An arsenal of grit, stamina, and determination

Leadership
Leaders have a nonstop flow of fortitude.  ~Bill Hybels

Last week the headline of Crain’s Chicago Business got my attention: “A Business of Life & Death: A South Side institution since 1933, Leak & Sons Funeral Home handles roughly a quarter of Chicago’s victims of gun violence.”  I watched the video link and read the cover story several times.  Last year Leak & Sons served 107 of Chicago’s 511 homicide victims.  That’s just slightly more than two per week. 

Spencer Leak Sr. is a leader with a nonstop flow of fortitude.  Quoting from Crain’s, “‘No mother should experience the death of a son on the streets of Chicago without having the ability to celebrate his life,’ Mr. Leak says.  He adds, however, that there are times when his charity causes his accountants and his sons to shake their heads in frustration.  It’s fortunate that at 76 years old, Mr. Leak has the stamina to live up to his conviction.  Always dressed in a three-piece suit, he routinely works up to 14 hours a day, seven days a week.”

This isn’t intended to suggest that we should all start working 14-hour days, seven days a week.  But it is intended to cause us all to pause and ask ourselves if we have a nonstop flow of fortitude, as does Mr. Leak. 

Since his father started the business in 1933, their mantra has been to “turn away no one.” Mr. Leak says you have to “look past the profit.”  But the Rev. Leak’s fortitude goes well beyond his business.  In 1965 he marched alongside Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama.  In the 70s he founded a church in Englewood.  Last year, out of 80 funerals at the church, 65 were for victims of homicide—more funerals than christenings, baptisms, and weddings combined.

All this talk of homicides and death can be bit on the depressing side of the equation.  But if we look at the other side of that same equation we see a leader among leaders, and that’s what I’m trying to emphasize.  His fortitude to walk alongside families grieving the senseless death of homicide, day in and day out, year after year and decade after decade is almost unimaginable.  I would be hard-pressed to find a more suitable example of someone with fortitude.

Synonyms of fortitude include strength, courage, resilience, guts, grit, stamina, and determination.  As a leader, is there something around which you can muster some fortitude? 

Now and then I become concerned that our culture isn’t encouraging leaders with fortitude.  When I think of leaders similar to Mr. Leak, they are individuals who have committed themselves to something over the long haul.  They aren’t frequent job jumpers or career changers.  It’s certainly possible to have a great deal of fortitude and change jobs or careers and keep moving toward a passion or goal.  But I think that’s far more rare than the person who truly commits themselves to something and with an arsenal of grit, stamina, and determination they see it through. 
In the coming years, may we all have the opportunity to encounter a few more Mr. Leaks along the way and experience their nonstop flow of fortitude.

Lead with questions!

Leadership
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.  ~Voltaire

I’ve only recently discovered Michael Marquardt, author of Leading with Questions, and of course now want to read everything he’s written.  I’m so intrigued by his work that today’s blog post is nearly all his work.  So I want to insure he gets full credit for insights that I believe really can change an organization.

Too often, we ask questions that disempower rather than empower.  These questions cast blame; they are not genuine requests for information.  Other sorts of questions are often no more than thinly veiled attempts at manipulation:  Don’t you agree with me on that?  Aren’t you a team player?  [My favorites are the questions we ask that are really suggestions dressed up like questions.  For example, Have you thought about…? or Have you considered…?] So the point isn’t that leaders just don’t ask enough questions.  Often, we don’t ask the right questions.  Or we don’t ask questions in a way that will lead to honest and informative answers.  Many of us don’t know how to listen effectively to answers to questions—and haven’t established a climate in which asking questions is encouraged. 

We live in a fast-paced, demanding, results-oriented world.  New technologies place vast quantities of information at our fingertips in nanoseconds.  We want problems solved instantly, results yesterday, and answers immediately.  We are exhorted to forget “ready, aim, fire” and to shoot now and shoot again.  Leaders are expected to be decisive, bold, charismatic, and visionary—to know all of the answers even before others have thought of the questions. 

Ironically, if we respond to these pressures—or believe the hype about visionary leaders so prominent in the press—we risk sacrificing the very thing we need to lead effectively.  When the people around us clamor for fast answers—sometimes any answer—we need to be able to resist the impulse to provide solutions and learn instead to ask questions.  Most leaders are unaware of the amazing power of questions, how they can generate short-term results and long-term learning and success.

One of the executives interviewed by Marquardt told him, “if you do not create and maintain a working environment where you are always asking questions of your employees and forcing them to think, then you will probably never be any better tomorrow than you are today.”

John F. Kennedy, at his inaugural address in 1961, asked Americans to ask a different kind of question when he spoke these words: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”  Questions have an amazing degree of power, and Kennedy’s exhortation to Americans on that cold January morning in Washington, D.C.—to ask what they could do for their country—inspired an entire generation to reconsider their values and priorities, to serve others more than be served.  Questions can indeed be that powerful.  They are surely the most powerful tool that leaders can possibly employ, for they can accomplish enormous results; questions have the potency and force to change individuals, groups, organizations, communities and even nations and the world.

Real leaders can walk around the table.

Leadership
If something is not to your liking, change your liking.  ~Patricia Ryan Madison

I recently tried a new exercise in a leadership development class and I think it got my point across much more effectively than if I had stated the obvious.  Everyone in the class had completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  Then I categorized their basic workplace MO (modus operandi) by graphing a combination of their Extrovert/Introvert and Judging/Perceiving scores.  These combinations fall into one of four groups I call Quickly Conclusive, Just-in-Time Planner, Thoughtful Spontaneity, and Reflective Realization.  Then I gave them each a slip of paper with one of the four categories written on it that did not represent their actual personality.  The task I gave them was simple.  As a group, decide where you would go out to eat this evening followed by some type of activity. But, participate in the discussion as someone with the MO that is written on the slip of paper, not your actual personality type.

It was kind of fun to watch them battle against their own nature.  My favorite was one person who just sat there and never said anything.  At the conclusion of the exercise he admitted that it was so difficult for him he didn’t even know where to begin.  Consequently, his experience illustrated my point. 

I reminded them that sometimes the person sitting across the conference table may feel the same level of frustration they just felt because their personality or MO is so different.  What feels so natural and “right” to us, may feel excruciatingly painful to the person across the table.

Real leaders learn to walk around the table (metaphorically).

Patricia Ryan Madison authored the book, Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up.  This book was not written for actors seeking to hone their improv skills, it was written for ordinary people just like you and me.  It’s described as an irresistible invitation to lighten up, look around, and live an unscripted life.  No matter how carefully we formulate a “script,” it is bound to change when we interact with people with scripts of their own.  As the quote states, “if something is not to your liking, change your liking.”

These real leaders walk around the table and change their liking.  They are able to listen, understand, empathize, and lean into the person across the table who may have an MO that’s a stark contrast to their own.  These leaders don’t focus on trying to get everyone to become “like them.”  Instead they move around the table effortlessly (or at least they make it appear as if it’s really that natural). 

I’m guessing some of you might think this doesn’t sound very authentic or genuine; like you’re faking it. I think we can make the argument that it’s very authentic and genuine.  If an individual is truly self-aware, knows who they are, and is so secure in who they are that they can meet others precisely where they are, then that sounds very genuine to me.  In other words, they know how to change their liking.  This isn’t implying we need to give up who we are, but it is suggesting that we need to learn to embrace and accept who others are, with all their similarities and differences.
Next time things feel a little uncomfortable at the conference table, instead of holding tight to your own MO, trying walking around the table.

The leader is not the expert.

Leadership
A leader isn’t good because they’re right; they’re good because they’re willing to learn and to trust.  ~Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal

Last week I began facilitating two new cohorts in a 12-month leadership development program.  As one of several ways to introduce the concept of leadership to these emerging leaders I used a TED Talk by Stanley McChrystal, a former 4-star Army General.  In his less than 20-minute presentation, he hits a number of key leadership behaviors.  But he also introduces an idea that I think will only become more common—inversion of expertise.

In the not so distant past it was typical for individuals in an organization to be promoted up through the ranks because of their increased level of expertise, and it was usually technical expertise of some form. It was assumed that the more technical expertise someone could offer the organization that they could also lead.  Maybe that assumption held true more frequently in the industrial age, but in today’s organizations that could be a recipe for failure.

John Kotter (Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School) defines leadership as “taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities.  Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about providing useful change.  Leadership is about behavior.”  Using Kotter’s definition of leadership, there is very little technical expertise required.

Getting back to McChrystal’s TED Talk, he said, “So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven’t done what the people you’re leading are doing?  It’s a brand new leadership challenge.  It forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from below.” 
            
I can think of several individuals who served on an organization’s board of directors and became the CEO.  Even though they had been on the organization’s board, they weren’t on the board for their content expertise but for their leadership within the community and/or constituency base.  One example that particularly intrigued me was Mark Murray, who went from university president to leading a big box retailer with nearly 200 store locations.  Murray had served on the retailer’s board of directors for a couple of years and Murray’s leadership capabilities were evident to the corporate leaders.  Without one bit of retail experience, he took on the challenge and for more than seven years led the organization well. 
This type of leadership, that now includes inversion of expertise, requires behaviors that haven’t always been thought of as leader-like.  Behaviors like being transparent, really listening, and a willingness to be reverse-mentored from below are somewhat new to the list for great leadership.  The leader is not the expert.  The leader is the one channeling the expertise to address opportunities that are coming at the organization faster and faster.        

Leaders shun complexity!

Leadership
Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.  ~Winston Churchill
“Complexity is a leader’s enemy not their friend. Great leaders live to eliminate or simplify the complex, while average leaders allow themselves and those they lead to be consumed by it. Complexity stifles innovation, slows development, gates progress, and adversely impacts culture. Complexity is expensive, inefficient, and ineffective. …great leaders understand opportunity and profits are extracted from complexity through simplification, not by adding to the complexity.”
I read that paragraph last week in an article in Forbes.com entitled, Five Transitions Great Leaders make that Average Leaders Don’t.  I thought back on my own week—having had several Skype calls with individuals in Argentina and Peru, helping someone with a leadership survey in Malawi, researching topics that seemed to have an endless amount of information available on the Internet—and I realized that even in my own little world just how complex things have become.  We don’t have to search far for complexity because we live in it!
This then led me to an article by Margaret Wheatley with Debbie Frieze entitled, Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host.  What an interesting analogy to describe the leadership transition necessary to lead in complexity—from hero to host!
These authors say that “leaders-as-hosts know that people willingly support those things they’ve played a part in creating—that you can’t expect people to ‘buy-in’ to plans and projects developed elsewhere.”  They say that hosting leaders must:
  • provide conditions and good group processes for people to work together
  • provide resources of time, the scarcest commodity of all
  • insist that people and the system learn from experience, frequently
  • offer unequivocal support—people know the leader is there for them
  • keep the bureaucracy at bay, creating oases (or bunkers) where people are less encumbered by senseless demands for reports and administrivia [I love that word!]
  • reflect back to people on a regular basis how they’re doing, what they’re accomplishing, how far they’ve journeyed
  • work with people to develop relevant measures of progress to make their achievement visible

I have to admit, as I read that list (and I didn’t include the entire list here) that I felt a bit exhausted.  Hosting leadership is hard work; it’s much more involved than simply playing the role of “hero.”  A hero can swoop in, make all the decisions, assume everyone will follow without question (because you’re the hero after all) and you’re on to the next challenge. 
Will you make the critical transition to shun complexity and live to eliminate and simplify the complex, or will you (and those you lead) be consumed by it?