One of my coaching clients is taking his leadership team to Phoenix next week for an offsite planning meeting.  (He invited me to come and help out, but my schedule wouldn't allow it. Too bad, Phoenix is nice this time of year!)  If you've been around as an organizational leader for awhile, you've no doubt participated in leadership team offsites. Whether they gather at a nice hotel in a warm place or someplace less exotic, it's a good idea for an organization's leaders to periodically change the scenery and step back to reflect on what's happened and look ahead to future goals.

Here's my question for you. When was the last time you took a personal leadership offsite?  I ask that question regularly of my clients and groups that I'm speaking to. Occasionally, someone will say that they've had one recently, but most people have not. This trend reminds me of the old line about the shoemaker's children having no shoes. Leaders tend to give so much time and attention to the development of their organizations that they often leave little space for their own development.

I'm not exactly sure how we decided to start, but my wife, Diane, and I have taken an annual Fall/Winter retreat for the past 15 years. The first couple of years were at a $25 a night one room cabin on a farm in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Since then, we've held it at some places that are a little less rustic.  Whether it's a rural or an urban setting, we've come up with a routine that works for us. Since this is the time of year when people are beginning to look back on the past 12 months and look ahead to the next 12, I thought I'd share some of our lessons learned about how to take a personal leadership offsite.

Schedule the time:  We've found that a three day weekend - two nights and the better part of three days -  works best for us. It's proven to be the right amount of time to wind down, have some fun and get in the frame of mind to reflect and look ahead.

Find a place:  It's important to get out of your regular environment and away from the visual cues that remind you of the day to day routine. If your budget allows an overnight stay, pick a place that you can get to relatively quickly and that has some diversions that you'll enjoy as a break from the regular routine.   You want to build in some breaks that will help you relax and get your creative juices flowing. If you're staying in town, look for some publicly available spaces that will do the above for you.

Do some prep: Before you leave for the offsite, do a little prep work that will help jump start your thinking when you get there. It could be some reading, a calendar review or some high level goal setting. As an example of the latter, Diane and I have both spent some time lately thinking through the big picture of what we want to accomplish in 2010. She's a visual thinker and came up with a poster she calls a Treasure Map. I'm more of a verbal thinker and have recently done a simple mind map by clustering ideas on Post-It notes on a piece of poster board.

Frame some simple questions: Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself to boil the ocean and figure absolutely everything out on your offsite. We've found that having a few simple questions to consider over the weekend can provide the structure needed to develop some insights with a minimum of stress. In our case, we use the Life GPS® model that we developed years ago and is outlined in chapter 3 of The Next Level. The Life GPS® is centered on these three questions:/p>

1. What are the characteristics that describe how you are at your best?


2. What are the routines that, if you were to practice them regularly, would reinforce how you are at your best?


3. What outcomes would you expect to see in the arenas of home, work and community if you were to consistently perform at your best?

Take some notes and keep them:  One of the things we've consistently done in our offsites is take some notes which we clean up and summarize within a few weeks of going away. As most people know, if you write your goals down, you're more likely to achieve them. When you have your notes written up, keep them in a place like your planner so you can review them on a regular basis. That will help keep you on track. We've kept our notes from years past and have found them to be a nice record of our goals and priorities and how they've changed over the years.

That's what's worked for us. If you've been in the habit of taking personal leadership offsites, what's worked for you?  What questions or comments do you have about the idea?

Have you seen the new smart phone commercial where the guy is standing in the middle of the desert and all of the thousands of people in his information stream are rushing at him? It's from Motorola. It's 30 seconds long and worth a quick look.

It's funny because it's true. We recognize ourselves as that guy. The information is washing over us like a flood and we just want to strain out the things that matter most. It's a challenge for everyone, but I think it's a particular challenge for leaders. 

There may have been a time long ago when leadership looked like a monologue.  Think of the great orator in the town square delivering a long speech to people who were actually listening.  Over time, leadership evolved to include dialogues.  Effective leaders learned how to have conversations with individuals or groups to identify and work on the most important issues.   In 2009, I think we've seen the emergence of the multi-logue.  The rapid adoption of social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter has created an environment in which a countless number of conversations are going on at anytime.  (See this post on the social media explosion for a quick primer.)

How does one lead in a mutli-logue age?

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been considering that question.  In a recent article for The Economist called "Leadership in the Information Age," she succinctly describes the situation for leaders today:

"The online world has guaranteed that every remark about your business and every change you implement will trigger a viral frenzy of second-guessing. Borrowing from the black bag of politics, your competitors will also be spreading their own version of "opposition research", feeding the blogosphere with critiques of your leadership."

In my book, The Next Level, I argue that leaders need to pick up a big footprint view of their role and understand that, as a leader, you are always on stage. In the past year, the internet has put the big footprint aspect of leadership on steroids.  What can you do in the midst of the multi-logue to ensure that your leadership footprint is making the desired impact? Here are seven steps to consider:

Get clear on your purpose  - To break through the clutter of the multi-logue, you have to be consistent with a message that is relevant to the people you're trying to influence.  Harvard's Michael Porter once said that strategy is as much about what you're not going to do as what you're going to do.  That idea applies here.  Be very clear about what you're trying to do and what you're not trying to do.

Be consistent in your presence - There are no time outs for leaders these days.  A camera phone makes it possible for that picture of you dancing on the table to be online about a minute after you finished the samba.  Be intentional about the presence you're trying to project and present it consistently.

Get in the game - Figure out where the conversation is happening and participate in it. It could be live or it could be virtual.  Actually it will be live and virtual.  You can't win, if you don't play. If the conversation is on the blogs and Twitter, you need to be on the blogs and Twitter.

Pay more attention to the forest than the trees - Accept the fact that you're not going to agree with, like or even see everything that is written or said about you and your organization.  Look at the individual threads and comments as data points. Look for and respond to the trends in the data.  Don't stress out on every data point.

Contextualize - Because the multi-logue is a stream of data points, it can be challenging to put it all into an actionable context. One of your jobs as a leader in the multi-logue is to see the patterns and put everything into a context that enables you and your organization to act on its purpose.

Review and plan the message - One of the consistently low rated items in my company's 360 degree review of high potential leaders is "Regularly takes time to step back and define or redefine what needs to be done."  An important leadership skill in the multi-logue will be to keep your head about you when everyone else is losing theirs.  Being intentional about reviewing and planning your leadership message can help give you the perspective to keep your head on straight.

Unplug regularly - The lowest rated item among high potential leaders in our survey is "Paces oneself by building in regular breaks from work."  Every so often, you need to create some space to renew your mind, body and spirit by literally and figuratively unplugging from the conversation.  When you plug back in, you'll a lot more clear and effective.

So, that's my take on this year of the multi-logue. What's yours? What are you noticing about the challenges of leadership in the internet age? What's working for you that you could share with your colleagues?

One of the big responsibilities of an executive coach is to help the client step back to a broader perspective and observe how what he's doing connects or disconnects with the results he's trying to get.  It's helping the client move, as Harvard's Ron Heifetz would say, off the dance floor and onto the balcony. I don't know for sure, but based on recent reporting, I'd have to guess that no one is providing that kind of support to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. As the Financial Times  thoroughly summarized this week, Goldman finds itself the subject of an unexpected shift from headquarters of the masters of the universe to object of universal scorn and anger over the $17 billion bonus pool it has set aside one year after taking billions of dollars in Federal assistance. Not content to fly under the radar screen (which wasn't really possible in the first place), Goldman CEO Blankfein recently gave a long interview to the Sunday Times of London in which he said, among other interesting things, that he's just a simple banker, "doing God's work."

Talk about pouring gasoline on a fire. If I was coaching Lloyd Blankfein, there are three basic questions I'd want to ask him to help him reframe his perspective and better align his actions with the results required in this new situation. Ideally, we would have talked through these questions about a year ago. It may too late for them to do any good now, but here they are:

What's Changed? The point of this question would be to encourage him to pull the lens back and assess what's changed in the past year and a half and how those changes have put Goldman in uncharted terrain.  Clearly, Blankfein and everyone at Goldman are at the high end of the scale in terms of IQ points.  They are smart people and could, at the drop of a hat, give a graduate level seminar about what's changed in the global financial markets. In a coaching conversation on what's changed, I'd want Blankfein to go beyond the IQ points and look at and reflect on what's changed in what the Germans call the zeitgeist (i.e. the spirit of the time). I'd also want him to look at what's changed around the impact of his words and actions. The combination of an unsettled and anxious zeitgeist with the internet's capacity to exponentially magnify the impact of one's comments can lead to explosive situations for leaders as visible as Blankfein.

What's Important in the Long Run? The FT and Sunday Times articles both make it clear that the driving principle at Goldman over the years has been to maximize the capacity to make money in the most productive way possible. The company has done that successfully over a long time by managing their risk better than any other firm. What seems to have been overlooked in the risk management process at Goldman is reputational risk. The principle of maximizing the money appears to have caused Blankfein and the leadership at Goldman to overlook the long term risk to the firm's reputation and its capacity to be profitable and productive over the long run. Going for the short term payouts may well lead to a killing the goose that lays the golden eggs situation.

You may have noticed that both of these questions are open ended questions that start with the word what.  That's a pretty standard technique of coaches. We like to use "what questions" because they open up thinking and help our clients think outside the box. Sometimes I joke that the only bad "what question" is...

What in the Hell Were You Thinking? Sure, it's a little rude, but it seems appropriate in this case. My guess is that if he thought about it, Blankfein would realize that he's been thinking within the terms of the old environment rather than the new world that he and his firm are in. As I said earlier, it may be too late for any of these three questions to do much good. Still, there may be a chance. Sooner or later, leaders screw something up. Some of those screw ups are more public than others and Blankfein has had more than his share of public ones lately. After making a big mistake, it actually can be productive to step back and ask,"What in the hell was I thinking?"  If you can identify the thought process that led to the mistake(s), you have a reasonable chance of making adjustments in your thinking that will serve you and your organization better in the future. In spite of all the bad press they've received and bad decisions they've made lately, Goldman Sachs plays an important role in the global economy. For their sake and ours, I hope Lloyd Blankfein and his leadership team take some time soon to step back and sort through some perspective checking questions.

If you happen to have 100 million Euros (about $150 million) to spare, you might be in the market for the yacht, The Why, pictured to the left. Yes, that's the stern of a boat that was featured in the House & Home section of a recent edition of the Financial Times Weekend. 

As described in the FT, The Why is a one of a kind yacht with 3,400 meters of guest space and an optimal cruising speed of only 12 knots. (You can see more pictures of The Why at http://www.why-yachts.com .)

I'm taking a wild guess here, but I'm doubting that very many of my readers are in the market for a $150 million boat. (I know I'm not!  Not in this lifetime, anyway.)

So what's the point of all this in a leadership blog?  It's this excerpt from the FT quoting Pierre-Alexis Dumas, one of the designers of the 12 knot yacht:

Dumas believes that, except in the case of aircraft, "speed as an aesthetic is passé". He questions when we now have time to think. "Time like this is not a luxury, it's a necessity. If we don't think, we alienate ourselves in a dangerous way. Going slow is a natural reaction to the artificial speed of light we created."

Think for just a moment about what Dumas is saying.  "If we don't think, we alienate ourselves in a dangerous way."  Even if (especially if) you don't have the opportunity to spend your thinking time on a luxury yacht, you still need to slow down a bit and take it.

I've been doing a lot of speaking to audiences of leaders this Fall and one of the things I've been talking a lot about is how, in this world where it seems like everyone is running flat out until they crash, we can find time to slow down and think about what we're really trying to accomplish and how we need to show up to accomplish it.  I'm sharing a framework developed by David Kundtz, the author of Stopping: How to Be Still When You Have to Keep Going, that goes like this.

Kundtz says that in our lives, we will have the opportunity to take three different kinds of breaks.  They are:

Grinding Halts: which are rare periods of extended down time of several months or more. Examples would include a scheduled sabbatical, time between jobs or retirement.

Stopovers: which are extended breaks and "unplugged from the grid" times of a few days or more.

Still Points: which are those cues that come up throughout the day that signal us to take a short break to pause, think, reflect, relax or rest.

I've been asking people lately to identify the still points that come up throughout their day. I've heard some good examples like lunch, commuting time and the little cushion that comes from starting or stopping meetings on the quarter hour rather than the half hour. My favorite example was a fellow at a speech in London who said his still point comes when he makes his afternoon tea and considers whether or not he'd like some cucumber sandwiches with his drink.

So, my question for you today is what are your still points and how are you using them to give yourself a break to just stop and think? My observation lately is that most leaders believe they don't have any margin in their day to stop and that taking a break to pace themselves is pretty much an impossibility. When I ask them to identify their still points and then ask them in the middle of my presentation to stand up, take a few deep breaths and stretch a little bit, they realize they have more control over their think time and stress level than they thought they had.

Give your still points a try. It may not be quite the same as lounging on the sun deck of a $150 million yacht, but I'll bet it will be an improvement over your current routine nonetheless.

For the past four years, the Harvard Kennedy School's Center for Public Leadership has conducted an annual public opinion poll to determine the sector leaders in which Americans have the most and least confidence and the factors behind those confidence levels. The 2009 results have just been released and there are some pretty interesting conclusions.

First, the sectors where the confidence level in leaders are up in a statistically significant way over last year are the military, the executive branch and business. Those that showed a significant decline are medical, nonprofits and charity, state government, the news media and Wall Street. Based on an index where 100 indicates a moderate amount of confidence the only three sectors that scored higher than that level were the military, medical and nonprofits and charity. Of those three, the military is the only sector to score well above 100 on the confidence index with a score of almost 120.

According to the study, there are six key factors that have the greatest impact on Americans' confidence in their leaders. These factors are:

• Trust in what the leaders say
• Competence to do the job
• Working for the greater good of society
• Share my values
• Get good results
• In touch with people's needs and concerns

Given what's happened over the past year, it's not surprising that the military and the nonprofit sector leaders were in the top three.  Likewise, when you consider the past year and look at the six most important factors, it's easy to understand why the two lowest ranked sectors were the news media (balloon boy, anyone?) and Wall Street (how about those bonuses?)

Reading between the lines of the study, I see one other factor that's not explicitly mentioned but I think comes into play. That factor is the perceived clarity and importance of the sector's purpose and mission. If you download and read the study, it's striking how much higher the leadership of the military and the nonprofit sectors are rated in all six key factors than are the leadership of other highlighted sectors. I asked myself "What do these two sectors have in common?" and clarity and importance of purpose was the answer.

To stand a chance of being effective, leaders must generate confidence in the people that depend on them.  How do you think you stack up on each of the six key factors? How are you doing on clearly defining and communicating why what your organization does matters? If you were going to pick one factor in which you could improve, what would it be? What are three things you could do in the next year to move the needle in a positive direction?

Something appeared in my inbox this week that sparked an opportunity to follow up on a post from last week - Feedback:  Why You Need It and What To Do With It. As an alumnus and faculty member of the Georgetown University Leadership Coaching Certificate Program, I'm a member of a Yahoo list serve in which all of us in the community share resources and get advice from each other. It's a wonderful ongoing conversation from which I learn a lot.

Yesterday, one of our members put out a question about how to deal with an executive coaching client who has received some clear developmental feedback from colleagues that doesn't square with his self-image. As my colleague described it, his client spent his energy in the feedback session comparing all of the constructive comments to his own standards and arguing that everyone offering the feedback should be more like him.

By definition, executive coaches coach executives. Most executives have become executives because they're smart and focused and driven to succeed. Sometimes, their track record of success reinforces a self-perception that they're right all or most of the time and that everyone else should get with their approach and program.

Needless to say, it can be really difficult for executives who fit this profile to accept feedback that suggests they're less than perfect. Here is what I think I've learned over the past 10 years about coaching an executive who argues with the clear consensus point of view in their feedback and spends all of their energy arguing about how people should be acting or thinking: It's important to understand the difference between what "should" be and what is. The fact of the matter is that if, when given the chance to provide anonymous feedback, 10 to 20 people have a consensus point of view on what you need to change to be a better leader, that's what is. Their perception is your reality. If you get tough feedback and you want to keep your team engaged and on board, you're going to have to change your behaviors to change their perception.

So what do you do if you're in that situation?  Here are four simple steps that, if you're serious about dealing with what is, almost always work:

1. Acknowledge and thank people for the feedback.  Give them a couple of headlines on what you heard that you appreciated and a couple of headlines on things you want to change.
2. Ask colleagues for their best ideas for anyone who is trying to change whatever it is you're trying to change.  Write down their ideas in a list.
3. Pick one or two action steps from the list that you want to incorporate into your regular routine.   The simpler, the better.  Tell people what you're trying to do. (e.g. "I'm trying to not interrupt people so much.") 
4. On an ongoing basis, ask them how you're doing.  If you keep it on your radar screen, you'll change for the better.  By following up with them, they'll recognize that you're actually changing.

There are a lot of leaders and coaches who read this blog.  What's your best advice for leaders who need to get past what should be and start dealing with what is? 

President Obama appointed Rajiv Shah to head the US Agency for International Development. The appointment comes after a 10 month vacancy at the top of the Agency and a 40 percent reduction in its full time staff over the past 20 years. Since the effective deployment of foreign aid is a critical component of the United States' diplomatic and security strategies, it's important that Shah get off to a fast and successful start in his job.

In spite of his relatively young age of 36, Shah has a background that seems perfectly suited to the role.  He'll be moving to USAID from the US Department of Agriculture where he has played a number of roles including overseeing USDA's participation in the global food security initiative. Prior to USDA, Shah worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the director of agricultural development and manager of the Foundation's $1.5 billion vaccine fund. Shah has an MD from Penn, a masters in health economics from Wharton, an undergraduate degree from Michigan and spent time at the London School of Economics.   It's pretty hard to argue with those credentials.

Still, Shah is stepping into one of the tougher challenges a leader can face which is leading the turnaround of a highly visible and critical organization. Especially in a political environment, it's important to get off to a fast and successful start in this situation. What you do in the first weeks and months on the job largely determines the path for success or failure over the longer run. With that in mind, here a are a few tips for Dr. Shah or any leader getting started on a turnaround:

Identify the key players:  Use the access that comes with your new role to sound out experts inside and outside the organization on who the key players are in areas like internal leadership, funding, boundary setting, partnering and priority setting.  Get on the calendars of those key players quickly to set up a...

Listening tour:  Meet with the key players to get their points of view on some common questions.  By asking a set of common questions of the key players you can sift through their responses more easily to determine where the opportunities and pressure points are. Some good questions to ask would include:

• What are the top three most critical priorities right now?
• What would success look like in 180 days, 1 year, 3 years?
• What does this organization do right that we should keep doing?
• What's the most important thing we should start doing?
• What is it critical that we stop doing?

Introduce yourself quickly and widely: Use all the communications channels available - retail and wholesale - to introduce yourself quickly to the organization and its stakeholders.  Use those early introductions to talk about what your early impressions are of what the organization needs to do and to set the tone of how you want to work within the organization.

Set some early goals that lead to quick wins:  While you probably won't have the three year picture fully formed in your first days on the job, you should have a general sense of the direction you're trying to set.  Communicate that general direction broadly and repeatedly so people understand the priorities.  Find some opportunities for quick win demonstration projects that can be celebrated and highlighted as examples of the new way of doing business.

Recruit a strong core team: The demands on your time as a leader in this situation will be overwhelming.  You can't do everything on your own. You'll need a strong team of talented people who get the vision and have the experience to act on it.  In the early days, your core team will likely be a mix of people you bring with you who know your style and people you recruit from within who have the talent but have just been waiting for a leader who can leverage their talent. You may not be able to find everyone you need immediately inside the organization. If you've identified a critical need that you can't fill quickly, consider hiring a contractor or consultant who do the job over the short term.

So, that's a starting point list for Dr. Shah or any other leader charged with leading a turnaround. It's certainly not comprehensive. Based on your experience or observation what would you add to the list?

First, let me apologize for implanting Subway's Five (five dollar), Five Dollar Foot Long ear worm in your head for the rest of the day. I hope that you'll agree with me that it was worth it to learn five lessons about winning support for change from the top leaders in your organization.

The lessons were inspired by a story in the current issue of Business Week on Miami Subway franchise owner Stuart Frankel. He owns a couple of Subways close to Jackson Memorial Hospital and five years ago was tinkering with ways to boost his sales on Saturdays and Sundays. From that, the original five dollar foot long was born. Since then, the sandwich has generated $3.8 billion in sales for Subway and put the company on pace to surpass McDonald's in worldwide store locations.

So, you'd think it would have been easy for Frankel to win everyone over to such a great idea, right?  Not so fast, my friends. Even though he was raking in the dough (bad pun intended), Frankel had to work hard to convince the top brass at Subway that the five dollar foot long was the way to go. In reading between the lines of the Business Week article, I've come up with five (what else?) lessons for anyone who is trying to convince senior leadership to take a good idea and run with it. 

Here they are:

1. Run some small experiments off the radar screen: Remember, the five dollar foot long idea started in two little stores as a way to boost sales on the weekend. Frankel, the store owner, was trying things out with no particular intention of going huge. What problem are you trying to solve that could use a fresh approach?  What small experiments could you try to see what else might work?
2. Collect compelling data:  As the Business Week story reports, Frankel was surprised that the five dollar promotion turned out to be more than a simple loss leader to get customers in the stores.  Even though his food costs rose as a percentage of sales, his overall volume increased and employee productivity rose because the stores were busier.  He made money on every five dollar sandwich.  Those numbers were the beginning of a story that he started sharing with others in the company.  What data could you gather to begin to prove your case for change?
3. Recruit some early champions:  When you've got a good idea, it's important to share it with some well placed allies who can champion the idea and spread it.  In Frankel's case, he brought in a development agent who oversees 225 stores in South Florida and another franchisee who owns 50 stores in the area to take a look at what he was doing.  Both of those guys ran their own small experiments.  When they almost ran out of bread in their stores, they knew they were on to something.  Who are the champions that you need to recruit to try their own experiments with your big idea?
4. Show them, don't just tell them:  In spite of the big success Frankel and others were having, the top brass at Subway just couldn't get their minds around the five dollar foot long idea when they heard about it.  The Subway franchise marketing board initially rejected the idea of investing in a five dollar marketing campaign.  So Frankel and his allies kept bringing store owners and marketing officers to Florida to see the lines of customers stretching out the door and down the sidewalk.  Word spread among other store owners and the five dollar foot long promotion started showing up in markets around the country.  When it comes to your own idea, what can you do to visually demonstrate its effectiveness to more and more influencers?
5. Stick(y) with it:  Four years after Frankel first ran his five dollar deal, Subway put marketing dollars into the promotion and that jingle that you can't get out of your head. There are two lessons about stickiness here.  The first is to get an idea across, you have to be committed to it and stick with it.  Not everyone is going to immediately get it and erupt in cheers and huzzahs.  The second is if you can come up with a sticky, memorable way to describe the idea, it's much more likely to go viral. (Type "five dollar foot long" into the search box on You Tube to see what I mean.)

So, two questions for you in conclusion.  Question #1:  What else has worked for you in convincing senior leadership to pick up on a good idea?  Question #2:  What are you having for lunch today? (You're singing that song in your head right now aren't you?)

One of the things that I've come to count on over the past couple of years is that my blogging friend, Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership blog will write consistently grounded and practical posts on how to be a better leader. His latest post, 10 Ways to Get the Most from a 360 Degree Leadership Assessment,  is the most recent example of the contributions he consistently makes. If you care about leadership, you need to subscribe to his blog.

As an executive coach, I read through a few hundred 360 degree assessments a year in my company's Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program. From that experience and the experience of being the subject of six or seven 360's in the 15 years that I was a manager and executive myself, I know that Dan's advice is spot on. I also know from talking with my clients and HR professionals that have been around the block a few times that it's often the case that not much happens when someone gets a 360. From the standpoint of your leadership development and your credibility in the organization, you're almost better off to not get any feedback at all if you're not going to communicate and act on what you learned from the feedback. It can be hard to admit to your colleagues that you're not perfect, but guess what, they already know you're not perfect. All of us have something we can improve on. By asking for feedback, telling people what you learn and then visibly acting on it, you get better and your organization gets better.

 So, with that in mind, I want to pick up on three particular points that Dan made and add a little bit of my own coaching perspective and advice to the mix:

Don't try to figure it out yourself:  Dan makes a great point that most people are way too close to their own experience to be objective about the data they get in a 360. At the risk of sounding self-serving, when you get a 360, make sure you sit down with a coach who has read through a lot of reports over the years.  Much in the same way that a weather forecaster with 30 years of experience can tell you when a front is forming, an experienced coach can tell you what's going on with your 360 data because they've seen so many patterns and connections in the data over the years. You need to walk through the data with someone who is experienced in seeing and pointing out the patterns.

Pay attention to and celebrate your strengths: Another great point, Dan!  Most of us who have been in the coaching business for awhile see the same thing again and again with high achievers. They'll blow through all of the positive stuff in the report and immediately go to what they need to fix. Here's the problem with that. Most of the time what needs to be fixed is related in some way to the strengths. One of the great truths in coaching is that a strength when over or under used can be a weakness. I think of strengths as being like a dial on a guitar amplifier (wanna' be rock star that I am). As an example, if the dial on the strength of confidence is set just right then the leader shows up appropriately poised and ready to make a contribution. If you turn that confidence dial too far to the left, it can look like meekness or disengagement. If you turn it too far to the right, confidence can look like arrogance. Quite often the development opportunity for a leader is to recalibrate a strength in one direction or another with a particular audience or in certain situations. It's a lot easier to make progress in that kind of situation if you take the time to actually process and understand your strengths.

Make a plan and take action:  In my company, we call it an Executive Success Plan™ or ESP. What are the one or two things you want to work on that would make the biggest difference to you and the organization in the next 6 to 12 months? Not 8 or 9 things, but the one or two behaviors that you can focus on day to day in what I call the school of real life. After all, your calendar is full of stuff every week you're going to do anyway. If you're going to do that stuff anyway, why not approach it with the additional intention of using that experience to try out some new tactics and behaviors that will make you a better leader? You'll find that there will be a big ripple effect from working one or two opportunities really well.  As Dan suggests, then tell a manageable number (8 to 10 is good) of people what you're going to work on and ask them for their one or two best ideas on what anyone who is working on that behavior could do to be better. Take notes on what they say and look for the patterns. For instance, if you decide to work on being a better listener and you hear five or six times from your colleagues that they think good listeners don't interrupt people then your real opportunity is probably that you need to stop interrupting people. So, tell them that you're working on not interrupting people and ask for their help in helping you notice when you do. Pretty soon, you'll be a much better listener.

What's been the best or worst experience you've ever had with a round of 360 feedback?  What difference did it make in your life and career? What's your biggest fear around getting and using feedback? If you'll share your thoughts and questions, I'll do my best to address them in the comments over the next few days.

The morning after election day 2009 was probably not a particularly fun one in the White House. As noted in a first rate summary by John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico, the outcomes of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and even the New York City's mayor race didn't really go the President's way. As an historical analysis by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post points out, it's important to not over interpret the results,  but one thing about the 2009 election results does seem clear. Voters who identify themselves as independents are looking for  leaders who seem to address the issues that are most important to them. 

As an example, since I live in Virginia, I had a pretty direct line of sight into the governor's race here.  The winner, Bob McDonnell, ran a very effective straight down the middle campaign centered on jobs, transportation, taxes and government spending. His opponent, Creigh Deeds, seemed to never get any traction on explaining exactly what his priorities would be if he was governor. (See Dan Balz's post election analysis in the Washington Post for more on this.)

In connecting the dots on the different races, I find myself looking for some common denominator lessons we can learn about effective leadership communications.  After all, that's what a campaign is ultimately about.  In reviewing this week's results, I've come up with four questions that I think leaders need to address either implicitly or explicitly if they hope to win over their followers. These strike me as important questions for any leader - not just political candidates - to address when they're attempting to mobilize people in a challenging situation. Here are the questions:

Who are you?   - As I wrote earlier this week, followers make up stories about leaders.  One of the first jobs of a leader is to define the terms of the story by answering the question, "Who is this guy or gal?"  In Virginia, Bob McDonnell put a lot of time and effort into providing his own answer to that question - a moderate, reasonable guy concerned about the economy and transportation. Creigh Deeds on the other hand spent most of his time and attention trying to define Bob McDonnell and very little time defining himself for the voters. The result was a 18% defeat for Deeds. As a leader, you have to have a story about yourself that connects with people.

So what? - Closely related to the "Who is this guy?" question is the "So what?" question. The leaders who are most successful in mobilizing followers are tuned into the "So what?" question and address that in their messaging.  In a low turnout election, the winners did a better job of answering, "So what?"  For McDonnell in Virginia, it was transportation and jobs. For Christie in New Jersey, it was property taxes and a long term culture of corruption. Simple, focused messages that address a real "So what?" usually win the day.

Do you respect me? - One of the biggest surprises of election day was that New York mayor Mike Bloomberg won by a very thin margin after spending $100 million of his own money against a relatively unknown and underfunded candidate. (Politico has the story.) You could argue that his narrow victory was a message that the voters didn't feel respected by Bloomberg after he had term limits overturned and acted as if he was entitled to the office. People don't want to feel taken for granted. They want to feel respected.   Likewise, the reaction to Jon Corzine's television ads implying that Chris Christie was too fat to be governor probably left a lot of people besides Chris Christie feeling disrespected. 

How does the drama help me? - I'm exposing my mega political junkie mode here, but the outcome of the 23rd congressional district election in New York was pretty interesting to me.  As reported in Politico, this is the one where the nominee of the Republican party was deemed by Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and others to not be conservative enough to bear the mantle. She was forced out and threw her support to the Democrat in the race who eventually won over the conservative third party candidate who assumed full GOP support when the original nominee dropped out. Got all that?  Anyway, I can't help but wonder if the voters in the 23rd, were sending a message that they don't have a lot of time for and interest in the drama.  I think the message for leaders generally might be to focus on the things that really matter to people.   When all the drama is stripped away, you still have to have a good answer to "So what?"

In its almost always interesting series, Sunday's New York Times ran a Corner Office interview with the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust. I've often thought that because of the range of different stakeholder groups involved that running an academic institution is one of the toughest leadership jobs there is. It was interesting to read what Faust had to say about what she's learned about leading in this type of environment. Most of the points she made apply to leaders in all arenas  whether it's academia, the private sector or government.

Here are some of the takeaways (in bold face quotes) I had from the Faust interview along with some of my thoughts about how they apply to the world beyond the Charles River.

"...people impute all kinds of things to leaders" - Is that ever true.  As an example, I was with a group of sales leaders in a well known company last week and was trying to help them understand how they're perceived by others.  They were all at the district manager level so I asked them this question, "How many of you have ever been in a conversation that goes like this, 'Man, the general managers and vice presidents  just don't get it.  They are so far removed from what we're dealing with, blah, blah, blah and yadda, yadda, yadda.'"  Most people looked a little sheepish because most of them had been in conversations like that.  My next question was, "Do you think it's at all likely that the people who work at levels below yours are having similar conversations about how much the district managers don't get it?"  Yep, that's not just a possibility, it's almost a certainty.  The point is that followers make up stories about their leaders and those stories are usually not particularly helpful. 

The point that Faust makes about people imputing things to leaders is key. When I coach leaders who are taking on highly visible roles, I encourage them to assume that they're starting out at a reputational deficit.  That almost always has nothing to do with them personally. It has everything to do with the role that they're assuming and the stories that people have made up about that role over the years. A lot of the time when you take on a big leadership role you're guilty until proven innocent.  You can counteract that by being proactive. Fortunately, Faust had some good ideas on how to do that.

"... understand(ing) the context in which you are leading" - In her interview, Faust noted that "universities have enormously distributed authority," and that that operating context means she has to spend a ton of time and energy staying connected with different stakeholder groups.  There are a couple of learning points here.  The first is that she's spending time thinking about what's unique about the context she's working in and is trying to adapt her leadership approach to the context rather than the other way around. The other learning point for me is that in an age of rapidly distributed information and ever decreasing cycle times on decision making Faust's notion of distributed authority is a concept that non-academic leaders are dealing with more and more. That puts a premium on staying connected.

"Leadership by walking around - that's a digital space now, it's virtual space" - The old idea of MBWA - management by walking around - in a literal sense is dead. How can you walk around and connect with people when they're not physically there? Leaders have got to use the tools available to monitor the pulse and communicate their message and brand. I've been talking for awhile now about the difference between retail (one to one) and wholesale (one to many) leadership. If, as a leader, you aren't constantly working on and refining your wholesale communication strategy, you are way behind the curve.  If you want an idea of the stakes involved, go back and look at this post from a couple of weeks ago on the exponential growth of social media.

"As a scholar, you don't want to repeat yourself... As a university president, you have to say the same thing over and over." - The same is true for an executive, a community organizer, a candidate or anyone else trying to mobilize a group around a particular set of objectives. Just about the time you find yourself sick of repeating the message one more time is when you're likely starting to break through.  There are at least two things to keep in mind on this front, however. First, is it's about having a focused dialogue (or maybe a better term these days would be multi-logue) rather than a disconnected monologue.  Second, focus and follow through is key. Today's leaders are in an enormous competition for the time and attention of their followers. The only way you're going to get the engagement is if you have something compelling to talk about and stay committed to a long term conversation.

So, this was a little more "think piecey" than I thought it might be at the start.  What do you agree or disagree with in these points?  If you've had a chance to look at the Faust interview, what other takeaways and applications did you have?