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“Creating Successful Leaders”

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August 21, 2013 Are We Too Hooked On Our Devices?

The other day, as I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic and having just finished a day of seemingly nonstop phone, e-mail and text message exchanges, a story on NPR came on that hit home for me.

NPR’s website has a neat little feature: it stores all the stories it reports throughout the day in transcript form, so if you know the day and general time you heard something interesting on the air, you can always revisit the stories later. Which is exactly what I did.

Here is the story, which covers a company called Digital Detox that offers retreats geared around being completely unplugged from phones and laptops. Not only that, the retreat center detailed in the story has had full attendance at $350 a person.

Why is there such demand for retreats away from screens? Well, the story interviews Digital Detox co-founder, Levi Felix, who sees this as a sign of an increased awareness of digital devices’ intrusiveness. “People are feeling like something’s not right here,” he is quoted as saying.

The story hit home for me personally because I’ve had a love-hate relationship with technology for years. On one hand, the ability to text anyone at anytime is convenient, sure, but what about the flip side of this? What if you’re the one being contacted at all hours of the day? How do you deal with the daily bombardment of communications from all angles?

I think that setting up parameters for yourself in regards to time spent plugged in can help keep you grounded and sane. It’s similar to the skill of saying no. In the same way you need to take care of yourself first by not overextending yourself for others, you also must be able to turn off the phone, guilt-free.

What’s more, we need to stay present and engaged in the moment in order to live fully. Phones and Facebook take us out of our present moment, and too much time online can negatively distort your perception of yourself as well as take away from the amazing world right in front of you.

What do you think? What have been your ways of managing the barrage of online information?

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August 7, 2013 Leading As A Moderator, Not An Enforcer

Leaders often burden themselves with being the only ones to make tough decisions and stick with them, even when they may not be popular with everyone on the team. There are times when you as leader must make this type of call and deal with a bit of unpopularity for a while.

But there are other instances–the majority, in fact–where leaders tend to take on too much when it comes to making tough or controversial decisions. They feel, rightly so, that because they’re the ones who must take ultimate responsibility within their organization, they also must personally decide, execute and maintain new systems or standards.

While it’s true “the buck stops here” when it comes to leadership responsibilities, we must remember that those we work with and manage have loads of helpful ideas we might otherwise not have thought of ourselves. We must also remember that our coworkers and/or employees are capable and eager to do a good job (and if they aren’t, then you have a problem with your hiring strategies).

With this in mind, we should take advantage of our teams when it comes to making, implementing and maintaining decisions.

Moderate The Decision-making Process, Don’t Make All The Decisions

As a leader, you should work to get your team involved in the process of making key decisions. Your role should be to moderate the group, keeping the discussion focused and realistic, and also to help peers work things out should disagreements arise.

Workers who are involved with decision-making feel more engaged and connected to their work, getting a sense of ownership for the visions the team has come up with together. This inevitably leads to better performance across the board, because ownership and meaning behind one’s work always gives them that necessary fire to push toward excellence.

Leading As The Vision-Implementer, Not The Productivity Police

If a team feels they are being micro-managed, they tend to become distant from their work. That is to say, a babysat team can easily be made to feel that they are not smart or capable enough to do their own work.

On the other hand, we all need standards in place to keep us all on the same page. A great team is well-organized, highly communicative and grounded in a mutual understanding of the standards and expectations.

You can see why involving everyone in big decisions can help you as the leader in the long run, when you need to begin implementing the vision (aka, the daily expectations of each team member). If and when you run up against disagreements or unproductivity, you can always point back to the standards the whole team came up with. You aren’t the dictator, you’re the one tasked with making sure everyone fulfills the requirements they set for themselves.

Maintaining The Vision

Things don’t always apply perfectly from the white board to real life. And, since the business world constantly changes along with the rest of the world, it’s necessary to constantly reevaluate the value of decisions you’ve made and implemented in the past. This means you’ll need to tweak things as you go and ask for feedback from the team, thereby keeping everyone directly engaged in the process.

This, my friends, is the recipe for good leadership, and for a functional, happy team.

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July 10, 2013 The 4 Components of Learning Agility

For the month of July, I’ve been focusing on learning agility. Last week’s post introduced the concept and gave a brief overview. This week, I’ll go into more detail as to how learning agility applies to your day-to-day leadership skills.

According to The Center for Creative Leadership, a research group out of the Teacher’s College at Columbia University, learning agility can be demonstrated in four attributes: Innovating, Performing, Reflecting and Risking.

Innovating:

This refers to challenging the status quo. Instead of going along with what’s worked in the past, an innovative leader embraces new challenges and is open to new ideas. An innovator asks questions, takes on new tasks and experiences to increase their perspective, and constantly tries to approach issues from multiple angles.

Performing:

To possess learning agility, you must be able to perform under  stress and deal with the inevitable ambiguous or unfamiliar situation as it arises. An agile learner does this by staying present, engaged and a keen observer of new information. This includes listening skills; a good performer must embrace, not avoid, verbal instruction.

Reflecting:

This goes beyond simply thinking about the new things you’ve learned. Reflecting means using new information, skills and experiences to generate a deeper insight into yourself, those around you and any problems you’ll face. Good reflection should always ask the question, “What kinds of changes do I need to make in order to  accommodate  these new experiences?”

Risking

Learning agility is a body of skills and attributes that can be boiled down to one character trait: the ability to put yourself out there. This means that you volunteer for opportunities that don’t guarantee success. In fact, an agile learner values the experience of failure, as it is a much better catalyst for growth than continual success. Risk here means risk that leads to opportunity, not thrill seeking.

If these attributes don’t describe the way you operate, don’t panic. “Being open to failure” isn’t natural, fun or frankly, very common. Don’t think of these traits as a list of must-do’s in order to be successful. To put it in perspective, these are the conclusions derived from studying a large and diverse group of leaders; no one leader perfectly reflects all these qualities.

That said, staying humble and open to change is the most important starting point to attaining agility in leadership and learning. If you can do that, the rest will follow.

Mitchinson, Adam and Robert Morris, Ph.d. “Learning About Learning Agility.” Teachers College, Colombia University, April 2012. http://www.ccl.org/leadership/pdf/research/LearningAgility.pdf

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