What Ineffective People (Usually Leaders) Have In Common

Writing about the pathway to workplace superstardom reminded me that I encounter quite a few people (usually managers and other organizational leaders) who have the opposite problem — they’re going nowhere. 

They’re chronically ineffective — as people and as leaders.

Their efforts to change and grow as people, or develop leadership skills have stalled — sometimes hopelessly.

I noticed something else about these folks — they have one or more characteristics in common, significant roadblocks to making the changes in their skills, focus or behavior necessary to become more effective, happy and successful.

Here they are — five surefire pieces of evidence that someone’s growth and development are blocked:

1. They’re Not Having Any Fun. They don’t enjoy their lives, or their jobs, or their circumstances to the fullest. What possible motivation does someone have to improve, to learn and to grow if they hate what they’re doing? The best way to achieve mastery at anything is to have a deep passion and commitment to the challenges and problems it throws at you every day. One of the challenges and problems you must enjoy deeply is building yourself.

2. They Live Scattered, Hectic Overloaded Lives. In other words, no margin. For most managers I know, life is like drinking out of a firehose — some gets in your mouth, but most just goes right over your shoulder. The major reason they don’t build themselves (or other people, for that matter) is they simply don’t have, or haven’t fought for, the time and space to reflect on themselves and their behavior, and to devote to the hard work of growth.

3. They Are Unable, Or Unwilling, To See The Truth About Themselves. It’s simple — great leadership starts out as a love affair with the truth. If you can’t, or don’t want to, acknowledge your own shortcomings or ineffective behaviors, how in the world are you going to do anything about them?

4. They’re Self-Absorbed, Unhealthily Focused On Their Own Needs. One of the biggest obstacles to change is a lack of focus on other people, particularly those you lead or those impacted by your behavior and actions. The antidote? Express gratitude daily; other people play, or have played, a role in your success. Acknowledging the contribution of others makes you aware of their presence in your life. And (now follow me on this), the more outward your focus, the greater the chance you’ll care about your impact on others. The more you care, the greater the chance you’ll do something about it.

5. They’re Isolated. Personal change and development is difficult. It’s even more so when you go it alone, without support, encouragement and, most importantly, accountability. People who don’t want to change want to continue to live in the dark, away from scrutiny and feedback. People dedicated to growth seek out partners who will hold them accountable, with whom they can generate mutual support.

Give yourself a score on each of these items; how closely does each describe you? We are all pursuing some sort of goal, from becoming better leaders to losing weight. If you find your own progress blocked, chances are you are struggling with one or more of these characteristics — partially or fully.

My advice to you: (1) have fun, love your problems; (2) fight for margin; (3) fall in love with the truth; (4) thank someone every day; and (5) find a partner.

Becoming an Organizational Superstar

On her blog and in an “Information Week” column, author Penelope Trunk (The Brazen Careerist) offers five steps to being a workplace superstar. They are all very provocative ideas, with a helpful message in there somewhere between the lines (with the exception of “start a side business” — this may be good for your career and your life, but it won’t necessarily make you a superstar at work).

I’d like to suggest five additional ways to shine brightly in the workplace, particularly for twenty- and thirty-somethings, but also for anyone looking for a path to accomplishment, accolades, control over your life, and value:

1. Build Yourself. You cannot spend enough time seeking mastery of not only your technical skills, but your personality/behavioral/leadership skills as well. Find out how the most effective leaders you know behave and treat people, and work exceedingly hard to become just like them.

2. Build the People Around You. Do you make everyone around you great at what they do? Coach, teach, encourage — that’s what a true superstar does.

3. Never Take Any Job You Are Not Matched For — one whose problems and challenges you don’t have a deep passion for and enjoyment of. You will suck at it or, at best, be mediocre and waste precious time in your one turn at bat on this planet.

4. Fight for Margin. Margin is the space between your limits — physical, time, financial and emotional — and your life’s workload. Superstars have margin, lots of it. They have the energy to work hard, the time to think, the financial security to say “screw you” if need be, and the relationships that give support. Also, all the great things you will do in your career will flow from margin — building yourself, building other people, and building a business.

5. Be Truthful. The biggest enemy faced by senior executives and CEOs is that no one wants to tell them the truth. There are two types of people who are useless in the workplace: those that can’t (or won’t) tell the truth, and those that can’t (or won’t) listen to the truth. Want to be a superstar? Be someone your leaders can count on for frank and candid insight, advice and feedback, offered genuinely and without agenda.

Superstars are superstars because the things they are good at are very rare. My experience is that these five things are among the rarest behaviors in any organization.

More, Or Less

You know, the same things that are scarce in the “real world” are just as scarce on the Internet.

Which is odd to a lot of people, particularly those whose exuberance about the Internet and Web 2.0 resembles a kind of creepy utopianism. Don’t get me wrong — the digital age has given us a lot of potentially great tools and resources, but it’s still no cure for the human condition. As someone I deeply admire is fond of saying, “we’re in the twenty-first century technologically, but we’re still in the first century behaviorially.”

The Internet (and the digital “revolution”) has made us more connected, but still searching for intimacy:

• given us more “community,” but no greater civility
• given us more information, but no greater wisdom
• given us more opinions, but no greater enlightenment
• given us more choices, but no greater focus

And so the rules of success on the Internet will be the same as in the real world — the people who will continue to make the greatest contributions to society are the ones who can give us (or lead the way to) the things — online or off — that are most scarce in life and in work.

Update on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by Joe Fusco

For additional perspective on the “more connected, less intimate” tension, this article is a fascinating and comprehensive exploration.

The Sponge vs. The Hose

My job requires me to give people advice occasionally. Every so often, someone actually listens. I gave a group of managers this advice recently:

“Be a sponge, not a hose.” In other words:

•  
  • Stop spewing all over everyone around you. Stop trying to be heard, and instead try to understand. Be just a little less enamored with the sound of your own voice, and the beauty of your own opinions and ideas.
  • Start absorbing, listening and learning. Ask questions; seek the truth — about yourself, your behavior, your environment, your customers, the world around you. Think, then speak. Attract and nourish talented, creative people; go out of your way to find people smarter than you. Figure out where the gaps are in your knowledge and skills, and get to work eliminating them.

In my experience, most managers are taught to be a “hose,” if you will. Daily managerial life can be a struggle for attention and affirmation, and against overload,  as well as a competition for scarce resources (material and psychological, like power, influence, titles). Generating attention and noise, and spraying a command-and-control attitude, then, are thought of as survival skills.

Truly great leadership goes beyond mere survival, doesn’t it? Mastery flows from clarity of purpose and mission and a form of humility that, paradoxically, grants you a quiet confidence that liberates you to listen, learn, and absorb.

The “hose” repels; the “sponge” attracts.

The “hose” belies an insecurity; the “sponge,” a confident pursuit of mastery.

Write When You Find Work, Pal

Why is it that a cat will spend hours dozing in a sun “puddle” in the middle of an oriental rug, and then have the unmitigated gall to sit up and yawn?

I mean, I could understand it if he did something other than eat and lick himself for a living.

Why We (Sometimes) Love Tabloids

I try to avoid the temptation to make this space a daily commentary on politics (you can get plenty of that here and here). However, today’s New York Daily News features a great headline, and a reminder that maybe, just maybe, newspapers aren’t completely useless yet. This is what tabloids do best:

"Like It Never Happened..."

Having been out of town on business on the appointed day, I wasn’t able to fetch my car until this afternoon.

While I was happy to have it back, I wasn’t quite sure how I would feel. Would I feel like I was driving a flawed automobile, unable to get past the fact that it had been damaged, even if only in a minor way? No matter how well the work was done, would I be able to tell? Would my guilt and disappointment tinge the experience of owning and driving it?

All of that apprehension disappeared instantly. The folks at Parker’s Classic Auto Works did an absolutely flawless job of restoration, and I’m very, very grateful for their skill, craftsmanship and attention to detail. On top of that, it was simply a perfect day — 72 degrees, pure sunshine — custom-made for this kind of reunion:

 

Baby, we is gonna get re-uh-quainted real fast.

A Few More Minutes With...My Son Andrew

Impressions of Japan

In late-June, my son Andrew travelled to Ishidoriya, Japan with four other students and a chaperone as part of a sister-city cultural exhange. It was a significant honor for him, and the source of over six months of excitement and anticipation; among other things, Andrew loves to travel and has a deep interest in learning about, and experiencing, other cultures.

(from left; Tsuneaki, Yuta, Cory and Andrew)

He calls his two week stay with a host family in Japan “one of the best experiences of my life.” He and I sat down recently to recount that experience. Below, in .mp3 format, are excerpts of that conversation:

Andrew Talks About Japan (1.75MB)

Reassessing My Pride, And Joy

I try very hard not to be one of those people who wishes his or her life away, but today was one of those days I had circled on my calendar with a thick, thick marker and, then, for weeks silently bemoaned at how far away it seemed.

First, for a moment, let me drop all the tongue-in-cheek pretense about “the blonde” and “my mistress.” The damage done to my automobile was difficult for me to accept, made many orders of magnitude worse by its timing, as I was forced to sit by and watch most of the summer drain away under deep blue skies. The season for a highly impractical, vanity convertible, like many other things, is very short here in Vermont and each warm, cloudless day and evening is precious.

I know it’s just a car. But it is my one indulgence, and a source of joy, relaxation and pride in a life woefully short of those kinds of moments. The loss of its use, if only for six or seven weeks, left me feeling confined and distracted. And in a state of denial, as well. I kept the car under a cover — a cover that had previously served to keep it clean and unblemished now kept the offending damage out of sight, if not entirely out-of-mind.

Today, at last, was the day I brought the car to the body shop — whose motto, by the way, is “like it never happened.”

They had better damn well mean it.

They told me it will be ready next Tuesday, September 18 — a day that has earned its own thick circle on the calendar.

When the car was damaged, a friend sent me a sympathy card, and suggested that, like Abraham being called upon to “let go” of his beloved son Isaac, perhaps I would only truly enjoy the car if I was able to “let go” of it as well.

He has a point. Much of my pride in the car arose from silly little things like using it sparingly, never driving it in the rain, obsessing over its condition and cleanliness, and bragging about how few miles I put on it each season.

The damage, though soon repaired, is a reminder not to put her — or “it” — or anything else on a pedestal and to stop hoarding or rationing the things in life that give myself and others pure joy.

I miss her already.

For the Customer and the Marketer, Scarcity is King

My wife always has the most interesting “customer service” experiences.

This weekend, she visited the local farmers’ market. Now, in this part of the country, farmers’ markets are an emerging feature of a minor economic and marketing revolution: perceived superiority in quality, convenience, flexibility and intimacy between merchant and customer. In other words, an alternative to mass-market, one-size-fits-all industrialized economics. Sounds reasonable, right?

Unfortunately, since marketing and economics are social sciences, they are subject on whatever scale — small, or large — to the quirks of human behavior. As a result, the things we dislike about impersonal, mass-market economics easily and often show up when dealing with the “little guy” as well.

So:

A little old lady who makes homemade dog biscuits has a booth at the local farmer’s market. She sells her biscuits six for one dollar. So far, so good.

My wife, who on occasion can be reasonably frugal, wants to buy some biscuits but doesn’t want to be stuck with them if our notoriously fussy beagle doesn’t like them. She offers the little old lady a deal: will she sell her three biscuits for fifty cents?

Absolutely not, says the old lady. The biscuits are sold six for a dollar.

After some discussion, she remains intractable on this point — she has to have a dollar for six biscuits. She loses the sale.

Our little old lady could have sold my wife three biscuits for seventy cents, earning (1) a per-biscuit profit margin forty percent higher than usual; and (2) an enthusiastic, satisfied customer who would, in all likelihood, return next week.

So what’s the lesson for marketers and congregants of the church of the customer? In today’s marketplace, where a customer can get virtually anything in any configuration for any taste, preference, fashion or budget, scarcity is king.

Smart marketers realize they’re not really in the business of selling dog biscuits (which are only a commodity, easily and cheaply duplicated); they’re in the business of selling scarcity — in this case and others, it’s flexibility or a custom solution or personalized value.

An unwillingness or inability to offer flexibility is a huge liability. “One size fits all” is a commodity and companies who sell only commodities are increasingly becoming roadkill.

Sell us something scarce with that commodity — personal attention, creativity, flexibility, a solution that meets our needs (not your production/volume/sales imperatives) — and you’ll acquire a loyal, high-volume customer.

Creativity and Education

If you care about how and what your children, or any children, are learning, if you care about how your children, or any children, are prepared to thrive — spiritually and intellectually as well as economically — in a changing world, watch this thought-provoking, humor-laden presentation by Sir Ken Robinson:

And While We're At It...

…what would it take for a hotel (any and all hotels, for that matter) to send someone around to every room and put a little WD-40 on the ironing board leg extension mechanism?

Every. Single. Time. I am treated to that wonderful fingernails-on-the-blackboard screech. In every hotel.

Customer satisfaction. It’s the little, inexpensive details, folks.

Maybe We Should Surrender Our Seats. Permanently.

Now, I know it’s like shooting fish in a barrel to point out the utter destruction airlines do to their reputations through a lackadaisical, indifferent or, occasionally, hostile approach to customer satisfaction and service.

Everybody’s got a story. Granted, a lot of frustration expressed by travellers can be the fault not of the airline, but an entire system that includes an increasingly overloaded, technologically stunted air traffic control infrastructure. And the weather. Which is nobody’s fault.

However, it’s the self-inflicted stuff that makes me shake my head.

Today, I flew to Charlotte, N.C. on U.S. Airways out of Albany, N.Y. on a flight that was overbooked. Overbooked by whom, you ask? Excellent question — by the airline, who sold all the seats on the plane. Plus one. Make a note of that: the airline.

Their solution? It started out pretty standard — looking for volunteers to surrender their seat on this flight, to be booked on another flight and compensated with a free, round-trip ticket anywhere U.S. Airways flies in the continental United States, blah, blah, blah.

And then, the kicker, straight out of what three-ring-customer-service-policy-manual-binder I’ll never know: “…and we won’t be boarding this flight until someone volunteers to give up their seat.”

And for good measure, they reminded us several times in the next fifteen minutes that they were willing to wait absolutely as long as it took for someone to step forward.

That’s right — punish your hostagescustomers for your mistake by delaying their flight, threatening them, marinating them in stress, and generally annoying them. Because you, dear airline, sold every seat on the plane. Plus one.

I haven’t encountered any other business that, when it makes an error, as a matter of policy and without a hint of irony or clarity about what they’re really doing, makes its customers uncomfortable, annoyed,  and inconvenienced. You may correct me if I’m wrong.

Now, I know they can’t board a plane that is short a seat or two. I know they prefer to have volunteers. But I increasingly suspect that at the heart of why everyone loves to hate airline customer service is a lack of human sensitivity and finesse in what is at heart a hospitality business that causes these ham-fisted approaches to problem-solving to be used.

And they fail to recognize it at their own peril. Because nearly every customer on that flight recognized it today, and understood very clearly that they were being punished and stressed for the airline’s mistake.

I will say this: the gate agent was pleasant, and hard working in an often thankless job. But she didn’t seem to comprehend the message she was sending. Or, maybe she did and was just doing what she was told to do.

Nonetheless, the consequences were not small. The plane boarded late, missed its “clear time” (a departure clearance window issued by air traffic control) from Albany, causing the flight to fall victim to a “ground stop” (a halt to all departures using a particular slice of airspace) due to excessively heavy air traffic using the airspace over and adjacent to the New York metropolitan area. We departed nearly 90 minutes late, wreaking havoc with three-quarters of the passenger’s connecting travel plans in Charlotte.

As the U.S. Airways website declares, “Customers First.” Indeed.

Update on Sunday, August 5, 2007 by Joe Fusco

Interesting perspective on this topic from the Wharton School of Business:

“Feel free to move about the airport: turbulence continues to roil the airline industry”

Be sure to read the comments, as well.

I Can't Eat. I Can't Sleep. I Can't Focus.

First, she gets rained on. Now this.

My wife called me at work on Wednesday morning, and bravely pretended to need to talk to me about a few items and errands she needed to run. Then she got down to business:

“I have some really bad news,” she says. “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

Okay. In an instant, I run through the options in my head:

• The kids are in the car; she’s standing on the front porch with her suitcases packed
• A large brown envelope has come to the house addressed to my wife, documenting a period of my life in which I apparently (I will claim) suffered from amnesia
• I’ve done or said something which I can’t remember at the moment, or I’ve forgotten to do or say something which I can’t remember at the moment, but for which I will most likely have to deeply and abjectly make an apology that I will never forget

“I don’t know,” I say. “Just tell me, okay?”

“Well, [graphic description of horrible, unspeakable act deleted].”

Pause.

”[Expletive deleted],” I mutter. “You’re kidding me, right?

“Noooo,” she says. “[Equally nauseous variation of the horrible act omitted].”

Pause.

”[Expletive deleted],” I mutter.

“You going to come home to look at it?”

“Why? I’m already having a bad day. Now I need to vomit in the front yard?”

Now, I appreciate my wife’s effort to overstate the life-and-death seriousness of the problem in the hope that breaking the news to me would allow me to immediately put it in perspective, but I’m still bummed. I’ve since understood, as I manage my grief, that others in this big world have had far more tragic and painful problems to cope with this week and that I remain, in spite of my grief, a lucky, lucky man.

But I’m still queasy. And [expletive deleted].

The bottom line: my buttercup needs some cosmetic surgery, but she’ll be just fine. Me? I hope to be taking nourishment sometime this weekend.

Flight of the Conchords

I stumbled across these guys one night on an HBO special a few years ago; now, they have their own HBO series that, to me, is gut-bustingly funny, but to others is a bit of an acquired taste.

Here’s, ahem, a flavor of their humor:

The premise of their series is the daily life of two Kiwi transplants trying to start a music career in New York. Try it; it’ll grow on you (Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on HBO).