The Three Choices of Resilient Leaders

'The Rambo types are the first to die.'

Navy Seal

Choosing to manage failure well is critical to expand commanding leadership skills. Yet, it is insufficient. Every leader encounters significant adversity throughout his or her career. How they choose to confront these hardships greatly determines their success.

Do you know any leaders who have been struck down by adversity and struggled to get back on their feet? Benedict Arnold, a traitor during the American Revolution, comes to my mind. He was actually a brilliant general in the Continental Army until he was blindsided by injury and insult. He handled it by turning his back on his country. Contrast that approach with those who seem to handle tough times like a rubber ball, bouncing back in record time. Former President Jimmy Carter recovered from his devastating 1980 reelection loss to Ronald Reagan by building the Carter Center and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What's the difference between these leaders?

Diane Coutu, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, has studied Holocaust survivors, resilient children, and business leaders who bounce back. (1) According to Coutu, the most resilient individuals choose to:

1. Accept of reality.

2. Value meaning.

3. Improvise.

1. Accept of reality. In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collin interviewed Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was held prisoner and tortured by the Vietcong for eight years. He asked Stockdale, "Who didn't make it out of the prisoner camps?" The leader responded, "Oh, that's easy, the optimists. They were the ones who said we are going to be out by Christmas. And then they said we'd be out by Easter, then the Fourth of July, then by Thanksgiving, and then it was Christmas again." Stockdale added, "They died of a broken heart." (2).

Commanding leaders choose responsibly by seeing reality the way it is and having faith that it will get better. That's what Collins calls the Stockdale paradox. The sun will come out, but probably not tomorrow.

This is the approach Gene Dimon chose to take when he was fired as president of Citigroup by then chairman Sandy Weill following 16 years of collaboration. Dimon scanned the already-prepared press releases and understood that the board agreed with Weill. He saw reality staring him in the face and walked out. A year and a half later, he took over the job of CEO at Bank One.

2. Value meaning. When we struggle, we try to make sense out of the struggle. We search for meaning. Coutu’s research shows that choosing a strong value system provides successful organizations and individuals meaning, especially during tough times. These values offer a way to interpret what is going on and how to act. Look how the self-serving values of the Benedict Arnold (e.g., arrogance, prideful, angry…) compare to the servant-leader values of Jimmy Carter (e.g., caring, compassionate, humanitarian…).

As an educator, one of my strong values is learning. So, when adversity strikes me, I search for meaningful lessons. I'll ask questions such as, What could I learn from this? How can this help me grow? How might this situation serve others?

3. Improvise. Leaders who thrive in adversity have options. The delivery company UPS considers improvisation a core skill. They empower their drivers to "do whatever it takes to deliver packages on time." This is exactly what they did one day after hurricane Andrew devastated southeast Florida in 1992. People were living in shelters and their cars because their homes had been reduced to rubble. Yet that didn’t stop the UPS drivers from delivering packages to these desperate, homeless people.

Laurence Gonzales concluded that versatility, the ability to perceive what's really happening and adapt to it, is critical to surviving life-threatening circumstances after he studied thousands who survived wilderness accidents. (3)

Which of these three can help you?

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. Diane Coutu; How Resilience Works, Harvard Business Review, May 2002, 46 - 55.

2. Jim Collins; Good to Great, HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2001, page 85.

3. Gonzalez L: Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. W. W. Norton: New York, 2003, page 279.

Choose to Be a Failure-Tolerant Leader

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

Henry Ford

To choose responsibly is the critical value for a commanding leader because choice determines how well leaders manage adversity, setbacks, and failure. (1) Richard Farson and his colleagues studied a number of “failure-tolerant” leaders in business, politics, sports, and science. They reported that leaders such as Robert Shapiro, former CEO of Monsanto, were troubled to find that their organizational cultures had conditioned employees to view unsuccessful products or projects as personal failures. To encourage more of an experimentation mindset, which is essential for innovation, Shapiro and these other failure-tolerant leaders employed a number of strategies, including the following:

1. Distinguish between excusable and inexcusable failure. Employees must know that failure is OK, but sloppy work will not be tolerated. Implement after action reviews that ask probing questions, such as:

- Why did the failure occur?

- Was the scope document and statement of work based on reality?

- How well was the project organized?

- Did the project manager collaborate and consult with the right people?

- What are the lessons learned and how are they disseminated?

2. Engage the person, not the project. Leaders who show a genuine interest in the employees’ growth and not just the status of the project, send the message that learning and development are just as important as project success.

3. Don't praise or criticize. Farson and his colleagues found that creativity decreases with praise. Employees actually want their leaders to be more interested in their work, and less focused on patting them on the back for the work. Robert Pirsig was correct when he wrote that caring is the precursor of quality. When the leader takes a nonjudgmental, yet caring interest in the work itself and the ongoing learning, employees are more willing to tolerate failure.

4. Fess up when you mess up. Leaders who candidly admit their own mistakes communicate that experimentation and learning is desired. Former CEO of Coke, Roberto Goizueta took responsibility, and years of ribbing, for the New Coke fiasco that occurred during his time at the helm. Admitting his mistake and laughing at himself taught more than hundreds of memos and speeches.

5. Collaborate, don't compete. Post-it notes might not be here today if 3M’s Spencer Silver had worried about competing and hoarding information about the "flawed" adhesive he invented with another colleague. 3M rewards collaboration and information exchange, not silo building.

These are a few ways to encourage your team to understand that failure is not only excusable, it is desirable. Adapt them to your environment to encourage everyone to choose to look at failure as learning opportunities. Let me know what works for you.

“The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

Thomas Watson, Sr., IBM

Keep failing,

Dave

Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes; The Failure-Tolerant Leader, Harvard Business Review, August 2002, 3 - 8.

Leaders Choose Responsibly

The Greek mythological figure Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, only to see it roll down again... forever. In the final chapter of his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares the absurd nature of life to Sisyphus’ predicament. Yet, the essay concludes, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

How could endlessly rolling a rock up a mountain culminate in happiness? Because Sisyphus made rolling his rock "his thing." He accepted the absurd nature of his being and became one with his rock. He threw himself into his work and became happy.

Sisyphus is teaching us that there is no “meaning of life,” only the meaning you choose to give life. Moreover, since life is a series of successive years, which consists of months, containing days, full of minutes... The meaning of life is the meaning you choose to give the minute grains of sand slipping through your hourglass of life. Sisyphus chose to make meaning out of his minutes and work. How about you?

Keep pushing your rock,

Dave

Why Leaders Need to Hug Their Reptilian Brain

According to a study of more than 100,000 executives, emotional intelligence is a better predictor of performance than technical skill, experience, or intellect. (1) As discussed in previous blogs, the four skills that can help you grow your emotional intelligence are:

I. Perceive your emotions. Emotions contain data. They are signals that tell us something is going on that we need to pay attention to it. The first step in being an emotionally intelligent leader is to be able to identify what emotions are occurring in ourselves and those around us.

II. Use your emotions. Researchers have shown that there are neurological links between how we feel and how we think. Emotions direct our attention to important events. We can try to ignore an emotion, but we are wired to have them influence our thinking and decision-making. Emotionally intelligent leaders use their emotions to help inform their thinking.

III. Understand your emotional future. One of the major reasons to grow our emotional intelligence is to be able to perform better - to produce outcomes that are more desirable. After taking the first two steps in this process, we are able to ask questions such as; What might happen if I choose option A? What’s the probable outcome if I try option B? Will option C really get me the result I desire?

IV. Regulate your emotions. Emotions are a feedback mechanism. The dictionary defines feedback as ‘information returned to the source.” Thus, emotions contain information for you. They are meant to help you manage your attention. If you do not stay open to this information and integrate it into your decisions and actions, you will miss an enormous amount of feedback necessary for effective leadership.

Leaders who regulate their emotions have self-control, think clearly even when they are experiencing strong emotions, and make decisions using both their heart and their head. They also can "psych themselves and others up" or calm others down. This fosters an environment of trust, fairness, integrity, and openness to change. (2) That's because politics, infighting, and resistance to change decrease when employees know that they can speak their mind, and share their concerns about change, without the boss losing their temper. One of the best strategies to help you manage your emotions is to hug your limbic system.

Hug your reptilian brain. Emotions flow from the neurotransmitters of your brain’s limbic system, sometimes referred to in evolutionary terms as your reptilian brain. This is the seat of feelings, impulses, and drives, and the home to your fight or flight mechanism. It is your limbic system that hijacks your brain under stress. Your copilot, the analytical neocortex, is often gagged and bound when the heat is on. That’s why thinking clearly under pressure is often difficult.

To improve your capacity to regulate your emotions you must engage your reptilian brain in training. Listening to a lecture or reading (including this blog), which is how most leadership training is delivered, doesn't enhance emotional intelligence because the learning doesn't involve the limbic system. Practice does not make perfect; progressive practice, in simulated conditions of reality, makes perfect.

For example, I recently interviewed the CEO of a billion-dollar technology company about the emotional growth of one of his executives, whom I have been coaching for the last four months. The CEO stated that his executive was "a different guy" because of the dramatic improvements he had made in a very short period of time. The CEO asked me how I had done it. I told him that I had recruited the people that surrounded his executive to help me. Thus, the executive’s own peers and direct reports provided frequent, timely, accurate feedback from the trenches.

Of course, my ego likes to think that my weekly coaching sessions made a big difference. But I doubt it. My leadership coaching is successful because I involve the limbic system in progressive practice under real conditions. That’s where leaders learn to hug their reptilian brain. You should hug yours there too.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves; Heartless Bosses? Harvard Business Review, December 2005, 24.

2. Daniel Goleman; What Makes a Leader? Harvard Business Review, January 2004, 82 - 91.

How Leaders Manage Paradox - The Top Ten Tips

How would you describe the best leader you've ever known; someone you've actually seen in action? Professor Quinn asked 295 part-time MBA students to answer this question by completing his "competing values assessment." (1) He found that less than 5% (i.e., only 15 leaders) could be categorized as “masters.” His analysis showed that the best leaders take on paradoxical roles, such as mentor and director, innovator and coordinator, facilitator and producer… These masters are effective because they maintain the creative tension among these competing roles. Quinn concluded that, "perhaps effectiveness is the result of maintaining a creative tension between contrasting demands." (This is one of the reasons leaders find the eXpansive Leadership Model so effective.)

Perhaps embracing paradox is what Gardner Kent was thinking when he came up with a strategy to compete with Greyhound and Gray Rabbit bus lines. In the book The Paradox Process - Creative Business Solutions... Where You Least Expect to Find Them, author Derm Barrett tells the story how Kent's bus line, called the Green Tortoise was having difficulty competing until Kent started thinking in opposites. Instead of competing on speed with his competitors, Kent decided to add extra days and make their trips more fun. These “fun” trips led to an entire new market and profit center. (2)

Professor Conlin and his colleagues also confirmed the importance of contrarian thinking. They studied 20 British string quartets and discovered that the most successful groups recognized and managed paradoxes in their work. (3) Professor Beech found what works for musicians also applies to managers when he studied 400 middle managers in the United Kingdom. He concluded that raising awareness of the tensions leaders feel at work enhanced their ability to manage them. (4)

Most of us were raised with an either/or mindset. There was one answer in the back of the book when we went to school, we were taught that leaders are paid to make tough decisions, and we learned early in our careers to select the answer to solve the problem. However, it also became obvious early on, that things are not always black and white. The research is now telling us that the most effective leaders supplement their traditional either/or approach to problem solving with both/and, paradoxical thinking. They learn how to manage the tension between competing demands from diverse stakeholders. Here are the top ten tips to help you eXpand your commanding style through paradoxical thinking (5):

1. What you see is not all there is. Understand that how you perceive your business challenge and environment at the present moment is not reality. Your reality is filtered through your limited mental model -- your narrow and biased view of the world. Pretend you're on the outside of a house looking through one window into one room. Don't assume you know what is going on throughout the room, much less the entire house.

2. A closed mind is a wonderful thing to lose. Welcome conflicting models, styles, and approaches. Do not fear them. Effective leaders like George Washington, invite contrary thinking, views, and opinions.

3. There are better ways. Leaders who embrace contrarian thinking are ready to conduct experiments to test new ways of solving problems and addressing issues. They know that the answer is somewhere in the house if they can just view the right room from the proper angle.

4. From the abstract to the concrete. Expansive leaders are not dreamers, disconnected from reality. They are thinkers giving birth to a new model of reality, as Kent did with Green Tortoise bus line.

5. Appreciate complexity. In the search for opposites, you risk getting lost in a convoluted maze of complexity. Messiness doesn't frighten the opposable mind. It knows it will wade through the muck in time.

6. Give it time. Leaders who embrace paradoxical thinking understand that it takes time to work through a paradoxical issue. When they’re under pressure, they pause. They recognize that it is better to respond to difficult issues than react to them. They seldom rush to judgment.

7. Practice shifting gears. If you want to stretch your mindset, change the rhythm of your work. Spend time thinking about major innovative growth strategies and then quickly transition to focusing on managing operations. Go from a motivating team meeting to a one-on-one counseling session with an underperformer. Fast transition activities teach the mind agility. In nature, sports and leadership, agility is a highly prized ability.

8. Support the opposition. When your top management makes a final decision that you disagree with, support it wholeheartedly. Don't let your team know that you do not agree with the decision. Become a member of the loyal opposition.

9. Adopt the beginners mind. Zen teacher Suzuki wrote that, "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." Improve your paradoxical thinking by spending four or five minutes every day pretending you don't know anything about what you're doing. Assume that your window is foggy. How can you see through other windows? Who might have different perceptions? What other ways are there to discover what's going on inside? Where might you go for more info?

10. Leverage your weakness. People do best what they enjoy most. That's the reason we should spend the majority of our time working in those areas that access our strengths. However, just as a bodybuilder who pumps iron but refuses to stretch becomes inflexible, leaders who overuse their strengths become narrow minded. To expand your thinking through paradox, leverage your weakness. Spend 20 to 30 minutes every day working on your relative weakness. If you're a strong rational leader, how could you stretch your visionary leadership style? If empowering is your strength, how might you work on your commanding style? You get the idea. Stretching your comfort zone leads to adaptability, flexibility and agility.

George Washington was a master of paradox. He longed to be seen as a great leader and reluctantly accepted his appointment to lead the Continental Army during the American Revolution. He was ambitious and needed to be persuaded to accept a second term as president of the United States. He was a commanding leader who shot deserters and a compassionate person who wept at human tragedy. He was even strong enough to doubt. How about you?

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. Robert Quinn; Beyond Rational Management - Mastering the Paradoxes in Competing Demands of High Performance, Josie-Bass Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1988, page 91.

2. Derm Barrett; The Paradox Process - Creative Business Solutions... Where You Least Expect to Find Them, AMACOM, New York, New York, 1998, page 18.

3. Conlon, D; The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups: A Study of British String Quartets, Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1991.

4. Beech, Nic; Contrary prescriptions: Recognizing Good Practice Tensions in Management, Organization Studies, January 2003, 1 -- 28.

5. Roger Martin; The Opposable Mind - How Successful Leaders Win through Integrative Thinking, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2007.

The Leader’s Top Ten Paradoxical Errors

“They were born to hate each other." (1) Thomas Jefferson was an American aristocrat from the agricultural state of Virginia. He was a sloppy-dressing, visionary philosopher, who gazed across mountains and oceans, and became America's first secretary of state.

Alexander Hamilton was a self-made man. A bastard and immigrant from the West Indies who dressed meticulously, thought rationally, and focused on the bottom line as the country's first secretary of treasury. George Washington knew that he and the country needed to manage the tension between these two strong personalities to accomplish the common goal of giving birth to this confederation of states. Paradox had come to America's first administration. Washington’s leadership genius was in his ability to embrace it in himself and others. How about you?

How often do your decisions involve competing priorities, contradictory demands, or conflicting stakeholders? Are you ever asked to: Get more done with less and coach/mentor team members? Hold employees accountable and increase motivation? Meet quarterly objectives and plan for long-term goals…?

“The problem, of course, is that… management is complicated and confusing. Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change perpetually and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. How is anyone supposed to reconcile all this?”

Professor Henry Mintzberg (2)

Leadership scholar Henry Mintzberg is telling us that today’s ambiguous work environment (perhaps as uncertain as America's situation was in the late 1700’s) requires that leaders at all levels manage these “paradoxical tensions” – issues that pull us in opposite directions.

A paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but in reality expresses a possible truth. It is derived from the Latin word paradoxum, meaning beyond belief. In times of stress, researchers tell us that leaders often focus on addressing one issue in the paradox instead of expanding their mindset to embrace both, as Washington did. (3)This tunnel vision under pressure results in these TEN errors:

1. Cutting cost without protecting strategic expenditures.

2. Reducing training in a time when employees actually have time to learn.

3. Increasing pressure to perform (e.g., productivity, sales) without assessing the negative impact of added stress.

4. Adhering to organizational policy while sacrificing the entrepreneurial spirit.

5. Meeting quarterly projections without keeping an eye on long-term growth.

6. Rewarding individual performance to the detriment of cross-functional collaboration.

7. Accelerating the pace of change while lacking the anchors of stability.

8. Pushing employees to get more done with less without engaging them.

9. Spending more time at work to the detriment of a satisfying home life

10. Mistaking broadcasting (i.e., get the message out) for communicating (i.e., ensure the message is well received).

Do any of those looks familiar to you? How often have you experienced the negative consequences of over-focusing on one side of the issue at the expense of the other during stressful times?

The essence of thinking paradoxically is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." To be able to think paradoxically is a very rare, desirable and effective leadership skill according to OnPoint’s analysis of global leaders. (4)

So, next time you see opposites in yourself, others, or in situations, keep your mind open to the whole truth; perhaps you'll see reality.

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. James Flexner; Washington - The Indispensable Man, Little, Brown & Co., Time Warner Book Group, New York, NY, 1974, page 232.

2. Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg: The Five Minds of the Manager. Harvard Business Review, November: 54 -- 63, 2003.

3. Robert S. Kaplan and coworkers: Unconventional Wisdom in a Downturn, Harvard Business Review, December 2008, 28-31.

4. Richard Lepsinger, How Top Performing Companies Get Ahead of the Pack and Stay There, American Management Association MWorld, Summer 2007, 3 - 4.

Five Tips Leaders Use to Manage Ambiguity

Given 100% of the information and unlimited amount of time, you could make excellent decisions most of the time. Yet in today's increasingly foggy, fast-paced, complex work environment, do you always have the data or time desired to make a decision?

According to the American Management Association’s survey of 1,573 global corporations, dealing with ambiguity is essential for leadership success because close to 90% of the issues leaders deal with these days are ambiguous -- the problem is often unclear and the solution vague. (1) Listed below are five tips to help you efficiently manage ambiguous issues or problems.

Analyze probable causes of the problem. Generate a list of the possible causes. Use a rating scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being slight possibility and 5 being highly probable cause. In a column next to your ratings, write down what you must do to investigate the cause further. Then, rate how much effort is required to conduct the investigation. Again, use a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being minimal effort and 5 being tremendous amount of effort. Finally, weigh the probability of the cause with the amount of investigation needed to determine the order in which you will investigate the causes. Rank the order in the last column.

Minimize unnecessary data collection. Do you ever find yourself collecting data just because it's going to make you feel better? If so, ask yourself two questions: “Is what I’m collecting absolutely necessary? How much value doesn't really add?” Just being conscious of ‘how much is enough’ will help you decrease the collection of unnecessary information.

Take small steps. To increase your comfort with uncertainty, increase your openness to mistakes. One way to do this is to take a small step, get immediate feedback, adjust course, gather a little more data, and take another small step. The process is similar to finding your way in the dark. By taking small steps and feeling your way along the way, you minimize the risk of a stubbing your toe or big fall.

Prioritize and organize. It is easy to become distracted when dealing with uncertainty. Review your priorities with your boss. Set aside specific time to work on these priority issues uninterrupted. Focus on the fundamental few, not the meaningless many.

Accept criticism as learning. Leaders who manage ambiguity well understand that they will make mistakes. They adopt the attitude that there is no failure only feedback. It's only failure if they choose not to learn from the experience. Even when they are being criticized by others, they choose to interpret the criticism as learning.

Leaders use these tips to find their way through these turbulent times. How are you developing your skills to manage the foggy future?

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

1. American Management Association Report, Leading into the Future, New York, New York, 2005.