People
When we think of career advancement and leadership development, a good option is the use of a mentor. Whether you are a senior executive or an emerging leader, there is never a bad time to ask for the assistance of a mentor. Just as Plato had Socrates and Bill Gates has Warren Buffett, mentoring is an excellent opportunity to accelerate your growth as a leader.
By definition, a mentor is someone with knowledge and experience that you can benefit from and is willing to share his or her acquired wisdom. The underlying idea is to improve yourself by connecting with their experience and insight. To get the most out of the relationship, here is a short list of things to keep in mind:
Define your need.
Take the time to define your mentoring needs. Are you a technically-minded person who could polish your relationship-building skills? Are you a junior executive who could benefit from the experience of someone more seasoned? Once you have a solid understanding of your mentoring needs, make a list of those who can potentially fill the role.
Build the relationship.
Learn as much as you can about the people on your list. Which ones have values that closely align with yours? Get to know them in a casual setting over coffee or lunch to see if you have a natural rapport. Don’t lead with “Will you be my mentor?” (That’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date.) Instead, get to know them. Start small and see where it goes.
Set expectations.
Once you’ve found a good match, take the time to set expectations for the relationship. Will you meet informally to chat over business challenges? Should you set up a weekly call to discuss an initiative? Maybe you’d prefer an interview style where you go over a set of questions. Choose the style that best meets your mentorship goal.
Be prepared.
If you’ve chosen wisely, there is a good chance that your mentor has just added you to an already busy schedule. Be respectful by showing up to your mentoring sessions on time and being prepared. If you agreed to do some homework, make sure you honor that commitment. If you chose an interview format, bring a list of carefully prepared questions.
Move on.
Just as you set expectations going into the relationship, be clear when you feel it’s time to move on. Don’t allow the relationship to end in an awkward fizzle, but bring it to an honorable close. Thank your mentor for taking the time and caring enough to invest in your growth. Chances are, your relationship will evolve into a long-term trusted friendship.
If you are the type of person who takes on challenges, you’ll likely have a series of formal and informal mentors along your career path. If you make the effort to manage these relationships well, they can be some of the most important connections of your lifetime. And when you get an invitation for coffee from a junior colleague, be prepared to use your positive experiences to pass it on.
Question: What knowledge or skills are you hoping to acquire that a mentor could help you accelerate?
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!
People
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
Like many of the quotes attributed to Henry Ford nearly 100 years ago, this one continues to ring true today. Ford was known for his innovation, ingenuity, and resourcefulness that revolutionized transportation in America.
Today, the world is in the throws of another revolution that will disrupt not only transportation, but every other conceivable industry. In order to meet the overwhelming demand and associated stresses that these changes bring, teams need to effectively deal with conflict. When some of your team members have strong, conflicting opinions about what strategy to take, here are three steps you can take to put everyone back on track:
1. Separate the business issues from the personal issues.
If personal styles vary greatly among your team members, administer an assessment like the Gallup© StrengthsFinder. Collect the top five strengths of every team member and put them on a matrix. Review the matrix with the team to help them see what personal styles they have in common, and where there are differences. Doing so will enable the team to build a common frame of references for dealing with individual differences.
2. Identify where the team is in violent agreement.
If you haven’t taken the time to create a team charter, now may be a good time to stop and do so. The process of creating a charter will allow the team to establish a common set of values, purpose, goals, and expectations. Have the team sign the charter, give each member a copy, and post a copy in a common area. When conflicts arise, use the charter as a North Star to guide the team back to what they mutually agreed to. Here’s a template published by Redbooth to get you started.
3. Pop the power bubbles.
Sometimes, conflict involves power issues or strong personal agendas that require your direct attention. If you allow these to go unchecked for too long, it will erode confidence in your ability to lead the team. Sit down with any members on your team who may be testing your authority. Help them identify the sources of their conflict. Let them know that you will provide every resource you have available to help them, but that team cohesion is your first priority. Read this article from the Harvard Business Review to learn more about toxic team members.
Conflict can be healthy for a team when it’s channeled properly. Knowing how and when to intervene is a leadership skill that will pay off for you and your team.
Question: What approaches have you found helpful to create a culture of healthy conflict with your team?
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
My team and I have delivered training programs to thousands of executives around the world. Some are in the form of lunch-and-learns. Others are delivered over the course of several consecutive days. While we love putting on “edu-taining” programs, we’re starting to push back on delivering these programs.
Here’s why. Global investment in platform technologies is expected to exceed $3.8 trillion in 2019 for things like enterprise resource management (ERP), customer resource management (CRM), and project management. Yet, when it comes to leadership training and development, most executives implicitly view their organization as an aggregation of individuals.
From silos to systems
Because of that logic, the $86.7 billion spent on global training last year was given to a disparate mashup of outside experts, coaches and consultants. Senior leaders have executive coaches who never meet one another. Offsite retreats are facilitated by a string of consulting firms. New training programs are launched from time-to-time for select cohorts of people, the lessons of which become lost. All of this leaves HR continuously chasing the answer to “now what?”
Unstructured training, coaching and consulting services can set people up to fail and cause unchecked organizational damage. Silos grow, communication gets bottlenecked, and cynicism sets in. This is why we designed triple loop learning programs. These programs offer more than a loose series of stand-alone training efforts with fuzzy ROI. Instead, they are based on an enterprise model that couples group training with team and individual coaching in a format that provides hindsight, insight and foresight to drive change that sticks. Here’s how it works.
Loop 1: Hindsight – the ability to reflect and learn from the past
In the earliest stages of designing a leadership training program, we ask our clients a simple question: what, precisely, is this program for and how will we measure results? Once we are clear on the program objectives, we design and deliver full-day sessions that allow participants to identify “what’s not working” gaps and what 3-5 changes can be made in the next 90 days to improve. We infuse these sessions with videos, case studies, hands-on breakouts and action-taking templates. By the end of the day, participants have looked back at problematic processes to gain hindsight into what they can do to make improvement as senior or emerging leaders. We let them know that we’ll continue to get together in full-day sessions every 90 days. But, we don’t stop there. We break the group up into smaller teams to move into the next learning loop.
Loop 2: Insight – the ability to interpret and respond to the present
The full-day programs allow participants time to step back, assess reality, and plan action for improvement. However, research shows that even after very basic training sessions, adults typically retain just 10% of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly 70% when they practice classroom training with real-world experience. Training participants, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful classroom experiences into changed behavior. Not only do they not have enough opportunities to put theory into practice, but they also lack critical insight about how their behavior impacts results. That’s why we coach the smaller teams as they work on the 90-day action items to discuss breakthroughs and breakdowns. We encourage them to identify root causes together and have catalytic conversations about what changes need to be made and how to hold one another accountable for making change happen and locking it in. Then, we go a step further. We provide one-on-one coaching for each participant to achieve deeper learning and growth.
Loop 3: Foresight – the ability to predict and prepare for the future
Becoming a more effective leader means adjusting one’s underlying mindset to address the root causes of behavior. We use a diagnostic tool to assess how each participant behaves when things are going well and when faced with conflict. We coach each participant through the results of their assessment, then use those results to accelerates the participant’s ability to identify what is going on, why it is happening, and how to change. These monthly coaching sessions enable participants to experience real-time course correction when working on resolving real-world issues through teams to effect enterprise-wide change. Over time, participants gain the foresight to predict the future and make better choices.
Learning organizations have a competitive advantage in the 21st century. Unfortunately, we continue to rely on broken models and disparate, hot-and-cold running consultants to provide ineffective, one-off services that fail. The way forward requires a focus on an embedded enterprise-wide model that takes learning from in the classroom to behind-the-desk.
Question: Do your training programs leave you with that “now what” feeling?
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 Role of Leaders in the Era of Incivility]()
People
Last month, results from an annual study that tracks the state of civility in the United States found that 93% of Americans identified a civility problem in the U.S., with 68% classifying it as a major problem. What is your guess about how that compares to civility in the workplace?
If you work at Google, you may be feeling that the culture of incivility at work is not much better than societal civility. Last year, Google issued a new code of conduct aimed at reducing online employee harassment within its own ranks. As reported in Wired, “a Google spokesperson said the company sought to clarify and formalize its policies after noticing incivility on all sides of internal debates around diversity and politics. The guidelines were based on feedback from employees and designed to remind employees to be civil with each other, so that Google could preserve the company’s open and transparent culture.”
With a global workforce of over 100,000 employees, the rise of Google has provided years of case study material for bringing out the best and the worst in people. The Google effect aside, according to the findings in Civility in America 2019: Solutions for Tomorrow, Google is an outlier when it comes to civility in the workplace. 89% of Americans surveyed considered the level of workplace civility to be strong, down from 92% in 2018.
That’s right. Most Americans still feel that their workplace provides a bastion of civility in an uncivil time. Companies today can act like a haven from the incivility minefield that employees navigate online, in the media, and in public discourse. The workplace is where people with diverse backgrounds and opinions can pursue shared objectives, less encumbered by the divides and tensions that exist elsewhere. And for society and democracy at large, the workplace may just be the one institution that incubates a more constructive way of bringing people together.
Whether you are an emerging leader or serve as a senior executive, you can take ownership of maintaining high levels of civility in the workplace. Take some time today to deliberately practice decency, listen to learn, and be curious when confronted with a point of view that differs from your own.
Question: Is incivility in the air at your workplace?
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 Role of Leaders in the Era of Incivility]()
People, Uncategorized
No matter who we are or where we come from, our assumptions and beliefs are shaped by our experiences, our upbringing, our race, our gender, religion, culture. Those beliefs help us navigate and make sense of everyday life. But they can also mean that we believe that there is no difference between our perceptions and reality. For leaders, that means we must continuously question our perceptions of reality and value the voices of people who are not like us. Here are three Netflix specials to help you move beyond tolerance and toward inclusion.
1. Nanette by Hannah Gadsby
What it’s about and why watch it: In her 2018 Netflix comedy special “Nanette,” Gadsby delivered sharp, delightful jokes before methodically breaking down comedy’s limitations as she revealed her experiences with sexism, homophobia and violence. Refusing to offer escapist laughs, Gadsby forced the audience to sit with her pain — and it turned her into a sensation far beyond her native Australia.
2. John Leguizamo’s Latin History For Morons
What it’s about and why watch it: With a rapid-fire lesson in overlooked Latin history, Colombian-American actor John Leguizamo comes to Netflix with his one-man Broadway show John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons. Examining 3,000 years of Latino history, Leguizamo charts everything from a satirical recap of Aztec and Incan history to stories of Latin patriots in the American Civil War, revealing how whitewashed history truly is. Latin History For Morons earned a 2018 Tony Award nomination for Best Play on Broadway.
3. Homecoming King by Hasan Minhaj
What it’s about and why watch it: “Homecoming King” is a show crafted for an audience of second-generation Americans of color, the cultural misfits who make up what Minhaj calls a New Brown America. He is skilled at generalizing the behavior of the “brown dads” and “brown moms” who raised kids like him. A phrase in Hindi recurs throughout the show. It’s what Minhaj’s father says when he is concerned about breaking with traditions: log kya kyenge—what will people think? Minhaj’s special distills a lifetime of grappling with that refrain.
Bottom line. To lead effectively today, you need to constantly recalibrate your ability to assess reality correctly. Exercise your diversity and inclusion muscles by building your library of resources that challenge your perception of reality as a human being and as a leader.
Question: What resources do you use to challenge your perception of reality?
