ITLP Tuesday Readings

Today's reading, "Smart Leaders Get More Out of the Employees They Have", is by Liz Wiseman, president of The Wiseman Group, a management research and development center in Silicon Valley and author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, and comes from the HBR Blog Network.

Wiseman's point in her article is simple: Research shows that organizations on the average don't use all the intelligence and capability of the staff they have.

As an example, the author notes that Salesforce.com's COO began measuring how deeply managers were tapping into the intelligence and capability of their teams. Once there was some data over time, the managers were challenged to rise the metric by 10%. In one year they raised the metric from 70% to 78%. This represents the equivalent of a significant increase in staff, certainly a larger staff increase than one could successfully argue for.

Wiseman's research went further and looked at the managers. In a study of 150 leaders across four continents,they separated these individuals into two groups: "diminishers" who so focused on their own ideas and capabilities that they shut down intelligence around them, and "multipliers" who act to amplify the intelligence around them. The study found that on the average, "dimishers" used only 48% of their staff's intellectual capability while "multipliers" use 95%, or about twice as much.

So, this brings us to several questions:

1. Am I a dimisher or a multipliers? Am I open to other's ideas? Do I micromanage? Do I delegate?

2. How much of my staff's capabilities do I use? How do I know? Perhaps , as a topic in a one-on-one coaching conversation?

3. What can I do to increase the utilization of my staff?

Perhaps you should give this some thought this week and then develop some action plans. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:26 PM | Permalink

If this post seems familiar, it's because I shared the same article on my blog. -jh

Today's reading "What Successful People Do With the First Hour of Their Work Day" by Kevin Purdy, a freelance writer, first appeared in FastCompany. It's not a new message - you heard it during your IT Leaders Program sessions - but it is presented in new voices.

Purdy points out that many leaders do, and more should, start their days in powerful different ways:

1. Don't Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That. His point is most often your focus on email will take you away from doing the important things you need to do to start your day.

2. Gain Awareness, Be Grateful. Tony Robins, Mike McGrath, and others have suggested that taking time to think of "everything that you're grateful for" before you begin to visualize "everything you want in your life as if you had it today." These two exercises should provide significant focus for your day.

3. Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First. Brian Tracy calls this eating your frog. The phrase comes from a Mark Twain saying that if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you've got it behind you for the rest of the day and nothing else looks so bad. So do your most difficult, most important thing first.

4. To eat your frog, you first have to choose it. So, every day at the end of your day have a practice of choosing your frog for the next day. Gina Tripani advises that you write it down on a pice of paper before you leave the office so you'll see it first thing. And, put with the piece of paper all of the materials that you will need to do this task. That will reduce the procrastination you'll experience in finding those materials.

5. Regularly ask yourself, as Steve Jobs suggested in his Stanford Commencement Address, whether you are doing what you want to do. If you're not, then do something about it.

6. "Customer Service." Every day, find a way to make a connection with your customers. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that contact with customers "anchors me to reality."

So here are some solid suggestions for starting your day. Why not select some of these practices try them out beginning tomorrow.

. . . . . jim

EXTRA :: GREAT WORK PROVOCATIONS from Box of Crayons

At the end of the next meeting, put a time limit next to actions. 4 hours. 24 hours. 48 hours. And ask people, "How will we know that that these have been completed on time?"

Box of Crayons credits Tom Peters for this idea. It's also something that we have suggested in the Leaders Programs.

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:09 PM | Permalink

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you." ~ Carl Sandburg, poet

Have you noticed how fast the years go by? Do you accomplish what you set out to do by the end of each year? If not, why?

Are you spending your time on your priorities, what is important, and in a way to achieve the results that you want? Set your priorities. Set your goals. Budget your time and use it wisely.

Posted by Jim Hall at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Today's Tuesday Reading is a recent reflection from Jim Phelps, ITLP alumnus and Senior IT Architect at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His thoughts do cause one to pause as we have (or really take) so little time to think that we have forgotten how.

You have to imagine the space first. The space is a conference room in a new building on campus on the 9th floor. There are tall windows that look east over East Campus Mall, past the beautiful old red brick Science Hall. If you look to the right far enough, you see lake Mendota and the sail boats. There are tall glass windows that look onto the lobby outside the Bursar's Office. And, on one wall there is a really big white board. I like really big white boards.

I had a meeting scheduled for this room but it was cancelled. I asked to keep the room so I could use it to think for 90 minutes. I was in there alone, sketching ideas and mapping out strategies on the white board. I could go to the far end of the room and look at the overall picture. I could stare out the window and think. Or, I could sit down and ponder a specific question or topic.

When...

... a colleague, a director with a great sense of humor, spots me in this conference room all by myself. She pokes her head in and asks, "Did they just leave you here all by yourself? Won't they even come sit with you anymore?" We laughed and told her about the cancelled meeting and me taking time to think.

She looked at the white board and paused then said very seriously, "I don't know if I know how to think creatively anymore. I mean, I'm so busy doing stuff I'm not sure I remember how to just think." We chatted so more and laughed and she left.

As I thought about this conversation I realized that she had hit on something I have been struggling through with a team I'm leading. It is staffed by people who are deep in the "do-er" category. I send them back and ask them to think about what we have done, what they have learned, if they have insights. I get mostly blank replies when I ask, "what did you come up with?"

I think that if they get 30 minutes in their day their heads are instantly filled with all the action items they haven't gotten done yet, and personnel problems, and dinner plans and soccer matches and... I'm not sure they have practiced stopping all of that noise and spending time "thinking deeply and creatively" about a problem (that wasn't solving an operational issue) in a long time.

I'm not sure they really know how to "think" anymore.

It will be an interesting problem to deal with.

So, right now, stop all that noise in your head and do a bit, maybe just 15 minutes, of real thinking about an issue that you are wrestling with. Then, consider how you might make this a breakthrough practice.

. . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 2:41 PM | Permalink

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing Myself." ~ Rumi

Do you get frustrated when others don't do what you think they should? Have you tried to "control" others thoughts and behaviors? How did that work?

What do others do, and how do they behave in a way that can influence you? Ask yourself daily, "What can I do today to demonstrate the change I want to see". Then do it.

Posted by Jim Hall at 10:10 AM | Permalink

Today's Tuesday Reading "Are You Sure You're Not A Bad Boss?" first appeared in the Harvard Business Review's Blog Network. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman are, respectively, the CEO and the president of Zenger | Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. They are co-authors of the October 2011 HBR article "Making Yourself Indispensable," and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

You can turn the title of this article around and ask how will I know whether or not I am a bad boss? Mining the Zenger | Folkman database of some 3000,000 feedback reports from peers, direct reports, and bosses for about 30,000 individuals, they have been able to identify ten "flaws" - mostly flaws of omission and not commission - that contribute to a leaders failure.

These flaws are:

1. Failure to inspire, owing to a lack of energy and enthusiasm. (This is the most noticeable of their findings.)

2. Acceptance of mediocre performance, in place of excellent results.

3. A lack of clear vision and direction.

4. An inability to collaborate and be a team player.

5. Failure to walk the talk.

6. Failure to improve and learn from mistakes.

7. An inability to lead change or innovate owing to a resistance to new ideas.

8. A failure to develop others.

9. Inept interpersonal skills.

10. Displays of bad judgment that lead to poor decisions.

Zenger and Folkman note that while any one of these flaws can "tank a leader," they typically come in clusters. Since most of these flaws are things that the leader does not do, they are hard to see as more than "point" failures. But, an individual can see them by regularly reflecting on his/her work by looking through these "lenses."

How are you doing? What would be helpful for you to work on? Perhaps you need to track your behaviors in one or more of these areas. You might keep notes in a journal and after a month or so, reflecting on your observations, then identifying what needs to be worked on, and getting to it.

I hope you will take the time in the coming week to hold yourself up to this template and take whatever actions you find appropriate.

. . . . . jim

Posted by Jim Hall at 1:55 PM | Permalink