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Posts from the ‘Kathleen’ Category

Aug 27

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Seasoned by Reflection

You’re the coach. It’s the NCAA basketball finals. Your team is down by 1 point with 4 seconds to go. Do you want your all-star rookie or your 4-year, seasoned veteran to take the last shot? My guess is that you’ll choose the seasoned player, even if her stats are not as impressive as the rookie’s. Experience in performing under pressure can give the seasoned player better odds.

Seasoned players and leaders have spent years reflecting on the situations they’ve encountered, considering what worked and what did not, observing what was required to meet the challenges. Reflection is an important part of personal development. The goal of reflection is understanding, synthesis, and integration of experience. It is not about judging the past as bad or good, criticizing yourself, or self-aggrandizement. It’s taking time to think about and recognize what happened, accepting the past as it is. Then it’s taking the next step to learn from what happened and identify your role, behavior, and response.

Think there isn’t time to reflect? I use the time spent driving to-and-from events or meetings. I often take a walk in the early evening. And, I set aside specific time to write and think each week. All of life’s experiences can teach us things if we are open to reflecting and learning.

Aug 25

People You Won’t Meet at the Water Cooler

The best leaders, the ones developing field leaders, won’t be the ones standing around at the water cooler. They are the ones working to get things done. But they don’t get things done by doing everything themselves. They start by looking around at the people they are responsible for leading and assessing their strengths and weaknesses.

A good leader knows that the people around them may possess strengths that the leader does not and is willing to allow people to be good at what they do. A good leader also assesses areas that need to be improved. Developing these areas will go a long way to creating new leaders. The challenge in developing leaders is to construct the environment and situations which will challenge people to develop and stretch their knowledge and abilities, even allowing them to fail — without significant consequences.

Once a challenge has been met, it is important to do two things: The first is to review what worked and what didn’t. Respectful dialogue and healthy debate can be part of a process that can improve not only the field leader, but the entire organization. The second is to go out and try again. In Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, the research is presented showing that people who are expert at their chosen task have practiced it for more than 10,000 hours. Trying again, assessing, improving, and trying again has been called by many different names over the years – from Total Quality Management to After Action Review; it is a proven method for exercising, growing, and building capacity.

The leaders who develop other leaders get things done. They don’t give up. They create challenging opportunities. They continuously act, learn, and improve. They put the well being of the organization and their people ahead of their own interests. They are committed to doing excellent work, work that makes a difference and is sustainable over time.

Aug 24

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Measuring Leadership Success

We recently rolled out our new presentation on developing leaders that is based on our research. It is worth revisiting the question of how leaders measure success.

Managers measure success in terms of goals met, projects managed, dollars saved and made, and people organized. Many managers use leadership of one type or another to accomplish all of these things. The cycle of information and resource management continues to be compressed from year to quarter to week to hour to minute. As managers it becomes tempting to quickly make the decisions and allocate resources quickly and effectively.

Given the driven pace and risks in every decision, it is more difficult than ever to think about developing leaders. And yet, in the end, a legacy isn’t built out of the best flowcharts and financial graphs; it is built out of the investments made in building people’s capacity to lead, investments in people’s lives.

I would argue that it is not enough to hope that people will watch and learn, or to send people to leadership training once a year. In order to develop leaders a deliberate approach is needed, becoming a leader is not magic. Energy and resources are needed to create the conditions for success. The joy of watching people grow in competence and confidence is the reward.

When I think back on one of the people in my life who was a developer of leaders, I reflect that after his death, the thing people remembered the most was his commitment to creating the environment for others to grow and succeed. Surely, that is the measure of a leader’s success.

Aug 13

Beware of Straight-jackets

I’m reading Cats: The Nine Lives of Innovation. I’m taking a break from my usual preference to look at what’s working to look at Lundin’s challenges to innovation. He lists the following four challenges to our ability to innovate, calling them “straight-jackets”. I include them here along with my comments:

  1. Distractions. Noise, doubts, fear, and the accumulated opinions, thoughts, and feelings of  a lifetime that drown out new ideas. When is the last time I turned off all electronics to experience life uninterrupted?
  2. Normal. Our preference for standardized and repeatable experiences and process inhibits breaking out in new ways. Of course, this is the safe and secure, normal and average way we stay in our comfort zones.
  3. Failure. We’re taught from childhood to avoid failure. In recent years I’ve seen parents applauding children for everything from taking a step to playing with toys. To create something new, we have to be willing to risk failing, to risk not getting the applause and approval of co-workers, family, and friends.
  4. Leadership. Here I think he means the old style of authoritarian, command and control management, where everything is measured, directed, and done by-the-playbook. To innovate, we have to go where the energy and passion are.

I’m ready to think about and discover what it means to be innovative and creative in my life and in the interactions I have with clients. After all, while we may spend time talking about how innovative Toyota or General Electric are, in the end, people are the ones who create new things and ideas.

Aug 9

Are we there yet?

The road trip continues with over a thousand miles completed. Like kids on a long car trip, organizations are prone to setting goals and then asking, “Are we there yet?”

Setting, working toward, and meeting goals are an integral part of a successful organization. Trust and energy are built when members experience the commitment of everyone to the process and the shared drive to deliver on time and within deadlines. Growth happens as successes are celebrated, new challenges appear, and further goals are set.

For organizations and leaders, goal setting is an ongoing journey with way points. Are we there yet? Yes, we are and we will be!

Aug 8

Actions Speak Louder than Words

I am on a road trip with my parents, heading for western New York where my Father was born and grew up. We’ve been talking about what we remember from the past as we drive along. One of the things I will always remember is the emphasis from my parents on not only knowing what I believe, but always remembering that my actions would speak louder than my words.

Lou Holtz, football coach, who we use as an example in the Friesen Group presentation on field leadership, talked about this principle in reference to trust. He observed that his college football teams changed personnel every year. But, the questions were always the same*:

1. Do you care about me?
2. Can I trust you?
3. Are you committed to the success of the team?

 In Holtz’s opinion, the answers to these questions are best given through actions. When we act in an authentic, trustworthy, and consistent manner, we will gain trust. My personal goal remains to be authentic, trustworthy, and consistent – the same person in the workplace, community, and home.

 *Holtz quote from “The Art of Innovation” by Tom Kelley, p. 85

Aug 7

Economic Transformation

Here’s a link to Otto Scharmer’s new paper on Economic Transformation. The question on the table is one that many organizations face today: how do we meet the challenge of a “double-split” .. the horizontal split that is seen in organizations where silos have grown up between different departments or different committees .. and the vertical split that occurs between leaders, group members, and the communities they serve.

Join the dialogue at the Presencing Institute.

Aug 7

Abundance

I’m writing about abundance as one of the core principles of Friesen Group: there is enough for everyone. Enough what? There are enough ideas, creativity, innovation, and potential for everyone to grow and succeed. It is why we brainstorm and dream with friends, co-workers, and clients – in offices, classrooms, favorite restaurants, and on the back porch.

I experience this when my friends in the Appreciative Inquiry community freely post and share everything from their newest ideas to templates for group experiences. I experience it when I use open source software, watch videos on YouTube, or listen to a podcast. I experience it when I teach and instead of a one-way exchange, encounter a learning environment where everyone contributes.

I first learned this lesson when as a toddler I was taught to share my toys. I learned that I was not an island and not the most important person. I learned that sharing was a way to have fun! Openness and sharing inspire connections and build relationships.

And so, away with the scarcity principle, the need to control, and the fear that someone else will get ahead of us. Thank you to all of my friends and co-workers who freely share their ideas – big and small. We are – and can be – more together than we are separately.

Aug 3

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Grounding Conversations

This past weekend brought thought stimulating conversations with a trusted friend. Often we work under the assumption that all of our conversations deliver the needed results. Yet, this is often not the case. We participate in formal meetings, water cooler meetings, and even more casual discussions on the back porch.

In reflecting on what made these conversations work at the most basic level, I was drawn to think about ground rules for conversations. Ground rules are often assumed, but here is a short list that I have been compiling for times when ground rules need to be specified:

• Be Present:
  welcoming yourself first,
  willing to sit in the peace or chaos around you,
  keeping the space open and flexible,
  being open to surprises.

• Participate:
  be willing to listen fully, with pauses for reflection,
  with respect for each person’s voice,
  without fixing, judgment, and advice giving.

• Be courageous:
  inviting and willing to initiate conversations that matter,
  speaking from your own experience,
  finding and using powerful questions
  documenting the answers, patterns, insights, wisdom, action items.

• Be willing to co-create with and include others:
  blending your knowing, experience and practices with theirs,
  developing a working partnership.

With credit to the World Cafe, Open Space Technology, and Appreciative Inquiry communities.

Jul 23

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Our Maps of the World

The human brain is an amazing organ. The wiring is now known to be flexible and adaptable throughout life. That wiring is what gives each person a unique view of the world, their own . . . , individual . . . , World Map.

In times of change and transition, we are disoriented. Our brains start by searching through our maps for familiar terrain, places, and paths — the ones that have helped us successfully navigate our experience.  If we fail to find a map that can serve us, we may reach a point where we agree with the old map makers, who when reaching the end of the known world, wrote, “Beyond here there be dragons.”

In our organizations and relationships, all of us act and react based on our maps. This works well until we are confronted with the extraordinary. The extraordinary can take many forms, an organization shake-up, a stock market collapse, a trip to another country, a death. When we encounter the extraordinary, we are invited to choose: turn back to the familiar and safety of our known map or confront and befriend the dragons of the unknown, creating a new map.

We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire Bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced toward us:
“I seen ’em myself!” he said fiercely.
                 C.S. Lewis in The Alliterative Metre

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