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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.

This is the last of three posts that I'm writing based on some great presentations I heard at the Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC last week. The primary keynoter for the conference was leadership guru Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and the new book, How The Mighty Fall. I had never heard Collins speak before and when I found out he was going to be speaking in my hometown zone, I signed up for the conference.  It was the right decision. Jim Collins is a fantastic speaker. He offers incredibly rich and though provoking content delivered with the passion and energy of a world class evangelist.  If you get a chance to hear him speak, take it. You won't be sorry.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share with you the top 10 to-do's for leaders that he offered at the end of his two hour segment.  (These are paraphrased based on my notes.) It's unlikely that all ten will resonate with you, but my guess is that you (like me) will find at least two or three that hit home.  Here they are:

1. Download the free Good to Great diagnostic tool from JimCollins.com and use it as the basis for assessment, conversation and planning with your team.


2. Answer these questions for your organization:  What are the key seats on our bus and are those seats filled with the right people?


3. Establish a personal board of directors for yourself.  When you create your board, choose the members based on their characters, not their accomplishments.


4. Get young people (i.e. Gen Y's) - the right ones - in your face.


5. Turn off your gadgets and create some regular white space for thinking.


6. Build a leadership council for your organization to engage in dialogue, debate and disagreement.


7. Check in on your questions to statements ratio and set a goal of doubling it in the next year.  An early mentor to Collins observed that he seemed to be more interested in being interesting than being interested.  That's what caused Collins to focus on his own questions to statements ratio.


8. Start working on your stop doing list.  (A good reason not to start trying to do all ten of these tips at once.)


9. Make sure that the core values and purpose of your organization are established early.  It will be too late to do so when the tough times inevitably come.


10. Set your BHAG's (Collins' acronym for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) 10 to 15 years out based on your experience to date.

Some pretty compelling ideas here aren't there? Which ones hit home with you?  What idea could you follow through on in the next week and what difference do you think it would make?

 

One thing I've learned in my years as an executive coach is that you can't convince a leader who is heavily focused on results to work on relationship building skills just because it's the "right thing" or a "nice thing" to do.  To motivate the client to change, you have to make a direct connection as to how stronger relationship skills will support the client in getting the results they're looking for. The results oriented leader usually needs evidence of how relationships can help him achieve what he wants to achieve.

So, it was with great interest that I read David Rock's article, "Managing with the Brain in Mind," in the latest issue of Booz and Company's Strategy + Business magazine.  Rock is an executive coach specializing in the connections between neuroscience and leadership. He is the author of Quiet Leadership and the forthcoming book, Your Brain at Work. In his S+B article, Rock opens with the story of recent MRI based research that demonstrates that people who feel rejected or treated unfairly activate the same regions of their brain as people who are taking a literal blow to the head. The brain's responses to relational and physical attacks are quite similar.

Rock quotes a neuroscientist who says the link between social discomfort and physical pain makes sense  "because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival."  In an economic environment where people are naturally worried about the future, this strikes me as a very important thing for leaders to pay attention to. Rock offers a helpful acronym, SCARF (which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness), which can help leaders better understand and act on the relationship factors that people naturally need to have addressed.  He outlines a number of ideas in his article about how to act on these needs. Building on Rock's model, I'll offer a few of my own here:
Status:  Perceived differences in status can make people feel threatened and, as a result, their performance can drop. Leaders can counteract this natural tendency by setting up systems and processes to encourage internal collaboration rather than competition. An even simpler approach is to offer praise and recognition for good work at all levels of the organization.

Certainty:  Particularly in uncertain times, leaders cannot over communicate. Be clear in your communications about what you do and don't know.  Keep people engaged and informed along the way.  If you're leading a larger organization, make sure your leadership team keeps ongoing communication with the troops at the top of their list of priorities.

Autonomy:  People feel agitated and threatened when they're micromanaged. Once you've set the goals, give people the space to come up with their own solutions. This is in line with my own prescription for next level leaders to pick up defining what to do and let go of telling how to do it. People will be more productive and learn more as a result.

Relatedness:  People need to know and trust each other to work effectively together. As Rock points out, you can't expect people to work well together without devoting some time and effort to helping them form as a team.  Take the time to help them understand how they relate to each other as people and teammates and not just a group of people working on the same task. There's an old saying that you have to go slow to go fast. Invest the time up front in forming the team and you can shorten or skip the storming stage to get to the norming and performing phases.

Fairness: One of the biggest reasons that people feel a situation is unfair is when they are unaware of what criteria were used to make a decision.  (That seems to be equally true for situations where people either gain or lose something.)  Whenever you can, share the criteria that you and the leadership team have used to make major decisions. Of course, to share the criteria, you have to be clear in your own mind first as to what they are.  If you can't figure out a way to explain the criteria to others, that's a pretty good indication that you're not ready to implement the decision.

Thanks to David Rock for his work and an interesting article. What were your takeaways from his SCARF model?  What tips do you have for dealing with the needs of others around Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness?

 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.

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.

One of the many fun things I get to do in my work is serving as a faculty member of the Leadership Coaching Certificate Program at Georgetown University. Last month, I had the pleasure of reading through some great papers by the current group of students offering their best ideas for developing the practice of leadership. I was particularly intrigued by a practice shared by Susan Palmer, an attorney and educator from Vermont who's next act will be centered on leadership coaching. It's what she calls finger painting meditations. With her gracious consent, I want to share with you what that's all about and a couple of her own creations that really grabbed me.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a devotee of the work of Ron Heifetz and his idea that leaders regularly need to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony to observe the bigger picture. This idea is very similar to one that Susan cited in her paper. In their book, Leadership Agility, Bill Joseph and Steve Joiner contend that the essence of being an adaptive leader is reflective action which they describe as "a process of stepping back from your current focus in a way that allows you to make wiser decisions and then fully engage in what needs to be done next."

Sometimes stepping back really does mean stepping back and that's where Susan's finger painting meditations come into the picture. Her suggestion for leaders who want to build their capacity around reflective action is to spend ten dollars on some finger paints and paper and take some time once a week to unplug and create. Specifically, Susan suggests that you set up your materials on a table, stand up, use both hands and start painting. When you're done, give your picture a title and then step back and notice how you feel about it.

So, let me acknowledge here that I haven't tried this yet but I promise I'm going to. In the meantime, here are a couple of my favorite works by Susan that she shared with me as examples of her own finger painting meditations. As I said to her earlier this week, just looking at her work was meditative for me. I found myself getting lost in the colors and the patterns. So, I've already benefitted from the practice without even getting my fingers messy!

Here's a request and a question for you. Request: If you've enjoyed Susan's work, let her know by leaving a comment. Question: What practice or routine do you follow to step back from your current focus?

The latest Leadership Lessons podcast interview is guaranteed to go well with your grande Caramel Macchiato. My guest is Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks Coffee Company. His book, It's Not About the Coffee is out in paperback with a new preface on leading in hard times and is available on Amazon.com.

Howard brings a unique perspective on leadership to our conversation. He joined Starbucks in 1989 as its VP of sales and operations when the company had 28 stores in the Pacific Northwest. When he retired as president in 2003, Starbucks was a ubiquitous global brand. He continued to play a role in the company's strategy as a member of the board of directors until 2008.

In preparing for my conversation with Howard, I thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on what needs to stay the same for senior leaders and what they need to change as their organization moves from the start-up phase to rapid growth and success and now, as is the case for Starbucks and many businesses these days, retrenchment. Howard is both passionate and clear about what leaders need to focus on as well as the mistakes they must avoid as their companies change.

Click here to listen to the podcast

Years ago, when I was a corporate executive myself, I read and re-read Kevin Cashman's Leadership from the Inside Out. (A second edition has recently been released which I encourage you to buy.) With its emphasis on the leader as a whole person, Kevin's book really helped me get up on the balcony and look at the bigger picture of what I was trying to do, what really mattered and how I need to show up to make all of that more likely. The time I spent with Leadership from the Inside Out had a lot to do with why I became an executive coach eight and a half years ago. As Kevin would say, coaching is my "sweet spot."

So, being such a fan of Kevin's work, you can imagine how happy I was to hear him deliver the keynote presentation last week at the annual meeting of the Washington, DC chapter of the International Coach Federation. He did not disappoint. In his talk, Kevin shared 11 things he's learned in 30 years of coaching leaders. It was all good, but here are a few of his points that hit home with me that I want to share with you:

A crisis is seldom what it appears to be. As an immediate example of this principle, we're not in a financial crisis right now. We're in a character crisis. If you really look at how we got here, you almost have to conclude that he's right.

Leaders go beyond what is while managers improve what is. The point here is not that management is bad and leadership is good. They're both needed, often within the same person. Here are a few of Kevin's examples of the difference between the two:

In addition to IQ points, effective leaders need to have four other types of intelligence - emotional, learning, innovation and global. Kevin's belief is that going forward innovation will be as important to the practice of leadership as "green" is becoming to the economy.

If you're interested in stretching your perspective of what it means to be a leader, check out Leadership from the Inside Out. What else has been stretching your perspective lately?

Have you noticed how many books are out there on how to have conversations? There are books on powerful, difficult, crucial and fierce conversations. Who knew there were so many flavors?

Recently, my coaching colleague, Dr. Janice Shack Marquez of the Federal Reserve Board, shared on the Georgetown Leadership Coaching Program listserv a terrific summary that compares three of the well known books on conversations. I liked it so much that I asked Janice if she'd like to run it here. She said yes, so here it is. Thanks Janice!

I work in an organization where it is all about the conversation. As with any organization there are plenty of times when this is a real challenge. We also have our own more specific brand of challenge as well. We have more than 200 Ph.Ds on staff. Individual success as an academic researcher depends, in part, on one's ability to dissect and analyze other's arguments. But we are a policy-making organization and success in developing effective policies relies first on valuing other's opinions and independent professional judgments and then on our ability to work as a team to mold independent viewpoints into coherent, effective policies.

As an executive coach and a leader, I'm always looking for tools to put in my toolkit, so I've been trying to come to an understanding about the distinctions among several excellent books on conversations: Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan and Switzler, Fierce Conversations by Scott, and Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heene and Fisher.

There are strong similarities between Difficult Conversations and Crucial Conversations. Both deal with how to conduct conversations that are high-stakes and emotionally charged. Difficult Conversations comes out of the Harvard Negotiation Project and shares important insights from law, organizational behavior, cognitive, family and social psychology and "dialogue" studies. The interdisciplinary nature of the Harvard Project provides a strong academic foundation for the reader. They break these difficult conversations into their component parts: the conversation about what happened, the conversation about your feelings about what happened, and how the conversation affects our sense of identity. One of the book's strengths is how to prepare well for tough talks in advance. The techniques in the book are geared toward getting people to lower their defenses, creating mutual respect and understanding, increasing emotional safety, and encouraging freedom of expression. The strength of Crucial Conversations is a formula for high-stakes conversations; this can be valuable for those who want or need the structure.

In my view, Fierce Conversations is different from Difficult and Crucial in that it focuses on how to have conversations about things that are important, but that may not have risen to the emotionally-charged level. The book is based on principles developed as part of the author's consulting practice. Its thesis is that relationships, both professional and personal, hinge on how conversations go, and that the best conversations require honesty and a willingness to listen. Of course, this is not a new concept, but the focus of the book is squarely on how to have the conversation that needs to be had, rather than the conversation that is easy in the short run. The book includes tools and assignments designed to help the reader develop the skills to have these robust and honest conversations. Fierce's contribution is that it teaches how to have a conversation so that you can avoid having it escalate to difficult or crucial levels.

When I am working with leaders, I find that Fierce Conversations has broad appeal because it focuses on improving the general quality of conversation, where a quality conversation is one that is held with integrity, honesty and forthrightness. And, of course, these are leadership qualities that transcend the conversation.

In his latest New Yorker article, "How David Beats Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell tells stories of how outmatched underdogs beat their much larger, more experienced competitors. He begins with the story of an inexperienced 12 year old girls basketball team that went all the way to the national championship game by running a relentless full court press every game. He moves onto the story of David slaying Goliath and cites some fascinating research by Harvard political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft who studied every war fought in the last 200 years that pitted strong and weak opponents against each other. On the whole, the underdogs won 28% of the time. When they recognized their weaknesses and adapted their strategies to compensate for them they won 64% of the time.

Pretty stunning, huh? Gladwell's article got me thinking about what leaders need to learn from underdogs. Over the past seven months, as the Federal government has taken a much more active role in stimulating the economy, reviving the financial services sector and restructuring the auto industry, we've been regularly reminded of Richard Nixon's observation in 1971 (and Milton Friedman's before that) that, "We are all Keynesians now." As we move through the downturn and into recovery, perhaps leaders need to adopt the mindset of, "We are all underdogs now." With that in mind, here are three success rules of underdogs that can help leaders facing long odds.

Get Real: Underdogs have a much better chance of winning when they honestly self-assess their strengths and weaknesses in the situation. When Arreguin-Toft broke his 200 year study of war down into 50 year increments, he observed that underdogs have been winning at a higher rate in the past 100 years. Why? Because they better understood their weaknesses and adopted insurgency strategies against their much larger and better equipped opponents. Think back to the pre- Petraeus period in Iraq for an example of this.

Go Where They're Not: In their book, Blue Ocean Strategy, Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne offer an underdog's handbook for succeeding by going where the competition isn't. Rather than competing in the red ocean (think of sharks fighting for the same food), they talk about creating blue ocean opportunities. Take online music as an example. It wasn't long ago that the Recording Industry Association of America was filing law suits against 15 year olds for downloading music from free file sharing sites. Enter Steve Jobs and Apple who said, "How about if we create a service where you can download all the songs you want for 99 cents each?" Five billion downloaded songs later, Apple's changed an industry and created two "must have" devices (iPod and iPhone) that have fed off the iTunes model.

Get Over It: Underdogs are innovators. They question the assumptions of the powers-that-be Goliaths. In the words of the famous Apple ad campaign they "Think Different." That can be a really uncomfortable position to be in when Goliath starts pushing back. The girls basketball team mentioned earlier lost the national championship game because they backed off the full court press when the other side complained vociferously and the refs started calling ticky-tack fouls. The conventional wisdom is very strong because it's convention. It's the way everybody does it or thinks about it. The cultural resistance to change can be exceedingly strong. Successful underdogs get over the need to be accepted by the keepers of the conventional wisdom. (Of course, they also pace the work from a change management standpoint, but that's a whole other post in itself.)

So, when you step back and look at what the opportunities are for your organization or where it needs to go, which of these underdog rules apply most to your situation? What underdog rules would you add based on your own experience or observation?