Learning Leader

The most important thing you must work on

I'm indebted to the writings of Michael Gerber ('The E-Myth Manager' and other associated titles) for explaining the common error that many of us who lead growing businesses can fall into: we get seduced into working mostly in the business rather than working on it. I find that this time of year is particularly good to stand back and reflect more broadly on how it ought to develop.

However, I find even this perpsective is becoming a little limited for me. For example, time and again, I hear experienced venture capitalists remark that the pitch is often not the thing that swings it for them in deciding to invest in this company or that; they find that they do not so much invest in a business plan or a business model as in the leaders themselves. They invest in the people; people who strike them as so remarkable and invigorating that they will back them with their own money, all in order to become part of their story.

So I find myself standing back from working in the business, even from working on the business, and working on me. This becomes a different take on the tradition of New Year's resolutions. The question I ask myself is, 'How can I develop in 2012 in four areas of my life?'

1. Physical.
   For me, this primarily affects matters of diet and exercise. How can I so eat and exercise that the energy I bring to leading my company goes up? I've come to value regular exercise in my struggle to gain energy. Often I will get ideas - such as the one for this post, for example - during or at the end of a workout; presumably because there is more oxygen coursing through my brain. So it becomes stupid for me not to exercise.
2. Mental.
   How am I stretching myself with my own reading and study? Major influences in my life are the other blogs to which I subscribe, the books I read (more history, agile management, and human psychology these days), and the Scripture my vicar occasionally asks me to preach on. Keeping a regular journal and writing this blog also help me keep sharp.
3. Emotional.
   As someone with a tendency to the melancholic, I find I must work consciously on this one. One of my favourite quotes from C.S. Lewis is, 'Joy is the serious business of heaven.' I aim to be more thankful, to smile rather more, to sing more, to play more. I find being around my grandchildren helps enormously.
4. Spiritual.
   As a Christian I practice the traditional disciplines, but privately as directed by my Rabbi (see Matthew 6:1) so I'm cautious about going into more detail here. I find these habits have helped keep me grounded as a businessman as to what 'success' really means, and they bring me back regularly to focus on what really matters.

Of course, all these areas affect each other, so I must attend to them all.

If you, dear reader, think I have missed anything, I'd value hearing from you.

As we all enter 2012, may I wish you and your loved ones well, a year in which we all grow. Remember the most important thing any of us can work on is ourselves.

Good Change: Relentless or Rhythmical?

As a continue to read (and value) John Kotter's latest book, A Sense of Urgency, there is a growing dis-ease that I must set out here. As I noted in an earlier post, Kotter makes a distinction between a true sense of urgency with a false sense of urgency and with complacency. But he goes on to describe this desired state a permanent dynamic:

    'It is often believed that people cannot maintain a high sense of urgency over a prolonged period of time, without burnout. Yet with all the alertness, initiative and speed, true urgency doesn't produce dangerous levels of stress, at lest partially because it motivates people to relentlessly look for ways to rid themselves of chores that add little value to their organizations but clog their calendars and slow down needed action. People who are determined to move and win, now, simply do not waste time or add stress by engaging in irrelevant or business-as-usual activities.' (p.9)'

Professor Kotter, you anticipate my objection. It reminds me of another quote, this time from Tom Watson, Founder of IBM:

    "IBM is what it is today for three special reasons.  The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would like when it was finally done. You might say that I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision  - was in place. 

    “The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason that IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture in place of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I then realised that unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realised that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.  From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day, we attempted to model the company after that template.  At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be,  and at the start of the following day, we set out to make up the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.  We didn't do business at IBM, we built one." 

But I am still sceptical about living this level of urgency as a business lifestyle. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal , and Dr Jack Groppel in The Corporate Athlete: How to Achieve Maximal Performance in Business and Life , have brought research on improving athletic performance to the business arena. All human systems operate on a stress and recovery cycle. What Loehr, Groppel, et al.
 have shown is that by introducing proper, regular disciplines ('rituals') that slightly stress more but allow a rhythm of recovery, individual performance can improve in measurable terms by as much as 20%.

Now, if this is true for individuals, could this also hold true for teams and organisations? I think there may be some carry-through into project or organisational performance. Indeed, I have come across organisations where there have been deliberate practices of planning shorter, high-stress project life cycle bursts, but then following that with a step-down into useful, but restorative recovery patterns of work.

As a Christian I draw on the Jewish tradition of Shabbat ('Sabbath') as one of my spiritual disciplines (rituals), and I can testify to the restorative nature of this practice. Among other things, it breaks the 'Tyranny of the Urgent', as Charles Hummel called it, and helps me to get my head above the weeds and remember what is truly important. It's more than a mere cliche to say that life is a marathon and not a sprint.

So, yes, working on truly urgent/important work as a tempo is energising, but I suspect it is even more productive when it is not chronic, but mixed with cycles of recovery.

Facebook? No, thanks.

The trouble with so many of us is that we underestimate the power of simplicity.
--Robert Stuberg

This feels like I'm about to go public on something bordering on blog heresy and family treason.

Facebook is the current social networking phenomenon that appears to be sweeping all before it. Only today on BBC News, mention was made of the number of hits a Wolverhampton tramp had received on his site. It seems a physical home is optional, but a Facebook syber-home is a 'must have'. Personal evidence for this is that, from what I can gather, all my children are on Facebook and I've just received another invitation from a friend to join.

Yes, the sad truth about me is that I'm not yet on Facebook.

From time to time a son or daughter tells me that they are aware of a sibling doing such-and-such or is feeling thus-and-so because of their Facebook. I met a client delegate last week who said she made it her business to get an invitation from her son to become her Facebook 'friend'; it took a while for him to comply while he did the Facebook equivalent of tidying up his room before the invitation was forthcoming!

So am I missing out? Probably. Well, shouldn't I 'get with the revolution'?

No, thanks. This is for reasons not directed at Facebook in particular. I am sure it is a very good piece of technology that brings all kinds of happiness to those who use it. And if I were criticising Facebook per se I would be doing so from a position of some ignorance, wouldn't I?

My reasons are more generic, both negative and positive, and apply equally well to why I don't have a Blackberry or an iPhone either.

Negatively, I fear such technologies will make further inroads into my already too-fragmented life. They will make demands on my time at inconvenient moments. Like adding a cuckoo egg to my nest, in time it will hatch into some growing, voracious monster, demanding more and more from me. I fear it will displace the quality and energy I commit to more conventional but deeply rewarding social networking: the small group of people I meet with weekly, for example. We 'do life deeply' together, and we do it the old-fashioned way by going to meet each other and sharing a real, not virtual, Java.

Positively, I decline Facebook invitations for a pursuit that is more deeply counter-cultural: I want to live more and more by the spiritual discipline of Simplicity. Like other spiritual disciplines, superficially it looks like denying oneself something; but at a deeper level it enriches the life of the disciple. By denying myself otherwise good activities and possessions I find I de-clutter my day and my thinking so that I can pursue and focus upon what Stephen Covey calls, "That which matters most". I've come to value 'thinking time' as crucial to staying focused on the important. Whereas when I react to email, IM or phone calls, I find I am doing just that - reacting. The more I can shift my life onto pro-active, simple focused thought and action, the more the quality and effectiveness of my life improves.

Try it.

So, if you are generous enough to invite me onto Facebook, MySpace or whatever other social network, please don't take offence if my response, sad as it may appear, is, "Thanks, but no thanks."

 

Technorati Tags: Facebook, simplicity, spiritual discipline, MySpace, Blackberry

The Cancer Code

While I was away on vacation I finished reading a book sent to me by the co-author, Hobie Swan, called The Cancer Code. The book tells the heroic story of Mike Jetter’s battle with leukaemia told through his own eyes and those of his wife, Bettina.  

It was when he went into his first of several relapses with the prospect of another two months cooped up in a sterile isolation room that he decided to use his time to develop MindMan, later to become MindManager. During this process, Mike found he recovered more quickly, and left him and Bettina beginning to service a growing business.

As I read this, I was reminded of Viktor Frankl’s observations in Man’s Search for Meaning, how often human beings can prevail through tremendous challenges if they live for some transcendent purpose - something beyond their immediate suffering. In Mike Jetter’s case, he wanted to leave some kind of software legacy.

The book also reminded me how truly ground-breaking the MindManager software has become. I go back to it now with a fresh appetite.

Finally, I noted the references in the book to my friend Nick Duffill, and how Mike and Bettina describe him as ‘scary smart’. And so he is. But I hadn’t realised he had made such a significant contribution to the Mindjet story.

So thanks, Hobie. I appreciated reading this inspiring story, and I would recommend it to others. (To my colleagues at Pearce Mayfield: my copy goes into the Pearce Mayfield library!)

The Leadership Summit

It’s been a few days since I returned from Chicago, and I’m aware since my last post all has gone quiet. I’ve been making this annual trip to the Leadership Summit in South Barrington for several years now. Why?

Well, I was looking over an entry I made in my journal after last year’s conference and I can affirm that the same reasons apply:

• World-class presentations. I’m a professional communicator, so I am always scrutinising public speakers for an insight into effective communications. At the Summit, delegates receive a range of different styles – from the coldly cerebral to this year’s black gospel tour-de-force from Kenneth Ulmer. Some of these speakers provide me with insights into good communication skills, simply by observing them engage a large audience (7,000 in the new Willow Creek Auditorium, plus another 50,000 simul-casted to 70 other sites around North America).
  
• Applications to Business. I am an entrepreneur. I love being about building a great organisation. Willow Creek has a reputation for breaking the mould, introducing the world of business to the world of church, and in my case vice versa. A fascinating example of this this year was when the Senior Pastor of Willow Creek, Bill Hybels, interviewed Ken Blanchard (author of numerous popular management books from The One Minute Manager onwards) and John Maxwell (21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership) together on stage. Blanchard was introduced as moving towards Christian spirituality in his later years, discovering Jesus Christ as ‘the greatest leader’, whilst Maxwell has transitioned the opposite way, from a career as a pastor into providing compelling leadership seminars to business.
  
  Whatever one’s views of Christian spirituality, business people generally can accept that developing churches in a post-Christian culture is probably one of the hardest things to do. Also, I find that churchey people are far less defensive about accepting lessons from business these days.
  
  In previous years at the Summit I have encountered Jim Collins, Daniel Goleman, Stephen Sample, Warren Bennis, Marcus Buckingham and other great commentators on leadership in the business world. It is also at Willow that I have across great writers such as Doug Hall, Roger van Oeck, William Bridges and Robert Quinn.
  
  And all that in the context of a conference aimed primarily to help church leaders grow. This environment is so stimulating because it is mould-breaking.It challenges one’s prejudices and preconceptions.
  
• Spiritual Insight and Renewal. I am a follower of Christ … or at least I try to be, with less success at times. This reason is more personal, but still vital.
  It was interesting at this conference that one of the speakers, Jack Groppel, spoke on the Fully Engaged™ method from a sports and business perspective, yet sitting at the top of his personal energy pyramid – above the Physical, Emotional, Mental – sat Spiritual. In this model’s view of personal performance – about managing one’s energy rather than time – I didn’t feel Dr Groppel was merely playing to the gallery, throwing a sop to these church leaders, but that managing one’s spiritual wellbeing was seen as vital.
  
  And so it is.
  
• Time Away to Reflect Privately. My Myers-Briggs colleague, Bill Patterson, tells me I’m an introvert. I suppose I am. (I always tell him I’ll have to go away on my own and think about that..) I find going away like this and having more discretionary protected time very energising.
  
  I suppose I could have hacked it as a monk.
  
  One of the big advances in my own self-awareness is something pretty obvious when I write about it: thinking takes time. I like the writer’s life, the reflective life.
  
• Processing all these experiences with my friend. My friend Mike is similarly a Leadership Summit ‘junkie’. We are engaged in leading in very different spheres, so that is probably why we sharpen each other up. As in previous years, we have stayed at the Marriott Schaumburg. So most evenings we would share a quiet Miller Lite in the ‘Bobby London’ bar (I think it’s supposed to be like a British pub – keep trying, Marriott) and mull over what particularly provoked us, or what connections we were making within our own business contexts.
  
  Mike’s a strategic thinker, and “get’s” the vision thing. The Bible says, “Iron sharpens iron”; I don’t think the text was just referring to metal-working. I always come away stimulated and somehow enlarged by my conversations with Mike.
  
• Church Application. I have a small non-professional role in my church. My leader, Tim was not able to come this year because of family circumstances, but I need to ‘de-brief’ him … soon.
  
• Combating Cultural Myopia. Tony Robbins first articulated this for me. Basically, we all have cultural blind spots in our thinking and in our commerce with each other. By travelling to another culture – and Chicagoland is another culture for us Brits – we can learn much about ourselves and the things we take for granted.
  
  For example, I think we British do have an unhealthily high level of cynicism. I suspect this a post-colonial thing: we are trying to be at ease with being a small player on the world stage, where most of the world map is no longer in pink.
  
  So it was kind of sad to see some of the Brits in our party purveying their cynicism in their little Church of England huddle, with all of their prejudices intact as they left O’Hare at the end of the week. It reminded me of the dwarves at the end of the CS Lewis’s The Last Battle. We all need to get out more. We Brits do. God knows, the Americans do. Arabs do.
  
  (Anyway, I’ll stop there as I can feel myself getting into an unhealthy rant… I need to go and have a little lie down ….)

I may post more on individual learnings from this year’s conference in other posts.

Proud to be British, Proud to be a Human Being ... in Oxford Street!

Just now, I was privileged to stand with thousands out on Oxford Street in silence as we remembered the dead and their loved ones from last week’s senseless bombings.

It was a remarkable experience.

Oxford Street is to my perceptions the busiest shopping street in London and yet for the two minutes at noon the thousands who joined me out on the street were in silence. Buses, cabs and trucks stopped. The clothes store next door even interrupted it’s non-stop music(!).

And the end …

many of us quietly applauded.

I think we were applauding London at its best. I was proud to be part of that moment.

The Process of Reconciliation

Tomorrow evening I am due to speak to this subject at my local church. As I researched and pondered on this area I came to see something of just how important this business of being able to engage in reconciliation is to us all. For me, my Christian spirituality is profoundly rooted in relationships, anyway; both with God and with others around me. So I now regard the business of reconciliation as a key element in my discipleship.

However, if you find such spiritual sentiments absurd or even repugnant, bear with me one moment. I am persuaded that what we call in business ‘conflict resolution’ is, in fact, a key skill in that meta-competence of leadership.

So often, I have seen the essential litmus test of a leader is how they respond when faced with a conflict. What they do next defines a leader. People who are no more than positional leaders (that is, in a position of authority but necessarily exercising a competence as a leader) are either likely to ignore the problem (denial), deal with it aggressively (anger) or engage in some kind of blame game (transference). Whereas those who show true leadership always head towards the relational rift in a way that is exemplary and reinforces trust in the character of the leader themselves.

In my research for this message, I came across a really helpful set of steps for a generic reconciliation process from the Reconciliation Institute. This process appears to have developed out of years of experience conducting the process between individuals as well as between communities in conflict with other communities. I like the way it first addresses the needs, values and feelings of ourselves before proceeding to try and understand those of the other party.

Regarding feelings, these are the emotions that put heat into any conflict, and denied feeling by the other party - or any attempt to dismiss them - only fuels that heat. Feelings need to be described and heard. They are as to be treated as tangible as facts in any reconciliation that is to be more than superficial.

Sadly, the mindset of too many in business ignores the dimension of others’ feelings, or regards such indulgence as a weakness. ‘The only things that matter are the facts,’ they say.

Facts matter too. Step #2 of the process_of_reconciliation recognises that it is often the case that a party with a grievance (perhaps because of misunderstood or ignored feelings!) will damn outright the other party. In Christian forgiveness we are taught only to ask for forgiveness and to release forgiveness for things specifically done. We do not forgive people for who they are, but specifically for what they have done. This is important. Otherwise we continue in the sort of conflict that so demonises our enemy that we regard them as less than human. This cannot lead to reconciliation. It’s easier to write off or kill our enemy if we regard them as other than human.

I’m struck by how much the whole process structure also looks very much like a negotiation. But it is a negotiation of sorts. We are looking for a win-win: I win and you win. That, along with the sometimes mutual forgiveness is the bedrock of lasting reconciliation.

What I will be saying tomorrow night is that:

• reconciliation is scary: we don’t know how it will turn out, so it requires courage (a leadership attribute).
• Reconciliation is also painful; and true leaders sometimes require all their courage and strength of character to engage in it.
• But the pay-off is tremendous: reconciliation is transcendent; it leaves all parties involved more fully human.

Today reconciliation might begin when a soldier gives a sweet to a boy in Fallujah, but it is only complete when both go through a process. That may take years. But isn’t it worth it?

[First published in my Bloglines Business Log.]