Stanford Study Confirms "Ordinary Greatness" Principle

The Stanford Graduate School of Business (http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/fast_commongroup.html?cmpid=news) recently conducted a study to determine if performance really matters when it comes to who we talk about and how often we talk about them.

The researchers asked participants to discuss baseball players, and gave them two lists: well-known players who were having mediocre seasons and less-known players who were having All-Star caliber seasons. They told the participants to discuss the players with one another, and more participants selected well-known players (66 percent) than lesser-known, higher-performing players (34 percent) to discuss with their conversation partners.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the participants selected the safer, well-known choice for a conversation topic as a way to seek "common ground." So when asked to select a player to discuss with a partner, performance seemed to matter less than how well the participant felt their partner would know the player.

In "Ordinary Greatness," we talk about blinders that inhibit our ability to see greatness, and this is an example of the blinders of compartmentalization and personal bias. We simply have a hard time spotting greatness if it doesn't fit into our preconceived notions of what greatness is or who can be great. In most companies there are employees who are doing great things who are less noticed because they may be quiet or are just not in a position to be noticed.

If you'd like to take a free assessment to see if there are any blinders you should be aware of in your own leadership, click here for that part of the Ordinary Greatness website: http://www.ordinarygreatnessbook.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=21

Thoughts on Leadership from CEO of Prescription Solutions

Interesting interview with Jacqueline Kosecoff in Sunday's Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/business/21corner.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all). She had some good advice and insight into leadership that really mirrors some things that I share with clients. Here are some highlights:

• She doesn't lead all of her team's meetings. "Each one of the executives leads the meeting — it rotates in alphabetical order and we just go through the list." She said this approach gets some good outcomes: "First of all, it teaches them how to lead a meeting. It also sends a message that this meeting’s not for me, it’s for us. And it’s been my observation that at a lot of these operations meetings, everyone talks to the C.E.O., not to each other. It also teaches good meeting etiquette. People are much more, I think, respectful of how they behave in a meeting because they’re going to be leading the meeting one day. "


• She also starts meetings by asking if someone in the company needs to be acknowledged. A good idea to be sure reward and recognition is prevalent in the company.


• Kosecoff also has this to say about silence: "it is consent. If you don’t speak up in the meeting, you can’t later come back and say: 'I really hated that. I don’t want it to happen.'" I would add that silence is really abdication. It is a good idea to have each team member go on the record and state their opinion on every important issue to avoid the outcome Kosecoff describes above. I am so glad she has thought this through. Shows good leadership on her part.


• She also stresses "assume positive intent." I agree. On the great teams I have worked with and on, there is a high level of benefit of the doubt.

Summer Reading List

Summer is a great time to catch up on your reading. Yeah, right! Who wants to read on vacation, you say? Well, whether you are a prodigious reader like us or not, these are the books we recommend this summer. We prefer books that are easy reads that challenge our assumptions and give us tools we can use in our everyday leadership. These definitely fit the bill:

How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
by Jim Collins

·Whether your company is on the way up, way down, or stagnating, this book will let you know the warning signs of failure and how some organizations stay successful. Hint: a lot of it has to do with your senior leadership team.

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
by Jack Covert, Todd Sattersten

·This is my kind of book - pick it up anytime you have a few minutes and read the 2-3 page summary of a book you have perhaps read before but want to be reminded of the key concepts.

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
by Seth Godin
·Puts a whole new perspective on how leadership develops on blogs and social networking sites.

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
by Geoff Colvin

A Sense of Urgency
by John P. Kotter


Here are some books that aren’t as new as the titles above, but ones that we definitely recommend:

Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters
by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward
·I picked this one up at a used bookstore just because I hadn’t remembered seeing a book on this topic before. At about 300 pages, there is a lot there, but it is a tremendous look at what it takes to recover from setbacks.

The Servant
by James Hunter
·A nice little fable that illustrates that the greatest leader is the greatest servant. This one changed my life.

Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers
by Robert Kriegel
·Funny and provocative look at innovation and shaking up your business.

The Transparency Edge
by Barbara and Elizabeth Pagano
·This isn’t just a leadership book – it will teach you how to live.

Of course, we recommend that you read anything ever written by Patrick Lencioni. Also, any of the “Little (Color) Book of ____________” by Jeffrey Gitomer. Both of these authors are especially good choices for people who don’t like to read traditional business books.

Any that you would add to your summer reading list?

Get More Done By Saying Less

Good article by Carmine Gallo on the Business Week small business site on the value of being more succinct when communicating. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jun2009/sb20090616_017396.htm

Contains a great quote by New York real estate queen Barbara Corcoran. "Nobody is as interested in you as you think they are." This can be applied to our communication strategy as well. People probably aren't as interested in our message as we think they are, but we can improve our communication effectiveness.

We coach leaders to use two strategies: elevator speeches and over-communication.

When introducing a new concept or message, employ an elevator speech. Elevator speeches should answer four questions about our topic:

1. What is it?
2. Why is it necessary?
3. What will success look like?
4. What do I need from you?

The idea behind the elevator speech is that if you can't describe your idea, product, or message in four sentences or phrases, it's too complicated and will probably not be retained by the hearer.

Then once the elevator speech is prepared, you can't just say it once. You have to absolutely pound the message over and over and over. Dont' be afraid to repeat yourself. Repetition is how people remember.

This Summer, Don't Be Camouflaged

I chuckled when I saw the "uniform" satirist Stephen Colbert wore when he went to Iraq recently to entertain the troops. I didn't know Brooks Brothers custom-made camouflage suits. Then I really cracked up when I saw the clip of him getting his hair cut by order of the President: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/31183492#31183492

Camouflage makes for a funny suit for Colbert, but fading into the background is something every leader should avoid this summer. Summer is already a time of vacations and time away from work as it is. The thing to remember this summer is visibility. In our book "Ordinary Greatness," we talk about the importance of leaders being as visible as possible in order to find the greatness that exists everywhere in the company. So instead of staying in the office doing e-mail or spreadsheets, get out and spend time with staff. Here are the benefits:

1. Builds trust between staff and management


2. Provides opportunities for the leader to identify and recognize
   ordinary greatness occurring during the course of the workday


3. Lets staff know that you care about the work that is being done
   and appreciate its importance to achieving organizational goals


4. Encourages staff to make suggestions and offer opinions to improve
   the organization, creating a stronger sense of ownership


5. Provides the context for identifying opportunities for improvement
   and understanding the dynamics of decision choices


6. Helps the leader recognize obstacles or barriers that need to be
   removed to achieve better outcomes

However, the myriad benefits of visibility are often lost on executives. They have given us many excuses for not being visible. Here are some we have heard over the years:

1. Too busy


2. Didn't I just do that last month?
   
3. I don't know what to say when I am with staff.


4. They don't want me around anyway.

Entire books can be written to debunk each of those excuses, but if you are interested in improving your visibility, here are some tips:

1. Commit to just getting started and doing it. It's always scariest right before you get started.


2. Schedule it. Be sure your schedule is not so overburdened that you miss out on being visible to your staff and customers.


3. Use your visibility time as an opportunity to over-communicate key messages. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself.


4. If you are interacting with staff layers down in the organization, don't forget to manage up their leader to them -- be positive. This is what we call a win-win-win-win.

So next time you are tempted to hide out in your office, remember Colbert's camouflage suit. Be sure this is one article of clothing that you never wear. Stand out and get out. Now about that haircut...

Any visibility tips that have worked well for you? How do you stay visible to your customers and staff?

What My Summer Job Taught Me

With millions of high-schoolers and young adults heading out to the workforce for their first summer jobs this month, the WSJ ran an interesting item, "The Strange Summer Jobs of 23 Famous People." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124389730538274205.html#mod=djem_we

While it is satisfying to think of Rod Stewart as a gravedigger, Brad Pitt in a chicken suit, and a young Colin Powell selling furniture, this article also acted as a catalyst for me to think about my first summer job. I worked at a Dairy Queen (just like Gwen Stefani, it turns out), and here's what I learned there:

1. The concept of mandatory effort/discretionary effort is real. I hadn't yet heard these terms, but before long (maybe a week), I had figured out just how much work I needed to do and how fast I needed to do it to avoid getting in trouble. Every one of your staff members knows where this line is as well. Those leaders who can tap into discretionary effort and get more than what is mandatory will be most successful. Not getting the maximum discretionary effort from people represents the greatest waste in most businesses today, and if leaders addressed this, most layoffs and waste-reduction efforts would not be necessary.

2. Find out the most important part of your job and do it better than anyone else. The rest is pretty simple. For example, though no one told me early on, I quickly found out that the most important part of my job was keeping the soft-serve mix bags in the cooler from emptying. Duh, you say, it is a DQ, and people will want soft-serve ice cream, but hey, give me a break, I was 15! Don't make anyone ever guess what is most important to the business overall, to you, and to their individual success. Are your staff members confused about priorities?

3. The true leader isn't always the one with the title. Every shift at the DQ had a crew chief as you might expect, but then there was a lady named Ruth. Ruth had worked there since the Dairy Queen was a Dairy Princess, and her combination of tenure and confidence and fearlessness made her a leader though she was not a formal crew chief. I made sure I didn't cross her, and often looked to her for guidance before I checked with my boss. Do you know who the influential informal leaders are in your business? Do you recognize that some people have more influence than others and deal with them accordingly? Fortunately, Ruth was generally a positive force and presence, but I have seen many cases where the informal leaders were negative influences, and those teams and businesses were almost always dysfunctional.

What about you? Any lessons you learned at your first summer job?

Is Your Team on the Way Down or the Way Up?

The current Business Week contains an excerpt from Jim Collins's new book "How the Mighty Fall." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_21/b4132026793275.htm

In the book, Collins talks about the importance of the role of the executive team in making the organization mighty. He lists the traits of teams on "the way down" and those on "the way up." Fascinating stuff.

If I could dare to supplement Collins's list, here are some I would address:

Teams on the way down are led by leaders who create confusion by assigning work and discussing outcomes only with individual team members.

Teams on the way up are led by leaders who know how to use the team's meetings to promote clarity and cohesion.

Teams on the way down are made up of members who come to the table representing first and foremost their vertical line of the business.

Teams on the way up are made up of members who come to the table representing first and foremost the team and the organization -- they think horizontally across the business.

Teams on the way down work together for years with the members never really getting to know one another.

Teams on the way up are cohesive because they genuinely enjoy being around one another and are comfortable discussing even personal aspects of their lives.

Teams on the way down are made up of team members who hide their weaknesses from one another.

Teams on the way up are made up of team members who willingly apologize to one another and freely admit mistakes.

Teams on the way down have meetings that are boring and that are dreaded by the team members.

Teams on the way up have meetings have that are interesting, compelling and relevant.

Teams on the way down pursue artificial harmony.

Teams on the way up pursue healthy levels of debate.

Is your team on the way down or the way up?