Jim Clemmer's Leader Letter

July 2012, Issue 112

Later this month, the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, officially the Games of the XXX Olympiad, get underway in London, England. The games certainly do have their detractors and a history of controversy, violence, and scandal. But more importantly, the games are an inspiring tribute to healthy competition, international cooperation, and the pursuit of exceptional performance. Dawn Fraser, gold medal Australian swimmer at three Olympics declares, "The Olympics remain the most compelling search for excellence that exists in sport, and maybe in life itself."

Time and again we watch resilient and highly driven athletes reaching deep inside to triumph over adversity. Many who don't win medals inspire us with personal bests as they overcome the toughest competitor of all -- themselves. "It is the inspiration of the Olympic Games that drives people not only to compete but to improve, and to bring lasting spiritual and moral benefits to the athlete and inspiration to those lucky enough to witness the athletic dedication," observed Herb Elliott, an Australian middle-distance runner. He never lost a race from 1957 - 1961 and broke the four minute mile 17 times during his career.

The quest for personal excellence is what the father of our modern Olympics and founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, envisioned over a hundred years ago: "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." French educator and historian Coubertin toiled  hard for years in the late 1800s to revive the modern Olympics. His persistence paid off with the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years in the Greek city of Olympia from 776 BCE through to about 261 or 393 AD. During those games battles were halted, as the best athletes competed in a healthier environment.

Coubertin felt that could be a model for international cooperation and rechanneling competition more constructively. A century later, American composer John Williams (his works include numerous popular film scores and theme music for four Olympic Games) confirmed that vision: "The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us."

Leadership, like athleticism, is multi-faceted. I hope you find this month's issue inspirational and instructional. We'll build off another international feat of athleticism -- Nik Wallenda's walk over Niagara Falls -- to discuss the high wire balancing act of leadership and management. Pursuing excellence demands change. We'll see how champions --- often monomaniacs with a mission -- can be incredibly irritating and vital to moving us forward.

The official 2012 Olympics web site features their logo along with the slogan, "Inspire a Generation." The core tenants of leadership like excellence are timeless and cut across generations. We'll take another look at the generational nonsense that too often clouds the real issue: every age group wants inspirational leadership.

London is famous for "The Tube" -- its subway system. Everywhere are signs to "Mind the Gap" between the train door and the station platform. In this issue we look at Zenger Folkman research on a critical leadership gap that can create a values ceiling.

Emil Zatopek was a Czech long-distance runner who won three gold medals at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. When asked about his unusual facial expressions while running he replied, "I was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time." Most of us aren't talented enough to do all the multi-tasking we take on. We'll look at how to reclaim our time and our life.

The Olympics have a history of wonderfully hilarious sportscaster gaffes. For example, a boxing analyst once defended the brutal and barbaric "sport" (pounding each other's face to a pulp is a sport?) this way: "Sure there have been injuries and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious." And a basketball analyst pointed out, "He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn't like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces." I hope to see laughter -- or at least a few smiles -- all over your face as you read "Jest for the Pun of It."

Let the Games begin.

Now For Your (E-Book) Reading Pleasure

I love e-books. Availability in a Kindle version is now one of the main criteria I use when deciding what books to read. Being able to read a book on my computer, Playbook, or Blackberry is much more convenient than lugging around a physical book or magazine/newsletter/newspaper. Making notes, highlighting, and copying passages in my research database is so much easier. Looking up word definitions, going back to remember who that character was when reading novels, or linking to Wikipedia (a Kindle feature) that might then lead to maps or other reference documents helps put things in context and broaden understanding.

So I am delighted to announce that my last four books (Growing @ the Speed of Change, Moose on the Table, The Leader's Digest, and Growing the Distance) are now available in electronic formats. Click on Kindle versions to purchase and download any of them from the Amazon site. That's another feature I love; being able to download a book instantly. I've been a participant in presentations/workshops, heard about a book, gone to the Amazon site, and downloaded the book a few minutes later. What a concept!

Click here to peruse all of my books, workbooks, audio tracks, and the full range of electronic formats available (Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, and others). This page also gives you all the languages and other versions of my books.

I've just read (electronically) that 30% of people reading e-content say they're now spending more time reading. And 41% of people who've owned an electronic reader for more than a year are reading more. Not all readers are leaders. But many "leaders on the grow" are readers. So: Read. Lead. Succeed!

Leadership and Management: The High-Wire Balancing Act

Last month Nik Wallenda made his record-breaking walk right across roaring Niagara Falls from the U.S. to Canada. With wind blowing mist around him and the wire dripping wet, he descended and ascended the sloping cable. It was high definition, nail biting, heart pounding, suspense that left Heather and I feeling weak-kneed as we watched. And he gave a TV interview in the middle of his crossing (he was wired with a microphone and ear piece)!

While none of us will likely ever do anything this dangerously dramatic, it's a powerful metaphor about balance. Life is full of many high wire balancing acts. A critical one for personal, team, and organization effectiveness is managing things and leading people.

Things include physical assets, processes, and systems. People include customers, external partners, and people throughout our team or organization (or "internal partners"). When dealing with things, we talk about a way of doing. In the people realm, we're talking about a way of being.

Both management and leadership are needed to make teams and organizations successful. Trying to decide which is more important is like trying to decide whether the right or left wing is more important to an airplane's flight. We need both!

I just came across Jesse Lyn Stoner's blog post reporting on her dissertation research years at the University of Massachusetts (Leaders vs. Managers: The Real Answer to What's Better). Over two years she collected data from more than 500 employees rating their bosses on how much they demonstrated leadership versus management behaviors and how those correlated to their team's performance.

She concluded that, "managers need to lead and leaders need to manage." She goes on to declare that, "it's time to retire the conversation about which is better."

Not surprisingly, Jesse's research showed that high leadership balanced with high management lead to high team performance. What surprised her was the discovery that high leadership with low management also produced high performance. When she looked deeper she discovered that bosses who provided strong leadership vision were often supported by teams who provided the management needed to implement them.

This is explained by Zenger Folkman's ongoing leadership research as reported in their book, The Inspiring Leader:

"Adequate leaders get everyone to do their jobs, but inspirational leaders are able to get people to rise far above that mark and achieve more … There is obviously something about a leader's encouraging innovation that has an extremely powerful impact on people. People are jazzed by the opportunity to participate in new and exciting activities."

We need both leadership and management for high-performance on the team and organizational high wire. And when working with supervisors, managers, and executives with strong leadership skills, team/organizational members can step up to provide counterbalancing management that takes everyone across the roaring maelstrom.

Further Reading:

Harness Resistance to Change as Positive Energy

A past Client and long time subscriber sent me an e-mail recalling the successful work we'd done together years ago. He was at the centre of the work we and the CEO were doing on culture and leadership development. They went on to become named as a Top 100 Employer.

Part of his e-mail focused on a vital culture change issue:

"As I recall, at the time you had a section on incorporating divergent thinkers into the change process and especially on differentiating between divergent thinkers and negative people who just want to derail change. I believe those employees who are resistant to change because they are negatively orientated in their personalities or wish to harm the organization need to be differentiated from those employees who are offering valid critique.

It seems to me that the latter are often divergent thinkers who are among the most innovative and morally courageous people we have. I also think that organizations need to get such divergent thinkers on board in order to benefit from their critique as well as to ward off any overt or covert resistance. We waste a lot of talent if we label all resistors as negative.

Would you be so kind as to direct me to any literature that you have on this subject matter?"

These are discussions I tend to have during many workshops and executive team retreats. We have a selection of Change Management blog posts and articles. The article, "Harnessing the Energy of Change Champions" gets into another critical aspect of this discussion and provides a list of how-to implementation ideas.

Resistance is energy. Apathy is the real problem. If resistors can be redirected, their energy can often be turned into a very positive force for change.

Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm on … Change Champions

This week marked celebrations of the creation of two countries. Canada Day was July 1 and Americans celebrated Independence Day on July 4. Both countries broke away from British rule. Canada was formed by evolution and America by revolution. It's a good time to look at a few thoughts on the role of change champions in organizational change or transformation efforts.

"Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one."

- 19th Century Scottish writer, essayist, historian, and teacher

"A man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds"

- "Mark Twain" pen name of 19th Century American author and humorist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission."

- Peter Drucker, American management research, professor, and author

" … once they have identified an idea that seems to hold promise, they tailor it to fit their organizations' specific needs. Next, they actively sell the idea -- to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. And finally, they get the ball rolling by participating in small-scale experiments. But when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute."

- H. James Wilson, Thomas H. Davenport, and Laurence Prusak, "Who's Bringing You Hot Ideas (and How Are You Responding)?" Harvard Business Review

"Only mediocrities rise to the top of a system that won't tolerate wave making."

- Laurence J. Peter, author of The Peter Principle

"Tempered radicals inspire change. Yet their leadership resides equally in their capacity to inspire people. They inspire by having courage to tell the truth even when it's difficult to do so, and by having the conviction to stay engaged in tough conversations. They inspire by demonstrating the commitment to stay focused on their larger ideals even when they suffer consequences or get little recognition for doing so."

- Debra E. Meyerson, Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work

"There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly."

- Kingman Brewster, American educator, President of Yale University, and US diplomat

Delivering Purposeful Customer Service in a Toxic Environment

June's issue of The Leader Letter opened with the opening story on Where's Your Culture on the Customer-Cattle Continuum? The issue also published a series of my May blogs on customer service that included "Want to Improve Customer Service? Treat Your Employees Better", "American Express Boosts Customer Service with Transformed Leadership and Culture", and "Delightful Dell Service Shows a Real Turnaround").

Just after publication, a reader's e-mail to me started with:

"I always feel that you all are poised outside my office window (which could be challenging, considering that my office is perched on the 8th floor), listening to the "coconut-telegraph" and then you formulate your monthly newsletter topics. Seriously, I enjoyed all of the articles and the way in which the thematic threads joined them all."

Honest, I wasn't hanging outside her 8th floor window! I am not sure what the "coconut-telegraph" is but it could be a useful -- and less dangerous -- way to hear about what's on reader's minds.

Laura went on to make a vital point on how to provide customer service in a toxic environment:

"Sometimes, a person has to find his or her own rewards in what they do. One can never count on a management team or corporate leadership to be positive. I have found that I have to be proactive with myself, since no one is forcing me to continue working in an environment where internal customers are not as valued as the external ones.

I make it my mission to 'be that person' to the callers who speak with me on our customer service line. My customers are calling to lodge a quality of care complaint about medical service that they have received from providers. They are usually at the end of their ropes, have been transferred from pillar to post, and are anticipating that I am yet another customer service representative longing to get them off my back and off the phone.

I make it a point to listen to them, hear what they are saying, and to advocate on their behalf. It's my mission to establish a meaningful relationship and to provide my name, number, hours of work so that they can count on me in the future. My rewards rarely come from my supervisors or my company. Instead they come from the people I serve and the satisfaction I get in knowing that I have made a difference in their lives, even if it is just one person a day."

This is an excellent example of Leading in a toxic environment rather than going along (Following), or becoming an embittered victim of a deadly culture (Wallowing). Laura's describing what's now been clearly proven to be our most powerful motivator: a deep sense of meaning and purpose that transforms a job into a cause or calling.

Click on Deepening Spirit, Meaning, and Purpose to peruse a series of articles on this critical topic so central to flourishing in our work and life. You might want to especially read "Just a Job or a Source of Deeper Joy and Meaning?" "Just a Job or Part of Our Deeper Purpose?" or "Stop Working and Start Living". Click on archived blog posts on this topic to read more perspectives including a short quiz on Checking My Spirit and Thoughts that Make You Go Hmmm…on Spirit and Meaning.

More on Less Generational Nonsense

I am fed up with the continuing stream of unsubstantiated psychobabble about how younger generations need to be managed so much differently than previous generations. This usually comes from, or is spouted by "experts" to, mediocre managers who aren't inspiring leaders.

In their solidly researched book, The Inspiring Leader, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman provide highly documented evidence that the characteristic of "inspires and motivates others to high performance" is the most powerful factor in great or extraordinary leaders versus good or average supervisors, managers, or executives. Their research with over 200,000 participants evaluating more than 20,000 managers clearly showed that frontline staff and team members value this competency above all others. Not surprisingly, of the 16 competencies Zenger Folkman have identified as key to effectiveness, this vital leadership skill is by far the most vital to employee engagement.

There is a generational difference: younger generations are much less willing to put up with weak leaders who don't inspire them. Where their parents might have gritted their teeth and trudged on to pay mortgages and feed their families, younger people are much less tied down to any organization or job early in their careers.

Uninspiring managers often say things like, "the work ethic is dying; young people don't want to work anymore." That's complete rubbish! And it's a convenient excuse weak managers hide behind. In "We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership" I cited Jennifer Deal's extensive research showing that today's younger generation is "just as intrinsically motivated as other generations." So the mediocre manager who wails about younger generations needs to be told the truth: they want meaningful and fulfilling work -- just like everyone else. They just don't want to work for you!

After "We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership" was published, two readers posted these comments:

"Thanks Jim! I prefer evidence to anecdote on big matters, and you've given us credible evidence -- I admire that. And it returns the discourse to leadership and purpose -- essentials -- rather than distractions."

- James Hilmar Todd

"What a refreshing article on the generation gap. I have been curious about all the attention on age diversity in the workplace, given my experience over 4 decades in both public and private sector organizations. Clearly these times are not the same as they were years ago, but Jennifer Deal's research and your commentary certainly rings true for me."

- Rick Fullerton

What are your thoughts and experiences? Post them below or add them to "We Need Less Generational Nonsense and More Leadership".

Jest for the Pun of It

If you're a father I hope you enjoyed Father's Day in June and were treated like a king. I tried to get our three kids -- although they're now in the twenties and hardly kids anymore -- to give me the gift of laughing at all my Dad Jokes all day long. But they would not groan for it.

Puns are maliciously maligned as the lowest form of humor. That probably comes from some uptight sour puss sucking on a pickle! I am a bottom feeder. I do like to poke pun at lots of situations. I agree with humorist, Herb True, "Don't take life too seriously. You're never going to get out of it alive anyway."

Here's where our kids would jump in with a warning about my Dad Jokes. When Chris, Jenn and Vanessa were teenagers and dating, they'd warn new boyfriends or girlfriends not to laugh at my wisecracks. Our youngest, Vanessa, has threatened her boyfriend, Andy, many times not to laugh because it encourages more. Despite being kicked under the table, he sometimes breaks into a small grin.

In my workshops and retreats I often kid about kidding and pledge to go easy on the Dad Jokes. You can watch a two minute example of this in front of a large audience at Getting Started With Humor and Dad Jokes. After one session, a participant -- a fellow Dad-Joker -- e-mailed me,

"We have three children as well. They, too, groan at 'Dad Jokes.' In fact, a couple of years ago they and my wife implemented a house rule of only allowing me two Dad Jokes a night! Great stuff … keep it coming … and don't give up the Dad jokes."

He clearly isn't on a humor-reduced diet.

So, I was delighted to read a Fortune article about the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. As described in Punny Business: When Words Collide contestants are invited to "come pun, come all." The article features past contest winner, John Pollack, who wrote a book, The Pun Also Rises, about his experience. The contest is "jest for a wordy cause" and awards "Punniest of Show." This is clearly where wit happens. Some contestants are also winners of a PunSlingers competition. They must come swaggering in from the wild jest with their puns on their lips!

The Fortune article concludes that, "Life is like business. That's why they call it buyology." If we do take business -- or life -- too seriously, it can scare the wit out of us.

Well, as the frog ruminated while sitting on his lily pad; time's fun when you're having flies. I hope I've tickled your punny bone just a little. After all, seven days without humor make one weak.

Mind the Gap: Are People Bumping their Heads on Your Values Ceiling?

Lead by example is a management cliché. Most executives mouth the words. But many executives don't appreciate how their behaviors set the upper limits for any core value they're trying to build their culture around. Too often the espoused values are what the top tells the middle to do for the bottom.

Ethics and honesty data collected through 360 surveys by Zenger Folkman on 5,268 leaders vividly illustrates the point. In their Harvard Business Review blog, "The Data's In: Honesty Really Does Start at the Top," Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman found,

"The top managers in an organization create a ceiling -- that is, leaders the next level down tend to be rated lower than their managers on every leadership dimension -- and that includes their honesty and integrity. In other words, levels of honesty are set at the top and can only go downhill from there."

Former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher famously observed "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't." The very same can be said about an executive's integrity, honesty, and ethical behavior.

Most executives, like most frontline staff, don't set out to do a bad job. It's rare that an executive will declare a value or behavioral goal and then deliberately contradict that value with his or her actions. Most acts of executive hypocrisy are committed innocently. Many executives simply have no idea that their actions are widely perceived to be out of step with their words. And as their personal credibility gulf widens their declarations of values raise the organization's "snicker factor."

A big reason executives' lived values are inconsistent with espoused values is simply ignorance. They're not getting feedback on how their actions are perceived. Ironically, those very executives who are the brashest violators of their own fine rhetoric are the ones least likely to hear about it. No one wants to tell the emperor he's naked and being snickered at. So the fantasyland surrounding the inconsistent executive rises ever higher into the stratosphere. And executive frustration also rises because managers, supervisors, and frontline people aren't grabbing hold of the new values. The values gap widens ever further.

While the two broad steps to help you and your management team live your values are easy to describe, they are very tough to do. The first step is to open up as many feedback channels to the executive team as possible. In today's interconnected world there's a multitude of informal and formal ways to get unfiltered feedback on your behavior from people in your organization as well as outside suppliers and customers.

Secondly, treat the messengers, especially internal ones, with kid gloves. If it looks like they got shot in the process, feedback will instantly revert to "gee boss, you're doing a great job!" Only those people with a career death wish will then participate.

Executives need to LOL -- Lead Out Loud -- to shift values from rhetoric to reality. Zenger and Folkman advise executives to "take deliberate care to communicate expectations of honesty." But as the American philosopher, essayist, and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said, "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." What we do shouts so loudly most people can't hear what we say.

Further Reading:

Reclaim Your Time, Reclaim Your Life

Recently I had a conversation with a Vice President about the pressing challenges she's facing in her division with priority overload. She was looking at bringing her management team to my June Leading @ the Speed of Change: Navigating Turbulent Times public workshop. We decided to tailor a session for her group that will especially focus on applying the leadership skills and approaches to their overwhelming problems of too much to do with too little time.

The prolific 19th Century writer, Charles Dickens, once reflected on this critical leadership skill;

"I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time …"

In today's crazy-busy, always on, hyper connected world, demands on our time and concentration have sped up dramatically since Victorian London.

It's a timeless principle that's even more critical in these times. Leaders take control of their calendars and their lives. Leaders know that they don't have to be accessible to everyone all the time. Leaders strive for balance. Leaders know they don't have to answer every electronic message. Leaders look for leverage points and focus there. Leaders sort through the chaff of data and information to find the wheat of true communication. Leaders set priorities then reset them if conditions change. Leaders prune low-value tasks and maintain stop-doing lists. Leaders don't confuse busyness and quantity with quality. Leaders know that blaming technology for sucking time away is like blaming the car for speeding. So they have found ways to tame and leverage technology. Leaders realize that being frustrated by endless streams of poorly run meetings and not doing anything to influence change is feeding the Meeting Monster.

Manage Your Own Time or Someone Else Will

Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has authored many books on psychology topics, including problems with attention, focus, stress, and worry. He feels we're in the midst of a major societal crisis. In his book, Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About To Snap, he writes,

"You can feel like a tin can surrounded by a circle of a hundred powerful magnets. Pulled at once in every direction, you go nowhere but instead spin faster and faster on your axis. In part, many people are excessively busy because they allow themselves to respond to every magnet: tracking too much data, processing too much information, answering to too many people, taking on too many tasks -- all out of a sense that this is the way they must live in order to keep up and stay in control. But it's the magnets that have the control."

If you're feeling overwhelmed and frantically busy, you're letting others "should" on you. That is you should always be available, your door should always be open, you should respond to every message, you should attend every meeting you're invited to, you should do whatever your boss asks, you should listen to every co-worker's "grump dump," you should have that expensive car, you should provide your kids with what they want, you should do it yourself to make sure it's done right, you should be perfect, you should multi-task, you should take on that new project, you should sleep less, eat on the run, and skip exercise to get it all done … you should do all that's asked of you. By everyone.

But … should you?

We've had decades of time-management studies that come to the same conclusion: people who get the most done and maintain a balanced life invest their precious time like a tightwad looking to stretch every nickel to its maximum buying power. "Sorry" isn't the hardest word for most people; "no" is. We need to be "in the no" so people don't should on us.

Effective leaders are focused and strategic with their time. In their article entitled "Beware the Busy Manager," professors Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal report:

"After observing scores of managers for many years, we came to the conclusion that managers who take effective action (those who make difficult -- even seemingly impossible -- things happen) rely on a combination of two traits: focus and energy … aware of the value of time, they manage it carefully. Some refuse to respond to electronic messages, phone calls, or visitors outside certain periods of the day … they decide first what they must achieve and then work to manage the external environment … refusal to let other people or organizational constraints set the agenda -- is perhaps the subtlest and most important distinction between this group of managers and all the rest."

Tweet Reading: Recommended Online Resources

This section summarizes last month's LinkedIn Updates and Twitter Tweets about online articles or blog posts that I've flagged as worth reading. These are usually posted on weekends when I am doing much of my reading for research, learning, or leisure.

My original tweet commenting on the article precedes each title and descriptor from the original source:

Read The Leader Letter in Twice Weekly Installments

The items in each month's issue of The Leader Letter are first published in my twice weekly blog during the previous month.

If you read each blog post (or issue of The Leader Letter) as it's published over twelve months you'll have read the equivalent of one of my books. And you'll pick up a few practical leadership tips that help you use time more strategically and tame your E-Beast!

Feedback and Follow-Up

I am always delighted to hear from readers of The Leader Letter with feedback, reflections, suggestions, or differing points of view. Nobody is ever identified in The Leader Letter without their permission. I am also happy to explore customized, in-house adaptations of any of my material for your team or organization. Drop me an e-mail at Jim.Clemmer@Clemmer.net or connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, or my blog!

Keep learning, laughing, loving, and leading - living life just for the L of it!!

Jim