A short time back I was talking with a friend who was having trouble with several aspects of his pharmaceutical regulatory consulting business.  He was not getting the performance he wanted from his employees and they were demotivated.    He was not making the profits that he should and he was overworked.  He felt that if he just worked harder, things would get better.  Unfortunately, he had been saying that for quite a few years, and he had not made any progress.  I could not imagine him working any harder, but he kept thinking that that was the answer.

This is not an unusual perspective for technically trained people, particularly people who hold the professional credentials for their business. 

In a moment of desperation, he asked me what I thought he should do.  First, I remarked that he was not utilizing his team effectively; he was not delegating enough; he was doing everything himself.  I said that this has a couple of bad effects on the business.  First, it is demotivating for your employees.  If you do everything yourself, your employees lose their motivation to think and act.  They have no latitude to draw upon their own expertise to contribute to the business.  They end up standing around waiting for you to tell them what to do and performing tasks that are well below their capabilities.  They feel no sense of accomplishment and they see no future for growing and developing their skills.

You have to look at delegation as assigning authority.  You maintain control and responsibility from a distance.

 The reason delegating is motivating is because it tacitly recognizes someone’s worth.  You trust them to do the job well, and they want to live up to that expectation.  They want to contribute.  They want to be of value.  Controlling everything yourself has the opposite effect.

Then I explained to him that there is an even more important aspect of effectively structuring your operation and delegating tasks.  To start we agreed that a fundamental principle in profitable business operations is delivering the right product or service, at the right price, at the least possible cost.  The “right service” is closely regulated in the drug development world, and pricing is very competitive.  That leaves cost reduction as the key to managing profitability. 

The problem here was that he was doing everything.  By doing so he was minimizing his profitability because HE was handling most of the tasks, and HE was the most expensive employee in the company.

He needed to do a better job of delegating.  His response, of course, was that he could not.  His license depended on everything being done exactly per the regulations, and he felt that he was the only one who knew the correct way to do these things.  So, I asked him if he always got regulatory approval on his submissions the first time.  He said, “rarely”.  So, I said, apparently the regulators feel that there are some other ways to do things that may be just as good, if not better, than the way you think best.  He agreed and recognized that perhaps he could allow people more latitude to do things without his direct involvement.

If you are not delegating, then you are not leading; you are doing.

Finally, I pointed out that if he were the only one performing all these tasks, or overseeing every aspect of every job, then the total volume of work he could expect to do in his organization was limited to the workload that he alone could handle.  That put a great limitation on his business prospects for the future.

So, he agreed to consider this idea of delegating.  Question was, “how”? 

• Simple first step: I told him to list ALL the tasks he ever finds himself doing…every one of them.  Take a few days, take notes about what you are doing, and make a list. 
• Second: Put that list in order from the most to the least by what REQUIRES your technical training and abilities. 
• Finally: Start to delegate by taking the bottom 10% of those items and assigning them to someone else.  Get them OFF your list.  Clearly define exactly what you want done, and establish the methods and mechanisms for keeping an eye on the quality from a distance by developing and reviewing checkpoints or metrics. Over time you can go to the next 10% of the items on the bottom of your list, and so on until you find the right balance.

Though it has only been a short time since we had this discussion, he has indicated that his team has been energized by the prospects of this new direction, and he is now able to focus his time and energy on those aspects of running the business that really require his expertise.    

*****

It is very difficult for people to let go of control in their businesses.  However, it is fundamental to effective and profitable operations to have a clear and appropriate delineation of duties.  You have to look at delegation as assigning authority while learning to maintain control and responsibility from a distance.  If you are not delegating, then you are not leading; you are doing.

Here are a few more thoughts on the subject of giving feedback…

A constant flow of information about how people are performing will keep their performance as close to on target as possible, as we pointed out in the last post.  Waiting to give feedback allows performance to stray until such time as you actually give the feedback to correct performance.  Every minute of substandard performance costs your organization.

Interestingly, your other employees know when a co-worker is under-performing long before you do.  They are closer to it and they see it every day .The longer it takes you to recognize the poor performer and act on it, the more credibility you lose as a leader.  The other employees see you as weak, unaware, or unable to make the tough decisions.  Conversely, when you do act on poor performers, other employees learn from it.  They learn that they must perform; they learn what poor performance looks like; and, they learn that you will act on poor performance.  Most importantly, they will learn that you have the strength and courage to do what is in the best interest of the organization and, therefore, in their best interest.  They will respect that.

Also, consider this.  When giving feedback to an individual about something they have done, you need to do so as soon as the action has occurred, or as close to it as possible.  In this way the action you are referring to has just occurred and the specifics of it, the assumptions and motivations behind it, and the impact of it are as clear as possible.  It is easiest to correct the behavior in that moment; the learning opportunity is at its greatest.  Waiting until the annual performance review to give examples leaves a lot of room for a lack of clarity and misunderstanding.   

Finally, how you give feedback is as important as what you say.  A couple of pointers on this:

Make feedback about an action and a result, not about the person.  As an example, one time I had a CFO whom I had asked to develop cost standards for one of our operations.  He did so, but they were not done correctly.  As a result, we were incurring unfavorable variances every month despite performing our production processes as defined.  I called him into my office and pointed that out.  I told him that we are incurring unfavorable manufacturing variances every month, and that the standards we are using apparently were not done correctly.  Then I asked him to tell me what he thought was wrong with those standards and how we should change them moving forward.  I made no mention of his or anyone else’s involvement in developing those standards.

By taking this approach, I focused on the problem and not the person.  He knew that those standards were standards that he had developed, and he knew that I knew it.  He did not need to hear anything more than the fact that they were wrong to get the point that he had made a mistake.   By focusing on the problem and not the person you move directly to corrective action without damaging their ego or self-esteem.  They can then focus on correcting the situation.  They will not feel that they have to defend themselves.  Saying to them that “the standards you developed are all wrong and are causing variances” carries with it the message that “they” did a bad job, that “they are not competent”.  Their response will be defensive, they will be less likely to hear the suggestions you give them, and they will be less likely to move forward quickly with correcting the situation.  They will be devoting time and energy to worrying about and repairing your impression of them; unproductive time.

Having said that, there will come times when it becomes clear that an employee is actually NOT able to perform a given set of tasks.  See the post on Managing Performance for tips on how to handle those situations.  http://www.scottneilson.com/?m=200902

Last point…Make giving feedback a personal matter between you and your employee.  I generally (not always) provide feedback, both positive as well as “constructive”, in private.  I call the person into my office and have a casual conversation about it.  Personally, I feel more comfortable that way anyway.  Funnily enough, I must say that giving feedback in this way makes for a very interesting scenario.  Whenever I ask someone to come into my office and I close the door behind them, they always assume that the end of the world is near and I am about to give them their last rites.  When I tell them that they did a good job with “X” or “Y” and what I liked about it, they always look surprised and say “but”, as if I am about to tell them all the things I did not like.  When I say, “no buts, nothing else, just a nice job on that”, they look surprised but pleased, and leave my office in a bit of shock but uplifted.

However, sometimes it serves a very useful purpose to give feedback in a more public setting.  For example, a positive stroke can send a message of credibility for an employee among his or her peers, and there may be a time when that is needed.  Likewise, “constructive” feedback for an individual may provide a lesson that is more broadly needed for a group of people.  In this case it is important to immediately and clearly frame that feedback as relevant for the whole group, not just an individual.  It may even require you to give other examples of similar behavior that quietly implicates others on the team and provides a broad lesson for the group.  In that way the one individual does not feel that he/she is being singled out in front of their peers, but broader feedback is being provided for the group. 

*****

There is a lot to giving feedback.  It is an important aspect of leadership, and one which you must be good at.  Like many other leadership skills it is not rocket science, but it does require developing an understanding of the concepts and applying them.  It requires practice.  It requires you to make it important.

This is a subject that generally scares people.  FEEDBACK!!!  “How do I tell someone when they are not performing up to my expectations?”  “I hate filling out performance evaluations.”  “I hate annual review discussions”.  The whole subject is fraught with negatives, and it doesn’t need to be.  Feedback must be given…it is so critically important to getting good results.

You achieve better results by giving people positive feedback about what they are doing right than by only giving them feedback about what they are doing wrong, or no feedback whatsoever.

One of the reasons people have trouble giving feedback is because they only focus on discussing the negatives.  Many people assume that giving feedback means telling people when they are doing something wrong; transmitting negative information that people will be upset about receiving.  It shouldn’t be that way!

Someone once said that you get a lot more mileage out of telling people when they are doing something right than only telling them when they are doing something wrong.  Think about it.  There must be a hundred ways to perform a task incorrectly, and only one way, or a few ways, of doing it correctly.  So, if you are only telling people when they are doing it incorrectly, then they are getting little, or no, information about how to do it correctly.  Absent any other feedback they will experiment with many ways, which may be wrong, while hoping to stumble upon that one way which really accomplishes the task.  What an unproductive use of time!!!

There is an activity I once saw conducted along these lines.  It demonstrated the point quite well.  A group was divided into two sub-groups…team A and team B.  The task was for each group to blindfold each member of their team, one at a time, and have that person walk across the room and try to put a sticker on a target which was hanging on the wall.  Each team would blindfold their contestant, spin them around a few times, and aim them in the general direction of the target.  Team A could give NO feedback to their team member who was walking across the room trying to figure out where the target might be.  Team B was to clap when their member was going in the RIGHT direction, and make no noise when they were going in the wrong direction.  As you would expect, the stickers from team B were very close to the target while the stickers from team A were all over the wall.

The point was clear.  You achieve better results by giving people positive feedback about what they are doing right than by only giving them feedback about what they are doing wrong, or no feedback whatsoever.

I have tried to make giving feedback a habit of this in my personal life as well as my professional life.  With my children I find it does a lot of good for their self-esteem to get messages about things that they are doing right, even if it is about things that I imagine to be small things.  With employees, I find that it is not only a way to ensure the results you seek, it is motivating for them.  Feedback, in these cases, is recognition.  Recognition means that they are of value to you.  Being of value satisfies a core need that we all have.

Bottom line is that I try to spend as much time giving positive feedback as I do giving “constructive” feedback…actually, even more.  When you focus on the positives, everyone feels good about it.  It contributes to a positive attitude in the workplace.  It contributes to continued good performance.  Unfortunately, the fact that people are often surprised to get good feedback is a sad commentary on what people have come to expect in the workplace.  It reflects that we have gotten in the habit of focusing on only the negatives in giving feedback and managing performance; that punishment is seen as a primary motivator in leading teams.

Oh well, the next minute is the first minute of the rest of your life.  It may be time to chart a new course.

Heard this one the other day…I thought it showed great poise.

Terry Francona…Manager of the Boston Red Sox was being questioned by the media about the batting slump that David Ortiz was experiencing for the first few weeks of the season.  Is he over the hill?  Has he lost it?  Should he be replaced?  How long will you wait before changing him out for someone else?  How do you plan to react?

He replied, “You can’t react to everything”.  The implication was right on.  As  a leader, you can’t react to everything.  Sometimes you have to let things play themselves out a bit before jumping in and taking action.  Immediately acting on everything raises the level of pressure on the situation, and creates an atmosphere in which everything becomes a crisis.  It creates a level of stress which inhibits everyones ability to perform effectively.

By letting things play out a bit you show poise and calm, which is so needed by your constituents…in this case the other team members, the fans, and the owners.  You demonstrate that the situation may not require intervention at this moment.  You diffuse the pressure.  You make it clear that you are aware of the situation, the implications, and that you have it under control.  It is critical to your constituents that they know you are in control of the situation.

In this situation Terry Francona was absolutely right.  David Ortiz is a pro.  He, like any other professional athlete, will have slumps and hot streaks.  If he were to have gotten all excited about this situation it would have made the situation worse.  It would have put extra pressure on Ortiz to resolve his problems, and it would have demonstrated to the team that they had better not go into a slump, or they would come under the same kind of scrutiny.  That would negatively affect the performance of the team.

What Terry Francona did not only silenced the media and took the pressure off Ortiz, he protected the core of the rest of the team and the organization from the same kind of pressure…a great leadership response on his part. 

The result of Terry Francona’s leadership was exactly as one would expect…Ortiz did come out of his slump in grand fashion and has been on a hot streak for the past several weeks.  Now, one could say that Ortiz would have come out of his slump anyway, which is certainly true.  But, the bigger effect of his actions is in how the rest of the team, the fans, and the ownership respond to his ability to manage the media and public scrutiny of their performance. He minimized the effect that external inluences could have on the performance of the team.

(By the way…I am to be congratulated on my objectivity in this post since I am a die hard Yankee fan.)

This is the last segment in the series on Common Mistakes made by leaders, in which I have been summarizing responses from readers.  This issue focuses on the impact of EGO on leadership behavior.  For this issue I interviewed Dr. Timothy Gilmor, a Psychologist in Toronto, Canada, with Gilmor Associates, who focuses on executive assessment and development, website www.gilmorassociates.ca

The comments I received from readers about the role that EGO plays in dysfunctional leadership behavior were focused on a leader’s ambitions for themselves, the effect that those ambitions have on their decision-making, and the de-motivating effect they have on the people in the organization. 

To start, Dr. Gilmor gave me a bit of an education on the subject and pointed out that EGO is not the issue here, it is the maturity of the EGO that must be understood.  He described the mature EGO as an enlightened EGO, one that is grounded in confidence and strong self-esteem.

Surprisingly, those leaders whose motivations are based in self-advancement do not seem to be aware that many people around them recognize their actions as being for their own benefit.

He elaborated by saying that a common trait among leaders is that they are people who are attracted to positions of power.  There is nothing wrong with that; it is part of the make-up of leaders.  A strong EGO is a sign of an individual who is striving and ambitious, and that is an important element of being successful as a leader.  Those individuals with strong EGOs will often rise to the top of organizations.  It is the maturity of their EGO that defines whether that pursuit is intended for exploitation and self-aggrandizement, or for the greater good of all involved.

Unfortunately, I think (and this is ME speaking, not Dr. Gilmor) that the term EGO gets a bad rap and is generally used to describe the behavior of people in hot pursuit of their own advancement.  Conversely, if I understand what Dr. Gilmor is saying, a strong sense of philanthropy is also a reflection of the EGO at work…in this case, an enlightened EGO.

Dr. Gilmor went on to say that today fewer leaders have a value of the greater good as a backdrop for their actions.  The desire to prove “ONESELF” has become strongly rooted in our culture and the desire to do good for all is no longer stressed.   Our society has become more about “ME”.  As a result, decisions are often made with self-advancement as a primary driver. 

Surprisingly, those leaders whose motivations are based in self-advancement do not seem to be aware that many people around them see through their feigned interests of “doing what’s in the best interest of the organization” and recognize their actions as being for their own benefit.

How do you recognize people with a less enlightened ego?  The alienating quality of the less enlightened ego depreciates you and makes you feel badly.  Ask yourself, does this person leave me with good, mixed or bad feelings?  In a hiring situation be attentive to how a person makes you feel.  Be aware of their interests.  Are they focused on what they can get for themselves, or are they more interested in what they can contribute to the organization?

What leads to a less enlightened EGO versus an enlightened EGO?  A less enlightened EGO has suffered from deprivation in life, mistreatment, and a lack of introspection.  Those individuals become fixated on power to enrich themselves.  The need for potency and power trumps all else and results in behavior that is damaging to others and organizations.

An enlightened EGO grows from self-awareness, and learning from experience.  Diverse experiences, both painful and not, influences of childhood, role models, care and security play a role in shaping the degree to which one’s EGO is enlightened. 

Leaders who are motivated by the “good of the many” accept responsibility for their organizations and people rather than finding blame and fault.  They make you feel uplifted, safe, loyal and ready to support.  These are signs of an enlightened ego.  Sounds like the type of leader Jim Collins describes in his book “Good to Great”.

What I often hear, and often think, is that behavior of the less enlightened EGO seems about as obvious as the nose on my face.  We all seem to know the people that behave in this way.  How is it that they seem to continually move up in organizations and stay in positions of power despite the problems that ensue from their actions?

The answer is in adaptive and deceptive behavior.  They learn what needs to be said to their superiors to maintain the veil of “enlightenment”.  They learn how to manage information to protect their turf.  They learn how to avoid responsibility for results.  And, they learn how to “take out” those that stand in the way of them gaining power.  People we often describe as scary!

It sounds to me as if the hardest part of this issue, for those of us with the “good of the many” perspective, is to be able take the responsibility to look at ourselves and our actions, and decide if they are intended for exploitation, or for the good of all.  Having said that, if we are well grounded enough to be able to honestly challenge our own motivations, then we probably don’t need to.

LACK OF LISTENING…

Sound familiar?  Yeah!  These comments actually had a couple of different twists.  Most of them were about listening to employees, and that connects to the last post about “taking employees for granted”.  Others talked about listening to customers, and I was happy to see that constituency spoken for.

…when people take the time to talk to you, it is important to them that you hear what they are saying.

Regarding the employees, there were a couple of distinctions even within that group of comments.  The first dealt with what I would call passive listening in which a leader is the recipient of unrequested information.  The leader has not asked a question, has not sought input, and has not solicited feedback at all, but information is being provided and not heard.  These types of situations exist all the time.  You end up in casual discussions, employees make comments, ask questions, or act in a way that sends a message.  The feedback from this survey is that leaders often do not hear those messages.  I suspect that in these types of cases they are not even conscious that messages are out there.  While I don’t know this for a fact, I suspect that if they are not asking for information, they are probably not in a receiving mode for information either, and so they are not hearing it.  Still, a missed opportunity for any leader!

As a leader, how do you get conscious of that?  You have to train yourself.  You have to recognize that when people take the time to talk to you, it is important to them that you hear what they are saying.  You have to train yourself to stop what is going on inside your head and listen.  I have found, though, that there are times when I simply cannot do that.  That’s okay.  A leader’s life is busy and there are urgent issues to which you must attend.  At those times I try to think to tell the person that I have other pressing issues on my mind and simply cannot take the time to listen that I should.  Then I ask if we can talk at a later date.  This is quite an acceptable approach.  People feel that you value their opinion enough to say that you cannot devote the attention right now as you would like, but that you are willing to speak at another time.  They feel heard, but, more importantly, they feel valued.  Unfortunately, I have to admit that there are many times that I do not think to do this, but I am trying to get better at it.

I had an interesting experience last year which might shed some light on this.  I was at the annual reunion for the Doolittle Raiders…the “boys” who flew a suicide mission to bomb Tokyo in April of 1942 in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor.  They knew at the start of the mission that would not have enough fuel to return to the aircraft carriers from which they had taken off, and that they would have to crash land in China and hope that they would be rescued by the Chinese army and not captured by the Japanese army.  

Nine of the original eighty pilots are still alive (in their late 80’s and early 90’s) and four attended the reunion.  They all spoke about what a great leader Jimmy Doolittle was.  I got the chance to speak with each of them, and some of the widows that were there as well.  I asked them what made him such a good leader.  The most frequent answer they gave was that he was a good listener.  They said that “when you spoke with him it was as if you were the only person on the planet.  You could be in the middle of a party and his attention would be totally on you and what you were saying.  He didn’t look at his watch, he didn’t glance around the room, he didn’t nod and walk away.  It was you and him.  What you were saying was all that mattered to him at that moment.  Generally, it was only for a moment…but for that moment he was yours.”

Personally, I think there is an element in this that also speaks to caring about what other people are saying.  That is an element of one of the other subjects people brought up in this survey which will be included in the last post on the question of leadership mistakes…post #4…to come.

As an aside, I think that listening is an element of what people are referring to when they say that a person has charisma.  I wrote a post on charisma a while back…one of my favorites.  Here is the link http://www.scottneilson.com/?p=39

This post is getting a little long and is a lot to think about, so I will stop here and add the rest on another post.

First, I want to thank everyone for their responses to my question about the most common mistakes leaders make.  I cannot say that I got enough responses to make the conclusions statistically significant, however, there were some consistent messages and some interesting points to think about.  There were several themes, so I am going to take them one at a time and do one post on each.

Here is one subject that I found particularly interesting.  There were numerous responses all along the same line.  Leaders tend to take employees opinions for granted.  They do not seem to pay enough attention to how employees interpret and react to their decisions and actions.  Leaders do not seem to realize that employees are watching them all the time and forming opinions about them based on their decisions, actions and attitudes.  And, those opinions have a direct effect on their motivation and performance.

Wow!  How true.  Think about that.  Everything you do, as a leader, is being watched and analyzed far more than you would imagine.  The interpretations people make of what they see has a direct impact on what they think of you and, more importantly, on their motivation.  To make matters worse, many employees will be drawing those conclusions without having complete knowledge of all the issues you are dealing with and the complexities of them.  Their conclusions are likely to be founded on some inaccurate assumptions.  It puts a lot of pressure on you to be aware at all times of how your actions are being perceived and interpreted…and managing that.

The areas identified as those in which employees tend to be most critical are ethics and accountability…and these are fundamental to trust.  If they do not see you taking responsibility for the performance of the organization, they will not trust you.  If they see anything that causes them to question your ethics, they will not trust you.  If they interpret your actions as being motivated by a personal agenda or self-interest, they will not trust you.  Without their trust you will not gain their commitment to you as the leader and to the goals and objectives of the business.  You will not get the best that they have to offer in terms of their performance – not just in the conduct of their daily tasks, but in terms of their creativity, innovation, and initiative.  What a loss!

My conclusion is that this group of comments focuses on trust, and that among the most common mistakes leaders make are: (1) failing to recognize the importance of trust, the fragility of it, and the tenuous nature of it, and (2) failing to take the appropriate steps to build it and maintain it. 

Lots to learn from that.  Put yourself in the shoes of your employees and recall how your commitment, motivation and performance wane when you lose trust.

As an aside…I have spoken to a former professor of mine who spent many years teaching Ethics.  I am going to try to interview him for a more complete perspective on the whole subject.  Another post…

In recent weeks I have been asked the question several times, “How do you take your corporate strategic plan and make it actionable for everyone in the organization?”

Great question.  One that all leaders need to think about.  This is a challenge that many leaders do not even recognize is facing them.  Unfortunately, it is also one at which we fail on a regular basis.  Without motivating and mobilizing everyone in the organization in the same direction, you are unlikely to achieve the results you desire.

First, I have to clarify one thing.  The failure to move plans to action is rarely one which applies across the entire organization.  The plan tends to take hold in one form or another in many places.  The problem is that it is rarely a consistently applied and orchestrated effort.  Our direct reports tend to understand the plans we are making and the direction we are taking because in most cases they have been involved in the discussions which have led to the decisions in question.  However, other employees may not.  This is where leaders often fail.  They fail to recognize that they must drive the effort to understand the direction and take action at all levels in the organization.

…most employees do not understand what strategic plans mean in terms of day-to-day actions for them.

The disconnects emerge and get worse the further the employees are removed from that decision-making level.  Unfortunately, the people who will be most critical in accomplishing the tasks you have defined are often those that are furthest from that decision-making level…the shop floor, if you will.  The cascade of information to all levels is generally not managed and monitored well.  The message received at shop floor level is often muddled at best. 

The problem is that leaders often feel that publishing the vision and a few strategies on the corporate website, announcing them in town hall meetings, or hanging posters of them in the lobby is enough.  It isn’t.  You, as the leader, have to understand that many people just will not get it as you intend.  They are not as familiar with the issues facing the organization as you are.  They do not deal with those issues every day so they do not see how those issues evolve, develop and change.  They do not discuss them with experts and colleagues inside and outside the organization to study, dissect and analyze them as you do. 

What they hear from you is the summation of a lot of thinking and analysis.  They hear the end result of all that analysis; they hear a conclusion and do not see all the steps that went into getting to that conclusion; they have not been involved in all the discussions and cannot make the jump from issue to answer.  They do not understand what those strategic plans mean in terms of day-to-day actions for them. 

In motivating a workforce one of the basic elements is clarity.  People are motivated simply by being clear on what is expected of them.  In this case what they want to know is “What does this mean for me?  What is required of me?  What can I do to help?”  They do not have any idea how to take that vision, strategy or plan and put it into practice every day.

I make it a point to conduct regular town hall meetings at every site in my organization.  At those meetings I remind everyone of the direction in which we are going as an organization, and I explain to them what it means.  I tell them what actions we will take to get there.  Most importantly, I tell them what it means that THEY must do every day to contribute to achieving that goal.  I make it a point to put it in terms that are relevant to the tasks they perform every day.  As I walk around the organization I make it a point to talk with the employees at all levels and ask them how are they applying our strategies in their everyday work.  Those discussions always lead to clarifying questions and a better idea of how they can do their jobs in a way that better supports our strategic direction.

As an example, if we are pushing hard on distinguishing ourselves on customer service, I will tell them that this means that they must look at every type of situation in which they come in contact with the customer, get a clear understanding of what the customer needs from them in that situation, and make it a point to meet that need.  In our business it can be something as simple as having a human being answer the call rather than a machine…ensuring that the reports we send arrive on a timely basis…being polite and helpful on the call.

Finally, to ensure that the plans are completely put into action, the direction must be reinforced regularly.  The daily demands in the workplace make it difficult for any of us to keep those priorities clear and actionable.  The cascade of direction and information from the top has to be accompanied by periodic assessment and feedback on how we are doing with it…Where is it working?…Where is it not working?…How do we keep it on track? 

It requires leadership making it important.

What do you think?

I think NOT!  I know many people who have zero charisma who are effective leaders.  I know people with charisma who are terrible leaders.  I know people who have charisma but led people down bad paths which were doomed to failure.

I have never heard a person say that charisma was the main skill they employed to successfully lead a company.

Is charisma essential?  Absolutely not.  There are many leadership skills which can be learned…in fact, most.  If you look through all the literature on Leadership you will find that most of the books are listings of skills which have worked for someone at some point in time or some situation.  Any one of those skills can be learned or developed.  Can charisma help?  I guess so.  It really depends on what is meant by charisma?

Wikipedia describes it as ”a trait found in persons with a facile personality, characterized by personal charm and magnetism (attractiveness), along with innate and powerfully sophisticated abilities of interpersonal communication and persuasion. One who is charismatic is said to be capable of using their personal being, rather than just speech or logic alone, to interface with other human beings in a personal and direct manner, and effectively communicate an argument or concept to them.

Personally, I think charisma is one element of many that CAN make a person an effective leader.  However, charisma, without any other skills, will not make a person a successful leader.  I have never heard a person say that charisma was the main skill they employed to successfully lead a company.

I think charisma refers to an ability to connect with other people…to relate to them.  If that is true, then I also think that some of the fundamental elements of charisma can be learned.  Think about it.  What does it take to connect with other people?

• truly listening to what someone says (putting aside all other distractions and being totally engaged)
• respecting and valuing their opinion (requires being open-minded and perhaps puttings one’s own ego aside!)
• empathizing with what they are saying (caring? how often do we really do that, especially in a business situation?)
• responding in a supportive way (again, how often do we do that in a business situation?)
• doing what you say you will do (walking the talk…actions speaking louder than words)

Charisma is often described as hard to define.  I agree.  I am sure you do as well.  I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Leaders, generally speaking, do not give enough credit to their employees.  They seem to forget what it was like as they moved up the ladder themselves.  They seem to forget how aware they were of the problems facing the business.  They seem to forget what it was like to be on the front lines and deal with the problems facing the business every day. 

Leaders also tend to believe that they are the first to recognize the symptoms of something being amiss in their organization.  They seem to think that the symptoms they are seeing about business performance have not yet become visible to the average person in the office. 

Leaders learn early to withhold information…sometimes due to confidentiality…sometimes to maintain power…and sometimes to manage the impact on employees…making it least disruptive to the business.  The great fallacy is that, in reality, it creates further distraction by creating a general sense of distrust. 

Finally, leaders also tend to think that there is alot of information which they should not share with employees.  In most cases this is because they feel that employees are not able to handle the information.  They feel that panic would ensue and employees will flee the sinking ship, or that some bad message would get out to the customer.  So they hide it, they gloss over it, and they talk around it.

The irony is that generally the leader is NOT the first to know about many of the problems in the business.  In fact, by the time the leader informs the general populace of these insights, the employees already know, and have known for some time.  In many cases they were the first to know.  During that time, in which the leader has chosen to NOT acknowledge the existence of the problem, he/she has been deemed by the employees to be unobservant or, worse, incompetent.

It once took me 2 years to earn the trust and commitment of the people at one facility of mine.  I remember the day I finally did.  I had just completed a quarterly Town Hall meeting.  In that meeting I reported on our progress toward key goals and pointed out that we were not achieving the goals.  It was not a pretty picture.  Most of the news that day was bad, and it was the first time I had had to report bad news to that team of people.  After the meeting the General Manager of that facility came up to me and said, “Today you earned their trust.”  I asked him, “Why today?”  He said, “Because you were up front with them about the bad news.  Your ability to recognize and speak about the bad news means to them that they can also believe you about the good news.  They already knew the things you spoke about.  Had you avoided the subject they would not have felt that you were not being forthright with them and they would have questioned the validity of the other news you had to report.”

Leaders learn early to withhold certain information from employees, customers, regulators, owners, etc.  It is learned under the guise of being a means of managing the impact on them and couching the dissemination of the information in such a way as to make it most palatable and least disruptive to the business.  It is meant to keep them from being distracted and to keep them focused on their goals and objectives.  And keeping focus is an important aspect of leadership. 

The great fallacy is that, in reality, withholding information serves to cause distraction because it creates a general sense of distrust among employees.  It IS a form of deception and people FEEL it that way.  They know what is really going on.  When you tell them something different they begin to lose trust in you and then they begin to wonder what else is being “sugar-coated”.  They then start to spend more time trying to figure out what is really going on rather than on doing their work. 

Moral of the story…be straight with your employees.  They know more than you think, and they can handle ALOT more.  Spend your time being up front about the issues your organization faces and the plans to address them.  This will serve to maintain trust and also enlist their support.