Grown-Up Leadership blog

Frances Hasselbein (the former CEO of the Girl Scouts of America) once said that women leaders tend to see themselves working in the center of a web of connections with others. Think spider web, without the Black Widow image. In contrast, Ms. Hasselbein says male leaders tend to lead from the top of a pyramid, with few if any internal confidantes. In this model, the leader is a more solitary, if not distant figure, ultimately responsible for the organization’s success.

Perhaps it is because I’m a woman but I see many advantages for leaders to place themselves in the center of an organizational web of relationships. Here’s just a few.

1) You’ll get to hear more perspectives about what to do or not do, in your organization.
2) You’ll get more honest and open feedback about what is and is not working.
3) You’ll feel surrounded by good people, knowing that a number of trusted colleagues are just a phone call or email away.
4) You’ll rarely feel alone in the professional issues you face—others no doubt have “been there” and are willing to share their lessons with you.
5) Others will get to know the “real you”—your greatness and blind spots. Their feedback, if “given with love” will make you a more competent and confident leader.
6) Any initiative, project or product will be more thorough and complete, since multiple points of view and many diverse talents will contribute to it.

Yet, I see some disadvantages too. It takes time to build these connections, time that is often in short supply. You’ll also get to hear some perspectives you frankly, don’t see as relevant. You’ll find that you are in demand—stretched to attend to the competing needs of others in your web. And, scariest of them all, you may also feel at times vulnerable. The more others get to know you, the more they may see the real you. They’ll see your genius and the weaknesses you may wish to hide.

So, what do you think? Male or female–As a leader, are the risks of the web worth it? I’d love to hear your perspectives.

I have been cleaning the garage at my lake home continuously now for five years. It is not that I don’t work at it. I have spent many hours cleaning and sorting through old “stuff”, deciding what to keep, donate and throw away. But I never feel a sense of satisfaction at a job well done.

Some explanation is probably in order. My father and a friend of his built the cabin about 35 years ago. When my father died, my mother took care of the place for a while, but eventually deeded the property to me when it became too much for her to take care of.

My father was great at building and fixing things. He fixed electrical problems and built furniture and painted the house and basically seemed to be able to build or fix just about anything.

Growing up, I learned to use a variety of hand and power tools. As I got older, I managed to build serviceable bookshelves, picture frames and even end tables. But I was never very good at it. My model rockets looked really amateurish compared to what my father could do. And my heart was never really in it.

Unfortunately, like many men of my generation, somewhere along the way I translated “I am not very good at building things and don’t like it very much” into “real men fix things and build things, and since I don’t do those things very well, I must not be a real man”. Seems logical, right? Has anybody reading this made a similar “translation”?

Psychologists call this kind of thinking shame. Shame is about mistaking “doing bad” and “being bad”. (Women are not immune from shame either. But that is for another time.)

A lot of the leaders I work with feel shame without being aware of it. When leaders feel shame, they unknowingly spend a lot of their time and energy proving to others (and trying to prove to themselves) that they are good enough. Shame makes it difficult for leaders to make decisions, take risks, say what they think, have tough conversations, and trust themselves because of the fear that if they make a mistake, it isn’t just a mistake. It is an indictment, proof that all of the self doubts they feel must be true.

So last week I was on vacation at the cabin and once again cleaning the garage. I expressed frustration to my companion about never being able to finish and she said something like, “It is not about the garage. Even if you take everything out of the garage, it is still the garage your father built.”

And she is right. The garage is a symbol of shame for me. The way to solve the issue (and finish cleaning the garage) is to decide for myself what it means to be a “real man” and then to evaluate myself against that standard, not the standard I internalized from my father’s era.

It is the same for leaders. To succeed as a leader, it is really important to learn to decide for yourself what it means to be a good leader and evaluate yourself against your own standards. In coaching, we call this “self actualizing”. When you self actualize, you free yourself bit by bit from the need for the approval and praise of others in order to feel safe and to feel OK about yourself. This is where leadership courage comes from.

Sounds easy. But trust me, it is some of the hardest work you will ever do. And it doesn’t happen over night. But I know it is possible. I have the privilege of watching clients work at self actualizing, and I see the difference it makes in their professional and personal lives. It is often amazing. Almost as amazing as the thought of finishing the garage!

I enjoy fishing, but our fishing boat has presented countless challenges to the experience. One night a few weeks ago, my husband noticed water coming in the back of the boat. It didn’t look so bad at first, but the water was coming up fast and starting to seep up through the floor.

I ran for my life jacket. We started to pump the water out of the boat and made it back to shore just as the back end of the boat began to sink under water. Whew! We survived and still have a boat! These “close calls” in life often get me thinking about what I might learn from the experience. As leaders we can get so caught up in the pressures to perform and produce results that we lose sight of what is going on around us. I was so busy playing with my new rod and reel that I didn’t even notice the water coming into the boat.

I talk to many leaders who say the pressure to focus on the day-to-day responsibilities keeps them from paying attention to needs and changes around them. Leaders feel the pressure to set direction, lead projects, meet organizational goals, keep their teams performing and keep employees engaged in their work. That’s quite a job description! Now add to that – pay attention to what is going on around you. However, the leader who takes the time to check out trends in the business environment, stays informed about other areas of the organization, keeps in touch with the needs of their team, and pays attention to the employee whose motivation seems to have changed will be the one who will notice the water seeping into the boat and get to shore before it sinks!

Leaders have a tough job. When I notice the water in the boat . . . I ran for my life jacket! But, this is the third time that boat has nearly gone under and I did panic less this time than the last two and sprang to action more quickly. I am learning how to pay better attention in the boat. Now, I only need to learn how to pay attention to the right things as a leader. What are the things you need to pay attention to as a leader and how are you learning to pay attention to them?

One of my goals is to eliminate victim thinking.

Victim thinking sounds something like this….“Why did they make us change? ” “When will they hire more people?” “Who will fix this problem? ” “Who is blame for this mix up?” It fascinates me how quickly we can slip into this victim thinking. We all do it and sometimes without even realizing. At a restaurant recently, I caught myself thinking, “When will my server bring my bill?”

An antidote for victim thinking is personal accountability. This means taking on the responsibility for creating ways to make things better. We cannot control all the events in our lives but we can chose to be accountable for our response to situations. So at the restaurant rather than letting my frustration build, I chose to find another waiter to pay my bill.

The funny thing about personal accountability is it really is personal. As a leader, I cannot control the behavior of my employees. If I want to eliminate the victim thinking around me, it starts with me. A tool that I have used is a book called QBQ The Question Behind the Question by John Miller. What I have learned is personal accountability takes practice and is well worth it.

As I said, one of my goals is to eliminate victim thinking so I am choosing personal accountability. How about you? Please share stories where personal accountability shows up in your life!

I love this phrase. Its relevance hits me almost every day, since what I do for a living is listen to what people think. Nowhere is this more evident than when I hear about conflict in the workplace. A common example (paraphrased) sounds something like this: “I have this colleague—he is such a jerk. Everyone feels this way and he knows it. He just doesn’t care!”

What I know is I have had the luxury of coaching “this guy”…Not the exact guy but people like him and this is their thinking: “I am the only one in my organization who gets it. Everyone tries to convince me I’m wrong but they have their own agendas (e.g., politics). They don’t get it.”

Honestly, for all I know both these folks are “right”! This guy could very well be a jerk AND he may also have solutions that are dead on. What I notice more than anything however is how these folks are clearly having completely different conversations, even when they are talking to one another. And, each time they get together, the conversation repeats. The problem and solutions seems perfectly clear to each one. I hear anger and exasperation that the other person isn’t seeing the obvious!

So, here’s my advice. Give it up. Quit trying to “convince” this guy (or the “guys/gals” in your workplace) that you’re right about what you think. Just share–directly and respectfully– what you think and how things look in your world, acknowledging explicitly that you are ONLY talking about YOUR world. Then, ask what THEIR world looks like. Phrase it as “I’d like to share my point of view on the problem. Can you listen to my thinking about this? Then, I’d like to hear yours” or “Before we go further, I want to tell you something. I don’t feel very valued or heard when we talk—it’s getting to me”. Will this magically solve the problem? Not all by itself but it creates an environment for a dialog that considers unique points of view that can lead to creative problem solving.

I had an experience recently that crystallized one of my core beliefs. A customer of mine (a marketing firm) hired multiple coaches to work with members of the executive team. The CEO of the firm brought the coaches together for a meeting to discuss results of the coaching. In the meeting, I had a “blinding flash of the obvious”. I observed that there are three “categories” of coaches and that I have a bias that only one of the three best serves executives.

The first category is coaches with psychological training but no business background. The second category is coaches who are experienced in business but have no training in psychology (the “I’ve been there and can tell you how to do it” types). The third category includes coaches with both training in psychology and business experience (what I call “versatile coaches”).

I acknowledge that I am a committed “versatile coach”. I hold a Master’s degree in Human Development (with a Psychology emphasis) and also have a background in Economics and Mathematics and am a business owner so I am extremely motivated to build my knowledge in both business and psychology. One of the things that make Bailey Consulting Group coaches unique is that we are all versatile coaches in our own way.

The limitations of having either business or psychology training but not both seemed very obvious in the meeting. The psychologists tended to focus on personal development issues (e.g. life balance) and were uncomfortable with the idea that the organization was evaluating coaching effectiveness based on business objectives. They also had a difficult time translating their knowledge and experience into language that was clear and understandable for business leaders.

The “I’ve been there” types with no training in psychology tended to want to tell people how to do things but lacked skill at key interpersonal skills such as listening, empathy, patience and adaptability. These coaches act more like mentors (sharing their experience and expertise) than coaches, and lack the knowledge of how to facilitate lasting behavior change in their clients.

Coaches who are trained in psychology and counseling skills as well as business knowledge and skills (”versatile coaches”) are best prepared to help businesses accomplish the outcomes they are striving for by hiring coaches. As a result of their psychology background, versatile coaches are successful in helping executives change deeply entrenched habits that limit the executive’s effectiveness. Also, because of their business training and experience, versatile coaches are able to make their coaching practical and immediately applicable to challenges faced by their executive clients.

My experience is backed up by research. The top 3 criteria executives use for picking coaches is: a) graduate training in psychology (82%), b) experience in business (78%) and c) reputation (25%).

So what do you think about my premise that great coaches need to be passionate about both psychology and business? What is your growing edge?

Being a senior executive is a highly stressful, highly visible role that requires being accountable to many different people and groups. The best executives are the ones who can set a strong vision and gain the commitment of others to follow them. This is no small task.

Leading from the top takes a special kind of person with self-confidence, courage, self-knowledge, tremendous energy and the resilience to face and work through challenges and setbacks. It takes exceptional relationship skills, too. You don’t see these characteristics in most job descriptions, or even on a resume, so they don’t get considered often enough when filling these leadership positions.

I encourage those seeking the right people to fill roles in the C-Suite to take a different perspective. (Caution: baseball reference coming in honor of the start of the new season!) In Moneyball, author Michael Lewis writes that maverick Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane succeeded in part because he promoted an alternative to the common scouting practice of looking for players who “looked good in a uniform.” I’ve seen corporate boards with the same problem: they look for good resumes, and give recruiters guidance that focuses on superficial qualities.

As a result, boards and hiring committees end up with candidates who get easily sidetracked from focusing on their vision. These executives run into a variety of predictable challenges:

• They are unable to create effective relationships with other executives and key board members.
• They face difficulty in building effective leadership teams. Either they don’t truly value teamwork, or they lack the ability to balance the forcefulness required to build a new team with awareness of when to share leadership and give the team opportunities to take ownership of the outcomes.
• They aren’t able to inspire or guide the people who work for them because they don’t have the skills to coach or mentor their individual team members effectively, or perhaps they don’t value their role as coach.

In our work as executive coaches, we work with clients to help them develop the personal maturity, versatility and relationship skills they need to be successful in their roles. I’d be happy to share more information with you on this topic. LB

Welcome to the Grown-Up Leadership Blog. All of us at The Bailey Consulting Group are excited to have this new forum to share our thoughts and insights about leadership, talent management, employee engagement and other workplace issues. We invite you to keep coming back, and always welcome your feedback.

On our part, we pledge to update this space regularly with perspectives on current events, recommended readings, real world issues that come up in our work, and information you can use in your own workplace.

I’ll start with a few thoughts on a highly visible legislative issue here in Minnesota—just last week, our legislature voted to override our governor’s veto of the Transportation bill, which included a gas tax to raise funds for road and bridge construction. (Those of you who are non-Minnesotans no doubt remember last summer’s bridge collapse, which provided much of the urgency for this bill.) By way of background, the override required six Republican legislators to cross the aisle in support for the bill that our Republican Governor Pawlenty opposed.

The aftermath of this veto override has become messy, and runs counter to leadership trends in business. According to the Star Tribune the six “Republicans who voted for the override February 25 were scolded and stripped of leadership jobs in the House of Representatives by their caucus, and are now facing varying degrees of resistance in efforts to get party endorsement for reelection.”

When we address effective leadership development in business, we help our clients create environments that encourage leaders to be themselves, take risks, challenge authority, and articulate their values in order to be creative and solve problems. While everyone must recognize and respect a decision-making process, the command/control approach in the political world is, in this sense, dramatically out of step with the business community.

I read that one dissenting Republican legislator, in clarifying his vote, said “I’m not down here to represent a party. I’m here to represent my people.” Of course he is. Any system that punishes—a strong yet accurate word in this instance—people for sticking to their principles is going to discourage the kind of leadership that makes organizations successful.

- LHB