Everyday leadership – virtually!

Yesterday I was asked what I consider the key elements of virtual or distance leadership.
The three words that come to my mind, now that I take a moment to think about it, are: clarity, consistency and trust. Actually the very same I would use about non-virtual leadership. Why? Because the core challenges involved in leading a team whose members are geographically scattered is no different from leading people in your proximity. The difference is that the communication channel you have at your disposal with people, who are not in your proximity is quite narrow. Consequently the crucial clarity, consistency and trust must be created in an environment where nothing comes for free.

When leading in proximity, your staff will see you and hear you in all kinds of interactions: both your formal interactions with staff and the informal ones; how you interact with other leaders; with clients and superiors; how you sound when answering the phone and it’s your 6-year old who tells you that about what happened at school today, etc. All of this comes for free, simply by virtue of working in proximity with you and having the ability to interact with you outside the formal settings. And it all contributes to your staff’s image of you as someone who speaks clearly, cares about and trusts in people, walks your talk – or doesn’t. All of these impressions eventually translate into a certain amount of mutual trust and alignment between you and the people geographically close to you.

When you work with virtual staff, this important ‘intangible’ of leadership is unlikely to build up unless you make a conscious and consistent effort to be clear, consistent and develop a positive and trusting relationship with the virtual staff.

It goes without saying that visions, values and goals need to be clear. From the companywide overriding visions and values and all the way down to this periods targets for each individual.

Likewise, you must use whatever technology you can get your hands on, which will expand the bandwidth of your communication. Forget about telephone conferences – get webcams installed so that you can have videoconferences. Make it a staff member’s explicit responsibility to stay on track of the technological improvements that happen every week – and make sure he or she keeps you posted, when there is a chance to upgrade the technology you use to stay in touch with each other. This is not only a matter of having the newest technology, it is also a clear signal to your virtual staff that you consider your relationship with them so important, that you want the best possible communication channels.

However besides these two, you create clarity, consistency and trust in three ways:

First, you should name your own leadership deliverables:

a) that your job as a leader is to deploy strategy, develop the organization, ensure the knowledge flow and the team’s wellbeing, nurture their individual career and competency development, facilitate decisions and ensure short term productivity.
b) that you will be a radar for positive and negative vibes in each of these areas in order to catch those situations when you must intervene as a leader
c) that you may choose to intervene as either the initiator, the coach or the referee

Secondly, you should use the leadership deliverables as your framework for discussions with individuals and the team as a whole. This will show the consistency, which is crucial when the bandwidth is narrow, and moreover it will give you the additional benefit that your staff will be inclined to monitor themselves in the same areas. In this way, they will experience your ‘presence’ even if you are geographically distant.

Thirdly, you should take the lead in creating an open dialogue. Be straight about your own thoughts and feelings in relation to work (what you like/dislike). Be curious and explorative, rather than judgmental and defensive. Ask for the same from your staff and intervene if you experience unconstructive behaviours.

What is your leadership mother tongue?

In my last blog post I shared my musings about the need for a leadership operating system, which followed a series of meetings with colleagues around the globe.

Now that I have been back in my own culture for a week, the notion of having a mother tongue as opposed to speaking a foreign language has struck me.

My own mother tongue is Danish, but I have been immersed in talking and writing English almost all of my adult life, so I am pretty fluent in English.

Nonetheless, there is still a distinct difference between my English skills and my mother tongue. In a certain way the wording I use here tells the difference. I possess a certain amount of skills in English, but Danish is “my tongue”, that is it is part of who I am, my identity, my outlook upon the world. For good and for worse.

Is it possible to make a similar distinction between leadership skills and having a leadership operating system?

Well, by and large I find that the comparison will stand trial for individuals as well as for organisations.

There is a distinct difference between possessing a set of leadership skills and operating from a leadership operating system .

The latter will do the same for the leaders and employees of an organisation as a mother tongue will do for the sense of coherence and inter-connection among a group of fellow countryment. The difference between mastering a set of skills in relation to communicating and interacting with people – and of having an operating system, which embraces every particular trait of the company culture, the organisation’s particular context and establishes a sense of belonging.

Do you possess a leadership “mother tongue”? If so, what is it?

Do you have a Leadership Operating System?

These past three weeks I have been on the road.

Two weeks ago I was speaking in Mexico City and Orlando, Florida about Direct Leadership. Last week I spent in discussions with colleagues who all work with The Human Element. And this week I am accompanying Jim Tamm in a speaking tour about his Radical Collaboration model for several different groups in Copenhagen.

All of this time I have spent in different settings, but all the time discussing my passion, i.e. how to improve our world’s workplaces through creating solid everyday leadership and company cultures which leaders and employees alike may take pride and pleasure in aligning with.

As the weeks have unfolded, more and more I have been convinced of the need for what I have begun to think about as a leadership operating system.

All leaders need to understand the organisation’s as well as their own particular context. What is the nature of the organization? The market it operates in? Who are the organisation’s stakeholders? Is there more than one bottom line? What is the organisation’s vision? It’s strategic goals? What is my department’s position in the organizational food chain?

Another thing is to have a solid grip on their values. On the one hand, the values of the organization that serve as guidelines for how the organization want to conduct their business. On the other hand, the personal values, which will determine if your staff perceives you as the kind of leader they would voluntarily select to follow or just their formal superior.

Thirdly, anyone with leadership responsibilities need what I call people skills. By this term I also refer to two things. Understanding what generally motivates people and what doesn’t – and understanding yourself and your own preferences when it comes to relating to others.

Lastly, you want to understand the leadership deliverables, the content of your role and the main leadership styles, which you should be able to apply according to what you intend to achieve with your staff.

With all four components of the leadership operating system in place, your organisation is well-suited to exercise coordinated leadership in the short as well as long term.

Without one or more of them you as an individual and the organization you work in are less likely to be effective.

Imagine…

This morning, as I was preparing for the two speeches I am going to give in Mexico this week – one for a group of Executive MBA students and one for a group of clients of my host and partner here (Monica Diaz of Quidam Global) I slipped into imagining things. The following is my train of thought and perspective on Everyday Leadership for these two occasions.

Imagine that you lived say 150 years ago in a small remote farming community. Work was physically demanding, the pace was slow, and the work space was limited. Nobody had a formal education. Every morning when you went to work in the fields, like your ancestors had done. And there you would meet your neighbours. Some of you would meet the other women regularly at the place where you washed the family’s clothes. If indeed there was one, the children would all go to the same school. On Sundays you would all meet again in church. And a couple of times per year work in the fields would demand that everybody worked together. Not a formally very structured organism, because there was such a strong sense of being ‘in it together’ and lots of opportunities to connect and communicate as the daily routines were undertaken. Likewise not a lot of formal leadership. The place operated more like a living organism.

Now look at the organisations most of us work in today.

Work is no longer so physically demanding. Most of us have some form of education. Some of us – indeed – have a lot of it. The work pace is high. The workspace may for some of us involve travelling or distance leadership. When we leave work, we spend our time with maybe a few people from our workplace and a lot of others either in person or on the internet. We do not live in the vicinity of our jobs, so both we and our neighbours go separate ways in the morning and come back separate ways. Our homes are equipped in ways which mean that nobody has to go to the common washing ground. And our offices are full of tools that allow each person to be much more self-sufficient than ever in the past.

The strong interdependence that tied people together around a common challenge and a common destiny is no longer there. Neither is the ‘social network’ which ensued from the fact that you lived your entire life among the villagers. Nowadays we are less dependent on each other and have a different relationship with our work. Am I right?

Imagine, what it would do to our organisations today if we could super-impose the strong interconnectedness, the sense of being well-informed about all things of interest – and the sense of common purpose that we used to have when we were living in the village …

Pause for a moment, visualize it…

It is obvious that we need something to replace the qualities of the village.

So we create visions, missions and strategies. We define company values and we break down goals while keeping in mind the big picture. We also create some social activities and we teach relationship skills, because we know how important relationships are if both people and the organisation are to thrive.

And we structure our workplaces. Shapes and formats vary, but all organisations have a structural backbone.

This is, however, where everyday leadership becomes important.

Everyday Leadership may be seen as one side of a coin, whose other side says ‘structure’. To lead any organization is to offer guidance in a very broad sense. You may find guidance in a road map, a GPS, from a tour guide, a parent, a teacher, etc.

Within our organisations, certain elements of this guidance may be put down into organigrams, procedures, job descriptions. They are the guidance elements that are stable over a certain period. Long enough that it makes sense to write them down.

Other elements are much less stable. They vary from one day to the other. One day you notice that some of your staff members are not as productive as they ought to be. Another day, you notice that two parties get along terribly and this has a negative impact on your team’s motivation. The next day a situation comes up which gives reason to take a look at how you share knowledge or make decisions. These changeable, fluid elements of working life cannot all be managed by procedures or organigrams, they require present, modern-day leadership.

Another way to put this is to say that leadership can take two shapes: structural measures for the long-term stable challenges and everyday interventions for the fluid, changeable ones.

Now then, how does my material/my model add something new to this picture.

I claim, that because leaders are allowed to interpret their everyday leadership work as they please, many organisations do not have that adhesive, that glue which tied the villagers together. They do not have a leadership operating system.

My model – Direct Leadership – offers a leadership operating system, which ensures that the leader contributes all the things that used to be present in the village:

• where we are heading
• how is work divided
• exchange of knowledge
• a sense of belonging
• that all talents are used
• decisions are made
• and that everybody pulled extra weight in harvest period.

Including ensuring, that these are provided in modern-day leadership styles, which is sometimes directive, frequently coaching and regularly monitoring.

This is different from most leadership training, which focuses mainly on two angles of leadership: strategic leadership and personal leadership.

I call my model Direct Leadership – I could also have called it Everyday Leadership.

My model addresses day-to-day leadership, the kind that each one of us has some of – and which together can make or break an organization.

And it works is much like turning on a lamp when you enter a dark room. By seeing and recognizing the elements in the room, you can manoeuver elegantly rather than groping and stumbling.

The way it looks in most places I have met is that while we are clear on strategic goals on values, everyday leadership is left to be defined by each individual leader. The only good (or at least for some of us nice) thing about that is…. that it provides each leader a sense of personal freedom, personal power to decide.

The downside is that it neither provides us with a clear definition of what we are measured against nor does it give us a separation between our roles and our personalities.

And that in turn means that whenever someone – an employee or our boss – is unhappy with what we do, what is being criticized is not how we take care of a certain job function. They fire away and criticize our personalities.

And eventually, our staff that should be receiving good, solid, day-to-day guidance – which corresponds to their skills and personalities, of course – are poorly helped.

This – and nothing else – is the precise pain my material can heal. For individual leaders, who read my book or go to a training, for their employees – and for organisations that see how a leadership operating system allows them to vitalize their collective leadership efforts.

Conflict dissolution …

I know, the common terms are ‘resolution’ or ‘solving’. However, real conflict solving literally makes the conflict go away, dissolve and give way to all sorts of good stuff: clarity, enthusiasm, joy, creativity…

I blog about this today, because I am in the middle of a conflict dissolution process myself. To solve it, we are following Jim Tamm and Ron Luyet’s approach to problem solving (a method called Radical Collaboration) – and both I and my counterparts are experiencing that one by one those things, which have for a while felt so aggravating and unnerving, now dissolve like sugar grains in a glass of water. We can no longer see the grains, but the taste of the water has changed and become more energizing.

Why is this process so successful? For several reasons.

One is that we are spending an unusual amount of time to explore and understand every single interest, which is at stake. Another reason is, that the aim is to create a solution, which satisfies as many of each party’s interests as possible. And finally, we consistently try to look beyond traditional ideas right and wrong. As a result we have set ourselves free to be both rational, irrational, reasonable, unreasonable… and above all creative about solutions.

Is there a lesson here in relation to everyday leadership? Well, I think so.

As leaders, we easily become the target of people’s projections or raise emotions, simply by virtue of our responsibility for being the person who judges what is good/bad/right or wrong. Just as the role of team builder will call for us as mediators in conflicts among our staff.

Conflict dissolution is an important side of the people skills, which must go hand in hand with the leadership deliverables, if we want the outcome to be solid, visible everyday leadership.

How getting our buttons pushed gets in our way

Yesterday I had an incident with a person I would really like to work with. Someone who is intelligent, passionate and knowledgeable about the same things, which I get passionate about. He is also a bit younger than me, which is another quality, because I enjoy and need a younger perspective on the work I do.

However, in past exchanges his buttons were pushed and yesterday, so were mine, and what might have been a fruitful collaboration is now at an impasse.

One way of dealing with this is of course to shrug our shoulders and move on. His fault-his loss (or from his perspective her fault-her loss).

Another way is to find a label to put on the person or behaviour, which bothers us. In our case we’ve already been down that road. I’ve been called stubborn and my choices have been called irresponsible. And, I have been told that this and that other person agreed with his view of me (which was when MY buttons got pushed). From my side, I haven’t spoken it out loud, but in my mind and in conversations, with the people close to me, I have tried to diminish the insult that I feel by labelling him ‘a young dominant male desiring to dominate older female’.

Yet another and better way, however, is to remember that when somebody pushes my buttons, it is because I have those particular buttons. They are MY buttons. Consequently the way forward and out of the blame game is to identify what’s going on in me, e.g. what kind of history do I have, which makes me overreact, etc. Then, and only then, can I make a conscious choice of whether I will hang on to the garbage or connect with the real person.

The garbage metaphor was one I learned a few years ago, when my colleague and friend Ane Araujo from Marcondes in Sao Paulo put a quote in her book about coaching.

”Serving is about knowing who the other person is and being able to give space to their garbage.

What most people do is to give space to people’s quality and deal with their garbage. Actually you should do it the other way around. Deal with who they are and give space to their garbage.  Keep interacting with them as if they were God. And every time you get garbage from them, give space to their garbage and go back and interact with them as if they were God.”                                                                      (Werner Erhard)

Time will show if this friend and I will succeed in pulling ourselves out of the attachment to each other’s garbage.

However, let me now zoom in on why I find this incident and these musings relevant for everyday leadership.

Everyday leadership is about interacting with others on a daily basis. Whenever my radar has caught a leadership opportunity and I have chosen which of the three action styles I want to apply – Initiator, Coach or Referee  – the ability to connect with people is crucial.

Just like in my incident above, if any of us want to be successful in our interactions at work, we need to interact with people based on their qualities instead of their garbage.  This only applies even stronger if I am leader, because I also need to set the tone and maintain this attitude among my staff.

Leaders and decision making

This morning I became aware of a discussion taking place on Twitter – about leadership and decision-making. An inspiring and enthusiastic discussion, lead by Lisa Petrelli from C-Level Strategies in Chicago. I’m definitely going to keep an eye on this woman from now on. However, that’s not the point of this blog post.

The point I want to make today is that I am passionate about shouting out the message, that it is time to change the narrative about leaders and decisions.

WE NEED TO STOP FOCUSING ON HOW LEADERS MAKE DECISIONS!

Instead, we must turn the spotlight to focus on how employees make them and to whether their leaders are instrumental in ensuring high quality decisions and sound decision-making processes.

Focusing on the various ways of exercising authority (authoritarian, consultative, involving, consensus…) was essential in the afternoon of the industrial society.

Admittedly, in some industries and areas of the world, this societal model still prevails.

However, most leaders today carry out their duties in a context, which is on the increase all over the world:

- the staff are as well-educated as (or better educated than) their bosses

- things move so fast that the majority of everyday decision-making must be handled by the employees at their discretion

By themselves, most of the day-to-day decisions are not crucial to a team’s or company’s performance. However a few of them could be. And certainly added up they are.

Ask any leader: “Did you ever have to spend days or weeks on patching up the relationship with a major business partner to you (could also be another department), because a staff member in his/her endeavours to do the right thing happened to make a poor choice?”

Or ask him/her: “Can you imagine if none of your staff made a single discretionary decision for just one day?  Or even during the two hours you were caught up in a management meeting?”

In both cases, notice his or her eyes start rolling by the memory or by the sheer thought of what kind of work it would be if every single question was waiting on his/her desk.

Let me close by repeating:

We need to stop focusing on how leaders make decisions and get leaders to focus on how they may be instrumental to their staff to their decision-making!

Do you know what JOIK is?

There are leadership lessons to learn everywhere.

The joik is a unique form of cultural expression for the Sami people in Sápmi (the Sami people’s nation). Each joik is meant to reflect a person or place. This does not mean that it is a song about the person or place, but that the joiker is attempting to transfer “the essence” of that person or place into song – one joiks their friend, not about their friend. If you want to listen to a joik, click here.

Last night I went to a joik-workshop with my friend, the Norwegian/Sami singer and teacher Biret Alette Mienna. It was not my first, but I realized that it was a while ago and that this was a powerful reminder of what human relationships is about: being present enough to sense the essence of what is going on and expressing precisely that.

When we interact as leaders with our staff, we do not express ourselves by singing.

However, the first thing to do when we have noticed a leadership opportunity must be to listen well and seek to understand what is essential in it. We must listen to the people involved and understand theier thoughts and intentions. And we must listen to ourselves well enough to know what we think and feel, so that we can choose the action which is authentic. Sometimes this authenticity may be overshadowed by thoughts about what we believe, we should do.  Don’t let it.

Biret Alette told us a story about her grand-daughter. When she was reading children’s books to her, the child would ask her to joik the birds or animals that were pictured in the book.  When the joik was done with the nerve that belonged to the particular bird or animal, the child would listen intently. However, when the joiking was done distractedly, the child quickly turned to the next page of the book.  

Your employees are not likely to be as explicit, but without listening you will lose their attention.

What do you do to practise your ability to be truly present and authentic in your everyday leadership?

Springtime – in everyday leadership?

On the northern hemisphere, where I live, it is still bitterly cold, but nonetheless – no doubt about it – Spring is here!

The sun is up before my alarm bell sounds, and even with temperatures still lingering below zero, we begin to sense the warmth of the sunrays. And we’re all ecstatic.

Now in the North, we don’t go about shouting out our joy: instead, when we meet friends or colleagues, we look up at each other, nod ever so slightly  and quietly say: “The sun is gaining power” or ”Isn’t there a distinct sense of Spring in the air today”. But do not be mistaken. WE ARE ECSTATIC.

If everyday leadership could be compared to the sun, what season is it for the people who YOU lead?

Is the sun gaining power?

Are they able to enjoy that you are gradually stepping up your presence and attention to the everyday leadership opportunities?

Do they see you covering the entire ground of your leadership role?

Or do they experience eternal winter?

To be an everyday leader requires only two things: that you accept your roles and responsibilities vs your company and that you accept your roles and responsibilities vs your staff.

Fortunately the two are identical. By mastering your responsibilities vs your staff you are at the same time fulfilling your company’s requirements of you in relation to everyday leadership.

 In my terminology these responsibilities consist of seven roles and four styles. 

7 roles	4 styles
Strategy Deployer Organisation Developer Knowledge Manager Team Builder Career Developer Decision Enabler Performance Generator	Catcher Initiator Coach Referee
7 areas of responsibility that together add up to a job description…Leaders must understand and pay attention to all 7 roles in order to cover the entire ground of their job.	4 different ways in which I as a leader can relate to my staff…Different styles reflect different intentions. Leaders must master and apply them all.

Source: Direct Leadership – the new narrative of everyday leadership

(soon available on Amazon, until then, please write to me)

What does not appear from the table above, however, is that the style of CATCHER plays a pivotal role in the dynamic of the model, because you use it to seize THE LEADERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES which are there all the time, but only become clear when you understand the seven roles.

Gradually catching more and more of the everyday leadership opportunities (and then acting upon them in one of the remaining three styles) compares to the sun gaining power in Springtime!

The more you do, the more you will shine. 

The more you shine, the more your staff will be ecstatic about your leadership, and eventually the more life around you will thrive and bear fruit!

Don’t skip a season. Start shining even ever so faintly now, and you will soon harvest the fruits of the change process you have initiated.

Leaders should back off from the personal lives of their staff!

- a provocative headline, but I love  the underlying message…

First, a few words in Danish, because there is a link to a Danish radio interview:

Ledere skal ikke blande sig i medarbejdernes privatliv!
“Den gode leder er ham eller hende, der kan definere arbejdsopgaverne og få de ansatte til at løse dem bedst muligt. Og så skal lederen i øvrigt blande sig helt udenom medarbejdernes privatliv.” Det mener Anders Raastrup Kristensen som forsker i ledelse og selvledelse

Lyt til DR’s interview med Anders ved at benytte linket nedenfor! (Interviewet med Anders kommer helt i begyndelsen af udsendelsen).

DR P1 morgen 22 feb 2011

And now in a language, all of you understand:

“A good leader  knows how to define the job requirements and tasks – and get his/her employees to solve them in the ideal way. Besides this, the leader should back off from the privacy/personal lives of their staff”, says Anders Raastrup Kristensen, a researcher at Copenhagen Business School. Danish group members can hear the Radio interview with Anders by means of the link below. However, for non-Danes, here’s my translation of Anders’ core message: “Anders further claims that leaders are currently ignoring the ‘core’ of the leadership responsibility, i.e. the work, which must be carried out by each employee or team – in favor of inquiring into ‘how each person feels and is dealing with their work vs their work life balance.”

Leaders, this means, you are required to put all of your competencies into exercising ’everyday leadership’.¨

Of course, you must also acquire and apply good people skills, but you must use them as a means and not the end of your leadership work.

Do I need to say that I LOVE this message?

This accurately pinpoints and confirms what has been my main driver to write the Direct Leadership book and create the accompanying training programs and materials:

It is not fair – neither to the leaders nor to their staff – to appoint leaders without making it clear to them what  basic, everyday leadership work implies!

Anybody want to help me restore this understanding?