ITLP Tuesday Readings

Six months ago, Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science at Stanford University and author of a new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss, had a blog entry 12 Things Good Bosses Believe.

Today's Tuesday Reading is Sutton's effort to delve into one of these issues: If You're the Boss, Start Killing More Good Ideas. Sutton's thesis here, identified from peer-reviewed studies plus his experience studying and consulting to managers, is very simple: Among the ideas that surface there are not-so-good ideas, good ideas, and very good ideas. It's a no-brainer to kill the not-so-good ideas. It's hard, even very hard, to kill the ideas that are only good.

Yet they have to be killed so that the resources, time, and attention can be made available to fully develop the very few, very good ideas. How are you doing on killing ideas?

. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 4:37 PM | Permalink

"Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable." ~Theodore N. Vail

Do you spend excessive time worrying about things that have already happened or things you have no control over?

Do you feel powerless and paralyzed over being able to resolve some issues vs. taking steps to improve the situation?

Think back to difficult times and how it happened that they are no longer an issue.

The past has happened, the future is to be determined by what you do in the present.

Posted by Jim Hall at 4:51 PM | Permalink

Today's reading is "The Four Capacities Every Great Leader Needs (and Very Few Have)" by Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps individuals and organizations fuel energy, engagement, focus, and productivity by harnessing the science of high performance. This entry appeared in FastCompany's Expert Blog on October 15, 2010. (It and other blog entries by Tony Schwartz can also be found at his blog.)

In this blog entry, Schwartz provides four lessons that he learned during his leadership journey:

1. Great leaders recognize strengths in us that we don't always yet fully see in ourselves.

2. Rather than simply trying to get more out of us, great leaders seek to understand and meet our needs, above all a compelling mission beyond our immediate self-interest, or theirs.

3. Great leaders take the time to clearly define what success looks like, and then empower and trust us to figure out the best way to achieve it.

4. The best of leaders - a tiny fraction - have the capacity to embrace their own opposites, most notably vulnerability alongside strength, and confidence balanced by humility.

There's much more in the piece and I urge you to read it in the author's own words. It's powerful stuff, lessons we an all profit from.

Do take some time to reflect on how you can incorporate these lessons into your practices.

. . . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 3:24 PM | Permalink

Today's reading, "Getting to the Heart of a Disagreement - and Resolving It," is from Roger Schwarz's Fundamental Change Newsletter.

Disagreements are natural and inevitable, and their resolution is often crucial to moving forward. So, how do you resolve them? Do you focus on developing common ground? Do you try to minimize the differences? Do you compromise hoping that the disagreement will go away?

Schwarz argues that the best approach begins with understanding exactly where you and others differ. He offers a four step plan which you'll find below. Take a look at his plan and work to put it into practice the next time you have a disagreement. I think that you'll find it very helpful.

Schwarz's basic steps uses a "roadmap" analogy, thinking of a disagreement like being on a road trip in a car:

1. Discuss where each person is trying to go, and how they are trying to get there. What's the "roadmap" to your destination?

2. Identify where the reasoning diverges. Compare the roadmaps. Do you agree on the destination, but now on how to get there?

3. What leads the other to hold the assumption or interest they do?

4. Propose a new roadmap that enables you both to reach your destination, while staying on the same path. The new roadmap may take an entirely different "route" than the roadmaps already discussed.

Repeat, until you find yourself on the same path to your destination.

. . . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 3:08 PM | Permalink

"Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly." ~ Robert H. Schuller

Do you seek permission or validation before making a decision or taking an action?

Do you think you need to know everything or be perfect at the skill before starting to act on something?

Does your work take you past the deadlines?

Perfectionism is far from perfect.

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:01 PM | Permalink

Today's reading, "Introverts: The best Leaders for Proactive Employees", is a piece by Carmen Nobel that appeared in a recent issue of the HBS Working Knowledge newsletter. The article reports on the research of Francesca Gino, associate professor in the negotiations, organizations, and markets unit at the Harvard Business School.

The key takeaway from Professor Gino's research is that introverts actually can be better leaders than extroverts, especially when their employees are naturally proactive. The piece lists three key concepts:

1. Extroverted leaders can be a liability if the followers are extroverts. This is because the extroverted leader tends not to be receptive to employees who make suggestions and take initiative.

2. Introverted leaders are more likely to listen to, process, and implement the ideas of an eager team.

3. Leaders need to adapt their style depending on the type of group they are leading. If the team members are proactive, the leader needs to be receptive to the team members' ideas. If the team members are more passive, leaders need to act more demonstratively and set a clear direction.

Take a few moments and evaluate your style and that of your team. Do you interact with them in the manner that is likely to yield the best results? Perhaps you need to adjust your style with your team or with some of the team members.

Have a great week. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 9:07 AM | Permalink

Robert Simons, the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has a new book, Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach to Execution which he recently previewed at a HBS Faculty Research Symposium. The Executive Summary from the symposium is today's reading.

The summary's overview begins with the book's key premise: "Business managers who fail to make tough strategic choices doom their organizations to eventual failure." You make the tough decisions or else failure is inevitable. The summary outlines seven imperatives and provides seven strategy questions that when answered improves the ability of an organization to execute their strategy.

From Simons point of view, successfully executing strategy requires tough, often uncomfortable choices. The essence of strategy is choice and failure to make choices means that the organization lacks a clear strategy. This leads to his imperatives and questions:

1. A business must determine who its primary customers are. The imperative is to allocate resources to customers. Who are our primary customers?

2. Companies must prioritize their core values. And the question is: How do our core values prioritize shareholders, employees, and customers? You cannot make tough decision without knowing your values.

3. A business must define its critical performance variables. What critical parameters are you tracking? What defines the difference between success and failure?

4. Organizations must control strategic risk. What strategic boundaries have been set? What explicit statements of "Thou shalt not ..." do you have to reduce potential temptations?

5. Every organization must spur innovation. How are you generating creative tension? What are you doing to encourage employees to innovate?

6. Organizations need to have commit to each other. How committed are your employees to helping each other? What could you do to increase that commitmnent?

7. Companies have to adapt to change. So, what strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night? Since it's known that today's strategy will be ineffective tomorrow, how are you moving new information into your strategic thinking?

As an exercise, you may want to hold your strategies up to Simons' outline and check how you have done. Then you might want to go back and do some additional work on them.

. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 4:50 PM | Permalink