfections, and screw-ups.  What qualified me to teach someone else, when I’m still learning? I don’t have answers for my own questions let alone theirs!  What if I steer them wrong?  What if they find out I’m… _____ ?

Acknowledge your weaknesses, and use your failures and mistakes as teaching stories and teachable moments.   

Logic won’t get you past the fears.  You need to imagine a different future.  Ask yourself a different category of question: What if I took a chance on <person>? What if I delegated some work to others, and gave them feedback?  What if I shared a few stories, especially about what I learned from that major screw-up, over lunch with those two people? 

We can do leadership development the cheap way or the expensive way.  The cheap way is to spend beaucoup bucks to send hundreds of people off to fancy “training” courses and they’ll come back loaded up with certificates and initials.  The expensive way is to pour into them, one person at a time. 

I know which way I’m called to develop leaders.  I hope you’ll see it that way, too.

I learned an important life lesson during my first year in grad school, working on my Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology.

The rule for 1st year students in my major professor’s lab was simple, and we hated it.

Here was the first part of the rule: you could not start an experiment until you had designed it, understood how it would test your hypothesis, and what you would conclude from different possible outcomes.  In most cases you had to think about the follow-up experiments that would be required.
It was actually the second part we hated most.

Once you had an experiment designed and written out, you put in your drawer, pulled out a blank sheet of paper, and had to design a completely different way to test the same hypothesis.  You weren’t allowed to try the first design until you had a 2nd workable experimental design.

Sometimes the second design came easily, and was obviously better. 

Sometimes I struggled to come up with anything at all, or could only think up a truly bad design.

You had to talk through your designs with our major prof before you could start actual bench work.  His feedback and commentary were some of the best learning experiences I had in the whole program.  “Think!” he would say.  “I am training you to think like a scientist!”

I encourage you to consider this in your own project work.  Come up with a design, an approach, a response.  Think of a completely different alternative.  The discipline pays off because you’ll often find a better approach.

There’s a horrible disease that saps the strength of leaders and managers.  It goes by the acronym ‘SSDT.’
  
How many times have you heard someone in your organization say, “Someone should do that”?  How often do you say it yourself?  All too often the response is… nothing happens.  You can hear crickets chirping, and the whisper of soft backpedaling out of responsibility.  Safest bet: change the subject, or reach into your bag of blameshifting tricks and say, “Not my job!”
 
Someone should do that.  SSDT.  It can sap the life out of you.
 
How should you, a responsible manager and sharp leader, handle these situations?  What do you think when you realize there is an opportunity to do something?  How do you respond when that someone might be you? 
 
Agree and deflect
Say “not my job”
Agree and accept responsibility
Speak clearly about commitment
 
 
Blameshifting is not professional.  It doesn’t move a project forward, build up a team, or add to your credibility.
 
Stop it.
 
Take responsibility. Take ownership.  Even if some task or project is not expressly yours, if you’re involved, you’re in it – and take responsibility and ownership appropriately for being part of the process or system.
 
Here’s my question: Outside of avoiding some immediate pain (but not really), does blameshifting make anything better?