Fundamentals First

“All of these principles are easy to comprehend, and all of them are damnably difficult to live and make happen. And that explains why truly great leaders are rare indeed.” Oren Harari

Writing in his book The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell author Oren Harari is talking about the fundamentals that were so characteristic of Colin Powell’s approach to leadership. I’m not sure why, but it seems these days that there is far too little attention paid to developing strong fundamentals, maybe it’s that tendency in human nature to complicate the simple.

Good examples would be the seemingly boundless enthusiasm for personality testing and emotional intelligence workshops and books these days. I’m not saying these are of no value, only that work on these topics will not transform an average team into a high performing team. In leadership, as in virtually all other endeavours, the foundation for success is found in strong fundamentals. There will always be far more upside in teaching leaders how to stay mission focused, provide good direction, build accountability and provide skillful feedback than there is in some of the more tangential leadership topics there seems to be so much enthusiasm for, yet I frequently see these foundational topics overlooked.

So what the are some of these fundamentals? In the space I have here I can’t possibly offer a complete list but I can cover a few.

Start with the right heart

All the best leaders care a great deal about the missions and people they lead. They are in it for the right reasons. They are mission and people driven. They value relationships. This doesn’t mean they coddle team members. To the contrary, they challenge people to deliver their best work and to continually get better and they encourage and support their efforts. We can’t teach someone to have the right heart for leadership, but we can help those who already do learn how it how to express it in the right ways.

Communicate well

We talk to people we care about and we listen to people we care about. For the best leaders good communication habits connect them with people and build engagement. As I have so often said, we can’t expect engagement if we don’t engage people, if we leave them in the dark. Opening the enterprise and building relationships with strong communication skills is essential.

Provide good direction

Research clearly demonstrates that when people know clearly what is expected of them they have higher levels of performance and more job satisfaction. Yet so often I meet people who don’t know or are unsure about what’s expected of them. Learning how to provide direction well and how to avoid common pitfalls is essential. This is why I include eight keys to providing direction well in my work.

Provide lots of quality feedback

I’m convinced that every truly team building leader has great feedback habits. Why? Because teams are built one member one situation at a time and skillful timely feedback is the key. Time and time again I encounter leaders at all levels who don’t provide enough feedback as well as those who provide it poorly.

Coach

Legendary coach John Wooden wrote, “Every good leader is a natural and enthusiastic teacher.” I couldn’t agree more. Wooden’s UCLA Bruins won more national championships than any team in history. His book, Wooden on Leadership, is a brilliant volume on applied fundamentals. His efforts to build relationships and improve skills through coaching ranks high among these. Time spent developing good coaching skills is time well spent.

Build Culture

I would offer without hesitation that every significant team building effort I led at newspapers across the country featured purposeful work on culture – not what your team does but the way they do it. If the leader doesn’t do something to promote the right team culture and correct problems then who will? Culture drives performance and there is a right way to go about building it.

Make every performance count

Last on my admittedly incomplete list is the way great leaders treat performance. They insist that every team member earn his or her place. When someone isn’t they confront the problem with feedback and coaching first (here we are back at these two fundamentals) and when this does not solve the problem they know how to have those difficult conversations and make the necessary changes to the roster with skill.

I take a fundamentals first approach because 20 years of building the teams I led convinced me time and time again that they work. Today, when I encounter teams who are not living up to their potential it always traces back to fundamentals. It’s fundamentals consistently applied that will always drive the biggest improvements.

Want to fortify the fundamentals with your leadership team? Check out these options for 1/2 day workshops and individual coaching.

Making the Most of Coaching

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that 14 years have passed since I resigned as president of a large daily newspaper to pursue a new direction in leadership development. Maybe not new so much as a sensible next step. I spent much of my newspaper career developing the men and women who served on my leadership teams. I did a lot of coaching.

In the years since, through Gaynor Consulting, I’ve provided a lot of coaching to a great many clients in many different industries – both in group workshops and individual sessions. Some have been more successful than others, I believe because they took the right approach. So how do I think you can get the most benefit from coaching?

Be an active honest learner
I can quickly tell those who want to learn from those who are across the table because they have to be. Those who want coaching come prepared with questions. They know where they want to get to (they have goals for growth) and they are open and honest about their situations. With coaching you really get more out when you put more in.

Make it a priority
We spend time on the things that are important to us so if you just squeeze your coaching session in when you can around everything else you are speaking volumes about what matters. As I have often observed, without coaching people under pressure usually just to the same things harder faster and you know what Einstein said about that – doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. Developing better, more refined leadership skills is the key to meeting old challenges in more effective ways.

Be teachable
I’m sure most people would like to think of themselves at teachable. The reality is, for many pride closes the door to learning. It’s humility that opens the door. Too many of the leaders I meet don’t make it to a workshop or a coaching relationship at all because they are too proud to be open to learning. It’s as if they believe that finding out they didn’t know something, like how to provide expert feedback, is an admission of weakness, when in fact it’s just the opposite.

A few years ago I was presenting workshops to a large organization. I had to present each workshop several times to cover the group. The CEO, (one the most accomplished leaders I’ve ever known) attended each and every session. His opening comments included the observation that he picked up something new in each one. Now that’s the posture that leads to continuous learning and sets the right example for every other leader on the team.

Keep an open mind
Too many people are so committed to a belief that they cannot see the value of a new way of doing something even in the face of the most compelling rationale. I often see people defend a flawed position far too long. Admitting a mistake, even to oneself, is an act of strength and a key to learning.

Revisit and reinforce
Over these years presenting workshops I’ve also come to appreciate the value of reinforcement. You simply will not attend a workshop or learn something new in a coaching session and lock it away for good in one pass. Learning requires repetition. I see the evidence when I do a brief knowledge check to discover time and time again that too many people have forgotten some of the most important fundamentals. This is why I encourage everyone to take lots of notes on the handouts and revisit the material from time to time. With enough repetition knowledge starts to stick.

Apply what you learn
I once heard it said that information alone does not lead to transformation. It’s information and application that gets the job done. The goal of good leadership development is to help people build strong new leadership habits but new skills don’t start as habits. Discipline always precedes habit. Nothing new, whether it’s an exercise regimen or a new approach to providing feedback, starts as a habit. It starts as a discipline that says, “I’m not going to miss that daily workout” or “I’m going to find at least one opportunity every day to apply the feedback skills I just learned with a member of my team.”

Over the years I have coached I’m sure hundreds of men and women, first as a newspaper executive and now through my own company. There are undeniably two groups: those who became better more skilled leaders and went on to produce great results and those who remained stalled right where they were wondering why the next promotion never came. Reflecting on this experience it seems to me that those in the first group knew how to make the most of coaching.

For more on timeless leadership practices check out my workshops or consider some individual coaching.

Dan Gaynor

Thinking About Potential

An encouragement for the day – a short excerpt from my book:

“However, we must accept that it is possible to treat people poorly and still achieve a measure of commercial success. The evidence is all around us. For this reason, let us fix our gaze on something higher: on potential. I believe that every team that achieves commercial success with poor leadership could become so much more with good leadership. Let’s ask ourselves what these teams could become if the people who did the work were enthusiastic participants and not reluctant survivors, if they were chasing a dream they cared about for a leader they cared about.”

Are you passionate about your team’s potential?

The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders is available as soft cover and in all major ebook formats. Order yours today.

Job Fit and Performance

Leaders are limited or lifted by the people they lead. Their success and that of the mission depends on the contributions of others. With this in mind, I believe all the best leaders have a kind of healthy discontent about the state of their teams. They are never satisfied with status quo. They are always looking for ways to boost team performance. This is why casting the right people into each role is always essential leadership work.

The key to casting well is Job Fit. For me, job fit is the combination of talent and values that make an individual well suited to the role he or she must play. When people are doing the work they have talent for, for leaders and teams that matter to them, and they have the right values, they are invariably satisfied and productive.

Talent is the stuff we are born with, the raw material. When talent is trained, and accompanied by the right experience, high performance and job satisfaction are natural outcomes. I learned a long time ago that I do not have the talent for math. Trying to make me into an accountant or mathematician would be an exercise in frustration for everyone and it would be a frustrating exercise for me, but I have other talents. The key to lasting success is matching talent and values to work. While this might seem obvious a lot of people are doing work they’ll never do very well or feel very good about.

Talent alone is not enough, we also need the right values. An individual could have lots of talent for math but be completely unable to respect others or take direction. Such a person will only damage the team and undermine the mission. Talent AND values are the keys to job fit and lasting success for everyone. So every great team-building leader is in a constant search for job fit with each and every team member.

Through job fit leaders build high performance teams one individual at a time. As I’ve been known to repeat constantly, “Great leaders surface and resolve the big questions about people and the work they do.” They do not sit by and watch someone struggle without doing something about it. Job fit becomes their reference point.

This is why great leaders make every performance count. They know that performance is always the best indicator of job fit. When performance is strong and the individual enjoys the work, we can be fairly sure of job fit – this is evidence of good casting. When someone is consistently performing poorly, job fit questions arise and it’s time to do something about it. This is when a leader’s observation, feedback, coaching and accountability skills all become essential. When performance improves in response to the leaders intervention, we can dismiss job fit concerns. When it does not, it is time to make a change for the individual and the organization. The most frustrating situations I came across during my newspaper leadership career were those where I knew there were job fit issues that previous leaders had ignored, sometimes for years.

When job fit is the issue, performance and job satisfaction will not improve until the casting issue is resolved. Delaying these changes is not skillful or caring leadership. While you can’t guarantee that everyone who leaves will find the right job the next time, know for certain that they won’t even get the chance to by staying in the wrong one.

Looking to go deeper in leadership? Check out my book The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders, available in soft cover and all major e-book formats.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are you currently doing to build your team’s performance?
2. Are there any job fit issues that need to be surfaced and resolved?

Thinking “Corporate”

Like so much of our language, the word “corporate” has taken on new meanings over the years, many of them not very flattering. Often when we hear it we think of power, money, cold-hearted leaders, business in it’s worst manifestations. A look at its classic definition provides a different perspective. Our english word corporate gets its roots in the latin word for the body, corpus. It literally means to form one body of many members.

We can draw insight from this perspective as we consider corporate life in all its forms – business, non-profit organizations, community groups or any other situation in which people come together to work or play.

The classic definition of corporate gives us powerful insight into organizational life and leadership. it carries with it implications that are worth thinking about, regardless of where you lead. It’s helpful to see the organization then as a corporate body.

Let’s start with the idea that corporate gets at the reality that we are at once highly individual and at the same time connected to everyone else who is part of the group. The contributions of one affect all. Whether or not we like it, we rise and fall together.

There is a reciprocal relationship within every corporate body. The body needs strong members; the members need a strong body. When the body is strengthened everyone benefits; when it is weakened everyone suffers. The body will only ever be as strong as its members and what they contribute. When one contributes even a little more, the entire body is strengthened for everyone. When one contributes less, or undermines the effort in any way, the body is weakened for all. This is why great leaders treat every performance like it really matters.

At newspapers across Canada, I shared this thinking in my own way, with the many different teams I led. I held a staff meeting, usually within a few days of my arrival. Among my comments, I told everyone that I believed people were the most important part of every newspaper. I waited for the predicable response, “Oh, he’s one of those guys, those people guys.” Then I would continue, “No, I really mean it. So if I really believe that people are the most important part of this newspaper, I will treat every performance like it really matters. I will insist on your best and accept nothing less.”

When you really believe people and what they do matters, it carries with it a responsibility to pay attention, and it sends the message to team members that they must approach work as though what they do really does make a difference. There can be no free rides. I have always believed that people want to make a difference, they want their contributions to matter. I sent this message early and often. I supported it with strong caring performance management throughout the organization.

In a strong corporate body there are no unimportant contributions. So how does your leadership team treat the development of the organization? Does every member of your leadership team treat the work of each individual as indispensable? How would this corporate perspective change the way you lead?

Want to go deeper into good leadership? I wrote, The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders to pass on what I’ve learned through a career of building strong teams. Or consider some individual coaching or a leadership group workshop.

Dan Gaynor

Authenticity and Vulnerability?

Regular readers will know that I am a proponent of timeless leadership practices. I am convinced that good leaders have always done the same things well. Poor leaders have always made the same mistakes. This said, leadership thinking often changes with cultural influences, giving rise to faddish ideas that seem good at first glance but don’t hold up to closer scrutiny. I believe this is the case with two of the most popular words in leadership today: Authenticity and Vulnerability.

Let’s take authenticity first. The thinking generally goes something like this: be authentic, be who you truly are, to become a great leader. But what if who you are isn’t so great? The call to authenticity seems to assume a certain goodness of character and this is a deeply flawed assumption. Too many leaders are bullies, narcissistic and or control freaks, to list but a few fatal flaws. Should they be authentic?

A few years ago I was seated beside someone on a plane who told me that when he simply gave way to the really nasty guy he is and embraced his nature to cheat and exploit others, he found real contentment. Yes, this is a true story. Remarkable as the exchange was in its candour, it pointed to a truth and to the problem with authenticity. Every leader, even the best, have lots of room for improvement.

In part one of my book, The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders, I wrote “Strong effective leaders have a healthy degree of introspection. They seek to know themselves, their strengths and their frailties. They reflect on each experience to help them become better leaders.” The best leaders don’t seek authenticity so much as they look for flaws and strive to improve. They seek to become better than they are today. For them character development is a never ending process. Authenticity from the worst of leaders presents a much bigger problem. Taken literally, it would legitimize the worst of behaviours as it did with the fellow seated beside me on the flight.

Now for Vulnerability, The Oxford Dictionary describes it as “exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.” The problem is that people just don’t follow weak leaders and vulnerability often leaves the impression of weakness when people need confidence. They don’t want arrogance but they do want courage and strength of character. The reality is that teams take their emotional strength from their leader.

There were very challenging times, even a few frightful times (a couple of very tough labour disputes come to mind), during my years leading newspapers that I knew if my knees buckled many others would have as well. When a team’s back is against the wall and people are feeling threatened, they are not looking for vulnerability. They need courage, confidence and strength. A leader may feel vulnerable but it is unwise to share this with the people he or she is leading.

Authenticity and Vulnerability have become hot leadership words these days. For reasons I do not completely understand they evoke a very warm favourable response. I suppose in some contexts there is nothing wrong with them, however they don’t fit in a timeless approach to leadership. Authenticity and vulnerability may play well with academics, writers and consultants but they don’t work in real world leadership.

Want to go deeper into timeless leadership? Consider a group workshop.

Dan Gaynor

The Pain Problem

“Pain insists upon being attended to.” C.S. Lewis

There is no question that pain presents a significant problem for many leaders. For many, their reluctance to say or do something that will be painful causes them to avoid many of the most important interventions. To develop expert performance management practices we must accept pain as a constructive and even essential force.

Pain often provides the motivation to correct a bad habit – it insists upon being attended to. Sometimes it leads someone out of the wrong work and into right work, providing for lasting job satisfaction. Pain is so often part of the dynamic of meaningful change. I know it has been in my life. Indeed it is in every life. Because pain is a universal part of the human experience it stands to reason that it serves a purpose. And yet the reluctance to accept it as an inevitable consequence of a leader’s work causes too many leaders to choose avoidance over engagement. Surfacing and resolving the big questions about people and their work often entails some pain and yet it among a leader’s most important work.

When you become aware of a performance problem, the first step is always to provide corrective feedback – a simple 2-5 minute coaching conversation that describes the situation, the problems it’s giving rise to, and the change that is required. Caring and fair leaders voice their concerns as soon as they arise, they don’t delay. This minimizes damage and provides the best likelihood of a successful correction, but the pain problem often prevents leaders from holding even these initial conversations. The individual loses the opportunity to correct a problem early and the mission must accommodate a poor performer. As performance issues worsen so too does the deterrent effect pain can have on leaders.

When corrective feedback doesn’t bring the change that’s needed, consequences up to and including job loss should follow. Experience has taught me that pain has a tendency to intensify until it is resolved at the source. This is the way progressive discipline should work. Job loss is painful, often intensely so, this we know. At times it provides the motivation for someone to learn an important lesson and make a necessary change. Once again, a skillful leader must in all things treat people fairly. This means clear feedback with a clear warning about future consequences. When the feedback is not acted on, however there is the limit to a leader’s influence, we cannot force the change we would like to see in someone else. When leaders are unwilling to resolve these issues in a timely manner, they become accomplices to the problem.

Pain often motivates change because it forces us to address it at its source, nothing else brings relief. Good leaders never deliberately cause pain for others, however the best all come to accept it as a natural, even necessary by-product of their work. In doing so they serve well the missions and people they lead.

For additional leadership resources I offer group workshops, individual coaching, speaking and a book.

Dan Gaynor

Discussion Questions:
1. When has pain played a purposeful role in your life?
2. When was the last time fear of pain stopped you from taking steps you should have taken to resolve a performance issue? What were the consequences?

The Big Question

Over the years I have asked a great many leaders, from supervisors to senior executives, a favorite question. It goes like this: When you made your first move into a leadership role, from player to coach, what was the big change and what does this suggest about your work? Very few people answer well, I suspect because most haven’t really thought about it. Most people simply move into a leadership role and start doing it as best they can with little or no preparation. The problem of course is that many miss the mark on one of the most important facets of the work.

I answer the question this way. When you take that first leadership job, often as a lead hand or supervisor of some sort, you move from doing things largely on your own to doing them through the work of others. This is a really significant change that many people don’t think nearly enough about. As you move up the leadership ranks leading larger groups of people, the implications become more significant.

So now on to the second part of our question. If your success as a leader is now determined largely by the efforts of others, it stands to reason that your efforts should turn toward building the motivation and capacity in others to do more and or better quality work. Think of them as the power that drives the team’s vision, mission and day to day performance. As the people you lead get stronger, better, faster, they lift you. The mission you are leading can’t help but be more successful.

And yet I see so many leaders who invest little or no energy in developing their team member’s potential. Year in and year out they assign, direct and measure work, with little or no attention to team and individual development. They wonder why results are not improving faster. Investing your time in the development of others does so much more than build up their skills, it also builds motivation because coaching is a strong indication that a leader cares. And people work harder for leaders who care about them, who invest in them.

I believe the best leaders never leave teams just as they found them. They have what I call a healthy discontent. For them the team and its players are always a work in progress. Put another way, I can always tell when a leader has been on the scene – the team and its members are always changed for the better. This contrasts with the many managers I see. Their teams don’t really change much at all. Tirelessly developing the potential of people should sit right at the top of every good leader’s job description.

Want to go deeper on leadership? Check out the book, The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders, available in soft copy and in all major e-book formats or how about a 1/2 day workshop for your team?

Dan Gaynor

Risky Business

Lately I’ve encountered too many leaders who seem far more concerned with playing it safe than they are with making a difference. The simple truth is that powerful transformational leadership and risk are inseparable. Leadership – real leadership – isn’t safe. Never has been, never will be. The few leaders who actually make a meaningful difference to their teams and missions all accept risk as part of the package.

The reality is that the risks of transformational leadership are real. There are no guarantees of success. At times you prevail and at other times, well you know what they say, the pioneers are the one with the arrows in their backs. Churchill put it his own way when he said, “Do you have enemies? Good, it means you stood for something.” Standing for something will eventually cost you something.

There is a bit of a paradox here. Leaders who make a difference are the ones who earn the promotions and rise through the ranks. Become a leader who makes teams better, stronger, faster and people notice. But that same work entails rocking the boat and challenging the way things are, that can also get you fired.

I’ve plenty of first hand experience with this. At one newspaper my drive to assemble a best in class leadership team entailed removing several people who were popular with leaders at head office and one who was popular with a very significant shareholder. There I was back at risk again: do the safe thing and leave a touchy situation alone or take on the problem and the risk. I approached it with care and was able to make the changes I felt had to be made. We built a leadership team I am proud of even today and went on to build that newspaper’s performance quite significantly together. The same approach though has cost me a few good clients in the work I do these days. I consider speaking the uncomfortable truth as tactfully as I can to be essential to my work. I know that I have to look into the mirror each day and feel good about the fellow I see. I know that real change isn’t possible without confronting difficult and often unpopular choices.

Taking risks is essential to powerful leadership. Taking them foolishly is not. When a move was risky I always took care to approach it thoughtfully. In the leadership team example I cited I took care to build my case step by step before I sought the approval to remove the individuals. Still, know that a thoughtful approach reduces risk, it doesn’t remove it. So many leaders today just seem unwilling to go there. They will spend careers as safe and ineffectual leaders, stuck endlessly in junior or middle management roles.

Just today, I was coaching another young leader through this same dilemma as she wrestled with whether or not to talk to her boss about an uncomfortable situation – play it safe or take a risk to try to make a difference. The choice will be hers alone as it must be. So where is your leadership today? Are you taking risks to make a difference or are you playing it safe, unwilling to rock the boat. This is a choice that separates the few truly transformational leaders from the league of ordinary managers who populate so many of our organizations.

Want to go deeper into great leadership? Check out my book, The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders. Available in soft cover and in all major e-book formats.

Dan Gaynor

1. What was the biggest risk you’ve taken in leadership.
2. Can you name a risk you had to pay for

Mentoring in the Moment

Mentor: An experienced and trusted advisor and guide

Mentoring receives a lot of attention these days and rightly so. Good mentors inspire us to reach for our potential. They encourage us when we need it and guide us along the path, passing on what they have learned in going there before us. Mentors build relationships that are often remembered fondly for many years.

Like so many other good practices though, we have over the years systematized mentoring in ways that have created onerous expectations and made it less appealing. Chief among these is the expectation that good mentoring must be regularly scheduled. My experience with mentoring runs contrary to this. The best mentoring is much more an organic exercise.

I would say that I have benefited from two mentoring relationships over the course of my professional life. Neither was systematic or forced. Both would be best described as mentoring in the moment. In both cases there were not all that many mentoring moments, however both individuals contributed in valuable and memorable ways to my development as a leader. Both met my criteria for mentoring. We had a warm relationship that became a friendship. They enjoyed teaching; I enjoyed learning from them. Both were trusted advisors, and when we did meet, we enjoyed our time together.

I remember well the day I went to Don Babick (then publisher at the Edmonton Journal) to present my work in redesigning our sales territories. I’d put a lot of work into the project, coming up with three progressive levels of sales positions: entry, intermediate and expert. I had developed a more complicated solution than was necessary. Don listened then offered his thoughts, “Dan I think you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. I think you should just make sure you know what a good sales rep has to be able to do and make sure they can all do it.” Then he added, “Most people think the ability to handle complexity is a sign of intelligence. The really smart people take what’s complex and make it simple.”

It was a mentoring moment that has remained with me over the years and shaped my approach to thinking and problem solving. Over the years there were other encounters and other lessons. Every now and then I find myself quoting something Don said to me, passing on what he gave me to the leaders coming after me – this is classic mentoring. We had no formally arranged systematic approach and we didn’t meet in a formal mentoring program. Our mentoring was infrequent and yet still important. It was natural. Today, many years and lessons later, I am more often in the role of mentor. Many of the best relationships I have enjoyed have been this way, more mentoring in the moment. Sometimes with people I no longer work directly with, years pass between moments. With others the encounters are closer together. Always there is a relationship.

It seems to me that systematized mentoring often misses the mark. Forcing relationships and timetables doesn’t work. We discourage potential mentors and disappoint everyone involved. Instead, let’s encourage a more natural approach. My bet is we’ll have a more more successful and satisfying experience.

Want to go deeper on leadership? Check out my book, The Heart and Hands of Leadership: The Twelve Timeless Practices of Effective Leaders, available in soft cover and in all major e-book formats. Or check out the half-day workshops and keynote speeches I offer.

Discussion questions:

How many mentors have you benefited from over the years?
How did the relationship begin and evolve?
What were the most memorable lessons learned from the relationship?