All about choice

I love the word 'choice.'  It's one of my favourite words in the English language.  I see choice like a dog - it needs to be taken out and exercised.  Sadly, it often lies in a corner, unwatered, unfed and neglected.

One day, some years ago, I was driving along a motorway in the UK and the traffic came to a standstill.  I tuned in to the local radio station which told me that, because of an accident further down the road, there was now a 35 mile traffic jam which would take at least an hour to clear.  I had some time in hand, called the client I was going to see to check that it would be ok for me to arrive late and decided to have a sleep.  I turned on some gentle music, tipped back the seat and thought that when it was time to move the driver behind me would sound his horn. I wouldn't treat it as a rebuke, but as a signal that the traffic was moving again.

I was beginning to doze off and heard a caterwauling outside.  A man was standing on the wheel arch of his 4-wheel drive car shouting and swearing at the traffic to get out of his way, because he was in a hurry.

The man was in his mid-thirties.  I suspect that the stress of living may prevent him reaching forty.  This was a man who had seriously misfiled the traffic jam in his mental filing cabinet.

In any situation, there are three choices - what can we control or be in control of, what can we influence and what simply belongs in the it's so drawer?  In the case of the traffic jam, the screaming man had filed it firmly in the control drawer.  It belonged in the it's so drawer.

The one thing we can control in any situation is how we react, as long as we have developed the self-discipline to make a choice, rather than simply reacting. That's not to suggest that we completely suppress our natural emotions; we are not automatons, and we have every right to feel stressed, upset, angry in certain situations.  What we need to do is choose the most appropriate display of behaviour according to the situation.

In any new or stressful situation, think about the outcome you may achieve by choosing different behaviours.  Will you or others feel better if you take one course of action, worse if you take another?

There are two types of choice - free choice and bounded choice.  We can't have completely free choice because, inevitably, there are social, moral, ethical and other constraints on our behaviour.  On the other hand, the boundaries which we believe restrain us are much looser than we may imagine.  We often constrain ourselves with our self-limiting beliefs then blame the world for restricting our freedom of choice.

So, feed your choice, water it, take it for a walk and feel that hugely liberating sense as you exercise it.

David

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I don't like your tie. Values in business...

Once upon a time, I asked the CEO of a large organisation what was most important to him at work.  He answered "values."  I asked him to say more and he explained that his values pervaded everything that the organisation did, that they were the foundation of the entire enterprise.  He said that chief amongst them was honesty, and that he encouraged honesty in everything.  I said "I don't like your tie and it doesn't match your shirt."  "How dare you!" he said, and I explained that somewhere in a parallel universe, someone had been talking to me about honesty..."  Honesty, in his mind, gave him permission to say what he wanted to others in his business, but did not confer on them the right to speak honestly to him.  (By the way, it was a perfectly nice, matching tie and shirt, but you get the idea.)

Values have little place at work because they are personal things.  I'd go further and say that, at some level, trying to label values can almost trivialise them; we don't really have adequate names for whatever these things are that drive us at a deeper level.  But because they are personal they can't, ergo, be corporate.  If company leaders tell me what my values should be they are denying me my personal values.  Of course, they are not really talking about values - they are talking about behaviours.  I think it's perfectly all right for a company to insist on reasonable standards of behaviour, but not to dress them up as values.

Consider this:  Take twenty people and ask them for their core values.  They will give you words like "trustworthiness", "integrity" and "honesty".  Ask them to define "integrity" and they'll give you twenty different definitions, none of them wrong, all of them personal.  So if we all define it differently, a company can't claim it as a corporate value because everyone will interpret it differently.  Values, as I said, are personal.

The only thing we can see in others is their behaviours.  I can't see your values, but I can see what you do and hear what you say and that's what counts for me at work.

Worse still, a company, having declared its corporate values, will often neglect to translate them into anything practical, so they remain an abstract statement in company documentation.  And the moment they do translate them, they have to explain them in terms of behaviours, which brings us full circle.

So there's no place for corporate values.  If a value is personal, the company can't own it.  If we all interpret them differently, we don't know what they mean anyway.  If we can' see them, they serve no purpose.

What we're left with is behaviours.  And now we have something we can discuss quite rationally.


David

We work all over the world providing management and leadership development. We'd love to hear from you. Call or drop us a line:

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Meetings. Plain and simple

According to the Ayers report , vol 1, issue 11 (http://bit.ly/b740t1), 25 million meetings take place daily in corporate America and around half that time is wasted.  Given that the UK population is 20% of the US population, that probably means that 5 million meetings take place in the UK each day. 

If the average meeting is, say, one hour, that’s 12.5 million hours of wasted time in the US and 2.5 million hours of wasted time in the UK.  

It has been said that you could take your annual salary, add £8,000, strike off the last three figures and divide by two to determine the hourly cost to your employer of employing you.  

So, if you earn £20,000 p.a., you cost your company £14 an hour just to turn up each day.  Assuming that your colleagues earn around the same as you, multiply half the length of a meeting in hours by the number of people there by £14 and that’s how much time you just wasted.

The figures may be open to question, but the fact that we waste an inordinate amount of time in meetings isn’t.  In many of my training courses I ask delegates what is the biggest waste of time in their working life and they say “meetings”.  When I ask what they do to change the way they conduct meetings, they blush and shuffle their paperwork.  So although they realise that they are wasting huge amounts of time in meetings, they continue to institutionalise the very behaviours which they condemn.

Here are some ideas to make your meetings more effective:

1. Ensure that every meeting has a purpose.  If that purpose, traditionally, has been to share information, then think about other channels you could use.  Often I hear complaints that if we distribute information by e-mail or put it on Lotus notes, nobody reads it.  That’s a different issue.  Think again about the relevance of the information to its target audience, the frequency of communication, the level of interactivity in the communication, the complexity, the style in which it’s written and the level of “push” and “pull” in the communication.  If you truly believe that the information is important and nobody is reading it, then you have a management issue.  What you don’t have is a meeting issue.  Information passing can be achieved through many better means than meetings
2. Gauge the responses of regular participants to regular meetings.  If they lack energy, arrive late, make excuses not to come, then you need to do something to enliven them or cancel the meetings.  Don’t blame the participants – the meetings in their present form simply don’t work.
3. Cancel the regular meeting. If you have a Monday meeting every week, it’s probably because you’ve always had a Monday meeting every week.  Try abandoning it for a couple of weeks and see if it makes a difference to anyone.  Shift it to different days each week. 
4. Rotate the chairmanship.  Let each person who regularly attends your meetings (if you insist on a regular meeting) chair the meeting.  This tends to bring a fresh perspective to the meeting and each meeting feels different and new – as a result, it becomes more purposeful
5. Make sure the meetings are chaired properly and appropriately.  A good Chair draws out quiet people who look like they have an interesting contribution to make and limits the length of contribution from the more vocal people.  In a meeting, everyone’s equal except the chairman.  If the chairman is the bombastic, noisy one, make representations to remove or change the chairman (or rotate the chairmanship, as above).
6. Don’t ever allow AOB on the agenda.  Meetings should have a purpose.  Any other business is not purposeful.  If participants haven’t told the chair in advance what they want on the agenda, then their topics don’t belong on the agenda.  AOB is usually a chance for those with their own ‘hobbyhorses’ to hijack the meeting and talk about things which are not relevant to the theme of the meeting
7.  Stick to your agenda.
8. If some of the meeting is irrelevant to some of the participants, just invite them to the relevant parts.  (This will only work well if you are all in the same premises. )  Call them as you are approaching the topics to which they can contribute
9. Prepare people for the meeting.  Let them know what’s expected of them, what they need to read or prepare and how long you expect them to speak on their own topics.
10. Ring round before a meeting to check that everyone who says they are going to come really will come.  If key people can’t make it, cancel the meeting and let everyone know the reason.
11. Only invite people with something to contribute.  If certain people don’t contribute to the meeting, don’t invite them again.  Don’t ever invite people simply for fear of offending them.  If they ask why they haven’t been invited to a meeting, ask them what they consider their contribution to be.  If it’s simply to be informed, tell them you’ll send the action points later.
12. Be prepared to introduce new people to a regular meeting (if you insist on having a regular meeting – see point 3, above).  New people bring fresh blood and ideas and break the rituals which dog your regular meetings.
13. Dispense with minutes and produce action points.  One of the jobs of a good meeting secretary or chairman is to chase people after the event (or before the next meeting) is to check on people’s progress in taking action. 
14. Check with people before a meeting whether or not they have prepared the appropriate topics.  If they haven’t, cancel the invitation or tell them that they won’t be needed on this occasion.
15. Try holding your meetings standing up.  They’ll tend to be very focused and purposeful.
16. Find out from your regular meeting-goers what would improve the meetings.  If the ideas seem reasonable, implement them
17. Make your meetings as green as possible.  Don’t ask anyone to travel if they can join the meeting via an audio or video link.   Travelling time is wasted time, it’s not green and it’s unproductive.

Finally, imagine that it’s your money being spent on the meeting.  Would you choose to spend it this way?  Would you allow such a waste of time and money? What would you do to make your meetings work?

David


We work all over the world providing management and leadership development. We'd love to hear from you. Call or drop us a line:

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The humble leader - humility as a strength in leadership

In an earlier blog, I spoke about quiet leadership and I’d like to continue that one with a few ideas around humility in leadership.   Far from being a weakness, humility can be a great strength in leadership.

A leader who displays humility is approachable.  Approachable people are trusted – and if people trust you, they tell you things. It’s difficult to lead an organisation when your staff are frightened to tell you what’s really happening and soft soap you to save their own skins or withhold some parts of the truth to protect themselves from you.  I’ll guarantee you that if you play the tough leader, you won’t know the half of what’s happening in your organisation.  People will take action and make decisions without your knowledge or blessing, crossing their fingers that they have done the right thing, because it seems safer than approaching you to discuss their ideas.  They would rather take the risk of getting something wrong than having to face you to effectively ask permission when you have erected walls around yourself.  If you don’t know your own organisation, it’s difficult to imagine how you can lead it effectively.

A leader who displays humility engenders loyalty.  If those around you know they can talk to you and have an adult conversation with you, they will demonstrate a great deal more loyalty to you.  If your failure to display humility is perceived as arrogance, they will talk about you behind your back, plot against you and, at worst, work against you.  Disloyalty and demotivation go hand in hand and demotivated people throw lots of energy into being unhappily emotional at the expense of being cheerfully productive.

A leader who displays humility stretches others.  Tell someone who reports to you that you have an idea which you would like to bounce around with them.  They’ll be flattered, motivated and eager to help.  Now you may already know the answer to the problem you’re presenting but this doesn’t matter – the very act of involving the other person shows you trust them, it involves them in the kind of decision making which is part of your working life and it motivates them to want to help.  Above all it stretches their thinking in ways in which their day job may not.

If you involve others in your decision making, then you are effectively starting your succession plan.  It pays for any ambitious leader to have others snapping at their heels, hungry for their job just as you, if you are genuinely ambitious, are snapping at someone else’s.  Now if you are only it for yourself, you won’t care about developing others to take your position when you move up a rung because your focus is solely on you, rather than the organisation.  If you have a real interest in the organisation, then succession planning is part of your responsibility – to ensure that as you move up the ranks, so there is someone behind already trained to slot into the role which you vacate.

You can’t be humble all the time.  Sometimes you have to make tough decisions, be directive and simply get on with things.  But a selective display of humility now and then will do wonders for your credibility and motivate those around you to do even better.

David

We work all over the world providing management and leadership development. We'd love to hear from you. Call or drop us a line:

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Quiet leadership

I was heartened in a recent LinkedIn discussion to see that I was not alone in thinking that charisma is not a necessary quality in leadership.  Leadership books have romanticised the notion of leadership to the point at which corporate leaders have become a breed apart, looking down on their organisations from a lofty perch with a clear view in every direction.  Their very presence turns heads.  They walk into a room and see only themselves reflected in the eyes of their admirers.  They are, in short, latter day narcissists.

In my experience of working with a vast number of private and public sector organisations, real leadership isn’t at all like that. The best leaders quietly get on with leading.  They are not in it for personal glory, instead having a real desire to see their organisations succeed. They realise that the organisation is simply a group of people temporarily working under the same banner and that if they develop good relationships with their people, they’ll probably do well. 

The big noises in leadership are self-promoters, great at their own PR and often using their current organisation as a stepping stone to the next.  They have little interest in leaving anything behind, and abundant interest in what they can take out of an organisation. 

And the sad thing is that for many years we’ve believed their hype. We’ve bought their autobiographies and “how I did it good” books and believed that this is what leadership is all about.  Worse still, we’ve tried out their ideas without first thinking about their relevance to our own organisations. 

Behind the scenes, this has caused some damage.  Many leaders today hold up the celebrity leaders as role models and berate themselves when they find it difficult to emulate them.  At times they appear to imitate their heroes, rather than looking inside and asking “who am I and what do I have to offer?”

So, throw away your ‘I’m-a-leader-please-worship-me’ books and spend a little time reflecting on what’s good about you, what you can do and what, given some support and encouragement, you may be able to do in the future, and you’ll start to see nice things happen.  You may not get a round of applause as you walk into a room; you may not be the most charismatic person on the block;  but you will be you.  

And once you stop emulating others and discover what you’re all about, life just gets better. 

David

We work all over the world providing management and leadership development. We'd love to hear from you. Call or drop us a line:

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Specialists? No, we just want generalists...

Now, here's a thing.  Once upon a time, we used to hunt out specialists, often put them through fairly rigorous tests and then really value their specialisms within our companies.  Now we hunt out specialists and, within minutes of their arrival in our companies, hand them a competency framework and tell them that they will be appraised on all ten areas.  


And here's a second thing.  Most organisations, according to the CIPD, either have a competency framework or are planning to introduce one, and either create it in-house or in-house with the help of external consultants.  What they produce is more than 80% generic.  So they have probably wasted enormous amounts of money developing something which they could have found on the internet in seconds and adapted in an hour to appear to relate to their own organisations.


So now we have specialists who aren't allowed to specialise, working to competency frameworks which are so generalised that most companies are using almost the same one.  Is it me or is there something deeply flawed in the logic here?


Take a look around your organisation, pick anyone at random and try to remember what made you want to hire them at the outset.  If it was anything more than their decorative appearance, then probably they had something of real value to offer.  To what extent have you capitalised on their strengths, encouraged them to develop those strengths, shown recognition of their ability?  Or did you simply hand them a competency framework and tell them to report back at the next appraisal?



David



We work all over the world providing management and leadership development.  We'd love to hear from you.  Call or drop us a line:


T: 44 (0)161 929 4145
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Isolation ward: socialisation for the self-employed

After years of corporate life, when often the only reason they went into the office was to socialise, many self-employed people feel a tremendous sense of isolation when they strike out on their own.  They yearn for the contact with others, the shared jokes by the coffee machine, the hot gossip, the flirtations, the chance meetings in corridors.

Self-employment doesn't have to be a lonely business.  It's just that the methods of communicating change.

First, realise that your telephone bill is going to be high.  It's worth having a separate business line installed so that you can separate your work and home bills.

Second, learn to type.  It doesn't matter whether or not you use the 'correct' fingers, but it does matter that you develop reasonable speed.  Your computer can be your social lifeline, and if you are still pecking out one  word a minute, you'll find your new social life develops rather slowly.

Then it's time to hook up with others.  Your contact list is your best friend here.  Get it as up to date as you can, then  make a point of calling two people every day for no good reason at all.  It keeps you within their sights and may sow the seeds for future work.  It's useful to have something to say to them when you call, but what you choose to say need not necessarily focus on work.  You'd be surprised at how often someone will say, within a week or two of your call "I was just thinking about you - are you interested in talking about a piece of work?"

Equally, e-mail two people for no good reason and you'll see the same kind of results.

Seek out people with whom you have lost contact through LinkedIn, Plaxo, Friends Reunited or other social networking media.  Don't do the hard sell with them - be conversational and mention in passing what you are now doing.  Again, you're sowing the seeds for future work whilst increasing the number of people with whom you can start to have contact.

LinkedIn provides a great space for meeting like-minded (and annoying) people - just like real life -  and the discussion forums can be educational, fun, aggravating and always interesting.  Contacts there can provide sources of  work. Ecademy provides a similar meeting space.

If you are feeling really brave, try Tweeting through Twitter.  It's a quirky tool and takes a little getting used to, and with practice can start to open up new contacts and, potentially, new business.

If you are working from home, get out of the house at least once every day and take a walk.  Ideally, go to a shop or somewhere where you can have face to face contact with others, albeit just for a few minutes.

Occasionally, attend a networking event - whether a training course, a formal business networking forum or a conference - it does't really matter.  The main thing is to get in front of other people.  In an earlier blog ("Klingons and wallflowers", January 2010), I talked about the joys of networking events, and you may pick up some useful tips there.  If you are well prepared, have your elevator pitch ready and don't have too much spinach between your teeth, you'll find that people want to talk to you, and you stand a reasonable chance of increasing your contacts.

Ultimately, self-employment can be more rewarding than corporate life, and if you work at forging contacts, it need never feel lonely and isolated.

David


We work all over the world providing management and leadership development.  We'd love to hear from you.  Call or drop us a line:

T: 44 (0)161 929 4145
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