Model the behavior you expect from employees

Employees look to leaders for guidance on culture, but they tend to discount lofty statements about abstract values. Instead, they closely observe what leaders do for signals about what behavior is encouraged, expected, and tolerated.

There is no correlation between what companies aspire to and how employees assess them on corporate core values. When leaders act consistently with core values, however, it is one of the most powerful predictors of how positively employees rate their corporate culture.

Donald Sull and Charles Sull writing for the MIT Sloan Management Review

The Emergency Exit Rule

People who have high emotional intelligence understand that if you want to be more persuasive and even win most arguments, it's important to do two things:

·       Avoid distracting, emotional mini controversies.

·       Offer easy ways for people to overcome emotional objections, and more easily follow the path you want them to take.

I call this whole concept the "Emergency Exit Rule." It's about planting seeds that allow people to save face and maintain their pride--while ultimately agreeing with you.

Imagine a police detective arrests a suspect. During interrogation, he or she uses a common but controversial strategy called the Reid technique. It involves questioning frameworks that can be summarized by example, like this:

·       "We know that you walked out of the store with the jewelry, but you don't seem like a bad person. Maybe you didn't realize how expensive it really was?"

·       "It's clear you were intoxicated when the police pulled you over. Am I right in thinking you'd probably had only a couple of drinks, and didn't realize you might have been over the limit?"

 The Emergency Exit Rule is all about giving them the easiest, most attractive way possible to back down and agree with your position.

Bill Murphy Jr. writing in Inc.

Harmful comments at Work

Families and workplaces have a tendency to overlook people’s harmful comments or behavior out of respect for a shared history. At family gatherings, “sometimes there’s this idea of like, Oh, well, that’s just Uncle Larry. He might say some homophobic or racist, sexist stuff, but that’s just how he is,” Cynthia Pong, a New York City–based career coach said. “I have seen that happen before in the workplace, excusing people who’ve maybe been around the company for some time, and really not holding them to account for the highly problematic things that they may be saying or doing.”

Joe Pinsker, writing in The Atlantic

Helping Others Develop

The purposes of the group are best served when the leader helps followers to develop their own initiative, strengthens them and the use of their own judgment, enables them to grow, and to become better contributors. -John W. Gardner

The Struggle for Social Innovation

Social problem solving is not only slow, it is untidy.  Purposeful social change occurs through a long and disorderly process of trial and error not unlike that of an infant learning to walk. The infant tries, fails, has partial successes, learns, bumps its nose, cries, and tries again. It has many failures before it succeeds. This is why Harlan Cleveland says that “planning is improvisation on a sense of direction.”  No plan for social or institutional Improvement can be put into effect without innumerable in-course corrections.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Shrink the Change

A sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It’s easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

If you’re leading a change effort… rather than focusing solely on what’s new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what’s already been conquered.  

A business cliché commands us to “raise the bar.” But that’s exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. 

If you want a reluctant to get moving, you need to shirk the change.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

The Leadership Context

The attributes which make for effective leadership depend on the situation and which the leader is functioning. There are no traits that guarantee successful leadership in all situations. the leader of the University faculty may have quite different attributes from the commander of a military attack team. the qualities required of a legislative leader are not those required of a religious leader. This is not to say that the setting or context is everything and the attributes of the individual nothing. What produces a good result is the combination of a particular context and an individual with the appropriate qualities to lead in that context.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Earned success

Earned success gives you a sense of accomplishment. Employers who give clear guidance and feedback, reward merit, and encourage their employees to develop new skills are the most likely to give you those feelings. Look for a boss who acts that way—and if you have the opportunity, be that kind of boss. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Why organizations become stale and ineffective

Organizations are created by their founders to serve vibrant, living purposes. but all too often the founding purposes fade and what finally get served are the purposes of institutional self-enhancement. It happens in hospitals to the detriment of patients, in schools to the detriment of students, in businesses to the detriment of shareholders and customers, end in government to the detriment of taxpayers. It is rarely the result of evil intent: it happens because memes triumph over ends, form triumphs over spirit, and the turf syndrome conquers all. 

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Stale and ineffective

Organizations are created by their founders to serve vibrant, living purposes. but all too often the founding purposes fade and what finally get served are the purposes of institutional self-enhancement. It happens in hospitals to the detriment of patients, in schools to the detriment of students, in businesses to the detriment of shareholders and customers, end in government to the detriment of taxpayers. It is rarely the result of evil intent: it happens because memes triumph over ends, form triumphs over spirit, and the turf syndrome conquers all.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Leading with Empathy

Leaders can demonstrate empathy in two ways. First, they can consider someone else’s thoughts through cognitive empathy (“If I were in his/her position, what would I be thinking right now?”). Leaders can also focus on a person’s feelings using emotional empathy (“Being in his/her position would make me feel ___”). But leaders will be most successful not just when they personally consider others, but when they express their concerns and inquire about challenges directly, and then listen to employees’ responses.

Leaders don’t have to be experts in mental health in order to demonstrate they care and are paying attention.

Tracy Brower writing in Forbes

Managers and Leaders

The manager is more tightly linked to an organization than is the leader. Indeed, the leader may have no organization at all. Florence Nightingale, after leaving the Crimea, exercised extraordinary leadership in healthcare for decades with no organization under her command. Gandhi was a leader before he had an organization. Some of our most memorable leaders have headed movements so amorphous that management would be an inappropriate word.  

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Prisoners of their own procedures

Means tend to triumph over ends. Form triumphs over spirit. People become prisoners of their own procedures. The means and methods were originally designed to achieve some specific end, but when circumstances change and new means are called for, it turns out that the old ones had become sacrosanct; the means have become ends in themselves— no longer effective perhaps, but enshrined. People forget what they set out to do. It happens all the time. So the mature organization ends up with a web of customs, procedures, written and unwritten rules that is extremely hard to cut through.

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Communication Upward

Middle- and upper-level executive should recognize that they are dependent on information that has been filtered, analyzed, abstracted, sorted and condensed by other segments of the organization. It is hard for them to stay in touch with unprocessed reality. Every official must periodically step outside the executive cocoon and experience the basic realities that the system is presumably designed to deal with. 

Every organization has its front-line activities— selling, fighting, healing, teaching— and its bureaucratic or executive-level activities. Both are important, but the frontline activities take place far from the executive’s swivel chair. The front-line people who wrestle with action problems every day know a lot more than anyone ever asked them.

The layers of middle and upper management can be a formidable filter against creative ideas generated below; and there have been many attempts to create alternative opportunities for communication upward, such as the suggestion box and the inspector general.But there is probably no substitute for creating a culture— a set of attitudes, customs and habits throughout the organization— that favors easy two-way communication, in and out of channels, among all layers of the organization. Two key messages should be implicit in such a culture: 1. “You will know what's going on, and 2. “Your voice will be heard.”

John W. Gardner, On Leadership

Here's what I'm thinking

"If you walk into a room as a senior person and innocently say, 'Here's what I'm thinking about this,' you've already skewed people's thinking," says Marine Gen. Peter Pace. His approach: "Start out with a question and don't voice an opinion."

Why? Because people can't line up behind you if they don't know where you stand. And if you present subordinates with an intellectual challenge, they feel freer to offer their opinions without fear of giving offense. "If you are looking for answers, ask the question," advises Pace, and "if you are looking for an honest critique, you ought to be the first person to self-critique." 

Michael Useem writing in Fortune Magazine

Acting The Part

The late Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack once told me that he was at a loss when he first moved behind the camera, so he simply acted like a director. 

 The feeling of not being up to the job, the belief that the role is too big, is something every leader has felt. It is evidence that the role is greater than the individual—and thus worth taking on. Pollack made the leader's requisite leap into the unknown, accepting the risk of failure that is the first step in becoming a leader—and he excelled. 

That adaptive capacity is the most important attribute in determining who will become a leader. It's also the defining trait of the best actors. Inhabiting roles other than the one most of us think of as self is essential to both. So is the empathy needed to project yourself into someone else's skin.

Like great actors, great leaders create and sell an alternative vision of the world, a better one in which we are an essential part. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that Churchill idealized his countrymen with such intensity that in the end they rose to his ideal. Mahatma Gandhi made India proud of herself. Washington and the other Founding-Fathers shared that great leader's gift of making people believe they could be—and were—part of a great nation. Martin Luther King Jr. had that same genius. 

When you consider such towering and theatrical leaders, you realize leadership may be the greatest performing art of all—the only one that creates institutions of lasting value, institutions that can endure long after the stars who envisioned them have left the theater. 

Warren Bennis, The Essential Bennis

Virtual Leaders are Doers

New data shows that the confidence, intelligence and extroversion that have long propelled ambitious workers into the executive suite are not enough online, because they simply don’t translate into virtual leadership. Instead, workers who are organised, dependable and productive take the reins of virtual teams. Finally, doers lead the pack – at least remotely.

The study shows that, instead of those with the most dynamic voices in the room, virtual teams informally anoint leaders who actually do the work of getting projects done. “They are the individuals who help other team members with tasks, and keep the team on schedule and focused on goals,” says lead author Radostina Purvanova,

As expected, the face-to-face teams chose leaders with the same confident, magnetic, smart-seeming extroverted traits that we often see in organisational leaders. “The people who portray themselves as organised, dependable and reliable look to us like effective leaders,” says Purvanova. But those chosen as remote leaders were doers, who tended towards planning, connecting teammates with help and resources, keeping an eye on upcoming tasks and, most importantly, getting things done. These leaders were goal-focused, productive, dependable and helpful.

In other words, virtually, the emphasis shifts from saying to doing. 

Arianne Cohen writing for BBC WorkLife

The Four skills of Daring Leadership

One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of four skill sets that are 100 percent teachable, observable, and measurable. It’s learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It’s why we’re here.

Brené Brown, Dare to Lead 

Child rearing is an art

Child rearing is an art, and what makes art art is that it is doing several things at once. The trick is accepting limits while insisting on standards. Character may not be malleable, but behavior is. The same parents can raise a dreamy, reflective girl and a driven, competitive one—the job is not to nurse her nature but to help elicit the essential opposite: to help the dreamy one to be a little more driven, the competitive one to be a little more reflective.

Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker

Attributes of a high-performing Leader

A decade long study published in Harvard Business Review set out to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs: 

Our findings challenged many widely held assumptions. For example, our analysis revealed that while boards often gravitate toward charismatic extroverts, introverts are slightly more likely to surpass the expectations of their boards and investors.

We were also surprised to learn that virtually all CEO candidates had made material mistakes in the past, and 45% of them had had at least one major career blowup that ended a job or was extremely costly to the business. Yet more than 78% of that subgroup of candidates ultimately won the top job.

We discovered that high-performing CEOs do not necessarily stand out for making great decisions all the time; rather, they stand out for being more decisive. They make decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction. They do so consistently—even amid ambiguity, with incomplete information, and in unfamiliar domains. In our data, people who were described as “decisive” were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs.

Read more about the CEO Genome Project in the Harvard Business Review