Leadership
During the financial crisis of 2008, I was completing my MBA at the Ken Blanchard College of Business at Grand Canyon University. The program was a blend of online classes punctuated by 3-day residencies at Blanchard’s headquarters in San Diego. It was a magical time of learning and growth for me, but a time when Ken and his wife, Margie, experienced some of their darkest years both personally and professionally.
Between the back-to-back Zoom meetings and constant before-and-after hand washings that have become part of my new normal, I find myself thinking about some of the lessons that Ken and Margie shared with our class during those years.
The 2007 wildfires began in the early morning hours of October 21, 2007, near the U.S.-Mexico border. In the end, the fires left 10 people dead and destroyed over 1,600 homes in San Diego County, including the one that the Blanchards had shared for 25 years. Luckily, they were out of town when it happened and no one in their family was injured.
But, all of the possessions they’d left behind – like the family photo albums that Margie had carefully and lovingly assembled through the years – were incinerated. Months later, Margie recalled that she and Ken started receiving what were some of the most precious gifts they could imagine. Not only had Margie made albums to keep at home, she had given away several copies of albums throughout the years for her children to keep in their own homes. One by one, the Blanchard children gifted Ken and Margie with copies of their family photo albums to rebuild their collection.
“In the end,” Margie reflected, “it was the things that we had given away, not the things that we had kept, that came back to us.” What a powerful life lesson in what Ken refers to as “holding loosely and clinging tightly.”
The next year, the 2008 financial crisis hit. The Ken Blanchard Companies was a global leader in management training with programs offered in more than 12 languages and clients across six continents. With the recession looming, the Blanchards treated their employees, not as overhead, but as business partners. They opened their financials and brought in a company called Wild Works to deliver balance sheet training to their employees. Together, the company found ways to cut costs and save jobs. As Ken writes in Leading At A Higher Level, “people without accurate information cannot act responsibly; people with accurate information feel compelled to act responsibly.”
Ken and Margie Blanchard are living proof that the best investments are the ones we make in others, both personally and professionally.
Question: What are you holding loose and clinging tightly to during this season?
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 article below was first published March 30, 2020, on the Forbes Coaches Council website. As a Forbes contributor, I am honored to have my answer featured and hope that you find this article helpful as you navigate resiliency as a leader. – Sheri Nasim
To be a great leader, you must be resilient in the face of setbacks. Resilient individuals can adapt to big changes, remain calm under pressure and guide their teams through challenging periods—all of which are key to the continued success of a company. That’s why it’s important for business leaders to practice and build this skill.
To help you do this, we asked the experts of Forbes Coaches Council to share strategies and practices leaders can adopt to become more resilient. Their best answers are below:
1. Learn To RISE
Resilient people are able to think back and learn how to reframe and reset. I learned that I took the same steps to deal with a lot of leadership challenges and so created the RISE methodology: Reflect on what happened; Identify steps you may need to take to correct or improve; Strategize an action plan going forward; Execute on your action plan. Take these steps and RISE as a leader. – Joyel Crawford, Crawford Leadership Strategies, LLC.
2. Find The Lesson
Don’t waste energy worrying about the issue at hand—accept it, be curious about it and learn from it. Put your energy into both addressing it and learning what lesson this holds for you. Build that learning into how you behave and manage in the future. The cumulative effect is that you will become an increasingly wise and proactive leader, and challenges will be part of a process of growth. – Aric Wood, XPLANE
3. Seek Inspiration From External Sources
Continuous development is critical for growth, but also to reenergize. Make it a habit to read inspirational books, attend seminars and go to industry conferences. Also, network with like minds. This can help keep you focused, motivated and give you the boost you need to remain resilient in the face of challenges. As leaders, we often take care of everyone else but forget to nurture ourselves. – Rosa Vargas, Authentic Resume Branding & Career Coaching
4. Make Time Each Day For Positive Reflection
End each day with a brief yet thoughtful reflection on challenges, accomplishments, learning lessons, results and gratitude. This is not a time for beating yourself up, but for stopping to smell (and account for) the roses on your fast-driven path. Slowing down to focus on the positive, even in the worst of situations and for the briefest of times, allows you to reframe and stay motivated. – Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International
5. Own Your Story
Don’t be afraid to fail. Have courage to own your story for what it is. Take a moment to reflect on what happened. Pause and take a deep breath. Ask yourself tough questions and answer them honestly. Get curious instead of building a shield around you. Don’t ignore your feelings, nor your ego. Understand your voice to know who you are without pretending to be anything else. – Kasia Jamroz, Conscious Leading Solutions L.L.C.
6. Develop Self-Awareness
Resilience is the ability to adapt to complex change. In today’s world of constant change, the demand for resilience is almost constant. The key to cultivating resilience is to know yourself first; be aware of your skills, your shortcomings and possible frustrations. Only then will you become a mindful leader and optimize your actions. – Lital Marom, UNFOLD Media Group
7. Focus On Recharging, Not Enduring
Try changing the standard length of your meetings from 60 minutes to 45 minutes. This allows you to carve out 15-minute margins, or white space, to record and reflect before charging into the next hour. Building white space throughout your day will give you the time you need to turn information into knowledge, and knowledge into insight. – Sheri Nasim, Center for Executive Excellence
8. Be Kind To Yourself
Leaders who adopt the practice of self-compassion will become more resilient. The attitude of “I have failed,” not “I’m a failure,” is the key mindset shift to allowing the brain to do its best work, being creative and engaged. This self-kindness will lead to revised strategies to be successful in the future. It will also model to others that in order to ultimately succeed, you must fail at times. – Deborah Goldstein, DRIVEN Professionals
9. Practice Self-Care
Exercise. Eat right. Get enough sleep. And, ensure you are taking time away from work to do the things you enjoy. For executives, this is easily stated and often difficult to implement. But like the disciplines we apply in our businesses that create success, we must employ similar discipline in our personal lives. This will enhance your resilience in your business. – Thomas Bradley Cox, Oliver Group
10. Take A Three-Pronged Approach
Resilience allows leaders to experience defeats and return more robust than before. I help clients with a three-pronged approach. Visualization techniques enable them to visualize their robustness through uncertainty and pitfalls. Somatic exercises increase awareness of what resilience feels like within the body. Acts of speech support the energy of steadfastness and lay groundwork for success. – James Glasnapp, James Glasnapp Coaching
11. Acknowledge Your Feelings And Reassess
First, acknowledge what you are feeling and why. Don’t move past your feelings too fast. Next, look at what behaviors you can incorporate to look at the current situation and modify your actions. Create small action steps so you can continue to move forward and not become immobilized or procrastinate to avoid pain. Then celebrate even the smallest victory. Continue to reassess and move forward. – Christie Cooper, Cooper Consulting Group
12. Aim For Consistency When Interacting With Your Team
One of the key components to resilience is consistency. Your team members need to trust that they can depend on you and your support regardless of the circumstances. That doesn’t mean you always agree with them or share honest feedback, but it does mean they have clear insight into your expectations and feel safe that you won’t fly off the handle from moment to moment. Consistency fosters trust. – Tonya Echols, Vigere
13. Push Yourself To Continuously Learn
Leaders who continuously learn, gain certifications and push themselves become the best examples to those they manage. A lot of leaders get to a certain high position and salary that they think they can stop learning. This sets a poor example to those they lead. By setting this example, your team will seek out and learn new information faster, and all organizations need this energy. – John M. O’Connor, Career Pro Inc.
14. Reframe The Struggle
The most innovative and intrinsically fulfilled leaders I know don’t pathologize adversity or struggle. They expect it, and see it as a breeding ground for new and better ideas. – Lisa Zigarmi, The Consciousness Project, LLC
Question: What practices would you recommend to become a more resilient leader?
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
Women’s History Month is officially here. We’re sharing some of the latest works by, about and for women to celebrate. This collection of six titles includes a blend of fiction and nonfiction, featuring women with unique viewpoints, and riveting stories of resistance and perseverance.
1. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
What it’s about: “Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. But in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance.” So argues artist and critic Jenny Odell in this field guide to doing nothing. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
Why pick it up: Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation, How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of the narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive.
2. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law by Haben Girma
What it’s about: Haben grew up spending summers with her family in the Eritrean city of Asmara. There, she found an abiding strength as she absorbed her parents’ harrowing experiences during Eritrea’s thirty-year war with Ethiopia. Their refugee story inspired her to embark on a quest for knowledge, traveling the world in search of the secret to belonging. She explored numerous fascinating places, including Mali, where she helped build a school under the scorching Saharan sun. Her many adventures over the years range from the hair-raising to the hilarious.
Why pick it up: Haben takes readers through a thrilling game of blind hide-and-seek in Louisiana, a treacherous climb up an iceberg in Alaska, and a magical moment with President Obama at The White House. Warm, funny, thoughtful, and uplifting, this captivating memoir is a testament to one woman’s determination to find the keys to connection.
3. The Beautiful No: And Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation by Sheri Salata
What it’s about: “Thursday morning. One hundred pounds overweight, no man in sight, and rounding the bend to 57 years old—a full-blown catastrophe.” What happens when you realize you’ve had the career of your dreams, but you don’t have the life of your dreams? This was the stark reality facing Sheri Salata when she left her twenty-year stint at The Oprah Winfrey Show, Harpo Studios and the OWN network. She had dedicated decades to her dream job, and loved (almost) every minute of it, but had left the rest of her life gathering dust on the shelf.
Why pick it up: After years of telling other people’s makeover stories, Sheri decided to “produce” her own life transformation. And this meant revisiting her past, excavating its lessons, and boldly reimagining her future. In these pages, she invites readers along for the ride—detoxing in the desert, braving humiliation at Hollywood’s favorite fitness studio, grappling with losses, reinventing friendships, baring her soul in sex therapy, and more. Part cautionary tale, part mid-life rallying cry, Sheri’s stories offer profound inspiration for personal renewal.
4. The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon
What it’s about: We live in a world where we are bombarded with messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis we face deeply ingrained beliefs that your sex determines your skills and innate preferences, from toys and colors to career choices. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions and behaviors? And what does it mean for our brains?
Why pick it up: By exploring new, cutting-edge neuroscience, Rippon urges us to see our brains as complex organs that are highly individualized, profoundly adaptable, and full of unbounded potential. Rigorous, timely and liberating, The Gendered Brain has huge repercussions for women and men, for parents and children, and for how we identify ourselves.
5. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
What it’s about: Lydia Quixano Pérez is living a picture-perfect middle-class life in Acapulco. Largely untouched by the drug cartels that are beginning to ravage her hometown, she owns a bookstore she adores and has a loving husband and son. Until one day, when a charming new customer walks in. Events quickly unfold and Lydia finds herself fleeing for the border with her son in tow.
Why pick it up: Fiction is the art of delicately sketching the internal lives of others, of richly and believably projecting readers into lives not their own. Writers can and should write about anything that speaks urgently to them, but they should put their work into the world only if they’re able to pull off their intentions responsibly. Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism. Perhaps not. Don’t let the opinions of others decide for you.
6. The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable by Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt
What it’s about: Written with grace and understanding and based on in-depth interviews and stories as well as personal reflections from Schwarzenegger Pratt herself, The Gift of Forgiveness is about one of the most difficult challenges in life—learning to forgive. Here, Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt shows us what we can learn from those who have struggled with forgiveness, some still struggling, and others who have been able to forgive what might seem truly unforgivable. The book features experiences from those well-known and unknown, including Elizabeth Smart, who learned to forgive her captors, Sue Klebold, whose son, Dylan, was one of the Columbine shooters, learning empathy and how to forgive herself, Chris Williams, who forgave the drunken teenager who killed his wife and child, and Schwarzenegger Pratt’s own challenges and path to forgiveness in her own life.
Why pick it up: The Gift of Forgiveness shares inspiring journeys—sometimes slow and thorny, sometimes almost instantaneous—by which people learned to forgive and let go. A perfect blend of personal insights, powerful quotations, and hard-won wisdom for those seeking a way to live with greater acceptance, grace, and peace.
Question: What books would you recommend in celebration of Women’s History Month?
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, People
Picture a leader. Do you see a woman? If not, you aren’t alone. A 2018 study published in the Academy of Management Journal confirms that getting recognized as a leader is more difficult for women than for men.
Yet, history is filled with women who defied the norms like the eight women below who persisted in claiming their leadership role. How many did you learn about in school?
1. Elizabeth Jennings, Sued a Railroad Company for Segregation (and won)
A little over 100 years before Rosa Parks took a stand by sitting on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Jennings, a young African-American schoolteacher, struck her own blow for justice after she was forcibly thrown off a segregated streetcar in lower Manhattan. Jennings teamed up with future president of the United States Chester Arthur to sue the Third Avenue Railroad Company, paving the way for integrated transportation in New York.
2. Victoria Woodhull, First Woman to Run for President (among other firsts)
Victoria Woodhull was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. She was the first woman to own a brokerage firm, Woodhull, Claflin & Co., on Wall Street, the first woman to start a weekly newspaper, and an activist for women’s rights and labor reform. At the peak of her political activity in the early 1870s, Woodhull is best known as the first woman candidate for the United States presidency. She ran in 1872 as a candidate from the Equal Rights Party.
3. Eliza Scidmore, First Female Writer, Photographer and Editor of National Geographic
When she began her career as a journalist, Eliza Scidmore (pronounced “Sid-more”) submitted articles using only her initials to avoid the common bias of her day against female journalists. Her passion for travel took her to the Alaskan frontier in 1883. She traveled solo at the age of 20 and published the first Alaska travel guide. At 26, she journeyed to Japan and submitted an article for the September 1896 issue of National Geographic, introducing readers to the Japanese word tsunami.
4. Lois Weber, First American Woman to Direct a Feature-Length Film
An innovative visual storyteller whose films tackled social issues, Weber was also one of the most respected and highest paid filmmakers in the industry. Her name was routinely mentioned alongside that of Cecil B. DeMille as one of the top talents in Hollywood. In 1916, she was the first and only woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, a solitary honor she would retain for decades.
5. Shirley Chisholm, Educator, Author, First African-American Congresswoman, and First Major-Party Black Person to Run for President of the United States
Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman in Congress (1968) and the first woman and African American to seek the nomination for president of the United States from one of the two major political parties (1972). Her motto and title of her autobiography—Unbossed and Unbought—illustrated her outspoken advocacy for women and minorities during her seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Discrimination followed Chisholm’s quest for the 1972 Democratic Party presidential nomination. She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one speech. Still, students, women, and minorities followed the “Chisholm Trail.” She entered 12 primaries and garnered 152 delegate votes—despite an under-financed campaign and contentiousness from the predominantly male Congressional Black Caucus.
6. Dolores Huerta, Civil Rights Activist and Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers
Dolores Huerta was born into the activist movement. Her father Juan Ferånández, was a union activist who ran for political office and won a seat in the New Mexico legislature in 1938. Huerta’s mother, Alicia, was an active participant in community affairs, involved in numerous civic organizations and the church in the Stockton, California community.
By the time 20-year old Huerta met César Chávez in 1955, she had founded the Agricultural Workers Association, set up voter registration drives and pressed local governments for barrio improvements. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez launched the National Farm Workers Association (now known as United Farm Workers). Her adept lobbying and negotiating skills were a vital part of the growth of the farm workers’ movement. Yet, the challenges she faced as a woman did not go unnoted. In one of her letters to Chávez she joked, “Being a now (ahem) experienced lobbyist, I am able to speak on a man-to-man basis with other lobbyists.”
7. Kathrine Switzer, First Woman to Run the Boston Marathon (and fight off a race official on the route)
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially run what was then the all-male Boston Marathon, infuriating one of the event’s directors who attempted to violently eject her. In one of the most iconic sports moments, Switzer escaped and finished the race. She made history then and has continued to run the race with No. 261 emblazoned on her shirt nearly every year since, including last year at age 72.
8. Nonny de la Peña, Founder/CEO of Emblematic Group
Another norm defying woman is the enigmatic Nonny de la Peña. Like Eliza Scidmore, de la Peña relied on her storytelling skills to launch her career and her company. Emblematic Group is a digital media company focused on immersive virtual, mixed and augmented reality. In laymen’s terms, it’s a company that produces films in which the viewer is virtually immersed. In her 2015 TED Talk, de la Peña describes how she created the first virtual reality documentary Hunger in Los Angeles that made its way to the Sundance Film Festival.
Question: What women have you known who have changed the world despite the odds?
Leadership, Mindfulness
In 1960’s America, hairstyles were getting longer, trust in institutions was getting thinner, and drug use was on the rise. The “turn on, tune in, drop out” counterculture movement popularized by Timothy Leary terrified parents, pastors, and politicians alike as experimental drugs like LSD spread from research labs to the city streets. Some psychologists turned to researchers to conduct experiments on rats to prove that exposure to these psychoactive drugs led directly to addiction and death.
The researchers took up the cause. They had labs filled with rats that were kept in what were known as Skinner Boxes where they could neither see nor touch other rats. The only visual stimulation they got was seeing the people who brought them food and water and cleaned the metal pans under their cages every few days. The researchers offered the rats the choice between drinking plain water from a bottle or another bottle of water laced with drugs like heroin, morphine, amphetamine, and cocaine. The rats quickly became addicted. They consumed large amounts of the drug-laced water until they overdosed and died. The researchers confidently concluded that the drugs were irresistibly addictive and deadly to rats, and by extension, to humans. The mass media, in turn, reported that irresistibly addictive drugs could not be allowed to circulate in human society.
In the 1970’s, American psychologist, Dr. Bruce Alexander, questioned these findings. “What if the rats were offered the same drugs in a different environment?” he wondered. Rats were naturally social creatures. Maybe they had turned to the drugs to overcome the abject isolation and lack of stimulation. Alexander and his colleagues created “rat parks” where rats lived with others and were free to play and socialize and were given the same access to the same drugs as those in the Skinner Boxes. The “rat park” rats remarkably preferred the plain water over the drug-laced water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-laced bottles, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed.
Connection with a social community beat the power of drugs.
In their new book, Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships and Lasting Happiness, Drs. David and Austin Perlmutter suggest that humans are becoming as isolated as the rats in Skinner Boxes. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the explosion of highly addictive personalized technology has caused us to turn away from community and toward irresistible short-term pleasures. Every time we give in to the addictive impulse, our brain gets a little hit of dopamine. And every time our brain gets a hit of dopamine, as Berkeley Professor Dacher Keltner shared in The Power Paradox, our ability to empathize with others gets suppressed.
As leaders, it is our job to connect with what is meaningful, not what is convenient. It is our job to stop the endless swipe, the bottomless scroll, to put down the screens between ourselves and others and start conversations. Our job is to step out of our hyper-personalized world that feeds us information that we’re predicted and programmed to like and connect with people who are different from ourselves.
Starting now, you can either reclaim your brain or give in to the addiction of disconnection.
Question: Have you noticed that while we’ve been upgrading our technology we’ve been downgrading humanity?
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
I concentrate better with music playing in the background. I especially enjoy dropping in the name of a song or artist on Pandora Radio and letting it find music with interesting similarities. Pandora happily plays whatever I’m in the mood for while I work away, until…I suddenly realize that the music stopped. “That’s funny,” I think. “When did I stop listening?”
Okay. I know that there is an upgraded version that doesn’t have this feature, but for purposes of illustration, stay with me.
Pandora’s Are you still listening? feature serves as a reminder that listening is a participative practice. Successful leaders use active listening to draw out the best from their team. Active listening involves three kinds of behavior:
1. Showing respect
The next time you meet with an employee to discuss an issue, fight the urge to “help” by providing immediate solutions. Instead, practice asking open-ended questions. Unlike questions that give people limited options for response, open-ended questions encourage them to express their opinions and ideas. This practice engages employees into critical thinking mode. It shows interest and respect for their input, and helps you build a team of problem solvers.
Examples of open-ended questions are:
- How does that process work now?
- How do you see this happening?
- What’s the most important priority to you with this? Why?
- What other issues are important to you?
- What is it that you’d like to see accomplished?
2. Observe the Rule of 80/20
Conversations with your team should not be like tennis matches where each of you hits the ball at a 50/50 ratio. Instead, practice the 80/20 rule as it relates to listening. That means allowing your employees 80% of the talk time. Use your 20% to pose open-ended questions rather than trying to have your own say. As you improve your ability to stay quiet, you’ll begin to use silence more effectively. Thoughtful moments of silence offer an invitation for your employees to dig deeper and clarify their own thinking.
3. Challenge assumptions
Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. Many executives never open themselves to a shift in mindset and the possibilities that can be drawn from conversations with others. Solving business issues requires common action, not common thinking. Expect your employees to speak up when they disagree with your ideas.
Unlike Pandora, your employees don’t come with active listening features. It’s your responsibility as a leader to demonstrate respect, allow employees time to clarify their thoughts, and open yourself up to facts that challenge your beliefs. Yes, Pandora, I’m still listening. Thanks for asking.
Question: Think back to a meeting where you left feeling that you were listened to. What happened to make you feel that way? What happened to your performance? Please leave your comments below.
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!
