Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

Managing Energy not Time

Managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

"The Power of Full Engagement" written by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz (Simon & Schuster) tells us that making change that lasts requires three steps: Define the Purpose, Face the Truth and Take Action to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Energy is simply the capacity to do work.  Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and recover energy.  Our energy bank is finite.  Your energy oscillates as you expend and then recover your source of energy.  Too much energy expenditure without recovery or too much recovery without sufficient energy expenditure pulls our life out of balance.  Balancing stress and recovery is critical to high performance both individually and organizationally.

Great leaders are stewards of organizational energy.  They begin by effectively managing their own energy.  As leaders, they mobilize, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.  Great leaders help people move toward full engagement---where personal and team energy pushes them forward toward their desired peak performance.

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Prioritizing is Crucial

If you don't prioritize your life activities, you'll find yourself spread so thin that you won't have time for those people and things that are important to you.

In our 24/7 global economy, feeling frequently rushed and impatient, becoming easily distracted and forgetful can come from environmentally induced attention deficit disorder (A.D.D.). Technology and activity overload tend to be the consequences of living in our attention deficit society where everybody is trying to do more in less time.

Juggling work deadlines and family activities can make us frazzled and negatively affect our on-the-job performance.  But deciding what's important and prioritizing your life around that can get your life and work in balance.  Ending relationships and projects that drain your energy and time helps.  Knowing what you are good at and doing it can make work more like play.  Blocking out quiet time to be creative can allow you to see new profitable possibilities.

Source: BusinessWeek, April 3, 2006

Speedy Innovation Imperative

Competition is more intense that ever because of the global economy, including the spread of disruptive new Internet technologies and business models.

To thrive in this hyper-competitive environment, you most innovate more and faster.

Google Inc. may be the highest-profile example of this new philosophy.  It launches product after product, more than 100 in the past five years.  Marissa Mayer, who helps guide the company's innovations, says Google wants to try new things and see what resonates with its users. The approach, says Mayer, "frees you from fear."

Here's how they do it:

Find new ways to spot hits: Try new methods to bridge the gap between what technology has come up with and what consumers will want to buy.

Launch with agile teams: Begin new initiatives with small teams and build 'fences' around them so they won't get tangled in red tap.

Break your unwritten rules: It's the invisible ties that slow down innovation, dummy.  Breaking through those bonds is tough.  Try brainstorming away from the office with outsiders who are able to provoke fresh thinking.

Outsource tasks to specialists: Outsourcers don't just do things more cheaply; they do them better and faster.

When you have it right, repeat: Once a new product or business process has succeeded in the market, don't reinvent the wheel.  Look for ways to use the same technology or business model again and again in other markets or applications.

Source: BusinessWeek, March 27, 2006

Previewing Outcomes

Businesspeople often get trapped in functional thinking.

They focus solely on their own area and fail to see the larger picture of the entire company, staff, and clients.  The authors of "businessThink" note that only seven percent of decisions are made after considering long-term priorities or conferring with colleagues.  We must learn to explore who or what else in the company is affected by the current problem or opportunity under consideration.

For example, suppose you were examining the high turnover rate in your call centers.  Your colleague feels the turnover is favorable as new people tend to be cheaper and more enthusiastic.  As a businessThinker, you consider the effects of constantly hiring new people on the human resources department, training costs, customer satisfaction, company reputation in the industry, and so on.  In doing this, you effectively see the ripples that can have far-reaching effects and gain an understanding of how the proposed solution will influence the bigger picture.

Source: "businessThink, Rules for Getting It Right--Now and No Matter What!" by Dave Marcum, Steve Smith and Mahan Khalsa

Computer Skills Matter

Access to the Internet has become an essential tool for most businesses.

77 million people in the U.S., or 55% of those employed, used a computer at work.  80% of managers and professionals use a computer and the Internet.  45% of employed women said they used the Internet at work, compared to 39% of employed men.

Among all workers aged 25 to 65 years of age, 60% used computers at work and almost half used the Internet.  The percentage of employed with a bachelor's degree and higher was 84% using a computer at work with 73% using the Internet.  Of those with some college, 61% used a computer while 45% accessed the Internet.  High school graduates who used a computer at work totaled 42% with 26% accessing the Internet.

No wonder when I go to a cafe for lunch and to get away from my office laptop computer, many people there have their laptop opened while they sip a drink or eat.  It is hard to get a decent paying job today if you can't use a computer to access a world of information.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey, October 2003

Costly Leadership Transitions

Some leadership transitions involve bringing new executives into the organization.  Some involve moving up to new positions within the firm and others occur when executives leave to seek new career opportunities or begin retirement.

Leadership transitions get riskier the higher up the organization they occur: up to 40% of new CEOs fail to meet their objectives in the first 18 months according to the Center for Creative Leadership.  The cost of failure is high.  Michael Watkins in his book, The First 90 Days, estimates the cost of a single failed hire range from 14 to 28 times the base compensation with the higher figure reflecting more senior hires.

Successful leadership transitions get results more quickly and result in richer and deeper alignment with the organization.  They are the result of guidance from outside executive coaches that cover not just how to meet the discrete requirements of the job, but how to build and maintain networks, as well as influence senior management or external authorities.

Leadership transitions that promise to deliver dramatically increased value, primarily through people, are not easy to execute. 

Transitions are times of heightened emotion where perceptions and feelings outweigh logic.  Leaders know and science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another.  Leaders in new positions who fail to recognize the impact of emotions in their future success are sure to fail.  

Hope Makes Happiness

After decades spent focusing on the psyche's dark side, now there's a new weapon in the arsenal: the emerging field of scientific research into what makes people happy.

One happiness researcher attracting attention is Stanford's Brian Knutson.  He is a professor of psychology and neuroscience who uses brain-image technology to measure satisfaction.  Some of his research is designed to track how money affects the brain.

In one study, he had subjects play a video-game that involved, at certain points, the anticipation of winning money, and, at other points, actually taking possession of that money.  He measured the difference in oxygen flow in the brain between those two activities.

His conclusion: gearing up to do something can make you happier than actually doing it.  "Anticipation is totally underestimated," says Prof. Knutson, whose work is funded in part by the National Institute on Aging and the MacArthur Foundation.  "Why do slot machines have arms?"  You could just have a button--but the arm heightens the anticipation."

Selling the experience rather than the product makes sense.  A running shoe ad that focuses more on the pleasure of running, for example, can build a viewer's anticipation in a way that talking about the makeup of the shoe itself can't.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2006

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Leadership Communication

Interview Success Guide

This FREE guide gives you a comprehensive look at the most important preparations you will ever take for successful interviewing. Written by management consultants who have worked with thousands of hiring companies in over 18 countries, the guide gives you what you need to achieve interview success.

Let’s face it.  Whether you are looking to become the next VP of Marketing or the CEO of a new startup, interviewing for any job is uncomfortable.  Sure, it can be an exciting time, but the actual interview itself is stressful, awkward and usually something you would rather just avoid.  This guide will ease some of the pain in the process.  In it, you will find simple lessons that will give you the knowledge and skills you need to have the best interview possible.

Aside from the traditional do’s and don’ts, the 36-page guide contains everything you need to know about a simple new approach to interviewing preparation which has been proven to be incredibly effective.  Called “Self Interviewing™”, it involves a simple process of learning your natural talents and selling yourself. 

The guide was written by Innermetrix, a management-consulting firm, that specializes in helping hiring companies find the best candidate. The purpose of the guide it to distill the experience gained from working with these companies down into a single source that will help you interview better than you ever have before.   Click here to download the Interview Success Guide.

Coaching or on the bench during March Madness?

Every player has a coach but not all coaches have a coach.  Why is that?

The short answer is coachless coaches have bumped up against the glass ceiling.

Who are these coachless coaches?   In the game of major college basketball, they are the ones whose teams were not invited to participate in the NCAA basketball tournament that begins this week.  Coaches who talk the talk but whose teams can't walk the talk.  They have developed a false sense of security, by thinking they know how the world works, which leads to "CEO disease."  This disease occurs when a chief executive officer (CEO) or a head coach is isolated from reality because no one (except maybe the media) tells them how and where they need to personally improve.   

Just as every Olympic and professional athlete has a personal coach, every coach needs someone who can provide reality checks on a week-to-week basis.   Getting to that area of self-awareness (where there is great leverage for positive change) requires a trusting and confidential relationship so both the person-being-coached and the coach can say the "unsayable" to each other.  This happens because both the person-being-coached and the coach have no other relationship or role in each other's life (that must be protected) and therefore can be completely honest with each other.

Coaching is an important part of leadership. 

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions.  But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court.  Great basketball coaches, military commanders and business leaders know that practice of the rules of engagement coupled with split-second decisions in execution by their team can make the difference between winning and losing. 

Malcolm Gladwell, in his bestseller, "blink" (Little Brown), tells us that great leaders know that if you can create the right framework (by everyone knowing the rules and practicing them), when it comes time to perform, your players will engage in fluid, effortless, spur-of-the-moment dialogue and action.  The leader provides the overall guidance and intent to the team, coaches them in mastering tools and general techniques through practice and then allows them to use their own initiative and be innovative as they move forward.

Placing a lot of trust in your subordinates has an overwhelming advantage:

Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves within the rules of engagement, focuses their energy and opens the possibility for extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct in decision-making.  When the team is "in the flow," split-second decisions are unconscious flashes of insight that drive extraordinary performance on the basketball court, battlefield or shop floor. 

It is the leader's job to keep the momentum going; so as not to lose the flow.  Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads.  It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out by external means.  Know that these kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal experiences are vulnerable...and...your players can drop out of the "zone" or "flow" when you, as their leader, start to become reflective about this rapid cognitive process.

Positive Psychology

The most popular course at Harvard this semester teaches happiness.

Positive Psychology, a class whose content resembles that of self-help books but is grounded in serious psychological research, has enrolled 855 students, who learn about creating, as the course description puts it, "a fulfilling and flourishing life," courtesy of the booming new area of psychology that focuses on what makes people feel good rather than the pathologies that can make them feel miserable.

"Positive Psych may be the one class at Harvard that every student needs to take," said Nancy Cheng, a junior majoring in biology.

Source: The Boston Globe

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