Can History Teach Us Leadership?

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Sometimes history can give us a lesson in a battle against the odds – a call for perseverance and fortitude – that can ring true when seen against some of the leadership challenges we face in today’s world. Henry V, by William Shakespeare, has shaped my leadership style, informed my decision-making and inspired me to persevere during the inevitable setbacks of life.

As you may know, Henry V is about a young man taking over the family business and building the respect of those he is responsible for. During the course of the book, he takes decisive action to expand, rather than stagnate.

Finally, faced with the greatest challenge in his leadership tenure (the pending Battle of Agincourt), Henry goes undercover and talks with his “clients” to gather their true perspectives on his leadership. With this knowledge, he then defines leadership when he delivers the most inspirational communication in the English language.

This communication embraces the constraints faced by his men and inspires them, outnumbered five to one, to defeat the French in northern France. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother.” – Henry V While the glorification of war is never great, perhaps this post could drive some lively discussion and perhaps raise the level of consciousness about our choice of role models and the future we are leading people towards… peace/war, money/meaning, love/fear. Let me have your thoughts below.

Steve Brown is President of Custom Decorators, Inc. and has a Ph.D in history from Oxford

 

The Only Way for Women to Win

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Something terrible is happening to women who work. I deal with it constantly because I coach men and women executives who work in large corporations. It gives me a front row seat that allows me to closely look at what really works for women to rise in leadership and influence and still like their lives. 

I can tell you one thing, the worst advice women get is to act like a man. 

And that’s exactly the advice they’re getting. “Lean In” Author Sheryl Sandberg has recruited Condoleezza Rice, Anna Maria Chavez (the CEO of Girl Scouts, pictured above, right) to encourage girls everywhere to be more assertive. You know, speak up! Push your point of view! And, “Man-up!” They have started a campaign called “ban bossy” to tell girls the lie that the reason society is cheating women out of their fair share of leadership opportunities and money is because they’re not aggressive enough.

Using anecdotes out of their own life stories they claim that assertive behavior in boys marks them as leaders while the same behavior labels a girl as being to bossy. So their solution is to make bossy the N-word for younger generations. Then girls could be assertive and become the leaders they desire to be. This is simply colossally crazy.

When I am called on to help an executive in trouble it is most often because they are too assertive.

Leaders whose primary quality is their assertiveness are known as jerks or worse. Nobody likes a bossy know-it-all whether you’re a man or a woman. In fact in today’s flat organization the most important asset a leader can have is the social intelligence to build collaborative work-teams to implement a stream of innovations. Leaders who try to do this by telling people what to do and using their power to take charge end up killing creativity, innovation and commitment necessary to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive world.

No, raising girls to be bossy women is not the answer to the lack of leadership opportunity that women have.

Yet it’s not surprising that smart people continue to make this error about the root cause of women getting a raw deal at work. A review of human history leads to a truly awful conclusion… Women have always been exploited by men. I don’t mean that all men are bad, abusive or even unkind. I’m just stating the obvious.

Human institutions, laws and culture have virtually always over-favored men at the expense of women.

A little history… Less than 100 years ago women did not have the right to vote! In most countries they didn’t have the right to own property or a legal right to raise their own children. Sexual assault was not considered a real crime. (It still isn’t in many countries.) Until 50 years ago there were few women professionals. Doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants and women were universally discouraged from pursuing careers.

The cultural effect was that women were almost solely dependent on men for their economic security which made them put up with a lot of stuff that they should have never put up with. In the 1960s we couldn’t pass an equal rights amendment so we got feminism. Now I don’t want to antagonize any feminists I just want you to consider how men have twisted feminism to make the world better for them rather than women.

While it’s true women got to enter the workplace, for the most part it wasn’t for good jobs. Today two-thirds of people who are in the minimum wage are women. And women still only make 75% of what men make for doing the same work. In management it’s even worse… women earn only 68% of what the same male managers do. (Source: Catalyst.org) And in 2013 we could not even get Congress to pass an equal pay law… I know, it’s insane!

So what’s the world men have created by manipulating the ideals of feminism?

Survey show that women are suffering the health effects of record-high sustained stress because they are the primary child raisers, house cleaners and family managers even when they have full-time jobs. And this is in families where a husband is present. We also have a record number of single mothers who teeter on the edge of economic disaster because of rampant job insecurity while they try to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.

And by the way, most men are just fine with this. Men have worked hard to create their unique twist on equality. For instance, single men rarely go out on dates, instead they just have meet-ups which enables them to meet potential sexual partners with the least amount of effort and commitment. They typically also require women to pay their own way and frequently find ways to wheedle women into paying for everything.

Research reveals that the male creative executives who control our diet of entertainment via movies, TV and music have created social norms that make women who do not make themselves sexually available at the very beginning of a potential relationship seem prudish or hung up.

But most of all, men love it when they can get women to do their work.

In most of the large organizations I consult with women make up the majority of the management ranks but not at the level of senior leadership.  Just like at home, male business leaders rely on women to make everything work but give them very little real power. And even the women CEOs I’ve consulted with are dominated by their male boards and testosterone-crazed Wall Street analysts who soon turn them into women who have to behave like men to succeed.

I know these results aren’t what feminists had in mind but it just seems to me that many of the real gains that women have fought for in political, economic and social equality have been distorted by male-dominated institutions that are awesome at doing one thing… furthering men’s self-interest.

And now we have the perfect spokesperson for male domination. Her name is Sheryl Sandberg. You probably know her as the billionaire COO of Facebook and the author of her horrifically, stupid best-selling book, Lean In. Her book and message has been summed up by many as… if you want to get ahead in the world act like a man, lead like a man… just quit making excuses, acting like a victim or being shy about what you want. Take your place at the big table, be prepared, be confident, and above all be assertive. A few other things. Work hard.

If your work requires travel, grit your teeth and go. Be sure to marry well and insist your husband does an equal share of the household work and child-raising. Get home by six every night, have family dinner, then get on your conference calls and kick some ass. If that sounds like good advice to you perhaps you, like Sheryl are a billionaire executive who graduated from Yale, have friends in the White House and have several nannies to cover for you.

And just look at what Sheryl Sandberg does. She makes sure that Facebook makes money so that CEO Mark Zuckerberg gets richer and can spend his days playing around with big ideas.

Let me point something out to you.

Creating a new generation of highly driven selfless women dedicated to making our businesses and institutions work is a man’s dream. Most powerful men would rather sit on Boards of Directors so we don’t have to do the real work. I just don’t see men giving up their power to women simply because they’re capable executives. The man’s need to be in charge is virtually limitless. On the other hand getting women to do their work… now that is very attractive. If you think I’m kidding consider General Motors.

They shocked the world by choosing Mary Barra to be the first female CEO to lead a car company. Awesome right? Well, you tell me. Her total compensation is less than 50% of the compensation of the man she replaced. He, by the way, will continue to serve GM as an “outside advisor” still making more pay than she does! It’s just another example of men getting women to do their work without paying them. Do women really want to be leaders so badly they will accept any terms pushed on them by men?

Well enough about the problem… how ‘bout a solution?

After doing a lot of thinking I believe the only real answer is to start a parallel economy. One driven by women-led enterprises. These companies need to operate on the useful disciplines of the old economy but incorporate the uniquely vital abilities of women to trounce their gray-beard competition. Please understand by women-led I don’t mean women only enterprises. It’s already proven that the most successful organizations integrate the strengths of both men and women in ways that reduce their individual weaknesses. But for this to become common place we need a lot more women entrepreneurs and CEOs.

The reason this is so important is that I believe that only radical change can create a future of sustainable abundance. All attempts to reform the old economy have failed.

But women can use the rules of the Old Boys Club to bring it down. They can out-compete them, out-innovate them and they can create work-lives that embody happiness as well as success. And they can turn capitalism into the engine for civilization.

I will tell you HOW you can do something to ignite this change right now in part 2 of this blog coming next week. I hope you’re curious.

Also don’t be shy about commenting on my unconventional views… am I out to lunch about how men exploit women? Is the ‘system’ rigged against them? Is Sheryl Sandberg right… women would be better off behaving like men? Thoughts?

 

The Journey of Social Enterprise

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Thinking about the opportunity of gathering with a growing community of social enterprises at the upcoming Social Enterprise Alliance Summit in Nashville has me thinking once again about journeys. The road I have traveled in social enterprise has felt as precarious as Highway 1 along the rugged ridge of the Pacific. Because of the vulnerability and violence experienced by the work force I serve, I have never found a clear path leading me. There was not a simple fork in the road where I got to choose an easy road.

In fact, for most of the past 15 years founding and growing Thistle Farms, a bath and body care company, I have felt compelled to find a new road on which to travel. It began with a few simple steps towards creating a not-for-profit to serve women who have survived lives of addiction, prostitution, and trafficking. There have been times I barely maneuvered hairpin curves and seasons of confusion that settled in on me like a thick, mountain fog.

There have been harrowing stories of recovery and horrible murders of women I loved. The road of an entrepreneur feels uniquely narrow and unsure at times, but, given the chance, I wouldn’t ever choose another path. The views are breathtaking, filled with grace. Thistle Farms began as a residence offering community at no cost for two years.

We didn’t take any public funding and vowed that we wanted to be a witness to the truth – love is the most powerful source of change in the world. The women served by Magdalene had traveled down roads more perilous and broken than I could imagine. On average the women who came were first raped between the ages of seven and eleven.

They had seen the underside of bridges, the short side of justice and the backhand of anger long before they saw the inside of prison walls. Immediately and faithfully volunteers and staff with expertise in the areas where we needed guidance came along the way at just the right time. Our model was simply to keep ourselves grounded in hospitality, reverence, and love. Five years into the program, we were on a steep learning curve.

It was imperative to educate the wider community on the myths of prostitution: that women do recover, that longer prison sentences and more institutions of incarceration are not the answer, and that there is a crucial need for more residential communities. We learned that we needed to provide a real home for the women, not another prison.

It was time to forge a new path again as we were growing more concerned about the economic wellbeing of the women in the community. The women had to redefine themselves, replacing the addiction that had come to typify their lives. So we began a social enterprise creating all natural bath and body care products to intentionally promote healing.

We had to learn a new vocabulary. The sweet ideals we had held had to become leverage to influence the economics towards sustainability. We have had to learn from some unfortunate decisions on products and sales. We had to learn branding was important and being tough on manufacturing procedures translated into a better work environment for the women. We can hold on tightly to our core values of loving people lavishly without judgment and still be economical. We stamp Love Heals on all our products and are still relevant in the market.

Currently 45 women who are residents and graduates help lead a company that now celebrates over 270 retail outlets. Just this month our shipping team has broken the record on Internet sales! We have welcomed over 1,200 people from all over the world this past year into our immersion day programs to reach out and help other communities duplicate the best practices of this model.

We now have formal partnerships with four other women’s social enterprises around the world. In the past year the women stood before audiences at over 300 events, articulating our mission and courageously sharing their personal stories. Six months ago we opened a Café on site. No one person who launched this endeavor could have envisioned the growth of the enterprise, nor could any one of us made the journey alone.

It took a community in which the sum was truly greater than its parts. We held each other up and we held each other accountable. If you are attending the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit in Nashville, we hope you will come visit our manufacturing facility and studio. If you do, I think you will see a communal vision that is still forming.

We are only part way down the road and we pray every day together for the grace to keep walking in community. I heard an African proverb a while back that went something like this. “If we want to travel fast, we should travel alone. If we want to travel far, we should travel together.” The deeper truth I have learned traveling down this road is that if all of us will travel together, not only will we travel far, we will travel with integrity, joy, and purpose. 

The mission at Thistle Farms is to help women make the journey from the streets to home ownership. Each day we accept the challenges secure in the knowledge we can meet them together. The path is getting straighter, but all of us still need to do more to stand in solidarity with women who bear the universal issues of violence on their individual backs. Looking back down the road it’s powerful to remember that always there has been a compassionate community offering signs and gifts that have helped make this a straight path towards love.

This post was written by Becca Stevens, Executive Director of Thistle Farms. You can find Becca on Twitter at @revbeccastevens.

 

Should Leaders Eat Last?

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I’m so frustrated. I recently watched a video of a new Simon Sinek speech based on his book Why Leaders Eat Last. I like both Sinek’s speaking and writing. It’s both muscular and gentle. He is a new voice for a timeless message. I think we all know the message. Greek philosophers were talking about the responsibility that leaders have to their followers 5,000 years ago. I boil down Simon’s message into two main ideas.

First, Great enterprises are purpose driven.

And second, that great leaders create trust with their employees by caring about them as individuals not just workers. The idea is if you put your people first, if you serve them, they will perform amazing acts of greatness. This is really not debatable. Leaders who fight for the well-being of their followers are legendary. Alexander the Great fought furiously alongside his soldiers and was among the first to tend to his wounded ones when battles were over.

George Washington often rode his huge white stallion between the front lines with his ragged troops and the well trained British as if to defy defeat. He was also unafraid to suffer with his men through the winter at Valley Forge. And it was Washington’s proven advocacy of common soldiers that kept our new nation from disintegrating into warring colonies after our independence was won.

As Sinek points out, great leaders sacrifice themselves to help their followers gain, yet today’s’ business leaders seek to gain by demanding their employees sacrifice themselves. So here’s why I am frustrated. Leaders have been told they should “eat last” for as long as I’ve been involved in leadership development. Yet they don’t. Not at all.

I know this because during the last recession I conducted a research project with students from the University of California at San Diego. We developed a screen to identify large companies that made strategic decisions consistent with their stated values or purpose and conducted operations according to sustainability standards. We crossed referenced that with lists of companies that we identified as great places to work for employees.

The were 21 companies out of 1,000 that passed that screen.

That’s 2.1%. Over the last four decades eloquent and compelling Thought Leaders of business leadership have said the same things. When I started out with Stephen Covey in the early 1980s teaching leaders the power of moral mission statements we inspired millions on a personal level but had little impact on the way businesses were actually led. Instead, being #1 or #2 and rising earnings per share became the only measure of greatness. As far leaders eating last, that was covered eloquently. At that time Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership was found on almost every executive’s desk. Ken Blanchard wrote the employee-centric One Minute Manager.

The exceptionally loud voice of Tom Peters told us that excellent companies have people-centered work cultures. Then Jim Collins wrote both Built to Last and Good to Great providing ample research that purpose-driven companies and humble determined leaders were the ingredients to enduring enterprises. And so what have we got today? Sure, there are new clubs being formed around Conscious Capitalism which is the latest way of saying that business ought to be focusing on creating the greatest value using the fewest resources and doing the least harm possible.

And while it’s true that there are a few companies whose leaders are sincerely committed to making a positive difference in the lives of their customers and employees, take it from me as someone who has walked the halls of many major corporations over the last 35 years as a leadership consultant.

There are very, very few of them who are willing the put those values first.

It’s true. I have been very fortunate to work with several great leaders who actually made business decisions consistently aligned with their personal values. However, I have to report that too often leaders do whatever they can get away with, certainly if it’s legal, to make more money. But for most business leaders the idea that the fundamental purpose of enterprise is to increase the quality of life of every stakeholder… customer, employee, vendor, community and shareholder is just not there. At least not in the strategic or tactical way. Instead, business leaders continue to be obsessed about making the most money with the fewest employees. In fact, that mindset has a dignified name. It’s called productivity. And in the name of productivity and profitability all kinds of really bad shenanigans are committed and justified because after all… it’s just business.

So help me out.

I would really like to get your best ideas as to why… after decades and decades of compelling and articulate Business Thought Leaders presenting compelling cases for purpose driven, employee engaged, moral enterprise as being the best way to create an enduring great business…so few leaders give a damn.

Is it that business just attracts amoral, competitive, self-centered leaders?

I really don’t think so. In all my consulting I have rarely met a leader who doesn’t actually have a strong desire to make a positive difference. It’s just that most often I’ve seen that same leader succumb to making expedient compromises that exploit their employees or push lower quality products on naive consumers. These decisions are always justified by some calculated business logic that somehow makes it okay.

Some real life examples:

I’ve worked with several highly principled CEOs of large non-profit health systems that employ analysts who are constantly looking for ways to charge patients $1.00 for one aspirin. Or they bill $50,000 for a procedure for someone without insurance that they charge $25,000 for the same procedure for someone whose insurance company has negotiated a lower rate. These “non-profit” healthcare CEOs make millions in salary and think nothing of bankrupting the working un-insured who suffer an accident or get a brain tumor.

And here’s the kicker. These are great individuals. Honest and kind personally, and they sleep fine. Yet they cause immense avoidable suffering. It seems OK because it’s the standard operating procedure in healthcare. Whatever. I’ve spent a day with the immensely popular CEO of YUM brands. They bring you the wonderful “food” of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. Their product causes diabetes, which now costs us more than smoking in public health care cost.

They design their food to have “bliss points” to deliver just the right amount of salt, sugar and fat to addict our brains as much as nicotine does. They also target high frequency users; low income, minorities, single moms with kids, and working classes in emerging countries. Their business model is dependent on unhealthy over eating. They also seek to keep their wages and benefits as low as possible. And I want to tell you the CEO is a simply a great guy. Smart, personable and caring, especially to his senior executives. I did some training for Bain Capital.

Now these leaders believe they are making the economy work… real patriots. Yet they still really think and act like Richard Gere in the movie Pretty Woman. These very smart, mostly very nice private equity pros will make virtually any promise to the owner of a company they “invest” in, but very often they act like smug little pirates planning their exit strategy that has no regard for the owners, the employees and often the customers.

And once again these are great guys who love their kids. They probably even like Simon Sinek. Oh and how about “valuing your employees like a companies’ most valuable asset.” How many times have we heard that whopper? During my working career I have seen leaders only get rewarded for big layoffs of bright hardworking people. I briefly worked with the CEO of a highly regarded pharmaceutical firm who had spent three years working his medical research staff to the bone to develop a brilliant new medicine.

It was about to be approved so he was laying off hundreds of these exhausted, dedicated employees because he had not designed his research pipeline to absorb them. Too bad. He wanted me to figure how to raise morale. Even the best companies have become places where leaders consistently eat first. The new CEO of IBM is zapping 15,000 ‘highly valued’ employees. Cisco has had waves of layoffs of smart people.

Meg Whitman was cheered for dumping 25,000 excess professionals. Most of these leaders will earn millions for firing smart people because they can’t think of anything productive for them to do. Does that sound like “eating last?” I could go on… these are not small or isolated cases.

So why is business leadership in general so unable to sustain interest in creating genuine value for humanity?

Why are they hell-bent on overworking their employees to the point of exhaustion while they continue to downsize? Is it that the business pressures put on leaders for financial results is just so overwhelming that it crushes their internal sources of inspiration? Is it because both business education and our business press praise leaders who are financially successful but do little to teach or promote values based business models? Is it because we don’t have enough women in senior leadership positions?

(I’m not being silly about this. Micro finance has shown that women are community builders. They reinvest their profits in education for their children and public works projects…things that will make the future better. Successful male micro-entrepreneurs on the other hand pretty much spend their profits on improving their status, paying for prostitutes and getting drunk. That’s why so few micro finance organizations loan money to men.)

What is it about business that drains smart, capable and so many fundamentally good people of moral ambition?

And one more thing. Small business leaders often seem the most uninspired. I have found the thinking that business should be conducted as a game whose only rules are “what can I get away with” is even more pronounced among businesses with revenue between $5 million and $100 million.  Often the leaders of these medium-sized enterprises have little empathy for their front-line employees and worker safety.

Their most common expression is that their success is all due to their own genius and that low wage workers get what they deserve. Yet again, on a personal level these CEO-entrepreneurs are caring and generous to their friends and family. My questions about what turns good people into bad business leaders is important to me. I fundamentally believe that creating a world of sustainable abundance for the 9 billion people that are soon going to live on our planet is the greatest economic opportunity in history.

I also believe that the innovation and discipline that arise from smart business can be the greatest single force for positive change in the world.

What I don’t believe is that creating sustainable abundance will happen by everybody acting in their extreme self-interest because some invisible hand will make it turn out all right. I don’t believe it because it simply isn’t true. It never has been. That’s the fairy tale of narcissists. Let me clear I am not a socialist. But neither do I respect the atheistic drivel of Ayn Rand.

Instead I believe that our future will largely be created by the collective wisdom of the leaders of business and our major institutions around the world.

Somehow, there must a new way of engaging business leaders with the practical skills as well as the inspiration to create, as Buckminster Fuller said, “a world that works for everyone.” So please don’t leave me hanging…

What do you think is in the way? Why has nothing really worked to change the mindset of leaders? And what might work?

 

The Power of the Collective: Co-location & the Social Economy

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The socio-political and economic conditions in North America have been undergoing a considerable shift over the last several decades. The end of the post-WWII “golden age” heralded a gradual erosion of the Keynesian welfare state social safety-net and as a result, state funding has been continuously withdrawn from social services.

The reason for this shift is due to the rise of a neo-liberal brand of capitalism that has the ability to create vast amounts of wealth but does not adequately account for the social and environmental externalities that result from ‘business-as-usual’ practices. These externalities can be understood as the destruction of the environment and the systemic social exclusion and poverty that arises due to the inherently dispassionate and detached nature of Neoliberalism – best captured by the sentiment of one of its staunchest supporters, Milton Friedman, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

By design, this economic system creates an ongoing need for non-profit organizations to fill the void in social service provision; however this responsibility has been undertaken in an economic environment increasingly characterized by limited fiscal and human resources. Enter the Social Enterprise.

Social enterprises operate at the intersection of the private, public and third sectors. In this space, the social enterprise fulfills a critical role of furthering social and environmental agendas within the confines of the capitalist system. That is to say, they utilize the tenets of capitalism to appeal to society’s consumer culture, but do so as a means of achieving social change.

This is an important distinction – one that has the potential to revolutionize the status quo and create a more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable reality. Having the triple bottom line (social, environmental and profit) as the guiding principle instead of solely profit, allows for a more inclusive system that can appropriately account for (if not eliminate) negative externalities.

My work as an independent researcher has focused on the ways we can adapt and enhance the social economic paradigm to create better business models capable of competing on larger scales, with private sector giants. The most recent article I’ve published on this subject deals with the concept of Co-location as a viable model that can reduce financial and administrative burden of social enterprises while generating social innovation.

Co-location is a popular concept for supply chain integration in the private sector and has incredible potential for social enterprise. The theory is based on the fact that throughout our history, humans have always thrived when working together towards common goals. The power of our collective action has built cities, transformed entire societies and even changed the course of history.

Co-location builds on this fundamental principle of human system interaction and is premised on the notion that sharing space can be an effective way for smaller non-profit or social enterprise organizations to reduce their costs, expand their services and improve their operational efficiency. Co-location also offers an avenue to capture and harness the creative energies of like minded people. Sharing space has been a practice of the third sector for decades, however new social research has uncovered that the benefits of sharing space go far beyond simple economic considerations.

Specifically, sharing space can “break down silos, reduce costs, increase opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, create knowledge and learning networks and spark social innovation”. So while this may not be a new concept, it is certainly one worth looking at again.

The research on co-location over the last two decades has found that the social, political and economic advantages of sharing space are profound. This is particularly important for non-profits or social enterprises that are more often than not: understaffed, underfunded and overworked. At a very mechanistic level, sharing space can reduce the administrative burden on non-profits through cost-sharing for common tools such as advertising, printing, heating and water costs etc.

There are also political advantages to sharing space: the political leverage that can be exacted from having strategic clusters working together on bids or lobbying can be significantly more than a singular organization working towards the same ends. Most importantly, there are tangible synergies that transcend these more technical advantages. The real magic of the shared space concept is predicated on the equation: Physical Space + Community = Social Innovation. The theory of co-location asserts that by sharing space (and costs) with driven, talented and like-minded individuals social innovation can occur at a more rapid and frequent pace.

Being immersed in such a creative environment allows for continuous learning, inspiration and accelerated growth and development. The upcoming Social Enterprise Alliance Summit 14 employs the tenets of co-location at the temporary but macro-cosmic level by bringing together giants in the social economy to help foster an atmosphere of learning by creating opportunities to engage with each other in order to harness the power of our collective action.

Summit 14 provides a platform to explore the potential of this emergent sector to create lasting and meaningful change that will ensure a better future for our children – and to remind us that together, we CAN make a difference.

This post was written by Andi Sharma, MPA, Policy Analist, Government of Manitoba. She will be speaking on this topic at the upcoming Social Enterprise Alliance Summit ’14.

 

What’s the Difference between Success and Happiness?

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I’m giving a speech today to a large group of executives entitled “What To Do When You Don’t Know What’s Going On.” The company these executives work for has just been acquired so everything is going to change. And change is tough. Very tough. Uncertainty is a major brain strain. There are four bad things we typically do when there’s a lot at stake and we’re not in control of the outcome:

  1. We amplify our confusion. Of course it’s natural to feel confused when facing an unknown future. But it get amplified to levels of high anxiety if you don’t have a vision and agenda for your own future. Without a personal vision, confusion turns your brain to mush.
  2. We listen to our self-doubts. All of us have that inner critic voice that tends to whisper that we are inadequate, unprepared and about to be exposed for being a goofball when we are under any nasty stress. Remember you are not that voice, so tell it to shut the hell up!
  3. We second-guess our decisions. Whenever you have to make difficult choices that involve tradeoffs, it is tempting to think that there is one perfect choice if you can only discover what is is. It’s not true. There are no perfect choices. What life is about is making our choices work or changing our choices if we have clearly made a mistake. We are farm more resilient and capable of positive change than we give ourselves credit for.
  4. Horriblizing. This simply means freaking out. It comes from feeling that you have no choice but to do whatever is presented to you. As soon as you give up your free will, you give up your dignity and your judgement. You always have choices. And sometimes you will have to say, “No.” to something good to get something great.

We simply need to learn to deal better with uncertainty because of the world we live in. Our work and our lives are constantly being altered by forces increasingly their control. We will have many moments of truth in our lives so it is good to be strong and wise. Here is how:  Research on happiness leads to the conclusion that when you build your life by saying YES to certain types of things, live will be good. Research also confirms that success comes from committing to the words KNOW and NO. (I’m indebted to Eric Barker for bring this research to my attention.)

Saying YES to happiness means that you’re actively embracing three things in your life. First, friends.

 The happiest people in the world have five to seven friends with whom they feel comfortable sharing secrets. This is incresingly difficult. A recent Harvard study indicated that 25% of adults have no one they trust enough to share a secret with. That’s zero real friends. Cultivating genuine friendships takes time. It’s an investment in yourself and your life. People with real friends live longer and are far more resilient to life’s hard moments.

Second, experiences.

Experiences have a much more powerful effect on our happiness than buying stuff. Experiences are life fine wine, they get better with age. That’s because our memories tend to put a glow on the happy times and help us forget the difficulties surrounding positive experiences. Experiences are also social, meaning that we can share them with others and relive them together. And importantly, experiences cannot be repossessed.

Third, enthusiasm.

People who are driven by enthusiasm are bright lights. They attract opportunities, friends and positive experiences. Enthusiasm is easy to generate. It is primarily created by verbally stating for the positives in any situation and to affirm the good deeds and efforts of others. Enthusiasm is very contagious and tends to make both working teams and families more positive and productive. The good news is it’s absolutely free.

So, if friends, experiences and enthusiasm are things to say YES to, what’s the deal with KNOW and NO?

Again, it’s pretty simple. Success is a bit different from happiness so it requires a different set of mental tools. The knowing part of this is that work success comes to those who know what they want. That is, they know their soul’s desire. They have deep longings. They want to do something that has a specific impact, often for a specific group. For instance, I have a daughter who wanted to be a neo-natal nurse, not just a nurse. She wanted to go to work each day to save babies’ lives. That vision guided all her decisions until she fulfilled it. That’s success. This need to know is born out time and again in my recent study of the patter of real world-changing geniuses. Many of their lives were difficult and they faced setbacks galore.

What they had in common was the grit of determination to pursue work that fulfilled their unique nature. 

This takes deep self-knowledge. Some geniuses seem to have been born with a mission, but for most, it emerged. Yes, what really sets super successful people apart from the rest of us is extraordinary focus.

This is where the other NO comes in. 

We live in a time in which everyone wants our time and attention. Advertisers want it. The media wants it. Your boss, of course, wants it. And that’s a problem. If you don’t say, “No.” to the vast majority of demands and temptations, you will spend your life achieving other people’s goals, watching what other people want you to watch and buying what other people want you to buy. That is not a path to either success or happiness.

There is one habit that will help you the most with both YES and KNOW/NO.

It’s the universal habit of genius. Go to be a half hour earlier. Then get up 3o minutes earlier and plan your day.

Don’t you dare look at your email. 

In the quite silence of the morning, separate what’s most important to you from that which is only urgent to others. Have a daily agenda for your work and your life. Defend it, act on it. And, have the grit to stay with it. Get great at saying NO because you have a bigger YES in your life.

 

Don’t Work For A Jerk

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Work should be a source of joy.

Okay, if that’s too strong, it should at least be a source of well-being. Gallup’s research confirms that work is the second most important factor in promoting our life satisfaction. (The first is the quality of our relationships.) We spend half our waking hours working. It is a source of personal identity, growth, and self-efficacy. That’s all great when our work is good. But when our work is not good, it’s our single greatest source of stress. And new research is confirming what we all know.

If our work is stressful, it’s mostly because our boss is bad. 

Here’s why: Business organizations are designed as power hierarchies. This is because the military is run as a power hierarchy, and modern organizations come from the military gene pool. The family tree of business also runs back to royalty, warlords, and a host of archaic organization models. They people at the top of hierarchies hold life-and-death power (or hire-or-fire power) over everyone. They are also expected to be smarter, better informed, and more capable than their employees. Of course, sometimes they are. Often they are not.

But it’s not competency alone that determines whether a leader creates a great place to work. More often, it is his or her personality, values and worldview. 

The emerging research on leaders of large, modern enterprises is that they tend to be more narcissistic and less empathetic than average. I know, this is not surprising. But let’s take a closer look. Narcissists:

  • Tend to act confident, be well-groomed, self-promoting, and extroverted. They make eye contact, offer inflated compliments, and have high energy.
  • Need and may demand the spotlight, recognition, and admiration.
  • Are self-serving, self-focused, and insistent.
  • Constantly search for better deals, better people, better jobs, better spouses.

And their grand ability is to leverage their influence to dominate a social group. That’s why leadership positions in business, politics, and the media appear to be loaded with narcissists. What’s dangerous about this is that the most dominant traits of a narcissist is fake empathy. That is when a person pretends to care about the sufferings and sacrifices of others, but really doesn’t.

It’s what enables business executives to permanently lay off hardworking, creative successful employees to temporarily raise profits. It is what enables leaders to sell and promote bad food and harmful products, or brazenly pollute and poison the environment. Researches have now administered thousands of personality assessments, and found that people with low empathy scores tend to become lawyers, economists, and investment bankers. (I know, I know, no surprise.) So what’s this got to do with our work? Everything.

IBM published research a couple of years ago revealing the person most employees least enjoy spending time with is their boss. They found that our stress hormone levels skyrocket when we talk to our bosses, due to the massive economic and social power bosses have. If that power is wielded by a narcissist or a low-empathy leader, it’s frankly very scary. The cure is simple. Not easy, but simple. And it has two elements.

First, become great at something.

That way, you have a career instead of a job. We all earn money by creating value. Value in a business is primarily created by saving money or making money. Be clear on what you’re great at and get better. Become an expert in a field you’re passionate about. You do this by reading, going to conferences, writing speaking, doing. Do something for at least 30 minutes each day to learn something new in your field of choice. Give yourself three years to get in the top 25% of your field. In five years, you’ll be in the top 10%. Life is short. Be great at your work so you will always be in demand.

Second, don’t work for a jerk.

Remember, business is a magnet for slick narcissists. So if you are going to work for someone rather than yourself, you must target great companies that push self-promoters away. You will discover these humane places to work through networking, reading local lists of good companies, and asking around.

Sometimes transitions take time. Don’t fret about it. Just don’t settle for being stressed, scared, and exploited. I recently finished teaching a career class to about 60 adults at the University of California at San Diego. What was reinforced to me is that we all have gifts to give. We all have a difference we can make. And if you want to, you can put yourself in the right place at the right place with the right people to work the way you are uniquely designed to.

Never give up your dream. 

Never.

Why ‘WHY’ Is So Critical for Performance and Innovation

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

The second principle of 5-Star Leadership is answering the question, “Why?” Remember the first principle is setting a clear direction by answering the question “What?” What am I trying to accomplish… what’s the goal here? Most seasoned leaders have no problem telling people what to do. They are goal-setting machine guns.

However setting goals without establishing a good reason for the goals…without dealing with the ‘purpose’ question never really engages followers.

Sure they may act busy. But activity is not the same as performance and when leaders sense that their goals may not be achieved they tend to escalate pressure or even issue threats. Clueless leaders do this because creating stress in employees temporarily ignites their energy. But negative stress has only a short-term effect on people’s energy. If it continues, people begin to protect themselves usually by blaming others and checking out.

This poisons a working culture and creates a toxic cycle of failure.

These are common situations I come into when leaders reach out to me to help them with their organizations’ performance. Their usual complaint is there needs to be higher accountability. Yet crying for accountability is always a sign of leadership failure.  If people are unmotivated to take responsibility there is no amount of external accountability that will change performance.

I’ve never seen accountability systems that accomplished anything other than lower performance.

Unfortunately, these kinds of employee management systems are everywhere.

Decades of psychological research confirm that personal performance rises when people are inspired.

Yet years of global leadership surveys reveal that the rarest quality of a leader is the ability to inspire followers. That’s a shame. You see people become self-accountable when they are inspired. People go the extra mile when their motivated.

People create, innovate and find better, faster, cheaper ways when your mission becomes their mission.

The flame of purpose can only be ignited by answering the question …‘Why?’

What is so important about what we’re doing? What difference will it make?

Those are simple enough questions. Yet I cannot believe the dumb answers most leaders give. Usually leaders announced to their followers that they must succeed in order for the company to be profitable, or to grow, or to survive. While these reasons maybe accurate, research is clear they are not inspiring. Brain research is clear that people are motivated by emotions not logic or facts. Even more important people’s creative centers are activated by their values.

That’s pretty important since creativity is necessary to innovate new products, connect with customers or revolutionize new business models.

On the other hand, logic and fear at best temporarily motivates people to do more of what they’re already doing… so good luck with that. I’m not sure why the vast majority of leaders continue to act so stupidly. It should not be news to anyone that humans are purpose-seeking beings. Or that inspired people work harder and create more new, cool, life enriching things.

Only a fool would treat humans as carbon-based robots. Perhaps the root cause is that so many people go to business primarily to make money. That’s just ridiculous. It’s like saying the primary reason for living is to eat. Sure, without food we die but if we live to eat, over-eating will eventually kill us. Even the world’s most uninspiring famous leader, Jack Welch, finally agreed that:

“on the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”

This is from a guy who pioneered firing people while businesses were profitable just so we could make the share price would go up. I appreciate the deathbed repentance but holding yourself up as an iconic leader only to later reject the core of your value system is more than a little sad. Human beings have spent thousands and thousands of years trying to create a way of life so that every day was not simply a grind to survive.

The Industrial Revolution gave us a huge boost in productivity so that we could create surplus. This surplus gives us an opportunity to improve the quality of our lives not just the quantity we consume. The Industrial Revolution was a means to higher opportunity but we haven’t seized it. Instead we are acting like idiots at a cheap buffet.

Is building an economy on never-ending mass consumption really the best idea we can come up with? Really?

Does your business depend on people buying things they really don’t need or especially value that are produced just as well by many competitors? That’s another way of describing business strategies that focus on market share rather than growth. The primary reason employees are not self-motivated is not because they’re lazy. It’s because their work is not purposeful. Of course for short periods of time simply accomplishing ambitious goals can motivate high achievers.

Goal achievement is a brain narcotic for people who define themselves through accomplishments.

But in reflective moments even people who define themselves as goal-seeking missiles have to ask… “Why?” Most businesses today are simply playing a game of trivial pursuit. When a talented leader like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos invests time and money into figuring out how to get packages to people using flying drones I just shake my head. What difference does that really make? For the last 10 years Microsoft has to represent the biggest waste of employee intelligence in recent history. What difference are they making? Would anybody care if they went bankrupt? Just look around you. The same thing could be said of 90% of business enterprises in existence today.

As far as producing unique value that really improves the quality of human life in most cases we’d be better off without them. They are just consuming resources and wasting human energy. I’ll let me be clear, I am not a moralistic snob.

I just believe the proper use of capitalism is to create new and innovative ways to actually improve the quality of our lives now in the future.

Of course you have to be profitable because profit creates investment surplus and investment is needed to research and develop new and cooler ways to progress. I think most people would agree that the world is better off because of companies like Disney and Nike and the old Apple.

Yes, these companies are not perfect but at least they’re up to more than simply making money. At least their employees feel like they are a part of making people happier or more informed or more able.

What people want from their leaders are goals that really matter.

This takes more than an MBA. It takes moral imagination, grit and discipline. In my recent study of geniuses Thomas Edison stands out. He held over 1,000 patents. He invented the modern research and development lab. He pushed his people to their limits. Edison established whole new industries because he was able to commercialize the use of electric lights, power utilities, and sound recording in motion pictures.

His inventions were critical to mass communication. And they changed the lives of virtually every human being after he was finished. The days of great breakthroughs are not behind us. Today a hard-headed leader like Elon Musk is so serious about alternative energy and sustainability that he created the Tesla car company to accelerate automotive technology to create systemic change.

Yes, Google is a scary company because they are a vacuum cleaner of all of our online lives. But at least they’re using their wealth to pursue interesting big problems like driver-less cars or doubling the average life span.

My point is that you don’t have to become Mother Teresa to run a meaningful enterprise.

You just have to be committed to solving problems that matter. Give us something to wake up in the morning for. C’mon, why are there intelligent people spending their time dreaming up Dorito tacos? Is this really the best we can do? Great leaders have meaningful answers to the “Why” question.  We need more great leaders.

 

The Instant Leadership Process – What’s Really Holding You Back

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

In a previous post, I wrote that there is little to no evidence that our attempts at leadership development over the last 50 years have resulted in better leadership. That’s right, although there has been literally thousands of books written on great leadership, armies of leadership consultants, and millions of dollars spent on leadership development, we don’t seem to have a critical mass of great leaders.

Looking at employee surveys from the 1960s to the present, there’s no data to support that employees today have any better opinion about their leaders’ abilities than employees did 50 years ago.

I’m not suggesting we give up on training and developing leaders, but what I am suggesting is that we get ‘real’ about its effectiveness. 

And the problem that we have today is that the demands of leadership have radically changed in the last 10 years. Leading a company with a hierarchical structure is vastly different than leading an organization which gets work done though networks. In fact, it’s much harder to lead a network of people with varying skills and abilities to achieve goals than it is to cascade your leadership influence through a chair of command.

What’s needed is a radical new approach that gets work done by having people follow a leadership process.

I believe this is far more realistic and effective than depending on developing individual leaders to be great. I do because I’ve had direct experience with it, working in some outrageously competitive business situations and highly resistant cultures.

This is how simple it is.

When a leader of a team or an organization is trying to accomplish anything, this process must be followed.

WHAT: A leader must create focus by clearly articulating the goal.

WHY: People become creative and innovative and understand the purpose behind the goal. A motivating goal will have two dimensions – a human purpose and a business purpose. If your only purpose is to make money or win market share your people will quickly become exhausted and disengaged.

This step is essential with today’s workforce… it’s usually skipped by most leaders.

HOW: Everyone must collaborate getting to the best ‘HOW.’ This demands new disciplined processes that create universal engagement that breaks down silos and creates a continuous strategic-tactical conversation. When this doesn’t occur the law of unintended consequences destroys execution.

DO: Leaders must drive goal-focused action constantly. Team members should always be looking for the next smart thing to do and initiate.

REVIEW: Leaders and teams must swim in a stream of feedback. You cannot wait for formal after-action-reviews to make important changes. Action reviews informally take place in three-minute hallway conversations and constant communication. (Formal after-action-reviews are also vital when critical milestones are either met or missed.)

The power of this process is that everybody can already do these things.

They just need to get into a habit of doing it. It needs to become embedded in the leadership culture. Of course individual skill makes any of these five steps better. So no-one is off the hook for individual leadership development.

However, in my experience without a common leadership process organizations are simply held back by the lack of skills of their poorest leaders rather than by the abilities of their best ones.

The biggest challenge to implement the systematic leadership process is that bad leaders say, “I already do this.” When they do, I say, “oh yeah?” Then I simply go one or two levels down and ask, “What are your most important goals and why are they the most important?” I continue, “Do these goals and the purpose behind them inspire you or discourage you?” Most often the answers I get reveal that people feel confused, pessimistic or cynical about success.

That’s why they’re on the lookout for another job. That’s why they are disengaged. That’s why it’s so damn difficult to get much done.

See for yourself. Use 5-STAR and ask your teammates or your leader or your employees if they are clearly focused on your most important business goal. Ask if they know why it’s important… both the business purpose and the human purpose. Then ask if everybody has been involved with the execution process so that glitches are minimized and important changes are made on a timely basis. Then ask…

“Are we getting better at executing our most important priorities or are we repeating the same mistakes we usually make?” So go ahead, give it a rip… and tell me what you find. The bottom line is that we are no longer playing football where coaches call in the play from the sidelines.

Business has become basketball. Everyone plays offense. Everyone plays defense. Action is a continuous flow where players are always trying to make it easy for each other to succeed so the team can win. Is that how your enterprise runs?

 

Three Conflicts & The Only Way Not To Be Bullied

Posted on by Real Leaders Inc.

Over many years of my leadership consulting practices, I’ve had to facilitate agreements among unreasonable people. Often these battles have occurred between chest pounding executives who are frustrated or frightened. I’ve also refereed Boards of Directors of merging companies and unions and management.

On a few occasions, I’ve been ambushed by spouses of clients who want me to help repair their ragged relationship…Yep, I’ve been in some pretty wild situations. Early in my career, I taught and relied on the tools of ‘seek first to understand and then be understood’ and ‘win-win’ to forge agreement out of the ashes of conflict. What I’ve found is that these tools are excellent to solve problems, Level One problems. Those are disagreements over tactics.

These conflicts arise when people have shared values and goals, but simply want to go about things in a different way. 

For instance, if both my wife and I wanted to take a relaxing vacation and I wanted to go to the tropics and she wanted to go the mountains, we could probably find a ‘win-win’ resolution by taking the time to sincerely understand what it is about those places that give each of us a sense of relaxation. Then we might come up with a simple solution like alternating vacations between the beach and the mountains.

We’d probably feel pretty good about the solution if we both agree that relaxation was the primary goal and that we actually planned our time and activities to achieve that goal. What makes this work is our supreme value for a harmonious relationship based on respect, fairness and mutual advocacy. Now if our conflict was a little more intense such that I want a relaxing vacation and she wants an exciting one… it would take a little more creativity. What’s not obvious about resolving Level One conflicts is that to maintain goodwill you need to not cave-in.

It’s important to have a reasonable tolerance for disagreement because this will stimulate creativity.

If you value harmony so much that it’s very stressful to even have temporary disagreements you will find yourself never taking the vacation you want or launching the marketing program the way you designed it… or any other priority that you’re willing to sacrifice to avoid conflict. The will to resolve Level One conflicts at high levels of mutual satisfaction stimulate creative innovation and resilient relationships. All good stuff… yet we often find ourselves in Level Two conflicts, which are more difficult to solve.

Sometimes far more difficult. Level Two conflicts are disagreements over goals. (Remember, Level One was conflict over tactics) sometimes I call these ‘small pie conflicts.’ By small pie I mean that there is simply not enough for everyone to get what they want in the amount they want. Sure it would be great if you could increase the size of the pie in every situation but that’s just not realistic. Once I was helping several physician groups negotiate their financial relationship with a large hospital system.

There was a limited amount of money to divide and it was clear that that small pie of money would not be growing very much anytime soon. If the doctors made more, the hospitals would make less and vice versa. Soon this escalated into a bare-knuckles battle with lots of accusations and emotion. The only way I could get these agitated adversaries to calm down was to ascend the ‘mountain the values’ until we could find common ground.

What they could agree on was that the hospital system and the physicians were sincerely dedicated to providing the best patient care possible. I was also able to get them to a common reality about their mutual finances.

When goals are in conflict it is critical to agree on the facts, so Level Two conflicts are resolved when people agree on both facts and values otherwise there is no path to agreement.

Now we come to ugly Level Three conflicts. These are conflicts over values. Most often they simply cannot be resolved. One example of Level Three conflict was the Cold War. The values of dictatorial Communism versus Western democratic values had no meaningful common ground. To preserve the peace we simply zoned off the world, rattled our sabers and frightened each other into avoiding war. It appears we have a similar problem with Al Qaeda. The unquestioned values that we have for individual freedom, self-expression and personal conscience are not shared.

Both sides actually believe they have the moral high ground so conflict is inevitable.

Throw in other high ignition problems like widespread poverty, political rivalry, tribalism and oil and you have a boiling stew of conflict. Level Three conflicts are not only geopolitical. They exist in the workplace and at home.

The most common Level Three conflict arises in working with people who are pathologically self-interested… just plain selfish.

Now all of us are selfish from time to time especially when we’re scared or stressed. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about people who refuse to empathize. These are people who treat everyone as either a threat or an ally to get what they themselves want. Their main tactics are bullying and manipulating. They bully by making threats, hoarding resources, stealing ideas and blaming others when anything goes wrong. Their arms get tired from throwing people under the bus.

What’s unfortunate is that bullies can thrive in hierarchical organizations that tolerate it.

Mid-level bullies are often miss-characterized as no-nonsense managers by senior executives. So they frequently persist and even thrive. Manipulators are passive-aggressive. They also blame others, deny responsibility and play the victim. An Olympic level manipulator seems to be able to figure out how to never be wrong or responsible…it’s everyone else’s fault. Bullies and manipulators are everywhere.

Social psychologists estimate that about 35% of adults never mature beyond this level of living. Every workplace has them and so does virtually every family. So what do you do with Level Three conflicts? There is only one thing to do. Create rules and boundaries for your interactions.

As the saying goes ‘you can’t make a good deal with a bad person’… at least not for long. When you’re in conflict with others because of the fundamental disagreement over values the conflict will never end. So you need to protect yourself from selfish nut-jobs. Unless the crazy person has a life altering experience which actually changes their values a healthy trusting relationship is simply impossible.

I didn’t always believe this. For 40 years I was a magnificent idealist. But the lessons of life taught me that the lethal combination of someone who is competitive and insecure will make them bullies. My attempts to have sustained relationships were totally disruptive to my own psychological health. What I found was that bullies look for people they can intimidate, and manipulators are simply parasites looking for hosts who will cave-in to the whiny demands.

What’s going on here is Level Three conflict. These conflicts will ruin your life if you allow them to.

There is nothing you can do to repair them and it’s not your job to.

Your job is to make a difference. Your job is to be healthy, loving and to do something that matters. The next time you’re in conflict take a moment to analyze whether it’s Level One, a conflict over tactics; Level Two a conflict over goals…or a code red Level Three.

Understanding the world this way changed my life.

I hope it does the same for you. Note to women:  Most women’s brains are wired for social harmony and empathy. This makes them “soft” targets for bullies and manipulators. The most common response is to become passive aggressive, which helps you maintain power without being confrontational.

The problem is being passive aggressive makes you psychologically sick and makes you feel weak. The best strategy is calm assertiveness. Know what you want. Ask for what you want. Create what you want. I know, it’s not as easy as it sounds… yet there’s simply no other choice.