Leadership
We’ve all been there. A project you committed to is due tomorrow. You know that, with concentrated effort, you could knock it out in a couple hours. Yet, somehow you manage to put it off.
Instead, you fill the time with busy work, things that could easily wait until next week. Or you indulge in completely unproductive things like scrolling through Facebook videos or checking out Google Street View caught-on-camera highlights.
If you’re guilty of procrastination tactics like these, take heart. According to New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant, procrastination is a virtue for creativity. In his book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Grant explains how procrastination encourages divergent thinking.
“Our first ideas, after all, are usually our most conventional,” Grant explains. “When you procrastinate, you’re more likely to let your mind wander.” Research shows that we have a better memory for incomplete tasks. When we finish a project, our brain files it away. But when it’s floating in limbo, our brains continue working it.
From writers like Aaron Sorkin (“You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.”) to artists like Leonardo Di Vinci (took 16 years to complete the Mona Lisa), highly creative people spend most of the creative process in pre-production. Instead of thinking of procrastination as a vice, think of it as an essential part of creativity. Consider these three ways you can use procrastination to your advantage:
1. To exercise your idea muscles. Give yourself permission to build white space in your day. White space will allow you to reflect — to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into “a-ha” moments.
2. To find the power in the question. Good strategic thinkers know how to hit the ‘what if’ pause button. It forces you to step back and challenge current assumptions that prevent you from seeing breakthrough solutions.
3. To move from quantity to quality. While you don’t have the luxury to mull over every piece of text you write before you hit ‘send’, some ideas are worth polishing.
Let’s be honest. Chronic procrastination is not healthy. If you have excuses for letting most deadlines pass, that’s a bad habit you need to address and correct. But true insight takes time. The longer we allow our brains to work on ideas, the more insight we can gain. Don’t be afraid to harness the creative power of procrastination.
Question: When has procrastination helped you be more creative?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
Power causes brain damage. If you’ve ever had a former friend get promoted then develop a case of colleague amnesia, you know this to be true. Or, if you saw the sorry, not sorry, congressional hearing of now-former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers, you’ve seen it in living color.
At times like these, you may wonder, “What was going through their head?” Research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it? Historian Henry Adams described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” According to research by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, that’s not far from the truth.
My friend and CEE Co-Founder, Dr. Tony Baron, and I flew to Berkeley in the fall of 2016 to pay a visit to Professor Keltner, who had just published a book called The Power Paradox. Using MRIs to study the brain, Keltner and his students found that when a person experiences power, the brain gets a little surge of dopamine — the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, love, addiction, and psychotic behavior.
The paradox, Keltner found, is that dopamine can also suppress our ability to empathize. That’s not good news for the people we’re supposed to be leading. (Read more about Professor Keltner’s findings here.)
Dr. Baron and I also reviewed what Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to as the “amygdala hijack”. If you’ve ever experience road rage, you’re familiar with this phenomenon. Here’s a breakdown of why it happens.
Our brains are made up of three parts. The first and oldest is the brain stem. It’s responsible for the body’s basic operating functions like breathing and heartbeat. Next, comes the limbic system where the amygdalae are located. The amygdalae activate during times of stress. They are responsible for “fight or flight” responses that have kept us alive as since the days that cave men crossed paths with sabre-toothed tigers. Over the limbic system is the neocortex, which is responsible for logic and reason.
When the amygdalae are triggered by stress, they race into action. First, they signal the brain stem to release adrenaline and cortisol through the body. The heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, and breathing accelerates. Next, the amygdalae shut down the flow of blood to the neocortex, because using logic and reasoning could cause you to delay jumping into immediate action.
That’s the amygdala hijack. And though we’ve evolved from living in caves to condos, our brains don’t know the difference between a sabre tooth and a distracted driver. When someone cuts us off in traffic, we can lose the ability to reason. Our focus narrows, and all we can think is “I’m right and he’s wrong!”
We get triggered the same way when we are in a stressful meeting, or even when we replay memories of stressful events. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the body. What’s worse is that these stress hormones can stay in the body for up to 4 hours, which is why we may stay amped up long after the stressful situation has passed. There’s a term for that effect too – the amygdala hangover.
So, is there anything that we can do to avoid an amygdala hijack? Fortunately, yes.
1. Recognize when you are triggered. If you get easily triggered at work, especially when you’re in meetings with the same people each week, this is an excellent opportunity to practice. You might start by going to the meeting, getting upset, staying upset for a day or two before you realize that you were triggered. The next week, you go to the meeting, get upset, and stay that way until you get home that evening before you recognize that you’ve been triggered. The next week, you’re in the meeting and you start to feel your chest tighten and your blood pressure rise just before you get upset. You still get upset, but you notice what’s happening in your body in the moment. Progress!
2. Fire up your neocortex. Once you can recognize that you are being triggered in the moment, you can move to Step 2. Thomas Jefferson once said that if you get mad, count to 10. If you get really mad, count to 100. This sounds simplistic, but it actually has the effect that you need to counter an amygdala hijack. When you count, you re-engage the neocortex that was shut off just seconds ago. Counting will give you the ability to re-access logic and will build the distance you need to see things more clearly.
3. Switch your attention. Take long, intentional breaths. Again, this sounds simplistic, but when you bring your attention repeatedly to each breath as you have it, you activate the parasympathetic system. That’s the part of your nervous system responsible for “rest and digest.” Taking deep, mindful breaths will have the net result of bringing you back into a calm state.
Recognize when you are triggered, reconnect with your neocortex, and take slow, deep breaths to find the path back to a calm state. Doing so over time, will form new neural pathways to re-take control of your brain.
Question: When was the last time you got upset? Did you blame others for your response, or did you recognize that you were triggered?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
When you think of your company’s values, what comes to mind?
Do they serve as guideposts for how your team behaves and makes business decisions? Are they feel good words posted on your About Us website page? Or worse, is your organization’s behavior so misaligned with your stated values that it reeks of hypocrisy? After all, the stated values according to Enron’s 2000 Annual Report were Communication, Respect, Integrity, and Excellence.
When organizations underperform, leaders often try to fix the problem by shuffling people around or investing in new technology. But when its culture and values are misaligned, no amount of shuffling or software will address the underlying problem. The importance of building on a strong set of core values and standards of behavior that align with your core values cannot be overstated.
As Patrick Lencioni wrote in Harvard Business Review, “Empty values statements create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility.” When organizations get this right, the culture is empowering. When they get it wrong, the culture is toxic. Either way, the effects show up in the bottom line.
So, how do you create a set of core values that will help align your employees and drive performance? In 2015, Greg Koch and Steve Wagner, the Co-Founders of Stone Brewing, came to us after enjoying 20 straight years of success. After hearing us speak at a leadership event, they realized that they had been so focused on survival followed by scalable growth that they had neglected their culture. “We needed our inside to match our outside,” as Steve Wagner put it. Here’s how we worked with Stone Brewing to create a culture of performance.
Be Aggressively Authentic.
We started by asking to look at Stone’s core values. As it turns out, they had never taken the time to capture any core values. So, we sat down with Steve and his hand-picked team of five people, and began reverse engineering what values differentiated Stone from the competition. We took the team on culture field trips to companies like WD-40, Patagonia and Taylor Guitars to give them a peak inside organizations whose values and performance were strongly aligned. We challenged them to create values that would act as a distinct blueprint for employee behavior and business decisions – one that would be used for attracting employees who fit the values, and for holding themselves and fellow employees accountable to.
Own the Process.
Not only did Steve Wagner handpick his Culture Action Team. He chaired it. He went on the culture field trips. He even amended his title to include Chief Culture Officer. Wagner realized that he needed to make culture and values alignment a priority. Early in the process, Wagner wrote a TED-like talk and made his way to every team meeting to let them know about what he and the Culture Action Team were working on and to get feedback from Stone employees. As he made the rounds and saw the excitement build, Wagner’s conviction and dedication to naming and claiming Stone’s values grew.
Let it Brew.
From the first meeting of Stone’s Culture Action Team to the day the core values were officially rolled out took just under five months. Wagner and his team knew that rushing the process could result in values that would not play out. They had to consider how the values could be put into action by the full complement of team members – from brewers to drivers, from sales reps to restaurant staff, from marketing to accounting. How would the values be interpreted from San Diego, CA, to Richmond, VA, to Berlin, Germany, and in countries where Stone had yet to make its mark? In the end, the team landed on these four core value: Fearless Leadership, Creative Risk Taking, Revolutionary Spirit, and Team Stone.
We left Wagner and his Culture Action Team with a roadmap for integrating the core values into Stone’s culture. That was 18 months ago. Today, the Culture Action Team has grown from 5 to 30 members, with culture ambassadors at every location, including its newly opened brewery in Shanghai. Stone’s marketing team created a special values logo, and the values are proudly displayed by Stone team members on everything from t-shirts to coasters. More importantly, everything from the hiring of new employees to how business decisions are made are put through a values fit test.
Stone’s connection with its core values – its competitive differentiator – was a much needed boost to employee engagement. In 2015, employee engagement was at 60%. In 2016, employee engagement rose to 73%, and in 2017, it rose to 86%. Those scores impact innovation, productivity, turnover costs, and bottom line performance.
Many leaders would not have the patience for the time and effort it takes to create and implement a solid alignment between values and culture. But for those who do, fortify their organizations with long-lasting, aligned success.
Question: What organizations do you know that live by an authentic set of core values?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![The Honor Foundation Graduates Another Elite Class of Special Ops]()
People
Joe Musselman founded The Honor Foundation (THF) five years ago to solve an injustice. In 2012, Joe had enlisted in the service with a dream of becoming a Navy SEAL. While in training one day, Joe sustained a serious injury. By nightfall, he was medically discharged. The next 12 months led Joe through rehabilitation and the discovery of dozens of other members of the SEAL community who were in serious need of help to transition out of military service and into the civilian world.
As he dug further into the issue, Joe found that just 13% of SEALs had job offers when they got out of the service. He compared this to the 98% of Wharton MBA graduates who received 2-3 job offers upon graduation. Even those SEALs who did find employment often moved from job to job in the first five years after transitioning. That was the wrong that Joe set out to right in 2013.
Fast forward to 2018. Nearly 350 men and women from all branches of the Special Ops community have graduated from THF campuses in San Diego and Virginia Beach. This world-class, 120-hour MBA-style program immerses participants in a wide range of subjects including Purpose, Change Management, Emotional Intelligence, Leveraging Strengths, Resume Building, Networking, HR and Entrepreneurial Panels, and Mock Interviews.
On June 6th, THF graduated its 15th group of Special Operations Forces. Men and women who have served our country with honor now have the tools they need to confidently enter the workforce with pride and a sure-footing. They are prepared to take the leap of faith that the civilian world will honor their service, embrace their elite training, and place them in positions worthy of their talents.
It is my honor to introduce you to a few members of the Group 15 graduating class, and to invite you to learn more about how you can employ, mentor, coach or donate to this amazing organization.
1. Brian Kelleher, “The ability to work with diverse teams to accomplish a common goal was a very rewarding experience and showed me my passion towards teamwork and mentorship.”
What he brings to the team: As I transition I am excited to find a company and culture that embraces the same community values I have grown accustomed to; diverse teams, embracing the chaos, inclusion, and always aiming above the status quo. I intend to be able to share the unique leadership and team building skills I have gained within Special Operations with my new organization.
Areas of Interest: Business Development • Project Management • Entrepreneurship
Education: Bachelors of Science, Organizational Leadership, University of Charleston (2017)
2. Michael Ortiz, “My exposure to solving complex challenges around the world has sharpened my intuition and I am looking forward to utilizing my leadership attributes, unique skills and active awareness in a variety of future roles.”
What he brings to the team: An established leader who communicates well and builds team spirit easily across all levels. Blends advanced education with practical experience to innovate common-sense solutions for diverse problems. Single-minded focus on exceeding established objectives, and expectations in every endeavor.
Areas of interest: Project Management • Logistics • Leadership Development (developing others toward an unlimited future).
Education: Bachelors of Science, Business Management, University of Phoenix (2016)
3. Marek Malik, “As we progress into the digital age, we must keep the most important resource at the forefront of our priorities – our people. By optimizing our community, we are able to unlock greater potential for our organizations.”
What he brings to the team: Forming and leading cross-functional teams, and managing workflow between departments. Ability to develop employment strategies and forecasted operations, while mitigating risk with ethics driven conduct.
Areas of interest: Strategy Development • Change and Project Management
Education: Bachelors of Science, Economics, United States Naval Academy (2009)
4. Zachary Peters, “I am a trusted leader that relentlessly strives for excellence in chaotic and austere environments.”
What he brings to the team: As the founding member of two military units, Zachary helped develop the training plans, management plans and long term objectives to guarantee the success of the enterprise. These experiences have given him the necessary tools to understand the importance of starting a corporation and the confidence to do so in any sector.
Education: International Relations & Diplomacy, Political Science and Government, New England College (2018)
5. Joshua Duntz, “After nearly 10 years of service, I’m ready to bring my leadership skills to the corporate world and use my unique problem-solving skills to help your business thrive.”
What he brings to the team: Worked with some of the world’s best problem solvers and mentors, allowing him to hone and craft leadership skills. Enjoys working hand in hand with other top performers as well as grooming future leaders.
Areas of interest: Team Builder • Project Manager • Problem Solver • Fitness Enthusiast
Education: Bachelors Degree, Organizational Development, University of Charleston (2018)
6. Preston Lee, “After graduating from UC Berkeley, competing on a historic D1 Rowing Program, and joining the world’s largest Fraternity, Tau Kappa Epsilon, I learned to evolve and develop teams. I am dynamic professional and results-driven leader with 8 years of work experience in Naval Special Operations.”
What he brings to the team: An innovative problem solver who thrives under pressure. Able to forge strategic, global alliances in order to achieve mission-critical objectives. Possess experience in consulting, training, and developing high-profile, cross-cultural teams. Historically exceed expectations and honored for work ethic.
Education: Bachelor of Arts, History, University of California, Berkeley (2009)
7. Joseph Wade, “I offer twenty years of global leadership experience and expertise leading high-performance cross-functional and cross-cultural teams in training development and crisis response.”
What he brings to the team: Creative, quick, and accurate problem-solving in diplomatic as well as dynamic operational environments.
Education: Bachelor of Applied Science, Defense Analysis, Norwich University (2018)
8. Matt Heber, “My mission is to continue utilizing my skills and strengths so that I can serve others by creating new opportunities and possibilities, all while forging strong personal relationships. Being able to build trust and loyalty is something I highly value.”
What he brings to the team: Articulate communicator, complex problem solver, risk manager, optimist, team leader, relationship builder, calm under pressure, and an enthusiastic self-starter.
Areas of interest: Areas of Interest: Healthcare • renewable energy • consulting • business excellence/leadership
Education: Bachelors Degree, Health Services/Allied Health, Health Sciences, University of Cincinnati (2018)
If your organization could benefit from service-minded, adaptable, problems solvers like these, there is no more elite group of talent than the graduates of The Honor Foundation. Contact The Honor Foundation here to learn more about employing, mentoring, coaching and sponsorship opportunities for this world-class program.
Question: What can you do to serve people who have dedicated their lives in service to others?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
The idea for this post came to me a few months ago during an executive coaching session with a client. I saved it until today, because it makes a nice preamble to Father’s Day coming up this weekend. During our discussion about becoming a better leader, my client reflected on his approach to fathering his children.
When his daughter, Rachel, was in 9th grade, she was a star player on the basketball team. One day, she told her coach that she wanted to play on the soccer team too. Her coach told Rachel that she couldn’t play both basketball and soccer. She wouldn’t have enough time to practice and be good enough for both teams. He told her that she needed to stick with basketball. Rachel thought about it for a minute, calmly told her coach that she chose soccer, and left her star spot on the team. The coach was infuriated by her answer. He called Rachel’s father to plead with him to talk some sense into her. Instead, her father said, “If that is Rachel’s decision, then she has my full support.”
My client knew his daughter. She was not making an emotional decision that she would quickly regret. She was making the kind of decision that he had groomed her and her siblings for since they were toddlers. It was a decision borne out of an accumulation of self-confidence and decision-making skills that were the foundation of his approach to fathership. He described his approach in three ways:
1. Meet them at their eye level. Towering over your children will only put them in a vulnerable and powerless position. Meet them at their eye level and let them know that they have your full attention. Being at their eye level also helps you empathize with their vantage point and perspective. The same applies to leadership. Regardless of your physical stature, your position on the org chart automatically gives you more power than those you lead. Instead of holding that power over their heads, show them that you are interested in seeing challenges and opportunities from their point of view.
2. Let them engage you into their world. If your son invites you to play trucks, play trucks. If your daughter wants to play chase in the yard, play chase. From dolls to dinosaurs — whatever world they are in — let your children know that you are ready and willing to let them create a safe space to play and begin to develop soft leadership skills. Nobody wants to be on a team where only the leader gets to be on the team, sets the agenda, makes up the rules as they go, then promptly breaks the rules themselves. Pass on the responsibility and accountability for agenda and rules setting to others on the team. It’s a fast track to learning both the hard and soft skills required to lead.
3. Help them build problem-solving skills. Life gets complicated at an early age. A parent’s job is not to clear their children’s paths of all obstacles. It’s to set boundaries of safety. Children should be given the freedom to navigate their own path within those boundaries. When the path looks unclear, and they come to you for help, ask, “What do you think you should do?” Don’t make the choice for them, but encourage them to explore their options. With time and repetition, they’ll grow to become accomplished problem solvers. It takes more time on the front end to let others explore choices and make mistakes that you could easily help them avoid. But, the investment of that time will yield long-term payoff – for your team member, for you, and for your organization.
Happy early Father’s Day to all the dads who are growing our next generation of leaders.
Question: What leadership lessons can you draw from fathers who were role models in your life?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
