Most Americans alive today cannot remember a time when a Kennedy of the generation of John, Robert and Ted was not playing a major public role in the life of the nation. The passing of Ted Kennedy this week literally marks the end of an era and is, I think, one reason why his death has moved so many people.  It is the clear end of an era in all of our lives.

There have been so many perceptive and thoughtful commentaries and remembrances written about Ted Kennedy in the past few days that it feels somewhat redundant on my part to add to the mix. Still, there are three quick things I want to address in this post.

First, I want to point you to some of the columns on Kennedy that I've found most thought provoking.  They include David Broder's in the Washington Post, David Brooks' in the New York Times and John F. Harris's and Alexander Burns' on Politico.com. 

Second, I want to share a couple of leadership lessons from Kennedy's life that I think are important and that I have not seen clearly stated elsewhere (with complete acknowledgement that they may have been. I haven't read everything.)

The first of these lessons is about resilience and personal redemption.  The record of Ted Kennedy's life is a mix of significant legislative achievement and, for much of his adulthood, poor and sometimes tragic choices. As he himself acknowledged in a speech at Harvard in 1991,  "I recognize my own shortcomings.  I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them."  Given everything that had happened in Kennedy's life up to that point - some of his own making and some not - it wouldn't have been surprising if at age 59 he had continued on the path he was on. If that had turned out to be the case, it's unlikely that we would be seeing the level of tribute and remembrance that's taking place this week. From that speech forward, Kennedy began to reshape the way he lived his life. You could make an argument that his last 18 years were his most admirable and productive. It is because the man had the resilience not to quit and the courage to seek redemption that he finished his life as well as he did.

Which brings me to the second lesson which is about the power of giving and accepting unconditional love in our lives. Kennedy was fortunate and blessed in his life to marry his second wife, Vickie, in 1992.  You can read more about her and what she did for him in this article in the Washington Post but the summary description is she loved him unconditionally and in doing so enabled him to find peace. We have an affection in the United States (and I'm as suspect to it as anyone else) for the myth of the heroic leader that is out there doing great things on his or her own.  Often the leaders themselves become entrapped in that myth. The reality of our interdependence is ignored or overlooked. 

If we're lucky in life, we find someone who loves us for who we are and we allow them to do that.  And, in turn, we give that love back. The result is that we become not just more fully realized leaders but human beings.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul wrote:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails... When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me... And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

When people speak of unconditional love, they often cite those words from Paul whether or not they are Christians or even people of faith. I sometimes think about how different the practice of leadership and the quality of public discourse would be if we were all intentional in following the direction of those words.  Who knows what we might accomplish?

Through the gift of unconditional love, Ted Kennedy was the only brother in his generation to move past the myth of the heroic leader standing alone.  Rest in peace, Senator Kennedy. Thanks for what you accomplished and, in the last years of your life, what you taught us about the power of resilience, redemption and love.

In my presentations and group coaching work, I'm fond of quoting Charles DeGaulle's observation that,  "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."  The point I'm trying to make with that line is that while every leader has unique opportunities and responsibilities in their role that only they can do, no one is personally indispensible.  President Obama's renomination of Ben Bernanke for another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has me thinking that Bernanke may be the exception that proves DeGaulle's rule. As Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post today, Bernanke, with his unique background as one of the world's foremost experts on the Great Depression and his willingness to take decisive and innovative action to restore faith in the credit markets, could merit a Time magazine cover headline as "The Man Who Saved the World."

While the praise for Bernanke's reappointment is just about unanimous among economists, there are two basic criticisms of his performance to date. The first is that he didn't see the crisis coming (who, in a position of authority, did by the way?) and, second, that along with then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then President of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, he allowed Lehman Brothers to fail thereby taking the global economy to the brink. Fair enough, but what gets me about these criticisms is they come with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. It's easy to see the impact of Lehman 's failure in retrospect. You have to wonder if anyone else would have done a significantly better job of managing all of that at the time.

The great thing about Bernanke as a leader is that while the global credit markets began to freeze, he didn't. He drew on his technical knowledge of the Great Depression and immediately pivoted to exercise what two of my mentors, Harvard leadership experts Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky would call adaptive leadership.  (Check out their new book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.)  He didn't just stick with the traditional Fed response of lowering interest rates, he recognized that completely new solutions were needed to keep the credit markets alive and, with his team, came up with new "liquidity facilities" that pumped $1 trillion into the system. Much of the rest of the world's finance chiefs followed his lead and, today, the global economy appears to be on its way back.

It's interesting to think about how a guy whose previous leadership responsibilities were primarily within the faculty of Princeton University pulled all of this off. Looking through the lens of leadership presence that I outline in The Next Level, I would say that Bernanke demonstrated strong performance in the three main categories of personal presence, team presence and organizational presence.  In the category of personal presence, he demonstrated confidence when the world desperately needed him to and, as I wrote here in March, he stepped far out of the mold of his predecessors to custom fit his communications to vastly different constituencies such as the American public, Congress, business leaders and global finance ministers.  In the category of team presence, people I know who work at the Fed have told me that morale there is high because Bernanke is the kind of leader who seeks out input from his team and looks to them to solve problems. Finally, in the category of organizational presence, Bernanke is someone who clearly gets the concept of interagency and global collaboration, takes an outside-in view of the problems that needs to be addressed and who has taken unprecedented steps to exercise his leadership footprint in a constructive way.

As this week's renomination suggests, Bernanke's work is far from over.  He now has to unwind a lot of what he and his team created to avoid a devastating period of inflation.  It's going to be a tough job, but if he continues to lead in the way that he has, I'm optimistic.

Finally, one thing I've learned from blogging about topics like this is that my readers have strong opinions and often radically disagree with me.  So, let's hear it.  What do you think of Bernanke as a leader?  What can we learn from both his positive and negative examples?

A lot of the clients I work with in our group coaching program are middle managers. They've moved beyond the level of front line leaders and supervisors, but have not yet reached the ranks of the most senior executives. They're the directors, senior directors and vice presidents in the private sector and the GS-15's and SES - 1's in federal government. And, based on my experience in working with them over the years, I would say that more and more they are the meat in the sandwich. By that, I mean they're constantly squeezed from pressure above them and below them in the organization.

Over the weekend, one of my colleagues from the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, Marijo Puleo, shared a McKinsey survey report, Leaders in the Crisis, on the alumni list serve. In that same daily digest from the list serve there was an extended conversation sparked by another colleague who has a client in crisis. Like a lot of people these days, this client simply has too much work to get it all done and still have a semblance of a life. About ten coaches responded to that issue and said they're seeing the same thing with their clients.

How much more evidence do we need that middle managers are the meat in the sandwich? The McKinsey survey had some interesting results that illustrate the point. Here are a few factoids for you.  Middle managers, compared to the top execs surveyed, are:

• Less committed to staying with their organizations
• Less enthusiastic about their work
• Less satisfied with their own performance and
• Far less satisfied than the seniors with how their bosses are doing. (Ouch!)

Does anyone else see a problem here? These are not just the people responsible for keeping things running during the current economic challenges, these are also the leaders that organizations are counting on for long term growth and success. The stakes around keeping this group engaged are pretty high. Here are a few ideas based on the McKinsey research about how to do a better job with that.

Don't Just Focus on the Numbers:  80% of the executives surveyed by McKinsey said that their organizations have taken steps to reduce costs and half talked about decreasing capital investment.  The executives who feel best about their performance, however, said they were taking extra time to motivate their people.

Talk About What They Care About:  So, how are the top leaders motivating the troops? Over 70% of them are talking about company values and financial performance. Nothing wrong with that, but back to the sandwich analogy, it's not a complete meal. Only 31% of the leaders surveyed said they're motivating through creating opportunities for career growth and 27% said they spend time showing interest in employees' lives outside of work. (What, you mean they have lives outside of work?)

Encourage Down Time (and If They Don't Encourage It, Take It Anyway):  The McKinsey research indicates that 65% of executives who aren't at all satisfied with their own performance are spending less time on social, religious or athletic activities they enjoy. In contrast, 64% of those who are very satisfied with their performance are taking time for the non-work renewal of their energy and perspective. Here's a tip. If you've got a boss who's in the 65% group, you're going to have to set some boundaries for yourself to take the time you need to renew and show up at your best. It's rare when a leader who's running flat out until they crash is going to have enough presence of mind to encourage others to take some down time. Don't wait to be asked. Take it.

A lot of the findings in the McKinsey survey remind me of one of the things that I think is most true about leadership skills. They fall into two big categories. The first is the skills that drive results. The second is the skills that build relationships. Great leaders have rich skill sets in both categories. Leaders under pressure (as are a lot of the leaders surveyed in this study) tend to over focus on the skills that drive results. The irony is that the conditions that cause the pressure make strong relationships that much more important.

What's your ratio between driving results and building relationships? What are you doing or what do your leaders need to be doing to practice effective leadership in this prolonged crisis? What have you done lately to take some pressure off the meat in the sandwich?

One of my favorite sayings about leadership is that it's a two part job. The first is to define reality. The second is to offer hope. The challenge is to strike the right balance between the two in a given situation.  It's hard to get it right. Some leaders go long on reality and short on hope. Others, perhaps because it's more fun and energizing to focus on the future, don't spend enough time and attention on defining reality.  

Of course, another factor in avoiding the discussion of reality is because it often involves delivering bad news. Unless they have some sort of pathology, delivering bad news is not something that most leaders enjoy or look forward to. As a result, a lot of leaders aren't particularly good or effective at delivering it.  In a time of great change and upheaval, as this one is, leaders will frequently find themselves in a situation in which defining the new reality requires delivering some bad news. It's important to develop some skills in this domain and that's the point of this post.

What got me thinking about this topic was an article in Thursday's New York Times by Anemona Hartocollis called, "At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort."  Her reporting focuses on Dr. Sean O'Mahony who, as a palliative care specialist, informs and counsels patients facing the end of their lives.  The article is informative, instructive and beautifully written.  I highly recommend it to you.

Dr. O'Mahony spends his days delivering bad news and, as the article makes clear, he is highly skilled at that. He strikes a fine balance between establishing connection with the patient while maintaining a level of detachment that he needs to protect himself so he has the emotional reserves to serve the next patient. While many leaders do not have to deal with literal issues of life and death, if you lead long enough at a certain level or above, you're almost guaranteed to have to deliver bad news. It could be firing someone, closing down a division, disappointing someone who was expecting something they're not going to get or any number of other situations. How well you handle these situations will determine how well things go for you and the organization after you deliver the bad news. As a former executive myself and now as a coach, I've had a lot of direct and indirect experience with delivering bad news. I know how hard it is. There's a lot that leaders can learn about how to deliver bad news from how Dr. O'Mahony does his work. Here's a list of the lessons I noticed in the Times article:

Be Informed:  The doctor is well informed about the particulars of a patient's case before he begins a conversation with them. He doesn't freelance or wing his way through it. When you communicate with people about something that is deeply important to them, they expect that you will have had enough respect for them to do your homework beforehand.

Be  Honest:  If a patient has cancer, Dr. O'Mahony tells them they have cancer. If there is no cure, he says, "there are no established cures."  He respects his patients enough to tell them the truth in simple, direct language. If he was a corporate executive, my guess is he would call a layoff a layoff instead of a made up word like rightsizing. He understands that people need to hear the truth in language that acknowledges their intelligence and their value as a human being.

Listen with Questions:  After he delivers the news, the doctor stays with the patient and listens for clues about where the patient is in the process and what the best next steps would be. In a case highlighted in the Times article, he asked his patient questions like, "What are your biggest concerns?," "What's your understanding of the status of the tumor?" and "What gives you strength?"  Asking open ended questions like this gives his patients space to process their thinking and identify what's most important. In an organizational leadership setting, just about any bad news conversation should at least include the question, "What questions do you have?"

Acknowledge What You Don't Know:  Dr. O'Mahony has learned that it's a risky game to predict the future and believes that offering "very concrete estimates of survival can cause as much harm as good."  He resists the desire that patients often have for specific answers for things that he can't control and instead focuses on what he can do to help the patient in the situation they're in. That strikes me as a good rule of thumb for leaders delivering bad news.

Take Care of Yourself:  Early in the Times article, the doctor states, "I do not feel obligated to be sort of eternally involved with the experience of death. It's not healthy to be there all the time."  That might sound cold on first reading. I'd suggest, though, that Dr. O'Mahony understands that he needs to maintain a certain level of emotional detachment with each patient so he can be fully present and engaged with all the patients to come. He is doing difficult work and needs to manage his emotional reserves to do it.  The same is true for organizational leaders in challenging times. To effectively deliver bad news, you have to believe that you've done what you can to help the people affected while leaving yourself with the reserves needed to lead the rest of the organization.

Have you ever noticed that the more stressed you get, the more likely you are to keep doing things that aren't that productive (e.g. waste another 10 minutes surfing the web or eat that second piece of cake)?  Well, I don't know if this will make you feel any better, but it turns out that lab rats do the same thing.

As reported in the New York Times this week, new research out of Portugal shows that chronically stressed rats keep doing the same thing over and over (like compulsively pressing a bar for food they're not going to eat), because they're too stressed to do anything more productive. Of course, you might be stressed too if, like the lab rats, you had to live with dominant bully rats or periodically got zapped by a mild electric current. (Come to think of it, that doesn't sound a whole lot different than getting buzzed by your Blackberry 200 times a day.)

But, don't despair; there is good news in Rat Town. It turns out that when the rats got some time away from their stressful environment they came back with all kinds of innovative problem solving and coping skills. Researchers concluded that some time to recharge allowed the synapses in the prefrontal cortex of the rats' brains to grow stronger while the dendrite weeds in the habit forming parts of their brains were pruned back a bit. (I guess the researchers must have some rat size MRI's that they're using.)

So, I know what you're thinking. "Lucky rats. I'd be more productive too if I got some time away." That's right, you would be. Vacations are a good thing. But, you don't have to take a week off to give your brain a chance to recharge and come up with some more productive behaviors. Over the past few years, I've seen dozens of high potential leader clients in our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program increase their overall effectiveness (as measured by feedback from colleagues) by building in some simple recharging routines into their days.

Here are five routines from my clients that stand out:

1. Leave your Blackberry in your office: Several clients have made a commitment to themselves that they will leave their Blackberry in their office when they're attending meetings. As a result, they've found that they're more present and productive in the meetings and back in their office.

2. Schedule planning and review time: Some of my clients have had great success by scheduling an hour of planning time on Monday and an hour of review time on Fridays. Others have taken a different approach by doing the same thing daily with 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day.

3. Start doing something you used to love to do: One of my clients used to love to swim when she was in high school and college.  When we went through the Life GPS® planning process as part of the group coaching program, she realized how much she missed swimming. She started swimming at 7:00 am every morning instead of logging on to her email. Six months later, she had lost 25 pounds and was thriving in a new role at work.

4. Go out for lunch: Lots of people either skip lunch or grab something to eat at their desk.  A client who lived a few minutes from his office decided he would go home for lunch a couple of days a week to visit with his wife.  If you don't work close to home, then find some places you'd like to go where you can think about something other than work during lunch a couple of days a week.

5. E-mail free time: It's all too common to let the e-mails intrude on personal and family time.  A number of my clients have set some boundaries on this by setting blocks of time each evening when the computer is turned off and the Blackberry is put in a drawer. Some of them use this time to hang out with the family and others have used it to work out.  One guy lost 15 pounds this way. (I think I'm going to start an executive weight loss program.)

So, those are five simple yet effective ideas for taking a break from the stress that can lead to non-productive habits.  What's worked for you on this front?

As I wrote last week, the health care reform debate is, unfortunately, full of important lessons for leaders on how not to drive change. Admittedly, it's a lot easier to observe what seems to be going wrong when you're watching the process instead of being in the middle of it. Still, it seems like President Obama's reform process is running off the rails. The White House spent last week playing defense on the health care reform town halls and the latest example is this morning's confusion (as reported on Politico ) about whether or not a public insurance option is still on the table.  

How did we get here?  I think there are three lessons from how the President and his team have handled this that anyone who is responsible for leading dramatic change should pay attention to. 

Define What's In and Out of Bounds:  While good leaders stay open to input to stakeholders, they just don't throw everything open and essentially say, "What do you want to do?"  Instead they set the parameters of the debate by stating some clear principles and defining, from their point of view, what's in bounds and out of bounds. From the outside looking in, it doesn't seem like the White House did that in framing the health care reform process. Instead, the design responsibilities were left to different committees in Congress. That's left the President with four different bills at this point and the inability to say what exactly is and isn't involved in reform. The White House took more or less the same approach with the $780 billion stimulus bill earlier this year and probably got less immediate impact and more pork out of that process than they hoped for. Leaders of change, especially when they have as much political capital as the President had earlier this year, need to set a clear purpose, picture and plan for the change.

Clear the Decks:  There was a lot of commentary in the late Spring and early Summer (including on this blog ) that the President was cramming too much onto his agenda. It seems like the impact of focusing on too many things at once is playing out now. For something as defining for the country and his administration as health care reform will be, it doesn't feel like enough time and attention was given up front to the design, coalition building and communications strategies needed to lead something so complex. It seems like the decks weren't cleared up front and now the White House is reacting to events rather than shaping them. When you're changing something big and important, make plenty of time up front to do the prep work.

Tell Compelling Stories and Give Clear Answers:  As Howard Gardner writes in his book, Leading Minds: An Anatomy Of Leadership, effective leaders have a core story that they shape so different groups can relate to it based on what they care most about. What most groups are going to care most about is "What's in it for me?"  It's only been in the past few weeks that the President himself has invested a lot of time in communicating the story behind health care reform. From what I've seen, it's only been in the past few days that he's started telling the stories of real people and what health care reform would mean to them. Yesterday's guest Op-Ed by Obama in the New York Times is a decent example of telling a few illustrative stories and making a few key points about how what you're trying to do will help make those stories better. The biggest problem with the article though was that it ran in the New York Times instead of Parade magazine.  When driving change, leaders need to tell stories that reach people where they live and then clearly state how what they're doing is going to lead to a better story.

What leadership lessons are you gleaning from the health care reform process?

If you've read this blog for awhile, you know that I'm fascinated and inspired by what people do in and with their lives.  I started this week by blogging about Julia Child and I'm going to end it with some thoughts about Les Paul who died Thursday at age 94.

If, like me, your musical formative years were in the 60's, 70's and 80's, you probably know Les Paul best from all of the rockers who played the guitar that bore his name. Let's go down the list a little bit: Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and, yes, I have to acknowledge the guys from Kiss, Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley (some of you, no doubt, picked up on the Kiss reference in the Shout It Out loud reference in my last post). A pretty impressive list of guitar heroes for sure, but we might not have heard of any of them if it wasn't for the person called Les Paul.

As documented in these obits from the New York Times and the Washington Post, Les Paul basically invented the electric guitar and a lot of the other technology that made rock and roll possible. The man was passionate about music and innovation and combined those passions to great effect. After a childhood piano teacher wrote his mother a note that said, "Your boy, Lester, will never learn music," Paul had learned to play the harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager. His first invention apparently came at age 10 when he made a harmonica holder out of a coat hanger so he could play the harmonica and guitar at the same time. (Somewhere right now, Bob Dylan is feeling very grateful.)  A few years later, Les put a phonograph needle wired to a radio speaker inside his acoustic guitar so the crowd at the local drive-in could hear him play. He kept tinkering and eventually came up with what he called "the log" which was basically a board with two pickups attached to a guitar neck. It was the first solid body guitar. He got so much grief over the way it looked that he put a traditional guitar body around it purely for cosmetic reasons. Oh, and by the way, he also played a key role in inventing multi track recording. (No multi track recording, no Sgt. Pepper.)

You can see the results of Les Paul's vision and passion in this short clip from a TV show that featured him and his wife Mary Ford. (Without multi track recording is there any way she could sound like this just singing in her garden?)  In addition to showing off his technically wizardry, this clip also shows that Les Paul was one heck of a guitarist. Take a look.

Why do I think Les Paul is such an inspiration for leaders?  It can pretty much be summed up in this quote from the man himself that ran in the Washington Post obituary:

"I wanted people to hear me," he told the publication Guitar Player in 2002. "That's where the whole idea of a solid-body guitar came from. In the '30s, the archtop electric was such an apologetic instrument. On the bandstand, it was so difficult battling with a drummer, the horns, and all the instruments that had so much power.
"With a solid-body, guitarists could get louder and express themselves," he said. "Instead of being wimps, we'd become one of the most powerful people in the band. We could turn that mother up and do what we couldn't do before."

Embedded in that quote are some pretty important characteristics of great leaders such as vision,  the passion to connect with others, shared power and innovation.  With last month's death of Walter Cronkite, the first TV anchorman, the recent emphasis on Julia Child, the first TV chef, and now with the passing of Les Paul, a true musical innovator, we've been reminded lately of the power of passion and persistence.  Find what you love to do and stick with it. I know I made that same point earlier this week, but I just appreciate what Les Paul gave us so much that I needed to say it again.

Now, go find your favorite song with a solo played on a Les Paul, crank up the volume and rock on.

You've no doubt seen the videos of members of Congress such as Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill conducting (or, more accurately, trying to conduct) town hall meetings on health care reform. This seems to be rapidly turning into the summer of the shouters. My friend and blogging colleague John Baldoni picked up on this trend and posted a solid piece this week on how speakers should deal with an unruly crowd. My concern is that with all of the cable TV coverage of the health care shouters, leaders in other domains may soon face more of this behavior in town hall meeting type settings. The health care town halls feel like the latest example of how the bar for what passes as civil discourse in our country keeps getting lowered.  

So, with the goal of prepping you for leading and communicating effectively the next time you face a contentious group, I want to recap John's good advice, see what we can learn about what not to do from Senator Specter and share with you a lesson I learned when I had to defend a tax increase to a bunch of beer fueled construction contractors twenty years ago.

John Baldoni offers three tips for leaders who think they might be walking into a verbal shoot out (or should that be shout out?).  The short, bold faced tips that follow are John's with my own commentary inserted.  Be sure to read John's post to get his take. It's good stuff.

1. Be Prepared: John makes the great point that you need to really know your content backwards and forwards before a tough meeting. I would add that an equally important part of the preparation process is to visualize how you want to come across to the group. If you can get a handle on the sort of energy you want to project before you walk into the room, you're much more likely to actually project it.
2. Be Flexible: I probably learned the most about this one years ago when I was a regular adult Sunday School teacher. In the group discussions, we would invariably have a few people who would lob verbal hand grenades into the conversation. Over time, I learned that the best way to handle that was to let them say their piece, acknowledge their comment without agreeing and then bring the conversation back to the main theme. Most people in the room appreciated that and would help bring the conversation back to the point with their own comments. Town halls are a different setting for sure (especially when they're filled with people who are coming with the express intent of being disruptive), but I think the principle of flexing by acknowledging without agreeing applies.
3. Be Resolute: As much as anything, I think this piece of advice from John is about setting some ground rules up front about how the meeting is going to work (e.g. take turns, questions come from the floor mics and not shouted from the audience, we're going to listen to each other, etc.) and then enlisting the audience's help in enforcing the ground rules. The key is to establish them up front. It's too late to set ground rules once the meeting has gotten out of hand.

If you want to see an example of how not to follow this good advice, take a look at this clip of Senator Arlen Specter getting in the grill of a constituent at a town hall earlier this week. No thought about how a leader should show up, no acknowledgment of the other person and no apparent ground rules.  (Ground rule numbers 1 and 2:  the speaker should never approach the audience member as if they're looking for a physical confrontation and the speaker should avoid getting into a shouting match with the audience member.)

And, finally, one more piece of advice based on my experience with that beer fueled audience 20 years ago. Keep your sense of humor.

Here's the story. Back in my young adulthood, I was the Deputy Director for the Governor's Office of Community and Industrial Development in West Virginia. Like a lot of political jobs, it was one where I had way more responsibility than I was actually ready for. Early in the administration, the Governor pushed a tax increase through the legislature.  A few weeks later, the Putnam County Home Builders Association asked the Governor to speak to their regular meeting.  He passed on that opportunity and so did his chief of staff.  I was the third string choice to give a speech.

The speech was scheduled for 6:30 pm in a private room at the local Ponderosa Steak House.  I showed up about 6:15 pm for what I thought were the closing moments of the social hour before the speech.  The refreshments were a couple of laundry tubs of iced-down Coors Lights. Everyone was having a good time.  So good, in fact, that they decided to extend the social hour to 7:30 or so.  There were plenty of Silver Bullets for everyone.  Even in my inexperienced stage of development, I began to figure out that this might be a tough crowd.

When I finally got up to speak at 7:45, the fun really started. It turned out that all that a room full of construction contractors really wanted to talk about was how that tax increase was going to kill their businesses.  They made that known loudly and immediately. They could not have cared less about all the wonderful things I had prepared to say about the Governor's plans for economic development.

I'm not exactly sure how or why, but after 10 minutes or so of getting pummeled, I just laughed and said let's acknowledge the obvious that you don't care what I have to say and you tell me what you want me to take back to the Governor and his staff.   I think the fact that I was able to keep a bit of a sense of humor was the only thing that saved me that night.  It helped get at least a few of the guys slightly on my side. 

Showing a little non sarcastic humor in a tense situation can help remind everyone that we're all human beings just trying to do the best we can.  It reestablishes connection when it's most needed.  I guess what it comes down to is not taking yourself so seriously that you set up an us against them dynamic.

I've rambled on more than usual here, but would love to get your thoughts and experiences on how to handle a tough crowd or meeting.

 My wife, the healthy food blogger (www.thewholegang.org), and I played hooky from work last Friday afternoon and went to the 1:10 pm showing of the new movie, Julie and Julia. (We were there with all of the retired folks and I concluded that that looks like a pretty sweet gig.)  Anyway, it's a great movie - two thumbs way up from both of us. Anytime you have Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Stanley Tucci (as her husband Paul Child) acting together you're well on your way to a great movie.

In case you're not familiar with it, Julie and Julia tells the story of two women, Julia Child, who revolutionized cooking in the United States with the publication in 1961 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Julie Powell, who in 2002, made a name for herself by cooking and blogging her way through the more than 500 recipes in Child's cookbook in one year.

A lot of the reviews I've read of the movie (like this one from Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post) love the Julia Child parts and hate the Julie Powell parts. The basic argument of the critics is that it is so much fun to watch the passionate, talented and humorous Child create herself that the segments that focus on the self absorbed and whiny Powell aren't as entertaining or compelling by comparison.

Looking through my leadership lens (as is my wont), I think those criticisms miss one of the more subtle points of the movie.  That point is that world changing success takes time and a motivation that goes beyond the desire to be famous. In his New York Times review, A.O. Scott notes that with Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child changed 20th century culture in her domain in the way that Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care and Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat changed theirs. Julie and Julia does a wonderful job of showing the joy, resilience and sense of mission that Julia Child took first in learning the craft of French cuisine and then in the eight years that she and her partners put into creating a book to share what they had learned with an American audience. As the movie shows, Julie Powell's motivation in blogging her way through the cookbook was to stand out in some way and make herself feel better in comparison to her seemingly successful friends. In terms of motivation and life purpose, the two just don't stack up against each other and neither does the impact of the two women's work.

For my wife Diane and me, a critical moment in the movie was when, during his State Department assignment in post-World War II France, Paul asks Julia, "What is it that you really like to do?" She laughingly replied, "I like to eat!"  From that realization sprung her passion and ambition to immerse herself in French cooking.  And from that passion and ambition sprung the greatness of her life's work. 

Do you want to be happy? Do you want to make a difference with your life and your leadership? Get someone you trust to ask you that question, "What is it that you really like to do?" Pay attention to and trust your answer and then look for ways to act on it. You may not come up with Mastering the Art of French Cooking but I'll bet what you do come up with will be great in its own right.

One of the questions that I get asked all the time in coaching sessions and speaking engagements is, "How do I work with or influence my new boss?"  That's a great question because it outlines a situation that most executives are going to face multiple times throughout their careers.  I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a riff on how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rather seamlessly transitioned from working for George W. Bush to Barack Obama.  (You can see that post here.)

A  couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who was working on a story about how to influence your boss and found the Gates post online. He was pitching the story to a web site that's focused on Gen X and Gen Y guys in the workforce.  When he told me the intended audience, my first thought about how to influence your boss was, "Ask for directions." Of course, as any wife or girlfriend who has been lost with her guy in the car knows, asking for directions is one of the hardest things for guys to do. Getting into why that's the case would provide enough material for a whole separate blog. So, let me focus in on why asking for direction is my first piece of advice for anyone (not just guys) who wants to influence their new boss.

Here are three quick tips:

Ask for Directions:  What I'm not talking about here is asking for step by step directions on how to accomplish an assignment.  That's probably one of the worst things you can do actually. What I am talking about is asking up front for the boss's direction or picture of what success looks like. (i.e. "If we were completely successful on this project what would you expect to see six months or a year from now?")  One of the biggest causes of executive level failure is to not get up front clarification of the expectations for success. Take the time to ask for directions.

Ask How Your Boss Wants to be Kept in the Loop:  When you were in college you probably learned that different professors had different expectations on how to write a term paper or respond to an essay question. It's the same thing with bosses. They all have their own preferences about how they want to be kept in the loop. When you get a new boss, ask her how she wants to be kept informed and how often.  The good ones will be able to tell you. If they can't, ask around among your peers about what's worked for them.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes:  Regularly take time to step out of your own shoes and get into your boss's.  A great way to do that is to do what top leadership coach Tim Gallwey calls transposing. Transposing consists of asking three questions as if you are the person you're trying to work with or influence. The questions are:  What am I thinking? How am I feeling?  What do I want? Coming up with some thoughtful responses to those questions should give you a broader perspective. Once you've got a perspective that goes beyond your own, it becomes easier to understand how to influence your boss (or anyone else for that matter).

What quick tips do you have on how to work with or influence a new boss?

Been to a Starbucks lately?  If so, what do you think?  If you're a long time Starbucker, how does the experience in the stores lately compare with the way things were four or five years ago?

What do any of these questions have to do with leadership, you ask?  (After all, that's what this blog is supposed to be about.)  Here's where I'm coming from.

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how Starbucks is starting a company-wide program to implement the concepts of lean manufacturing to raise the efficiency and productivity of its stores. In a tight economy, it's understandable why Starbucks or any organization would focus on controlling its costs.

I'm reminded, however, of a point Stephen Covey made years ago in the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His point was the you can be efficient with things (e.g. the design of the workspace or where to place ingredients in the production line) but you have to be effective with people (e.g. customers and baristas). As someone quoted in the WSJ article pointed out, efficiency strategies only yield profitability if you're getting customers in the door in the first place.

That brings us to the effectiveness part of the equation. One of the original goals of Starbucks founding (and current) CEO Howard Schultz was to create a "third place" between work and home that people could use to meet, work and hang out.  For me personally, this concept worked so well that when I wrote my book, The Next Level, in 2005, I spent the better part of 12 weekends in a row at a local Starbucks writing the manuscript. For me, it was the right mix of being in a different place, being around people and still being able to work, and the endless supply of drinks, sandwiches and oatmeal raisin cookies that I needed to power through the writing process. The place was packed with customers all weekend long.

What I've noticed lately is that people don't seem to be using Starbucks as that third place location as much anymore. (You'd actually thing that in a recessionary economy they might be using Starbucks more as a meeting place for networking and such but it doesn't seem that way.)  Have you noticed the same thing?  Maybe the leadership emphasis on efficiency is out of balance with an emphasis on effectiveness.

Let's say that you were appointed as the new "guru of effectiveness with people" for Starbucks, where would you start in returning the company's stores to that magnetic status of being the "third place"?

From a broader leadership perceptive, what do you notice in your own organization about striking the right balance between efficiency and effectiveness? Especially in a tough economy, what are your best ideas for keeping your customers and employees engaged with your organization? Let's get a conversation going on this and see what good ideas we have to share with each other. Who knows, we may even come up with some that our friends at Starbucks want to pick up and run with.

Last week was a vacation week for me and this week sort of, kind of is. What's the difference?  Well, one big difference is location - Laguna Beach, CA vs. Northern Virginia.  I learned last week that when the Pacific Ocean is a three block walk down the street from where you're staying that it's pretty easy to lose track of time. And then there's the three hour time difference between the West Coast and the East Coast.  That always throws off my rhythm a bit.

So, still being in vacation mode, I was really interested to see a graph in the Sunday New York Times  that draws on an annual survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that asks Americans to track how they use their time over every minute of the day. The printed version compared the differences in time usage between employed and unemployed people. No big surprise that people with jobs are more likely to be up by 6:00 am than people who aren't working. Likewise, it may not be that big a surprise that people without jobs tend to socialize more and later into the evening than people with jobs. Wonder if there's any correlation between the longer evenings and the later wake-up call? Nah, probably not.

If you share my tendency to be a data geek, you'll love the online version of the graphs prepared by the Times. I just spent 20 or 30 minutes (Hmmm, how do I account for that?  Working, leisure, computer use?), toggling back and forth on the differences in time usage between age groups, education level, ethnicity, employment status and kids or no kids at home. It's pretty fascinating and raises some questions as well as provides some answers about where we are as a society.

For instance, it looks like the third most common activity at any given point in the day after sleeping and working is watching TV and movies. Playing sports is way down on the list as is relaxing and thinking. As a matter of fact, it looks like no more than 2% of Americans are relaxing and thinking at any given point in the day. (The implication being, I guess, that relaxing and thinking and watching TV or movies are mutually exclusive.) It really makes me wonder what the impact on the quality of our work is when we spend so little time relaxing or thinking.  

As I've written here before, the lowest ranking item in our Next Level Leadership™  360 degree survey of high potential managers and executives is consistently "Paces himself/herself by building in regular breaks from work."  Here's something to consider. How long can you stay with the same task (e.g. answering e-mails, staying engaged in a conversation, writing a report, prepping a presentation) before your performance degrades?  (It's what economists call diminishing returns.)  Most people I ask that question of tell me it's somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes. What would it do, then, for your productivity to be intentional about inserting some reenergizing relaxation or think breaks into your day?  They don't have to be long.  Five or ten minutes of breathing, stretching or walking around the block could do the trick. Give it a try this week and see what happens.

And , for my fellow data geeks out there, take a look at the interactive graphs from the Times and let me know what's in the "how we spend our time" data that makes you go hmmm.