Month: June 2022

Information abounds; we’re frankly awash in information to the point of noise. 

Leadership and management are crafts – a combination of learned skills and art to create something useful and beautiful – so they are lifelong adventures along a mastery curve.

Yet there are small number of foundational concepts accessible by studying a few books.  My recommendations, in no particular order, and what you learn from each:

Warfighting (Marine manual of Maneuver Warfare) Best 100 pages on strategy and tactics I’ve ever read.  Far more accessible and applicable to the Western mind than Sun Tzu’s canonical work “The Art of War.”  You can easily translate these concepts to business and non-profit organizations. 

The 80/20 Principle (Richard Koch) Unequal distributions are ubiquitous in the universe.  Learn to recognize them.  Learn to work with them as allies. 

Getting Things Done (David Allen) Incredibly useful practices for managing massive information flows while staying focused on your best work.  Use your brain for what it’s best doing, and systems for managing everything else.

The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge) Systems thinking is crucial in a complex world.  Master the 11 Laws of the Fifth Discipline and study the archetypes in the appendix – once you recognize the common patterns you’ll diagnose problem and solution spaces much faster. 

The Personal MBA (Josh Kaufman) Concise explanations of business concepts.  Use it as a reference book when you need a quick refresher. 

The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) Classic text on knowledge work and the work that needs to be done to drive an organization forward.  Prescient and still timely. 

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey) Covey invented nothing but shares old wisdom extremely well.  These seven habits will serve you as you play the long game.

How to Read a Book (Mortimer Adler) Use the approach described here to dissect complex information in any medium and extract its value efficiently.   

The Effective Manager (Mark Horstman) Hands-down the best information for the basic practices of managing employees: delegation, feedback, coaching, and how to run meetings. 

Bare Bones Project Management: What you can’t not do (Bob Lewis) Only 56 pages, addresses key issues about working with stakeholders.  This is the ideal book for people who need to manage projects as part of their regular work, not as a full-time profession.  

Crucial Conversations (Joseph Grenny et al) There’s an 80/20 distribution to conversation difficulty.  This book outlines effective tactics you can use in the deeper end of difficulty. 

The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) The concepts of minimal viable product and carefully testing your assumptions are generally useful.

The Power of Full Engagement (Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz) Manage your energy, not your time.  Manage your performance like an athlete.

Many other people have benefitted from these recommendations.  I’ve listed these as being the best available in English.  There are other books which touch on these concepts and practices.  Find what works for you.

Final recommendation:  Concentrate on books which are deep enough to yield value each time you read it. 

There you go, 10 essential leadership books, none of which have the word leadership in the title.

In the past 30 years the bulk of HR effort is protecting the rear-end of the corporation.  Compliance. Policy. Dealing with personnel issues which threaten the organization.  The next largest chunk was transactional.  Compensation and Benefits. Performance reviews and promotions. Support for reorganizations. Do everything personnel-related with as little money and labor as possible. The smallest portion was about talent development.

The legal and operational aspects will remain for corporations.  They’re a cost of doing business.  But optimizing exclusively for these is not going to help organizations thrive.

Therefore, I recommend leaders design the organization with separate-but-in-touch groups for (1) Operations & Compliance, and (2) Developing Employees.  (Find better names!)

The burnout rate in HR is incredibly high.  One of the major reasons for this is the mismatch between the people who go into HR roles and the major work being asked of them.  People who love culture, org design, coaching and people development are generally NOT the people who thrive by creating transactional efficiencies and operations groups. 

Organizations should hire people suited for operations work to execute and incrementally improve HR transactional systems, self-service, and help desks.  Corporate policies and directives can be established by leaders who don’t need to be charged with day-to-day execution. 

Everyone will happily repeat that “people are our greatest asset,” but our behaviors suggest otherwise.  Plenty of energy has gone into “people development” activity.  “But Glenn we’ve already been doing all that! It’s not working.” An emphasis on self-development is insufficient.   Your current system is perfectly designed to generate the results you’re getting.  If you aren’t satisfied with the results, you’ll need to change the system.

I suggest that we’ve been optimizing for the wrong things. Investing in the long game of talent development by optimizing for maturity and professionalism is the distinguishing opportunity.  Cultivate and reward developing better skills.  Create systematic plans to bring new people managers up to strong competence quickly.  Set expectations for developing mastery of foundational skills like communication, running meetings and projects, and effective decision-making.  Reward more senior and experienced employees helping others. 

Also, consider who is leading as well as the means of developing people.  Abandon the traditional metrics to gauge progress (e.g., # of course hours/employee/year).  The apprentice model (training to learn new skills, practice with feedback, and associating with masters of the craft) is the time-honored way to develop maturity and mastery.  Pieces of the apprenticeship model won’t be enough.  The most obvious failure point is the dearth of trustworthy mentors able and willing to bring apprentices along. 

My recommendations for creating a larger pool of mentors:

• Provide training and coaching in how to have coaching and mentoring conversations.  They’re less difficult than some imagine; there are landmines which some don’t recognize.  Stop assuming people know how to do this kind of work with others.
• Create a pathway to foster makers of apprentice-makers
• Celebrate your “Ben Franklins” – those with decades more experience and perspective
• Reward people for sharing stories about their mistakes and lessons learned
• Intentionally hire people with pastoral and counseling experience in their background, not as their primary role, but as a powerful complement to their other competencies.  These men and women are unsurprised about human foibles and ever optimistic about human potential.

Optimize for maturity and professional growth (skills, behaviors). Why maturity?  Because immaturity and pride are at the root of nearly all our worst behaviors, including self-sabotage.

What does professionalism look like?  My list:

• Be truthful.  Always be honest, with appropriate candor.
• Keep promises.  Keep confidences.
• Be on time and respect the time of others.
• Criticize and challenge ideas & interpretations, not people.
• Express appreciation.
• Assume the best of others rather than the worst.
• Own your results.
• Work hard with your strengths; work cooperatively with those having complementary strengths.
• Be prepared.  Excuses are lies we tell ourselves.
• Play the long game.
• Expect much from other professionals, and even more from yourself.

This whole process will take time and sustained energy.  Choosing this path requires leadership courage because this is crock-pot work for organizations rather than microwave, and frankly out of step with some popular approaches.  You will see early signs of progress, and the right people will respond well to the initiative.

Many people say they want a balanced life.  They’ve heard that a balanced life is the goal. 

Balance feels nice. The dream of balance feels even better. 

Balance is a transitory state.  It’s not a permanent condition.  Pay attention to what your muscles are doing when you walk a tightrope — maintaining balance is not a passive process!

Something I’ve noticed studying the biographies of accomplished men and women is that they didn’t lead very balanced lives.  But they had rhythms and practices which helped them.  Balance was never their goal.

You can’t work directly on balance.  It’s an emergent property of paying attention to rhythms. The way to achieve some occasional balance in your life is to work harder at productive rhythms.  Here are examples:

• Work, changing the type of work, rest periods.
• Seasons of engagement and withdrawal.
• Information input and creative output.
• Times together and times alone.
• Intentional self-restraint and feasting celebrations.

As mammals we’re biologically very poor at measuring balance and exquisitely able to sense when there is imbalance.  Use that ability to recognize when you need to shift the rhythm.

You can also apply this to organizational work. Balance is not the goal, but times of productive balance can emerge when there are resilient rhythms.

“A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized, but not defined, by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance.” (from Wikipedia)

One of the characteristics of high-performing individuals and teams are specific rituals they create to “attach” meaning and psychological preparation to functional tasks. 

A police officer friend tells me that every morning he puts on his uniform is a ritual to get his head into the right place to be effective.  He buttons his shirt from bottom to top because it helps him stand tall.  He gives his badge and name plate a quick polish to remind him what he stands for.  He carefully checks the snap on his pistol holster to reinforce the requirement to keep lethal force under control. 

Moms develop morning routines for young children to help them get everything organized and launch into the day.  Teachers greet students at the beginning of class and send them out with a repeated phrase.  Soldiers go through their checklists before battle, and a comm check becomes an opportunity to affirm “we’re together in this.”  Many businesses have rituals associated with starting or ending a meeting, when a new person onboards, and when the company hits a big objective.

Many families have rituals for birthdays and special events.  I know of families which only eat certain foods on holidays, or always go out together to see a movie on January 1^st. I grew up in a family that had red plates for the birthday person to use at meals.  My wife designated “backwards” meals on birthdays – we started with dessert first.  My dad used to tell me “Be a Brooke” – meaning uphold the family honor of hard work and truthfulness – when he dropped me off at events, and when he sent me off to college. 

Rituals can also guard against our worst tendencies.  I knew a coworker who identified a telephone pole about midway from his home to the office.  When he headed home from the office, he mentally took all the work stuff in his head and stowed it in an imaginary bag hung on that telephone pole.  He picked up the contents again as he drove to the office.  This helped him be truly present at home with his family.

Rituals are more than habits and traditions.  They have psychological power to help us perform our best. 

Give some thought to what rituals you can create for yourself and your team.  Creating new rituals sets you apart as a leader.

You and I (and everyone we know) are more likely to make poor decisions when we’re financially stressed.  We’re more susceptible to temptations and ethical compromises.  Financial stress is a significant distraction from doing your best work.  It’s a kind of bondage.  A friend says “Heroin addicts and people with steady paychecks have things in common.”  I’ve known people who were compelled to stay in toxic work situations because they absolutely needed the next paycheck.  I’ve seen a friend need to declare bankruptcy when he was laid off and couldn’t get another job for 8 months. 

I’m all in on being responsible and caring for your family, even if you have to suffer somewhat.  I’m challenging bondage because of avoidable financial straits. 

I wasted money when I was younger.  I chased the expectations of a particular lifestyle as my income grew.  I didn’t make any huge mistakes, but wise up before I did! 

My specific advice, especially now that we’re living in a period of high inflation:

• Build and maintain an emergency fund of 6 months living costs.  You’ll be well-prepared for a layoff.  You’ll be able to walk away from a toxic job.  You won’t panic when the car needs repairs or the appliance dies or when insurance won’t cover all the roof damage from the storm.

• Save money early for retirement, college funds, and life goals – let compounding interest be your friend.  $50/month in your twenties can be more powerful than $500/month in your late forties.

• Get everything you can from company benefits – especially 401K match, insurance options, scholarships, and EAP help. 

• Get life insurance.  I was twice astounded to learn of widows with children being left with little but debts because their husbands didn’t arrange for life insurance.  Term coverage is available and cheap.  Whole life coverage could be a good part of your overall financial plan. 

• Don’t run up credit card debt on little stuff.  Debt is a useful tool in the right hands, for the right reasons. 

• The most likely debt crises will be from car and house obligations.  Live below your means.  Don’t compare yourself to others.  Yeah, the other guy has a gorgeous new car and brags about pricey vacations, but you can sleep better.

• Teach your children about good financial practices. 

You’ll be a better leader and person if you’re financially free.   

An acquaintance who had read my book “Bold and Gentle” inquired how I had decided on the biggest challenges my kids would face in the next 50 years. “How do you anticipate the future when there are so many uncertainties about so many factors?” he asked.

Apart from revelation given to us, you can’t predict the future, but you can anticipate it and prepare for possibilities. 

There are a few principles:

Studying historical patterns helps us anticipate the future because people are still people. Individuals and mobs have only so many motivations, therefore behaviors will repeat. There will always be malevolent individuals with a will to amoral power. There will always be some sheeple. Individuals can be unpredictable over short time periods, but large groups of people are quite predictable over longer time periods.

You can count on hard trends. A hard trend is something which will generally be true over time. We can reasonably expect that compute power increases while the costs decrease. We can reasonably expect that medical advances will reduce deaths from heart disease, cancer, and neurological decay. We can reasonably expect that people will prefer faster service at a lower cost. We can reasonably predict that any new technology has rabid early adopters, consensus adopters, and stubborn laggards. You can’t always guess the precise timing implications of a hard trend, but it still has predictive power.

You can expect that a few key decisions and singular events will have disproportionate effect. This is the “sandpile instability” reality. Grains of sand accumulate in a pile and fingers of instability develop. One of those fingers will collapse at an unpredictable time – affecting the larger pile. (This is described well in Mark Buchanan’s book “Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen.”) One assassination triggers WW1 because fingers of instability had developed over decades. Multiple recessions have occurred after economic bubbles grew unstable and popped. Sand piles cannot grow forever without shifting to release unsustainable tensions.

…

It’s instructive to evaluate God’s rules for the nation of Israel as taking the tension out of instabilities before they became disastrous.

For example, God forbid Israel from entering alliances with other nations. This kept them from being drawn into wars that were not their direct concern. This insulated them from interconnected political instability.

They were to give the land a Sabbath rest every seven years. This minimized the problems of chronic soil depletion.

All debts were to be forgiven every seven years. This prevented massive debt buildup and avoided the inevitable problems of economic collapse. Forgiving debts took economic tension out of the system.

Indentured servants had to be freed after seven years. This mercy minimized the likelihood of creating a permanent underclass of citizens. Certain social tensions and resentments would not accumulate.

I’m not advocating we adopt these laws today. There is no indication in the New Testament that these specific laws would carry over to the Christian church, and indeed, the NT fosters even higher principles. I’m simply pointing out the “self-repair” wisdom embedded in the laws for an agrarian society surrounded by violent nations.

…

Anticipating the future is a responsibility. We can forecast different scenarios and consider how we could respond – and be less surprised as events unfold. We can also forecast possible future states to decide which actions and what systems will be most effective and helpful for more people over longer times.

“The mind is strong against things it has prepared for.” (Seneca) Cultivate your imagination to anticipate the future.

The common view is that we’re terribly divided as a people. This is not unique in history. The path towards unity and amity requires more dialogue that explores tough topics. We’ve mastered babbling and talking past one another and raised non-purposeful conversation to an art form in social media. We need genuine dialogue.

Observation: We simultaneously crave dialogue and are fearful of where it takes us. The popularity of long-form podcast interviews and panel discussions is not a surprise. We get to hear it from a safe distance. At least we’re passively learning what meaningful conversation sound like.

In-person conversations are both desirable and riskier. Many (not all) of us can do small talk well enough, on safe subjects. Dialogue to explore deeper subjects? We grimace at the thought, even if a part of our heart longs for it.

I’m not talking about the uber-confident “I know the right answer” folks who are eager to vomit up their talking points. I mean genuinely open and curious conversation where there is no pre-determined end point. Education (from the Greek educare, meaning ‘to draw out’), not two people each trying to indoctrinate the other.

Dialogue comes to English from dia (two, or mutual) and logos (word, meaning). Dialogue is a two-way exchange of meaning.

There are learnable skills to make sustained dialogue valuable. Asking questions. Listening with an ear to understand. Summarizing points back to your conversation partner to test understanding. Use of humor and exaggeration to get through rough spots. Patience to be still and let silence be. Sensing when to pivot to a different topic. Pacing. Willingness to push through uncomfortable, resisting all temptations to “win the moment.” Sharing facts gently as a means of support, not weapons to club someone into submission.

Real dialogue with people who don’t share your echo chamber perspectives is difficult, and worth the work.

I’ve mentioned Perry Marshall’s principles of demilitarized conversation zones before:

1. Put down your weapons

2. No anonymity (no hiding behind screen names)

3. Assume other people have reasons for believing what they believe

4. Agree to get to the truth, not the sale…or “the win”

…

Climate change is an area where I’m loaded-for-bear with facts.  I’ve been good at ‘winning’ arguments but less good at dialogue-working-toward-solutions.  Some readers and colleagues take me to task because they perceive that I’m not all in on the existential threat of global climate change. 

I should begin my dialogues with points of agreement, rather than documenting errors in the way climate data has been collected, analyzed, and presented.  Or stating that “climate change” is an untestable hypothesis because no matter how it changes (or how quickly) you’re right. Or wilting fantasies with cold facts about energy and agricultural economics. Plus a few other ways I’ve irritated sincere believers. So here goes:

Climate is changing.  Atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing; this increases the acidity of water.  Human beings are healthier with clean air, clean water, and abundant food. Human beings have polluted the planet, and we generate considerable waste.  Fossil fuel-based energy is dirty at multiple steps in the process; by contrast, electrical energy is cleaner at the point of use.  The natural forces that drove ancient cycles of glaciation, sea level rises and falls, and tectonic plate movements are still at work.  Our sun goes through an 11-year cycle of solar minimum and maximum.  Environmental and biological systems are resilient right up to breaking points. We poorly understand complex systems and rarely identify tipping points before they happen. All predictive models will be wrong, and some are still useful.  We have a shared responsibility to care for the planet for the current and future generations.

Yes?  With me?  Good.

So now let’s discuss what should be done, where, and when.  Let’s explore possible solution spaces, cognizant that long-term climate shifts are more complex than human activity-driven CO2 release. (CO2 levels rose and fell dramatically prior to the Industrial Revolution.) Let’s remember that cause and effect are rarely close in time and space.  Let’s agree that there is no “right” CO2 level or temperature, so we need to be careful about setting targets.  Let’s be mindful that not every soul has the same choices as those of us living in affluence. Let’s be candid about economic tradeoffs and the price we’re willing to pay. 

Most of all, let’s be driven not by fear but by the opportunity for every person to live in a world of energy and food abundance, with minimal air and water pollution.  Human beings are the most adaptable multicellular species on the planet, going places even roaches, nematodes, and funguses can’t go. 

This last point is an example of a helpful strategy in dialogue: Point to the desirable future and pull people along with you.

…

It’s popular to identify hypocrisy, bash them over the head with it, and then walk away with a triumphant smile.  You tread to the edge of personal attack without getting sued. YouTube is replete with “gotcha” and “So-and-so destroys…” videos. 

This is popular because it’s easy, preferable to violence, and plays well to your preferred echo chamber.  We’re all hypocrites, we’ve all made statements in the past that were foolish, or we’ve changed our mind. 

The real opportunity is to gently (strength-under-control) point out inconsistencies and hypocrisy as a starting point for seeking truth and solutions.  No personal attacks.  No use of a hypocritical statement as a weapon.  Open acknowledgement that complex issues are messy and it’s possible for two things to be true at the same time.  Ready acceptance that individuals will prefer different problems associated with a type of solution.

I encourage you to keep going past “you’re a hypocrite” and “this is a horrible problem getting worse – lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”  We need solutions.  We need one another to discover truth and find solutions.

I respect a friend who strongly advocates for higher government payments to single parents.  She knows that in some cases this creates unhealthy dependency.  She acknowledges that it likely increases state debt.  “I know a few of these moms.  They’re hurting. They’re scared. They need help.”  At the same time, she’s furious about high taxes that make it harder to pay for her food and rent.  She’s been burned by lazy bums failing to show up for interviews because all they needed to do to collect unemployment was schedule an interview. We’ve had good conversations about alternative ways to help, such as neighbors and churches, and the role of personal responsibility. 

My conversations with her have reinforced the value of another dialogue tactic:  Say thank you.  “Thank you for that perspective.”  “Thanks for sharing that information.”  Saying thank you lays individual bricks in a bridge that can carry more weight in the future.

I wrote this advice on how to be a more effective reader and writer, and these same practices help you become a more effective leader:

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People have asked how I can be such a prolific writer and reader.  The simplest answer is “It’s a choice followed by corresponding action.”  The truth is that I have multiple writing projects sitting partially done, and struggle constantly to finish and publish my writing.

Here are things which help me:

• Deadlines and commitments.  I have committed to this newsletter weekly, three LeaderLearning messages weekly, two blog posts weekly, and at least 3 posts on LinkedIn daily.  I’ve forced myself to create deadlines for publishing some of the Anger and 300 years book content via email on a schedule.
• Assume that everything you encounter is fuel for pondering, cross-connecting, prayerful meditation, topics to write about and teach about.   Capture thoughts and inspiration as quickly as possible because they have the same vapor pressure as gasoline on a sidewalk in July sun.  There may be “nothing new under the sun,” but there are things which are new for you and the people in your sphere of influence!
• Put myself in good company of smart and savvy observers and story-sharers – in person, via books, podcasts, films, etc.  This is food and fuel for your creative process. Invest your limited time and attention where it will yield higher returns.
• Always have a book handy.  You’ve probably noticed how many people, given a few spare seconds, whip out their smartphone.  Do that with books instead.
• Extract quality from quantity.  Don’t expect brilliance in a first draft of a sentence or book.  As best you can, squelch the self-editor which wants to work as you write – then unleash the editor’s power in the next stage.  No gem emerged from the ground cut and polished.  As I write this sentence, I have a “for newsletter content” document which is 121 pages long and hopefully no one will ever see 3/4ths of it!
• Walk!  It’s amazing how much clarity and coalescing happens in your mind when you walk.  Charles Dickens, incredibly prolific, walked the streets of London 2-4 hours daily.

The primary reason current leaders should be coaching and mentoring other is to elevate their team’s performance and build the resiliency that comes with a leadership pipeline.

The primary benefit for leaders to do this work is that it’s the best way for them to develop their skills and perspectives.  Teachers learn more than their students because the process of teaching requires a person to absorb, understand, and articulate.  New insights come this way.

I frequently talk with seasoned leaders who are in a “plateau” stretch of work – they have created some level of mastery, work is getting done, problems still take enormous energy, but they’re not growing.  My two questions for them are:

• “Do you need to consider moving into another role or area of responsibility?”
• “Can you do more coaching and mentoring?”

Those are the two routes for moving from a plateau to a growth curve.