The Practice of Leadership » Personal Leadership

Become a Better Leader with 30 Day Experiments

George Ambler — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:03:43 +0000

Photo by U.S. Army Environmental Command

By definition a leader is an innovator. Leaders are pioneers, seeking to break new ground, to make old things new, to put things together in a new and creative way. A leader seeks new things with an eye on the future. The challenge in bring about new things is that you cannot rely on tried and true methods for creating a new future. To bring to pass things that have not been done before requires experimentation.

Experimentation helps leaders learn what works and what doesn’t. This helps leaders to learn and grow, adjust their approach and to try again. In this situation, leaders don’t worry about failing, rather they use their errors to learn. Without experimentation leaders fail to grow and visions do not come into reality.

The practice of experimentation is needed for leaders to learn and grow. In fact, leadership can only be learnt and improved through practice and experimentation….

“You can’t learn by reading up on it, you’ve got to do it. The only real laboratory is the laboratory of leadership itself.” – Warren Bennis, “On Becoming a Leader”

Leadership entails risk and a continual experimentation, learning, reflection and adjustment. A great way to get into the habit of leading and learning through experimentation is to adopt the practice of 30 day experiments.

Use 30 Day Experiments to Embed New Leadership Practices

30 day experiments are a way of taking a great leadership idea or practice and setting aside 30 days to focus on making the practice a part of your life or organisation. How often have you read a book and found a great leadership idea or technique that you thought would make a real difference on your life. But, despite you best intentions you have not taken any action to make the change. The following story from the post “Read any good books lately? So what?”, illustrates the difficultly many people experience in applying leadership principles and practices in their lives.

“One of the best-selling business books of all time is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A colleague of mine recently told me about attending a workshop at which the presenter asked, “How many people here have read 7 Habits? Stand up if you’ve read the book.”

More than half of the 100 people in attendance stood.

Then the presenter said, “If you can remember three of the seven habits, stay standing. If you can’t name at least three habits, sit down.”

More than half of those standing sat down.

Then he said “If you can recite all seven habits, stay standing.”

Only three people remained standing.

Finally, he said, “If you are living all seven habits in your life, remain standing.”

The remaining three people sat down.

That event further illustrates the sad truth that we can read good books, but reading is not enough. If we want to incorporate what we read we need to seriously study the content.”

30 day experiments can help us apply leadership practices in our lives, this works as follows:

Identify: Identify one leadership practice which you feel will make a significant improvement in your leadership.
Decide: Turn the practice into an experiment for 30 days. For the next 30 days look at ways of apply it in your life. The goal is to learn how to effectively apply the practice and to then test the results.
Adjust, Learn and Embed: If you find the results are positive make a decision to incorporate this new leadership practice into your life. If the results are poor, learn from the experience. Then repeat, move on to the next 30 day experiment.

The development of effective leadership is a life-long process built on strategy, execution, reflection and learning. Through this process we become authentic in out leadership, to be an authentic leader means we are our own author.

Identify 2-3 leadership practices that will make a difference in your life or in your team?
Which 1-2 practices do you think can be implemented by using a 30 day experiment?

20 Bad Habits That Can Hold You Back from the Executive Suite

George Ambler — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:58:07 +0000

A Business Week article lists the following 20 interesting bad habits, complied by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, describing what hinder leaders from progressing into the executive suite of their organisations:

Winning Too Much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
Adding Too Much Value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
Passing Judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
Making Destructive Comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these qualifiers, which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
Telling the World How Smart We Are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
Speaking When Angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
Negativity: The need to share our negative thoughts, even when we weren’t asked.
Withholding Information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
Failing to Give Proper Recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
Claiming Credit We Don’t Deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
Making Excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
Clinging to the Past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
Playing Favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
Refusing to Express Regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
Not Listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
Failing to Express Gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
Punishing the Messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent, who are usually only trying to protect us.
Passing the Buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
An Excessive Need to Be “Me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they exemplify who we are.

Take the time to reflect on the above list. Which three of the above habits most describe habits that are holding you back? Make a decision to change them in the weeks that lie ahead. As John Maxwell reminds us “Leadership is developed daily, not in a day”. By working of removing bad habits daily, we become more effective leaders.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Career, Habits, Development, Business, HR, Growth

How to Read a Business Book

George Ambler — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:50:23 +0000

Having written one of my first posts on “How to Read and Digest a Book!” the post by Seth Godin on How to read a business book, really caught my attention. In the post Seth makes the following observation on how people go about reading a business book…

“…..They cruise through the case studies or the insights or examples and imagine what it would be like to be that brilliant entrepreneur or that successful CEO or that great sales rep. A pleasant adventure…. [however] … There’s a huge gap between most how-to books (cookbooks, gardening, magic, etc.) and business books, though. The gap is motivation….. The fascinating thing is this: I spend 95% of my time persuading people to take action and just 5% of the time on the recipes…. The recipe that makes up just about any business book can be condensed to just two or three pages. The rest is the sell. The proof. The persuasion.”

Given the difference between “how to books” and business books, to be effective we need to read to extract maximum value for the investment we’re making of our time and money. This is the initial reason I wrote the post on “How to Read and Digest a Book!”, in which I recommend that to be effective one needs to have a system to extract insight and plan for their implementation…

Seth Godin, in his post How to read a business book, recommends the following tips which complements and builds on what I have already recommended, making the following points:

1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.

2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.

3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action–that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

Effective managers hand books to their team. Not so they can be reminded of high school, but so that next week she can say to them, “are we there yet?”

These a great insights and take my thoughts a step further. So, how purposeful are you in your reading? Do you have a system to extract, process and implement the insights you’ve gained from your reading? How many of these insights you actually implemented over the past year?

Leader: Who do you intend to be?

George Ambler — Mon, 05 May 2008 02:59:41 +0000

“Management has a lot to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: ‘Who do we intend to be?’ Not ‘What are we going to do?’ but ‘Who do we intend to be?’” —Max De Pree, Herman Miller

As leaders we spend a lot of time focusing on action, on getting results. To do this, most of us track our actions with a “to do” list of some sort. However, great leadership is more than just getting results, it requires us to act from a deep sense of who we are. To have a foundation integrity and character that inspires and motivates others to trust us and in turn take action. As leaders it’s important that we manage our action, with a “to do” list, as well as our being, with a “to be” list. ThirdAge blogger Doug wrote a great post on creating a “to be” list. He describes these two domains as follows:

Being and doing – these are the two domains of human existence. A person’s ‘being’ is their boundless, timeless natural self. Their ‘doing’ is the expression of that nature within form (activities) and time. Being is our ‘identity’. Doing is our ‘career’. When we are most healthy and vital, we connect identity with career – who we are with what we do. Conversely, those with careers completely disconnected from their natural self eventually experience ill-health and exhaustion. Clearly, being and doing are equally important for creating and maintaining a fulfilling and meaningful existence.

Dong recommends a great way of improving our being by using a weekly “to be” list, which describes how we intend to be this week. At the end of the week we can review our list to assess how well we did. Here’s my to be list for this week:

To peach what I practice (yes this is the right way round)!
To take accountability and to hold others accountable.
To be optimistic and inspire hope in others. South Africa is facing high levels of uncertainty at the moment and people need hope and encouragement.
To praise and encourage others.

Here’s the challenge:

Spend some time thinking about who you want to be this week.
Take this moment to create your own personal to be list for the week ahead?
At the end of the week conduct a personal review the progress you’re making daily towards your “to be” characteristics. Then review your list and your progress with a trusted peer.
Make the necessary changes based on the feedback you receive.
Post a comment on this post on how well you did or how useful the exercise has been.

Technorati Tags: Doing, Being, Identity, Action, Results, Character, GTD, Getting Things Done, Lifehack, Lifehacks, Leadership Development, Leadership, Management, Personal Development

Persistence: The key to the Achievement of Meaningful Goals

George Ambler — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:49:53 +0000

Photo by Soon.

“Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.” – Seth Godin on Persistence

As leaders it’s importance to be persistent. Anything worth achieving in life requires constant effort. Just having a meaningful goal is not enough, to make a difference we need to continuously take action. We need to be persistent, as we strive to reach our goals, working daily towards the achievement of our goals. Persistence is necessary as meaningful goals don’t come easy. There are days when we will feel life giving up, days when it seems that we are not making any progress, there will be days when we feel like giving up. It’s during days like these, that sheer determination and persistence is all that that’s left. It’s persistence that ensures we continue and don’t give up!

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” – Calvin Coolidge

The challenge in reaching any meaningful goal, requires persistence. It’s persistence that keeps us moving forward, meaningful goals are not achieved overnight, they require, no they demand persistence, patience and perseverance. If you continue to take action, you will build the necessary momentum…..

“If Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him. No one would have remembered him either.” – Unknown

In the face of challenge, persistence ensures that we continue to take action towards the achievement of our goal. As Seth Godin points out, this may require us to frequently adjust our tactics, until we achieve the goal.

“In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins – not through strength but by perseverance.” – H. Jackson Brown

Reflecting on your goals…

Do you need to change the tactics you’re using to archive your goal?
Have you persevered toward you goal? Or have you perhaps given up too soon?