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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?

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.

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?

The next time you're feeling challenged about how to reach a goal, think of the sailors from the USS Carl Vinson. As reported in the Washington Post,  30 sailors from the Vinson set a goal to make last Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon their first 26.2 mile race.  More and more people are running marathons these days, but not very many have their training space limited to the confines of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. The sailors from the Vinson were inspired by the example set by their former commanding officer, Walter Carter, a recently promoted rear admiral who shared his enthusiasm for running with his crew.  Carter has left the Vinson for his next assignment but came back to DC to run the race with his men. Through his own commitment to fitness and his and camaraderie with his team, Rear Admiral Carter is the embodiment of what a positive leadership footprint looks like.

I'm honored to report that I got a first hand account of how the race turned out for the sailors from the Carl Vinson when I was one of the opening speakers last Sunday for the Navy's annual Flag Officer and Executive Training Symposium at a federal training center in the suburbs of DC.  (This is a week long annual event for the newly promoted admirals and their civilian colleagues in the federal Senior Executive Service. )

The speaker that followed me on Sunday was the head of the Navy's Fitness program. She was there to brief the participants and their spouses on the range of support available to help these leaders stay fit in their very demanding roles. As she wrapped up her remarks, she read from the Post story and asked if Rear Admiral Carter was in the room. He was indeed and reported that all 30 of his sailors had successfully completed the race and that he had finished it in 3 hours and 36 minutes himself.  Bear in mind that this briefing came about six hours following the marathon.  Let it be noted that the admiral did not have the bearing or tone of someone who had just run 26.2 miles in under four hours.  He pretty much looked fresh as a daisy!

There were a number of  things I took away from the Sunday session that I think are worth offering as food for thought for leaders. Let me share three of them here.

Takeaway 1:  There aren't many people who are in more demanding jobs than rear admirals and senior executives in the US Navy. By definition, these are busy people. And yet, the Navy has found that there is a high return on investment in taking these leaders off line for a week to support them in adjusting to their new roles. The Navy is apparently unique among the services in its inclusion of spouses in a program of this nature. They want the life partners of their top leaders to know and understand their spouses' roles.  They also want to let them know how much the Navy appreciates their leaders and their families.    That strikes me as an approach worth emulating for any organization interested in fully supporting its top leadership.

Takeaway 2:  I was really impressed that the third item of a week long agenda was an overview on fitness.  To be fully effective, leaders need to have a fighting chance of showing up at their best. The Navy understands that fitness is the foundation for that and has a team of personal trainers that work with their leaders on exercise planning, nutrition, stress management and a range of other health and wellness opportunities. They take a research based approach to fitness and have found that incorporating simple activities like walking (10,000 paces on the pedometer a day is the goal) has a greater long term positive impact than focused exercise programs (those are still important, by the way).

Takeaway 3:  Leaders set the tone and example. Thirty sailors from the Carl Vinson had the experience of a lifetime in the Marine Corps Marathon because their leader led by example.

Like I said earlier, it was an honor to be a witness to these lessons.The people of the Navy do amazing work. It's easy to see how their commitment to the total development of their leaders makes the difference.

There's an old, old saying that, "A fish rots from the head down."  It dates in English from at least 1674 and has probably hung around all these years because it's true.  The Washington Redskins are one of the latest examples of the truth of this aphorism.

Since the NFL season began, I've thought of writing a post on what can be learned about how not to lead an organization from analyzing the Redskins' owner Dan Snyder.  After Sunday's 14 - 6 loss to the previously winless Kansas City Chiefs that included a safety in the closing minutes, the time finally seems right.  After all, the Redskins have lost to the 1 and 22 Detroit Lions and haven't beaten a team this year with a winning record.  As the Washington Post has reported, the team sues its fans who have fallen on hard times and can't honor their ticket contracts.  They have one of the most bloated payrolls in the NFL and week by week, publicly humiliate their head coach Jim Zorn (a classic example of what I refer to as an NGB - "nice guy, but...") by removing one more aspect of his duties.  (This week it was play calling.)

Seriously, if we can't learn something about how not to lead an organization from watching Dan Snyder then it's probably time to move onto another topic.  What are his secrets for leading a rotten organization?  Here are a few that catch my attention:

Live in the past:  The Redskins haven't won a Super Bowl since  1992 and have made the playoffs only three times in the 10 years that Snyder has owned the team.  And yet, they act as if they're perennial contenders for the Super Bowl.  The first step in dealing with reality is to live in it.

Manage things you don't know about:  By all accounts, Snyder has surrounded himself with front office personnel who are not up to the job of managing the football side of an NFL franchise.  The weak staff gives Snyder the latitude to become personally involved in football decisions that he doesn't have the experience to make.

Squeeze your customers until they bleed:  The Redskins charge a premium price for an inferior product.  They have long term fans whose loyalty and passion for the team dates back longer than the owner has been alive.  When some of those fans fell on hard times and couldn't honor their long term ticket contracts, the Redskins sued them and bankrupted them.  This is from a team who claims to have the longest waiting list for season tickets of any franchise in the NFL.

Chase after shiny objects:  One thing Redskins fans have come to count on is that the off season will bring a high priced player acquisition that will be a "game changer".  This year, it was a $100 million contract for tackle Albert Haynesworth.  In previous years it was Deion Sanders or Bruce Smith or somebody else.  Heck, even bringing back the great Joe Gibbs was part of this pattern.  The acquisitions don't pay off because there is no long term system or plan in place around which the entire team can gel.

Offend and insult people's intelligence:  As society has changed, there has been more and more discomfort and offense taken with the very name, Redskins.  As many commentators have pointed out, it's hard to come up with a team in another sport that is named after an offensive label for an entire ethnic group.  It's gotten to the point where the U.S. Supreme Court may agree to hear a suit from six Native American tribes on the team name. In the face of such criticism, Snyder talks about the honor and tradition of the Redskins. Please. Could it possibly be about the money wrapped up in the trademark?

Hire and fire rapidly:  How many head coaches has the team had since Snyder took over?  Let's see if I can name them all.  Norv, Robiskie (Don't remember him? Look it up.), Schottenheimer, Spurrier, Gibbs, Zorn.  That's six head coaches in 10 years.  How in the world can you build an organization when there is constant churn in the top operational job?

Embarrass your key people in public:  Let's say you're a young quarterback with some potential.  You've shown some promise at the end of the previous season and are learning.  And then in the offseason, your owner and EVP of football operations start publicly wooing number one QB draft picks and some veteran QB's without even talking with you about what they're thinking.  Would you feel supported as a leader of your team?  Would you feel confident in your position?  Would you feel wanted?  No, I didn't think so.  That's what it's been like for Washington QB Jason Campbell this year.   Let's not even get started on how his head coach has been treated.

Accept no accountability:  The silence from Dan Snyder and his EVP of football operations Vinny Cerrato as the team has gotten worse and worse has been deafening.  The two of them are the only constants over the 10 years of Washington's decline.  One might think they have some accountable role in the situation.

Make your organization an extension of your own ego:  This is what it probably all comes down to.  I remember when I was in my last corporate job, it looked like our parent company was probably going to be acquired.  A bunch of us on the senior team were sitting around talking about what was next and one of my colleagues who had been around the block a few times said to us, "Remember, whoever buys us is going to be thinking, 'If you guys are so smart, how come we bought you?'"  That's it in a nutshell with Dan Snyder.  If all of you are so smart, how come I own the team?  Until he gets his ego out of the way, there's no hope for the long suffering fans.

OK, that's my take.  What's yours?  If you follow the NFL, what have I gotten right or wrong here?  What are some of the leadership lessons you've learned along the way by watching someone else and saying, "Wow, I'm never going to do that?"

British MP's Behaving Badly: When Appearances Trump the Rules

I've been in London this week for a presentation I gave to a group of new executives yesterday. It's been a great trip with a lot of friendly people and fascinating things to see. One of the things I really enjoy when travelling abroad is immersing myself in the local media to learn what the big stories are and how people think about them.

Well, the story that's dominating the UK's headlines and airwaves this week is a controversy over how members of Parliament used their expense accounts for items like housekeeping, gardening and, in one infamous case, the digging of a moat. Sounds sort of outrageous doesn't it?  The back story, as my cab driver explained it to me the other day, is that when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister she wanted to give a pay raise to the MP's but knew that wouldn't fly with the public. So, instead, she adjusted the expense reimbursement schedule for MP's so it was much more liberal and ended up significantly supplementing their incomes.  That was all going along swimmingly for the past 20 years or so until earlier this year when the husband of the Home Secretary watched a couple of porn movies on the family telly and the cable bill was submitted for reimbursement under the MP expense plan. You can probably figure out what happened next.

So, that brought us to this past Monday which was the first day of the new session of Parliament and my last day in London before heading out to the suburbs to give my presentation. I was taking one last walk around the Thames and was crossing Westminster Bridge adjacent to Parliament when I took the following photos with my iPhone. For those of you who didn't have little boys at home in the last 20 years, you're looking at a life size version of that really useful engine, Thomas the Tank Engine.

In case you can't make it out, the passenger car is carrying 3 or 4 people holding prime minister Gordon Brown masks in front of their face. The sign across the top of the car reads, "All Aboard the Gravy Train."  As the Brits might say, "Simply brilliant!"

The story has come back with a vengeance this week because as the MP's returned to Westminster they were presented with letters detailing how much they each need to repay the government for expenses now deemed inappropriate. The PM and the conservative party leader are trying to enforce the repayments but there a lot of members who are pushing back saying that they operated within the existing rules at the time and shouldn't be on the hook for the money. 

With Thomas the Tank Engine, moats and dirty movies on TV, this story has a lot of comic elements but there's a serious lesson in all of this.

What's amazing to me is that many of the MP's are putting a few hundred or a few thousand pounds ahead of their long term credibility, reputation and effectiveness. They are becoming a laughing stock while they argue over expenses that seem hugely inappropriate to the average citizen. And that is what leaders really have to watch out for. It's easy to get into a bubble when you're a leader and pretty soon the abnormal begins to seem normal. One of the executive speakers in the session I spoke to yesterday summed it up really well. There are, he said, rules and there are appearances. There are times when the appearances matter more than the rules. True leaders understand the difference. When the rules you're following wouldn't stand up to a smell test with the average person, it's time to take a step back and upgrade the rules. When it's all said and done, the most valuable currency a leader has is integrity and credibility.  Maintaining that currency requires an understanding that it's more valuable in the long run than currency of the paper sort.