Leadership | Elisa K. Spain

Leadership View #12: Watch For (Perhaps Unintentional) Malicious Obedience…

July 14, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #12: Watch for (perhaps unintentional) malicious obedience…

Early in my career, I learned this valuable lesson. I had the opportunity to lead a transition of a client reporting group from a fully manual process to a fully automated process. This area was the last functional area to be automated in this company (guess that tells you how long ago this was). When the previous manager left in the middle of the systems conversion, I was asked to take over.

As those of you who have led systems conversions know, it is never a smooth process and there are many long hours that are just part of the process. On one of these long nights, the senior person on the team came up and asked me how to calculate a certain number. I didn’t know the answer, and I didn’t ask him if he knew the answer, I simply guessed. And, I ass-u-me-d, he would tell me if I was wrong. See previous post, What results when leaders Ass-u-me?

In this case the result was, every report, to every customer, went out wrong. Like, I said, I learned a valuable lesson.

Perhaps in this case the obedience was intentional. My sense is, it was not. Here was a man who was overwhelmed by change, his world was being completely turned upside down. He had never used a computer in his life and suddenly his work had to be done on one. It didn’t occur to him that how he had calculated this number before was the same way to do it on the automated system.

More importantly, I didn’t ask, I told. And, I didn’t lay the ground work for my being open to being questioned, I simply ass-u-me-d he would know.

I wonder, how many of the big disasters that we read about could have been avoided by the leader asking questions and making sure the team knows he/she wants to be challenged?

As you go through your day on Monday, I encourage you to pause and notice how you respond when someone on your team asks questions, and perhaps consider answering the question with a question of your own….

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: Leadership Is Not Magnetic Personality…

June 30, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Once again, I am taking a brief pause from the Leadership View series for the monthly quote. The series will return next week with Leadership View #12.

This month’s leadership quote:

Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations — Peter F. Drucker

What a relief, this means EVERY leader has the potential to succeed…That is, if he or she wants to. For me, this quote means that to accomplish successful leadership, we must step outside of ourselves and focus on the people we are leading. We must identify what drives each individual on our team, identify their unique genius and coach them toward success. It is our job as leaders to inspire the people we lead to take the next step, to take the risk to achieve growth and as Drucker says, achieve beyond their limitations.

Perhaps the place to start is with identifying these same factors within ourselves…

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #11: Hardest Task

June 23, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #11:

Hardest task – changing your leadership and management styles as your company grows or you go up the ladder.

I often hear entrepreneurs say, “I don’t want to lose the culture as I grow this company” or “We are like a family, I want to keep this feeling as we grow”. And yet as the company grows the culture inevitably changes and the owner no longer knows the name and the family of every employee.

And, what the company needs as it moves from “go-go” to “prime” (to quote Vistage speaker Gerry Faust) is for the leader to change.

In the go-go period, everyone is equal and it is all about getting the job done, getting the orders out, meeting the customer needs. Typically the owner is the chief sales officer and innovator. And, then as a company adds more people and moves to prime, management becomes necessary and terms like “building a leadership team” come into play.

Suddenly the owner is thrust into a role of CEO and has people reporting to him or her who are focused on their own career path. These key executives want the opportunity to innovate and have an impact themselves. And, the CEO while still expected to define the vision, must also become a coach and mentor, allowing others to grow and develop as leaders.

At the same time, the folks who came to the company as experts and doers are often expected to become managers. And those that came to “manage” are expected to become leaders. The best operations manager who succeeded because he or she can implement processes must learn to think like an owner and take a broad view. These new roles and new ways of thinking require new behaviors as well.

Those that are able to change are those rare few that build and lead the less than 1% of companies >$100mm in revenue.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #9: An Absolute Skill Of An Effective Leader…

June 9, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #9:

An absolute skill of an effective leader is the ability to grow and adapt.

So often we find that what has made us successful in the past, is not working for us today.

From the entrepreneur who built a successful company what I hear is, “I got here because I know my product, and I know what my customers need. Along the way I added a team and now they need leadership and management and I don’t have any experience doing that.”

From the key executive I hear, “I got to this level on my business knowledge; I have always been the expert. Now, I know I need to develop the experts below me, how do I do that?”

For me the skill of an effective leader is first recognizing the need to grow and adapt and then finding resources to help us get there. Vistage members recognize this and look to their fellow members and chair to support them on this journey. Often members take the opportunity to share their challenges with other members who may be further along on the same journey.

And…those that take the risk of letting their teams know they are learning right along with the team are those that I observe adapt the fastest. Often it is the people who report to us that help us recognize the growth we need and teach us, by asking, what we need to do to be there for them.

After all, isn’t effective leadership really about taking care of our team so that they take care of the rest?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #8: Merging Two Organizations…

June 2, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #8:

Merging two organizations gives a leader an opportunity to form a new culture / leadership team / operating style. A common mistake is to adopt one or the other, thereby creating winners and losers.

This leadership view is actually a continuation of Leadership View #7 where I talked about getting buy-in during a merger. Once we have that buy-in from the early majority, the next question to answer is: what will be the culture, leadership and operating style of the combined group?

Remembering that a “merger” can mean combining two companies, two groups, or simply adding a significant number of new team members.

In my experience the culture bends. Last year, I added several new members to my Vistage CEO group and most of these new members came from other CEO groups where they had been members for some time. The groups they came from had their own culture, operating style and formal and informal leadership.

Here is what I learned from that experience.

First, the integration must be intentional. The people that were there first, feel a sense of ownership of the group. The new people want to add value. The challenge is creating situations that allow for both. The following steps worked for us:

-We form workgroups including members with various tenure and personality styles – sometimes the official leader was from the new group, sometimes from the old.

-New members were given the opportunity to showcase their expertise in a way that helped the group.

-We recognized that groups follow Bruce Tuckman’s model of forming, storming, norming, performing and they do it continuously. The merged group naturally moved through this process at it’s own pace.

The result: The group today is an integrated group with many of the same values as before, yet with updated norms and a new culture, well on its way to high performing.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: Most People Need Repetition

May 26, 2013 by Elisa Spain2 Comments

Once again, I am taking a brief pause from the Leadership Series for the monthly quote. The series will return next week with Leadership View #8.

This month’s leadership quote:

Most people need repetition more than instruction.

I had a clear reminder of the importance of repetition last month. One of my Vistage members noticed we were neglecting some of the tenants of our group’s Operating Agreement and called it out in a meeting. His noticing led to a rich discussion amongst members of that group, and one of the members said it well: “Just like diet and exercise, we know what to do and sometimes we need a reminder”.

In our busy lives, we are mostly focused on the urgent (hopefully it is the urgent and important). If we want to pay attention to the Important, Non-Urgent issues in our lives, we need reminders. Whether it is our Vision, our Mission or Operating Agreements that we share with our teams, or the commitments that we make to our spouses, life partners or family; we all need that repetition to keep us focused.

As a reminder,

Most people need repetition more than instruction.

What do each of us need reminding of today?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #7: When Merging Or Combining Two Organizations..

May 19, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #7:

When merging or combining two organizations, it has been estimated that 60% of the people will be relatively indifferent, 20% will be strongly supportive, and 20% will be strongly non-supportive. Focus on the 20% that are strongly supportive and converting the 60% who are neutral.

It is so easy to be drawn to want to “convert” those who are negative. Whether it’s the one customer we can’t seem to please; or the one person sleeping when we are giving a presentation; or the one person on our team of 25 who always has a negative comment.

And the same applies when combining organizations. There is an old adage that mergers succeed or fail based on cultural fit. My experience when combining organizations or adding a significant number of people to an existing group, is the culture bends. The core of the culture remains and it bends to accommodate and subsequently grow from the additions or the merger.

Those who are supportive and positive can inspire us as leaders to carry on and inspire those who are neutral to come on-board. Why waste our time on negative energy, when we can create more positive energy?

Questions for you to consider:

When was the last time you were leading an integration and felt drawn down by negative reactions?
Upon reflection, what percentage of those involved in the merger was actually negative?
What might you do next time to notice what percentage is positive to neutral and focus on them?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #5: When Leading Change..

May 5, 2013 by Elisa Spain4 Comments

Leadership View #5:

When leading change – get some early wins –this makes change irresistible to those that resist. Getting these “early wins” may involve changing priorities or sequencing of events.

How often do we begin an initiative by setting a goal with a date when everything will be complete?

When starting a project we are excited to get “it” done. What if instead we focused on getting small wins and buy-in, how might we approach the project differently?

One of my favorite visible stories of a leader who understood the importance of early wins is The Chicago Wacker Drive Project. Mayor Richard M. Daley began this enormous project, raised the funds for it and hired the team to lead it. It was a massive undertaking. The job required rebuilding both Upper and Lower Wacker, a primary downtown Chicago artery.

What I remember most about this project is it began in early 2001 and was declared “finished” 20 months later in late 2002. It was declared a success coming in on-time and on-budget. The reality was, only a portion of the Wacker Drive rebuild was completed during this period. Work on Wacker Drive continued for many years and continues today.

Mayor Daley knew he had to get an “early win” and sequence the events so that he could pause and celebrate success. The work that continued for ten years hence followed this same model. Small incremental projects are funded, begun and then completed and celebrated.

Here are my questions for you to consider when you next begin an initiative in your company:

What is the ideal sequencing to get the job done right and on-time?
If my goal is buy-in, what changes might I need to make to get that buy-in?
Am I willing to go slower at the front-end to get to adoption?
Who are the people I can count on to be early adopters and influencers? How do I engage them, so they are willing proselytize our success?
How will I celebrate success?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: Our Job As Marketers And Leaders

April 28, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Once again, I am taking a brief pause from the 45 Years of Leadership series for the monthly quote. The series will return next week with Marsh’s Leadership View #5.

This month’s leadership quote:

Our job as marketers and leaders is to create vibrant pockets, not to hunt for mass. – Seth Godin

This quote comes from Seth’s Super Bowl blog, entitled, Why do we care about football? In this post, Seth claims, that while mass TV built many elements of our culture, mass TV (except for the Super Bowl) is basically over. The new media giants of our age (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) don’t point everyone to one bit of content, don’t trade in mass. Instead, they splinter, connecting many to many, not many to one.

Facebook, Twitter and Google connect businesses to business, businesses to consumers and consumers to consumers. The question is no longer simply are you B2B or B2C but rather who are your customers, who do you want to have as customers and how do you continue to be relevant to them.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

45 Year Leadership View #4: A Leader Must Balance…

April 21, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Marsh Carter’s Leadership View #4:

A leader must balance between near-term and long-term leadership and management tasks.

Hmm.. last week’s leadership view involved balance and here we are with the same subject line again. It does seem that balance is a key challenge for every leader.

Most leaders have a sense of urgency, entrepreneurs especially. Often it is this sense of urgency that got us where we are. And, much like balancing the needs of the organization with the needs of our followers, we must also recognize which of our goals belong in the long term column and which belong as short-term.

And it is certainly a balancing act, because for high urgency leaders, we sometimes move tasks into the now, when they belong in the future. If you are challenged with sorting between short term and long term initiatives, here is a suggested approach to get started.

Begin by capturing all the ideas, tasks and goals. Next ask yourself the following three questions for each item:

How much time will it take to get this done?
What will be the impact/outcome for the organization when this is done? (people, resources, capital, impact on other initiatives impact on customers, etc.)
What will be the impact/outcome for the organization while we are getting this done? (people, resources, capital, impact on other initiatives impact on customers, etc.)

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com