The Importance of Role Modeling

Recently, I have chosen to share with leaders the following quote by Kevin Cashman: “Leaders get what they exhibit and what they tolerate.” While many leaders right now focus on the word “tolerate”, I have had to remind them of the word “exhibit.” During complex times with many unknown unknowns, we, as leaders, often underestimate the power and importance of role modeling.

The old phrase “actions speak louder than words” is a powerful concept in the world of leadership. It is based on a deep understanding that not everything can be said in words. Sometimes, the most important and powerful act of leadership is to show up, be respectful and give others your undivided attention. 

Furthermore, each day we have the choice to role model the core values and/or operating principals of our company and our own lives. In every interaction, we can demonstrate this by how we treat others, namely with respect, compassion and understanding. We also have the opportunity to support, encourage and inspire people to be their best selves at work and at home. These small but significant choices on our part can and do make a difference.

Upon reflection, I realize that there have been many people in my life journey such as family, friends, teachers and mentors who have left a deep and profound impact in my life. They have been and are valuable role models. They have helped me to become a better person, not just helped me to do better work.

This week, I encourage you to give thanks for those who have been role models in your life and I encourage you to aspire to being a better role model for those who are part of your life now. At this time of profound change, we need people who seek to be their best selves at home, at work and within their community.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Now Is The Time For More Coaching

For many leaders who are overwhelmed by the never ending COVID-19 situation, coaching has mostly defaulted to two main actions, namely telling people what they should have done and attempting to fix their problems. The result is a weakening of the supervisory relationship and the possibility of creating active disengagement by the employee. 

I understand why a leader would be choosing to act in this manner. He or she has reached their limit of how much chaos they can tolerate around them so their goal is to reduce disequilibrium and restore a degree of control, predictability and order in their circle of influence. However, the price of this choice is quite high because the person being coached can perceive these actions by their supervisor as signaling that they do not matter and that their job does not matter. As Patrick Lencioni points out in his book, The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, formerly The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees) (Jossey-Bass 2007): “people want to managed as people, not as mere workers.”

When successful coaching takes place, a leader will focus on two categories, namely skills and knowledge based coaching or mindset based coaching which directly impacts their willingness and commitment levels as an employee to move forward through a challenging situation. Yet, upon significant reflection, I have observed that the best coaching happens when the person being coached feels the support of their supervisor and when the supervisor helps the person being coached put things back into perspective and subsequently understanding. Many times this act of support and realignment of perspective by the coach involves a tremendous amount of concentrated listening with the goal to create an in-depth understanding of how the person struggling comprehends what is happening around and within them.  

The other part of this successful coaching process involves listening and giving feedback rather than constructive criticism. However, we as leaders and coaches need to remember that right now people have a limited bandwidth for receiving feedback. Most employees are barely coping with the amount of on-going disruption and chaos in their work and home lives. They are are doing their best in a COVID-19 centric world and feeling exhausted by the constant lack of structure and normalcy in their day to day lives.

During this global pandemic, the best coaches I have visited with by phone understand one small but significant fact about coaching people. It all begins with the building and maintaining of trust. In the May-June 2020 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote an exceptional article called “Begin With Trust: The first step to becoming a genuinely empowering leader.” As Frei and Morriss explain, “In our experience, trust has three drivers: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they believe they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgement and competence (logic), and when they feel that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced to a breakdown in one of these three drivers.” The article points out a variety of strategies if you are experiencing problems in any one of the three drivers of trust.

At the same time, Frei and Morriss also point out one more important thing about trust. As they write, “We’ve argued that the foundation of empowerment leadership is getting other people to trust you. That’s certainly true, but there’s one last thing you need to know. The path to empowerment leadership doesn’t begin when other people start to trust you. It begins when you start to trust yourself.” 

This is a major insight into great leadership and empowerment. And the best leaders recognize that the pathway to trusting one’s self is to have a variety of allies and confidants who can hear you, help you, and ask you thought-provoking questions so you are constantly creating a greater depth of internal clarity and understanding. When we as leaders want to unleash the creativity, talent and commitment to learning and subsequent action within our companies, then building trust at all levels of the organizations begins with creating a greater level of internal clarity and integrity.

I encourage all of you to read the above article during the coming days. I also encourage you to coach more, be more supportive and to be open to being coached more. With all that is before us right now, we need allies and we need confidants as we process our own thoughts, feelings and struggles during these most unique times.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

The goal of the plan is to have it be owned and understood by those who have to execute it; the goal is not just to get it done.

When a senior team comes to the realization that the organization needs a new strategic plan, it is “all hands on deck.” Meetings are organized. Charts and graphs are created. People go into a frenzy of goal setting. Metrics abound. There is a rush to create the document so that the really important work of execution can take place. 

Some times, a strategic planning consultant is brought in to make it go faster and to be better organized. If that person is me, one of the first things I do is to stop the entire goal setting madness and slow things down. I remind people that the purpose of strategic planning is way more than creating a document in record time so that everyone can get it done in even faster time period.

Instead, I point out that the purpose of strategic planning is to create a process and a document where by the people who will do the work own it and understand why this is the best plan given the challenges before the organization and their industry. When people understand the WHY behind the plan and feel like they had a voice in creating it, then, when it is time to execute the plan, the plan is framed up as “our plan” rather than senior management’s plan.

When we create a process that results in clarity, commitment and ownership, then we have created something that is amazingly powerful, namely the desire to want to execute the plan. This is the secret to creating a strategic mindset which will be the foundation for creating multiple strategic plans over time.

This week focus on the process of building ownership and understanding. It will make a world of difference.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

How do leaders get coaching and employee development to become routine and systematic? - part #2

The obvious answer to the above question is to set up regular coaching sessions with all of your direct reports. During these coaching or routine check in sessions, help all involved recognize that coaching is a structured dialogue about purpose, strategy, relationships. It involves questions, analysis, action planning and follow through. In essence, coaching happens with you, not to you.

What we some times forget in the process of routine coaching and development time is that one goal of this process is to create improved role clarity, job clarity, and priorities clarity. However, there is something else I have noticed when people receive regular coaching. The more they are coached, the better the coaching becomes. In short, the experience of coaching and being coached has a cumulative impact. 

Along with routine coaching, another element to successful coaching takes place when we help people set goals and teach them how to prioritize. One element of this process is to check to make sure those who are receiving coaching can differentiate between a check list and a goal. In simple terms, a checklist is binary and focuses on done or not done. A goal on the other hand has a clearly defined WHY element to it, and generates clearly defined results or desired outcomes.

Having coached people for over thirty years, I have learned that people want to be heard, and they want to be respected. People are always doing their best with the tools they have. And when possible, they always want better tools and better understanding if it allows them to deliver better outcomes. Therefore, we as leaders need to remember that operational and financial results happen when we have the right people in the right jobs, creating and executing the right business strategy, and with the right kind of routine coaching and development. 

This week, put that combination of elements together and you will always have a winning season.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

How do leaders create an understanding of a problem and buy-in for the solution?- part #1

In some companies, preparing for strategic planning involves numerous power point presentations to middle management. Recently, I was with one company, sitting in the audience of middle managers in a darkened room, when the VP came up and started to talk about their upcoming strategic planning sessions. When he finished early and there were no questions, I was asked if I had any comments to make. I came to the front of the room and asked the VP to return to the second slide in his power point presentation. It was about creating an improved value proposition for the customer. I turned to the large group of middle managers and asked the question: “What is the difference between a customer and a partner?” The room erupted into a very active strategic level dialogue with great debate about what the words “customer” and “partner” meant. No one agreed and people did not understand the definition of "value proposition" either. 

Weeks later, it happened again with a different company. This time a VP gave a power point presentation related to the upcoming roll-out of a new performance management system. Again, they ended early and asked me to comment. Again, I went to the front of the room and asked if we could go back in the slides to the one that talked about cascading goals. Then I turned to the room of managers and asked the question: “What is the difference between a goal and an expectation?” The response was similar and intense dialogue with little agreement followed.

Right now, we are getting so busy as leaders, dealing with details and participating in endless meetings, that we have forgotten to be architects of meaning. An architect of meaning focuses on building clarity about the strategic nexus and focuses on explaining why this work is meaningful. At the same time, the leaders needs to be a translator who focuses on building clarity about context outside of the organization. It is the combination of the two, architect and translator, that sets the stage for employees at all levels of the organization to understand the problems and challenges before the organization, be they operational or strategic.

Along this same line of thinking, we as leaders often forget that understanding a problem can be a complicated process. While the most common cause of failure related to dealing with problems, as noted by Ron Heifetz, Ronald, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Harvard Business Press, 2009, is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. Furthermore, we as leader often forget that most problems do not come neatly packaged as either “technical” or “adaptive.” Often, for example, adaptive challenges can have significant technical aspects.

This week, remember to be an architect of meaning and a translator for your organization. This will help all involved understand better what are our problems and our challenges.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Change Is The Only Constant

Right now all across the country and around the globe, change has become the only constant, and people are reacting in a normal and dynamic manner. Thus, leaders at all levels need to routinely engage in more strategic level dialogues to create continuous clarity and focus. The challenge is that few people understand what is a strategic level dialogue and why it is important. 

In the beginning, think of a strategic level dialogue as a free flowing conversation about context, strategy and operational excellence. The goal is to help people improve their capacity to build, define, share and engage at a more strategic level. When they better understand the why and how elements rather than just the what to do next elements of their job, they can then make new and better strategic choices and transform those choices into consistent communication and action at both the strategic and operational levels.

Nevertheless, many leaders say they are too busy to spend time visiting with people. Now I know that many of them are getting caught in the trap that things are more important than people, but few recognize that the time spent visiting with people in a strategic level dialogue allows their colleagues and partners to better transform awareness and understanding into commitment and responsibility.

Still, I can hear someone in a management and supervisory position telling me that it would just be easier to simply tell people the strategy rather than  engage in a dialogue about it. Here, I refer them back to the work of James Belasco and Ralph Stayer from their book, Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring to Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead. As they wrote, "The primary purpose of strategic planning is not to strategically plan for the future, although that's an important purpose of the exercise.  It is primarily to develop the strategic management mind-set in each and every individual in the organization. The purpose of the process is not only to produce a plan. It is to produce a plan that will be owned and understood by the people who have to execute it."

We as leaders have to recognize that in many companies, there are dual operating systems, i.e. one for day to day business and one for the design and implementation of strategy. It is the second one that is focused on continual development and communication of strategy. This is the one that will create a strategic mindset, the unification of understanding about context, strategy and operational excellence. When this takes place, we have the potential for creating strategic ownership.

So, how do we actually do a strategic level dialogue? First, it can happen any time and any where. Over coffee or over a meal, the key is to start with some excellent questions like the ones I shared last week in this blog.

Once you have asked a question, listen carefully to the answers. As the late Stephen Covey reminded us, “seek first to understand and second to be understood.” Build a common ground and perspective, and remember to connect everything back to the strategic nexus the union of mission, vision, values and the strategic plan.

Given constant change is the new normal, now is the time to hold more strategic dialogues. Can you afford to have less clarity rather than more clarity in your organization at this time period?

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Become an Architect of Meaning

Every day, leaders are confronted with big questions such as Who are we?, Where are we going?, and How are we going to get there? Their answers to these questions are very important. People count on them to make operational and strategic decisions. 

Most leaders answer such big questions with what-we-need-to-do-next oriented answers. They focus on “go here” and “go there” answers. However, the best leaders do something different. They give purpose to the answers. They explain “why” more than “what.” As a result, the answer and the work have more meaning. The best leaders build understanding rather than simply awareness.

If you, as a leader, are seeking to create a coherent and comprehensive understanding in your organization, then do the following.  First, remember that past strategic choices were made with the best information possible; they were seen as the “right choice” at the time. 

Furthermore, everything we are doing today reflects past choices. Some of those past choices were good and some might have been poor, yet all of them were choices, typically based on the best information possible. Even choosing not to do something is a form of choice. Our challenge as leaders is to help people understand these past choices. This will give all involved perspective about what is happening now.

Second, we must remember that past strategic choices created both impact and precedence. Exceptional leaders are clear about these two elements and often explain them in greater depth to all the members of their team.

Third, current strategic choices are harder because leaders have to contend with more variables and more constituencies and stakeholders than ever before. Ram Charan, interviewed by Melinda Merino, for an article called “You Can’t Be a Wimp - Make the Tough Calls,” Harvard Business Review, November 2013, states that good decisions require “perceptual acuity,” namely the ability to see change coming,  “qualitative judgement,” which allows leaders to formulate and select the right options, and “credibility” which helps them gain acceptance for decisions. Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis in their article called “Making Judgement Calls: The Ultimate Act of Leadership”, Harvard Business Review, October 2007, explain that most judgement calls arise in three domains - people, strategy and crisis. “Good judgement is grounded - in all three domains”, they explain, “and throughout the process - in four types of knowledge: self, social network, organizational, and contextual.”

Given the current strategic choices before most organizations, it is important to role model being an architect of meaning, namely one who builds awareness and then understanding of the significance, importance, and purpose of change. Realizing that people learn more from role modeling than communicating, my challenge to you this week is practice living the mission, vision and values rather than just speaking about them. Then, you will see what happens when you become an architect of meaning.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Delegate Outcomes, Not Just Steps

Recently, I have seen an epidemic of poor delegation which is resulting in many strategic and operational problems. I have come to the conclusion that many leaders and managers in their developing years did not experience good delegation and thus they can not role model good delegation. Since it is clear that you can not teach what you have not already learned, the same goes with delegation. While I wish there was a blue light special on aisle two where leaders could get three packets of delegation experience for the price of one, I have come to the conclusion that we need to simply reeducate the entire management structure of many companies about what is delegation.  

First, the standard dictionary definition of delegation revolves around the transferring of authority and responsibility from one person to another in order to carry out a specific activity. While this sounds straight forward, I always point out to leaders and managers that in order to do this transferring of authority and responsibility well, we need to actually redefine delegation into three levels of delegation.

In Level-One Delegation, we, as leaders and managers, give direct control to someone or a group to do whatever needs to be done as long as it is full alignment with the strategic nexus, i.e. the sum of the company’s mission, vision and core values plus their strategic plan.

In Level-Two Delegation, we, as leaders and managers, give direct control to someone or a group to do whatever needs to be done but first ask that all choices are discussed at the time of delegation and that there are defined parameters to the possible actions that can be taken. In short, Level-Two Delegation is delegation with an expectation of results but also with limited choices.

Finally, in Level-Three Delegation, the person or team being delegated to is given the opportunity to generate ideas about how to achieve the desired results but no control over how the work gets done. While this can result in action without commitment, it is often used when very tight parameters for action are needed.

Once we are clear about what kind of delegation is taking place, I often like to ask all involved a couple of questions. First, do they understand the problem that is trying to be solved through delegation? Remember that awareness is not understanding. 

Second, do they believe they have the authority to do it successfully? Commitment without understanding is a problem, and so is responsibility without choice a problem. 

Third, do they know how to do it? Having the right knowledge and skills makes a huge difference when it comes to successful delegation. 

Finally, do they know how to measure progress and/or success? This one factor alone can make or break successful delegation.

While delegation is not easy, it is a mission critical skill set for being a successful leader and manager. Starting today be more mindful when you do it, and take more time in the beginning. It will pay off in the long run.

Geery Howe, M.A. Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer in Leadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational Change Morning Star Associates 319 - 643 - 2257

Three Key Concepts

There are days and even weeks when as leaders we can become very, very busy. For many, this coming fall appears to be one of those time periods. We all know that during the busy time periods we will be in back to back meetings, making many major decisions with limited data, responding to a diversity of critical issues, while simultaneously attempting to keep up with e-mail and other assorted forms of communication.

During such extremely full periods, your path and my path often cross. Sometimes it is on the phone, after a meeting or over a meal. Then, during our visit, someone will ask me a simple but complex question, “So, what am I missing in the midst of all that is happening?” While I could point out that most executives are recovering controlaholics who need to control less and focus on alignment more, I usually share the following three observations

First, your ability to plan must be balanced by your capacity to execute.

Too many times this year I have witnessed groups who plan well but execute poorly. The problem is not the plan. It is the depth of capacity within the organization. While the plan could be modified and often is, the real challenge is the lack of strategic commitment and effort to build for the future.

Second, real change does not take place inside your comfort zone.

We like being comfortable and happy. We do not like being uncomfortable and unhappy. Therefore, when faced with certain challenges we settle for good when we should have strived for great. However, to achieve greatness, we most step outside our comfort zone and confront the brutal facts.

Third, awareness is not understanding.

Volumes could be written on this one short sentence. It is a powerful insight. In my mind, it ranks up there with the Iowa farm wisdom I learned many years ago, namely “What you feed, grows.” While awareness is important, understanding takes time, reflection and dialogue. If we are to create understanding, be it during planning or execution, then we have to step outside our own comfort zones and engage in an in-depth dialogue with others. Because it is through this process of sharing that we generate great understanding and greater clarity.

Busy is normal. It happens. But the best of us keep learning and sharing in the midst of it.

Geery Howe, M.A.Consultant, Executive Coach, Trainer inLeadership, Strategic Planning and Organizational ChangeMorning Star Associates319 - 643 - 2257