Dear Madeleine,

I am fairly new to the workforce. I have a degree in accounting and got a great job right out of college, working in the finance department. I’ve been in this job for almost two years now. I like the company, the products we make, my manager, and my work.

My issue is that I feel there is so much more our company could be doing to appeal to people my age. Our CEO and our head of marketing are the age of my grandparents. I hate to be ageist, but we could be so much more successful if they were willing to expand their view of the market and to use social media. I don’t have a degree in marketing or even work in marketing, but I don’t need to be an expert to see the missed opportunities.

I hear a lot about generational differences, and I worry if I say something that I will be seen as a know-it-all or worse. Do you think I should say something?

Big Ideas

____________________________________________________________________

Dear Big Ideas,

I can’t really say. But I can propose some ways you can look at this that might help you think it through and come to a decision that feels right.

The first thing to consider is the company culture, values, and overarching strategy. Are there stated values? If so, is there anything about innovation or continual improvement? Does your CEO communicate about where he sees the company going and the goals that are going to help it get there? You might find some clues there as to how open senior leadership might be to new ideas. You can connect any ideas you want to share to the values and strategy of the organization.

Your next stop would be a conversation with your manager. Generally, people in finance aren’t thinking much about marketing, but your manager should be able to offer some guidance of who might be open to hearing your insights. There could be a young counterpart of yours in the marketing department who sees things the same way you do. It wouldn’t hurt to develop a relationship with someone like that.

Finally, you might think about framing your ideas in compelling terms, depending on who you are talking to. Anything you can do to get to know people and what is important to them will help. You can check out their social media to see what interests them, and then tailor your pitch to leverage that. Some people will be interested in market share, others in revenue, and still others in creativity and the reputation of the company.

Be ready to ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. If you ask “what ideas have you had?” you can weave others’ thinking into subsequent pitches so it doesn’t sound like you are only sharing your ideas.

The more you get people talking, the more they will end up thinking any ideas that get adopted were theirs. This would be a win! Start slow, with just a few people, and build from there.

I love big ideas! And, being a grandparent myself, I find that my world view is vastly enriched by engaging with the younger generations. But, of course, that’s me. Start by enlarging your network and developing relationships with as many people as you can. Find ways to connect your ideas to what interests them. Take your time and be respectful. You might just be able to spark some interest that becomes a fire. As long as you aren’t worried about controlling the outcomes, or being seen as the owner of whatever happens, you might be surprised at the impact you can make.

Having vision for what is possible is a leadership trait, Big Ideas, and figuring out how to influence people to see what you see is a critical leadership lesson. There are great things in store for you, my friend!

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I was recently promoted to a VP role in my company. It was a bit of a surprise as I thought my boss would never leave—but he did, quite suddenly. I have been in the role now for about five months.

My new boss keeps telling me I need to “get out of the weeds” and be more strategic. I have no idea what that means. I am still doing my old job while now also supervising the work of all my peers. I am at my wits’ end with the workload. The meetings alone are killing me.

My biggest issue is that I am most comfortable simply getting things done—making my list of tasks and systematically checking them off. I suspect that isn’t particularly strategic.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

How to Get Out of the Weeds

______________________________________________________________________________

Dear How to Get Out of the Weeds,

I can appreciate your overwhelm and confusion. The transition you are going through is one of the hardest, in my opinion, because everything you have done in the past that has made you successful is now getting in your way.

It is very common among people who are great at execution to be at sea with how abstract and unproductive “strategic” activity can feel. It is a shift in mindset that very few people recognize and even fewer are able explain or help with. It sounds like your boss might be one of those folks who expects you to just figure things out on your own.

I recommend a couple of do-nows—things you can do right now that will set you up for success in the near future.

• Identify someone in the organization that you respect and ask them to mentor you. Tell them you specifically need help to figure out how to be more strategic.
• Ask your boss what five things they need to see from you that will give them confidence that you can be more strategic and that you can do the job the way they want it done.
• Replace yourself: find someone who can do the job you were doing before. Either promote from within or request to hire from outside the organization. Nobody can be successful doing two full-time jobs.

Once you have done all of the above, or have them in process, you can turn your attention to what it means to be strategic.

This issue has come up so much with my coaching clients that I have developed a list of things a strategic leader does, gleaned from my experience and from reading books and articles. There are a million books on this topic and even more opinions, so remember this is just my take on it. Maybe use this list with your boss to see what they agree with and what they think might be missing or not quite right. That will at least get you two on the same page.

What does it mean to be a strategic leader?

See the big picture:

• Anticipate what is coming. Note and develop plans to navigate the unknown.
• Get the big ideas right.
• Stay aligned with reality while entertaining innovative ideas.
• Use big ideas to set direction while considering potential contingency plans.
• Craft the short-term and long-term objectives that will move people in the right direction.
• Communicate about objectives and direction clearly and repeatedly. Use storytelling and share inspiring wins widely.

Translate the abstract into the concrete:

• Help design tactics to achieve objectives, especially those that require cross-functional cooperation.
• Oversee implementation and execution of tactics—create dashboards of the most relevant data to create transparency, visibility, and accountability.
• Track analytics—interpret data to formulate meaning found in analysis.
• Refine big ideas, direction and objectives, and tactical approaches as activity surfaces new information.

See all, know all, intervene judiciously:

• Re-direct to maintain focus.
• Measure and evaluate performance.
• Track successes and breakdowns—help tackle hiccups in processes and systems.
• Support solving of complex entrenched problems.
• Make sure people feel noticed, seen, and heard.
• Keep your ear to the ground to get advance notice of potential problems and to surface time-wasters—policies that aren’t producing intended results. Anticipate.

Focus on the future:

• Create multiple paths for generating and testing ideas.
• Create an environment of learning and innovation.
• Develop opportunities for high potential performers.

Master political agility:

• Cultivate relationships incessantly.
• Challenge the status quo without provoking outrage.
• Be masterful at shuttle diplomacy—conducting negotiations, especially between parties at odds with each other, but also parties who can’t see how their goals can be aligned.

As you can see, a lot of these activities involve thinking or relationship building, which can feel like anything but work. And to be fair, it isn’t work as you have known it. But it is work—it is strategic work and someone needs to do it. You can expect this transition to take some time and a lot of getting used to. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Give yourself some grace. As long as your boss is getting what they need from you, you will be okay.

Good luck.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a senior leader who reports to an SVP. I lead a business unit for a region. I recently had a one-on-one with my boss—a rare thing—and she gave me some feedback I am grappling with.

My company recently started doing pulse surveys, so I thought she might want to talk about the scores from my business unit that made it seem people’s morale was low. I was right.

She said I was very good at processes and systems and she was pleased with my unit’s results. Then she told me she thought I needed to work on being more inspirational. She asked me what my vision is for my business unit and I had to admit, beyond hitting our numbers and deliverables, I don’t really have one. Then before I could get more detail, she was called away and that was that.

I don’t even know where to begin on how to create a vision—or what to do with it once I have it. Any insight would be useful.

Feeling Blind

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Dear Feeling Blind,

This is a very common predicament for people who are straddling senior management and executive management positions. You have been consistently promoted because you are great at setting up processes and systems, holding people accountable, and executing results. But until someone points out that you need to start developing your ability to inspire and motivate people, it just doesn’t occur to you. So here you are.

It’s okay; you can do this. It might be uncomfortable but getting good at it at this point in your leadership journey will serve you very well.

The first step is to remember a leader you had in the past who did inspiration and motivation well. Try to remember what that leader did that worked. You can also ask your SVP for her vision so that you have an example of what she means—but the fact that you are drawing a blank on this leads me to think your boss may not have a vision either. Or if she does, she hasn’t shared it or it is unremarkable.

For guidance, I turned to the book FULL STEAM AHEAD! Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Company and Your Life. Authors Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner define vision as “knowing who you are, where you are going, and what will guide your journey.”

Essentially, it means you are providing the why—the context and meaning of the work your people are doing. You are painting a compelling picture of a job well done that will Be motivating for your team.

People often talk about creating a vision—but I would argue that you probably have one already. It’s clear that you are super motivated, which is probably because you have a strong sense of what is possible and how the success of your team connects to the success of the organization. So your job is to articulate those things as simply as possible. My experience is that many leaders think these ideas are obvious to others because they are obvious to them. And this is never the case. You have to spell it out, and then you have to repeat it like you are broken record.

Blanchard and Stoner lay out the elements of a Compelling Vision. The questions and comments below each element are mine:

• It helps us understand what business we are really in.

You know what results you are after. But what will those results do the for the company? The world? What does your team do that no other team does? A great example is Disney, who we all know is in the theme park business but they say they are in the business of making memories.

• It provides a picture of the desired future that we can actually see.

What is possible for your BU if you continue to do well? Maybe you could grow? Attract top talent? Be a role model for other BUs?

• It provides guidelines that help us make daily decisions.

What values do you use to make decisions? Have you shared those? What behaviors do you expect from your people? Do they know?

• It is enduring.

What makes your team great? What makes it special?

• It is about being great, not just about beating the competition (or in your case, hitting the numbers.)

You and your team are doing a lot of the right things. What do you do? How do you do it? How can these things be replicated? How are you different from other teams or business units?

• It is inspiring, which is not expressed solely in numbers.

A vision is different from a goal, which can usually be expressed in measurable terms.

• It touches the heart and spirit of everyone.

It may feel too arrogant or touchy-feely to express possibility or highest ideals and use language that it isn’t brass tacks. This can be what makes it so uncomfortable for many. It took me twenty-two years to get the courage to include the word love in the vision for Blanchard Coaching Services. 

• It helps each person see how they can contribute.

More than ever before, employees are seeking meaning and connection. When people can see how what they do connects with the bigger picture, it makes their job much more compelling.

Once you have your answers to some of these questions, you are ready to get a draft vision down on paper. Don’t worry about getting it right the first time—just get it all down. Then revise, word craft, and keep at it until you have something simple. Short and sweet is much easier to remember.

You might want to follow your vision statement with a mission statement. The vision is what is possible, and the mission is why you do what you do, and for whom. A mission statement structure could look like this:

Our mission is to __________ (do something) for __________(what people?) so that __________(those people can have something, do something, and feel some way).

There is no reason you can’t involve your team at this point. Let them poke at it and provide further input.

Then share it. With everyone. Start meetings by restating the vision. Ask people to print it out and put it over their desks. If you are all in the office, have posters made. In the rough and tumble of the workday, it is easy to lose sight of the vision. You should take any opportunity you can to remind your people what it is.

This will undoubtedly feel downright weird and risky to you. Feel free to share your discomfort with your people so you aren’t trying to pretend to be someone you aren’t or be good at something you are doing for the first time. You can also share that the whole exercise is a work in progress and that you are open to reworking it.

The key is to start. Examine what drives you, what makes what you do matter. Get all of your thoughts down on paper and then start shaping them. Take your time. Be prepared to have things sound hokey, or high minded, or farfetched. It will all come into focus.

I have no idea if this is what your boss meant. But I can promise that the work you do on this will not be wasted time. It will give you new insight into your team and yourself as a leader—and it almost certainly will be inspirational.

Love, Madeleine

About Madeleine

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response soon. Please be advised that although she will do her best, Madeleine cannot respond to each letter personally. Letters will be edited for clarity and length.

When we think of innovation, people like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs tend to come to mind. The lone hero in solitude has a hold on our imagination, but the truth is that innovation is rarely the result of an inspired genius toiling away in a garage.

Groundbreaking innovation takes lots of people. Consider that more than 1,000 engineers worked on the first iPhone. More than 7,000 people worked on Curiosity (the rover on Mars). The takeaway? Innovation is a team sport.

Innovation doesn’t have to be splashy either. Call it micro-innovating. In fact, small and incremental changes can have an oversized impact on your work life. When to innovate? Anytime you feel your work isn’t serving the greater good. Micro-innovation can be extraordinarily powerful.

So how best to micro-innovate? Let’s take a closer look at what gets in the way of doing it and how you can harness your power.

Micro-Innovation Killer #1: To-Do Lists, Tunnel Vision, No Vision

A typical day: Most of us create a to-do list and strike items as we finish them. I know I personally feel a sense of completion and satisfaction when I click my task off my calendar. To-do items can become so ingrained in our routine. At its worst, checking off items becomes mindless, and we don’t even think about it. When that happens, our to-do lists have more meaning than the tasks themselves. Over time, the work loses significance, and we question why we do the things we do in the first place. Our perspective narrows and our thinking becomes siloed.

Purpose? Process improvement? Innovation? Forget about them because we’re so focused on completing a task—even if the task no longer serves a need. It’s easy to have tunnel vision and wear self-created blinders. And to be fair, we must make so many decisions in our personal life, it’s easy to turn it off at work. But, when our work is filled with tasks, we lose sight of our larger goals.

Micro-Innovation Killer #2: Fear Kills Creativity

Recently, I was speaking to one of my peers, a manager of individual contributors. She manages the leadership development at a large company and was making some updates to a program. She had asked one of her people for their honest opinion, wondering what they might change and how they might improve it. She loved the suggestions and wondered why the person didn’t share these great ideas sooner. The answer was disarming. The individual assumed that the choices were made for a reason and who was she to question those choices. She did not feel empowered to share her fresh perspective; there was no psychologically safe space to share her opinions.

How many people remain silent because of a fear? The majority. In fact, McKinsey found that just 26% of leaders create psychological safety for their teams. Where there is fear, there is little innovation.

Five Tips for Micro-Innovating

Innovation is one of those words that can be intimidating. But it’s inherent in our nature—or else we’d still be living as hunter-gatherers. We are attempting to improve our lives every day and innovate in the smallest ways. Whether it’s preparing meals on a Sunday before a busy work week, optimizing schedules with a planner app, using Microsoft Teams or Slack instead of email, we are always trying to improve our status quo.

Here are five tips to ignite your creative spark and start micro-innovating.

1. Give others permission to speak: Those ubiquitous “If you see something, say something” signs in the airport are relevant for innovating. A leader’s job is to make sure their people feel safe to say, “This task doesn’t feel helpful to what we are trying to achieve. I’d like to understand more about the importance of the task to the overall process—what do you see that perhaps I’m missing?”

Don’t expect your people to have an answer at the ready—and be clear that it’s okay they don’t have one. Pointing to areas of improvement is NOT complaining! They may not know how to fix the situation, but they have at least diagnosed that something needs improvement. They have ‘seen something and said something.’ And that can short-circuit a potential problem before it becomes a monumental one.

2. Ensure systems exist for people: Processes are supposed to streamline tasks, but often they become workplace handcuffs. When a process creates unnecessary administration or you get hints of malicious compliance, it’s time to rethink the process and suggest ways to streamline. Ask yourself these questions: “What are we trying to solve with this process? Are these actions having the desired impact on the experience we want to achieve? Does the system support us and the customer or slow us down?”

3. Always be learning: Innovation requires experimentation. This also means the willingness to fail. We learn through mistakes, bumps in the road, misalignments. It’s where we improve how we work together and how we meet the needs of our customers/business. The words of Thomas Edison, on the painstaking task of inventing the lightbulb, are a good reminder: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

You can speed innovation by having a learning mindset. Ask your people: “What do you see that I’m missing?” Then remember the iPhone and how it was an iterative invention driven by thousands of people. It takes time and patience. So be easy with your people and yourself.

4. Adopt the right mindset: Throw away your preconceived notions about innovation and focus on fostering a culture of innovation for yourself and your team. Be mindful of your emotional reactions and others by pausing before you respond. Be curious and open-minded and you will bring in multiple perspectives. Have courage to push through your fear of failure. Be resilient to overcome challenges you will face while converging and diverging along the innovation process.

5. Take needed downtime: Ever take a shower and a great idea comes while you’re shampooing your hair? Ever wake up in the middle of the night with a “eureka” moment? The brain needs downtime. When it gets a break, it can make new connections and serve up inspirations. So instead of relentlessly hammering away at the task, take a purposeful break. See what brilliant ideas spontaneously arise.

Micro-innovation is something for the ambitious and courageous. It requires the willingness to be wrong; to fail; to be resilient. All this can be humbling. And it likely will undermine your self-confidence at times. But what’s the alternative? Doing the same old thing over and over—even if it’s no longer useful.

Ready to rally your self-confidence, resilience, and fearlessness to create a small revolution?

If you’re frustrated that change efforts in your organization are taking too long, are too difficult, or are too often ineffective, this book is for you. Leading change expert Jake Jacobs shares eight failsafe ways to make any change initiative successful in his latest book, Leverage Change: 8 Ways to Achieve Faster, Easier, Better Results.

Jacobs explains that leverage is about getting more done with fewer hassles, headaches, and problems. It is important to leverage change instead of just managing it. He defines the eight levers as:

• Pay Attention to Continuity—Don’t focus solely on the change; remind people what will stay the same so they have something to build on.
• Think and Act as if the Future Were Now—Make a plan but don’t get stuck in the planning phase. Move to implementation quickly.
• Design it Yourself—Don’t rely on what worked for another company; chart your own course of action to meet your unique challenges.
• Create a Common Database—Share information widely so people at all levels have enough data to make wise decisions that will positively impact change.
• Start with Impact, Follow the Energy—Start your work where you will have the biggest positive impact, then share that success to build energy for the entire initiative.
• Develop a Future People Want to Call Their Own—Make sure every individual, team, and department understands specifically what the change means to them so they can be committed to the change.
• Find Opportunities for People to Make a Meaningful Difference—Encourage people to look beyond what has always been done in the past to explore new, different, and better ways to get the job done.
• Make Change Work Part of Daily Work—Change is constant, so don’t think of it as something to do in addition to your job. Make it part of the daily routine.

Jacobs explains how to apply each of these levers and includes a list of success criteria to consider as well. The book includes 44 case studies to show how companies put these levers into action. It’s truly a guidebook for making change an easier process for everyone.

For more information about Jake Jacobs, visit www.jakejacobsconsulting.com

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Jake Jacobs, listen to the Leaderchat podcast and subscribe today.

As so many industries are beginning the long challenge of recovering from the pandemic, organizational change seems to be happening everywhere. The first issue many organizations must deal with when planning a change is finding an effective leadership approach that encourages large numbers of people to buy into a change at the same time. What most leaders don’t understand is that change will not succeed when:

• Top executives make all the decisions behind closed doors,
• They announce the change in an all-company meeting, and
• Everyone is expected to immediately get on board.

The best way to initiate change is to involve as many people as possible in the change process. Why? Our research shows that when you invite your people to participate in a change initiative, they will be much more likely to embrace the change and to influence their coworkers to participate. This high involvement, collaborative approach that involves all parties is far more effective than the minimal involvement, top-down strategy—which, according to Gartner Research, is still used by more than 80 percent of organizations. Top-down change typically results in short-term compliance, slower implementation, and marginal results. But involving people at all levels of an organization in the change results in faster implementation, increased commitment to the change, and more sustainable results.

When change initiatives go well, they improve innovation, creativity, productivity, engagement, and employee retention. When they don’t go well, it’s a waste of time, energy, and resources—and company morale plummets.

Contrary to what some believe, people don’t actually resist change. They resist being controlled. High involvement in the change process by those who will be impacted by the change lessens their feelings of being controlled and builds momentum for the needed change.

Leaders working with people during a high involvement change process must anticipate and manage the five stages of concern people are likely to go through: Information (What is the change about?), Personal (How will the change affect me?), Implementation (How is this change going to work?), Impact (Is the change worth our effort?), and Refinement (Are we trusted to lead the change going forward?).

Change leaders who are effective at addressing these five stages of concern can often minimize or resolve these concerns. When you use a series of change leadership strategies to create an inspiring vision for your people, build a clear plan, show proof the change is working, and ultimately allow people to lead the change, your organization will be more successful at navigating the process of change.

1. Frame the case for change/create an inspiring vision (Information/Personal concerns)

In order to frame a compelling case for change, leaders need to first describe the gap between what is and what could be. When leaders paint an inspiring vision—a picture of the future where people can see themselves succeeding—people will have fewer personal concerns and be more likely to support the change.

2. Build the change plan and infrastructure (Personal/Implementation concerns)

High involvement change leaders work with people to uncover obstacles to implementation and create a realistic change plan. When they get to collaborate this way, people feel better about the change because they have some influence on successfully implementing it.

3. Strengthen the change (Implementation/Impact concerns)

This is where leaders share information, stories, and data to prove the change is working. They model the mindset and behaviors they expect from others and have discussions with anyone who remains resistant to the change to ensure that everyone is accountable for implementing the change.

4. Entrust the change leadership to others (Impact/Refinement concerns)

Once people’s concerns about the success of the change are taken care of, leaders can begin to rely on their people to help lead the change. Daily responsibilities can be delegated to others while the leader remains available for support if problems arise.

I’ve been known to say that great leaders treat their people as their business partners. High involvement change leadership is a perfect example of this. When leaders involve their people in making important decisions throughout the change process, their people feel respected—and respect leads to trust. When your people truly trust you as their leader, they will want to do their best work to ensure the success of your organization’s change initiative.

It’s a timeless truth that bears repeating: Good leadership starts with a vision. Why? Because leadership is about going somewhere. If you don’t know where you’re going, your leadership doesn’t matter. Great leaders understand this and mobilize others by coalescing them around a shared vision.

A compelling vision will help you and your team get focused, stay energized, and achieve results. Your vision will also keep everyone going during times of adversity.

Can a Team or Department Create a Vision When a Company Doesn’t Have One?

Yes! Vision can start anywhere. You don’t have to wait for the rest of the organization.

Creating Your Team Vision

There are three aspects to a compelling vision: your purpose, your picture of the future, and your values. If you are a team leader, help your team create a team vision by working together to define and establish these three elements.

Purpose.  To begin, start by asking, “What is our team’s reason for existence?” Your team’s purpose will answer this question.

When writing your team’s purpose, don’t simply describe your roles and activities. For example, if you’re in the automobile business, don’t say, “Our team exists to sell cars.” That purpose is hardly inspiring. Take a cue from Tesla, whose purpose isn’t simply to sell cars; it’s “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Notice how those words inspire excitement and commitment? An inspiring purpose makes work meaningful and fun. It also helps everyone stay the course when things get tough.

Picture of the Future. What is your team’s picture of the future? What do you want to be true in the future that is not true today? Picture the end result of your efforts.

Your team’s picture of the future should be something you can actually see when you close your eyes. Don’t define your picture of the future in vague terms, such as “being great.” Use precise words that bring an image to mind. Walt Disney’s picture of the future for his theme parks was to “keep the same smile on people’s faces when they leave the park as when they enter.”

As you and your team work together on your picture of the future, keep it positive. Focus on what you want to create, not what you want to get rid of.

Finally, don’t get bogged down in describing the process for getting to your envisioned future. Just focus on a visual image of the end result.

Values. Values are deeply held beliefs that certain qualities are desirable. They define what is right or fundamentally important to your team. They provide guidelines for decisions and actions.

What will be the core values by which your team operates? Here is a small sampling of some values you might consider: integrity, knowledge/expertise, accountability, success, relationships, kindness, humor, creativity, innovation, dependability, service to others. There are countless others.

To determine your team’s values, answer the question, “How will we behave on a day-to-day basis?” Then describe the behaviors that demonstrate what that value looks like when it is being lived.

Be careful not to select too many values. Zero in on a maximum of six. Also, your values must be rank ordered to be effective. Why? Because life is about value conflicts. When conflicts arise, people need to know which value gets the highest priority.

Once your team has agreed on the shared values, it’s up to you as the team leader to model these values in your behavior and to encourage the other team members to do the same.

A Worthwhile Investment

Teams with a shared vision work in harmony and generate positive energy that creates extraordinary results.  These are the teams that others notice, admire, and emulate. If your team is working without a vision, take the time to create one. It’s an investment you won’t regret.

Editor’s Note: For a deeper discussion of vision and how it can focus and energize your team, read Full Steam Ahead: Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Work and Your Life by Ken Blanchard and Jesse Stoner.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a regional director of compliance for a global services company. Covid has been a trial for everyone. Most of my people had never worked from home before and were not set up to succeed working in what are, for many, cramped and noisy conditions. On top of this, Covid has resulted in a massive spike in demand for our services. On its face this is good, but the necessary restrictions make it almost impossible for us to meet demand. The teams that have to work together to ensure delivery are at each other’s throats.

Enter a new regional EVP who is hellbent on making his mark. He is engineering massive changes, most of which will result in outsourcing to areas where people are willing to work for less. The changes include a big move to digitization and automation.

One of my people called me in a panic when he was asked to interview with the consulting firm hired to create the plan. He had spent a couple of hours outlining his exact job and how he did it. “Are they interviewing me so they can automate everything and make me redundant?” he asked me, point blank. Things are happening so fast that I was unprepared. I said something half-baked in response. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I hadn’t considered the implications of what is happening.

Now I am the one in a panic. Why would our senior leadership decide to do this now? People are already suffering so much. The human cost of this is going to be staggering. I need some perspective on this.

Panicked

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Dear Panicked,

I have heard this from so many of our clients, and it’s a reflection of what’s happening at our small company as well. Automation and digitization are coming at all of us like a bullet train. Think about it. Industry leaders have accustomed all of us to getting exactly what we want, how we want, when we want it.

I recently went on a website to understand what it would cost me to engage a company for a small but complex specialized service. I expected the website to give me a short worksheet and generate a quote. Nope. I got four emails asking to set up a conversation, and someone called me three times to discuss my project. I was still in the speculation phase and wasn’t ready to talk to a person who I knew would try to sell me and then hound me. I simply wanted to access a ballpark cost to help me plan. Another website did this for me. Guess which one I will probably use?

This is why your senior leadership is doing this now. It’s because they want to take the noise, static, potential for inevitable human error, and wasted time out of the system. The additional pressures of Covid have exposed weaknesses in our characters and in our systems. Pressure has been applied to your current systems and you say your teams are now “at each other’s throats.” We tend to blame people but, really, this is a clear sign that your systems are failing you. Your executive leadership wants to make it easier for your customers to do business with you—to get exactly what they want, the way they want it. Because your leaders know that if your customers can’t do that, your company will eventually go the way of the buggy whip. Or Blockbuster.

It isn’t even that your leaders want to minimize head count—although that is always the fantasy promise. In some cases, they might be able to reduce the number of employees they need to get the job done but in many cases, they won’t. They will need the same amount of people doing different things. In cases where senior leaders seek to leverage automation, the ideal is not so much to reduce headcount, but to minimize the time-consuming and error-prone aspects of processes used to produce necessary results. Most processes, before they are properly automated, depend on humans doing exactly what needs to be done, in the right order, correctly, in volumes that are not humanly possible in the needed time frame. In short, these processes will inevitably cause errors, missed deadlines and conflict. Aren’t those human costs worth eliminating?

A colleague shared something a former boss used to say that has stuck with her: “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like obsolescence even less.” Touché.

The change coming at you is sudden. For this, I do blame your new EVP. Change is hard and it’s harder when people are already stressed. The brain loves certainty. When you can’t offer that, you can at least share what you do know. People respond to change in predictable ways. You can equip your leaders to deal with change through effective methods they can use to help their people manage themselves through the discomfort. Check out our material on Leading People Through Change—even a high-level overview can help you make a plan.

You need to focus your attentions on three big buckets:

1. Understand exactly what the change is designed to achieve. Find ways to articulate it that will best suit each different audience, so that it will make sense to them.
2. Figure out how to leverage your position power and ability to influence so that you can better identify threats to humans and mitigate the pain of loss.
3. Devise a plan to help each of your direct reports—and help them help each of their direct reports—to navigate what is coming. This plan must involve a lot of listening and communication on your part.

Helping your people hide from change would not be a favor to them. In fact, in the end, it would feel like a betrayal.

I hope this is the perspective you were looking for—although I suspect you were hoping for something else. Max Dupree said “The first job of a leader is to define reality.” So putting your head in the sand and hoping this will go away is not an option. For that I am sorry. I work with many leaders, every single one of whom has wanted to go to bed and pull the cover over their heads. And some have actually done it. For a little while. But then they get out of bed and do what needs to be done. Go to bed if you need to. But then, you know what you need to do.

Love, Madeleine

About the Author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

The rapid onset of COVID-19 forced all of us in the leadership and talent development space to quickly create new ways of thinking, learning, and working; it affected every fiber of our world. In essence, the pandemic has forced the birth of new ways of doing just about everything, from parenting to schooling to working.

On the work front, organizations are being called upon to reimagine the way they do business, care for their employees, grow, and more. But rising tensions and stress cause people to withdraw from true dialogue or try to dominate it. The consequences are costly: Some 77% of employees say poor communication hinders their company’s ability to compete.¹

As a result, leaders became learners again, rediscovering how to build trust, manage in a remote setting, and engage in authentic, straightforward dialogue. Along the way we’ve gained more clarity around what’s truly important, found the ability to quickly change course, and become skilled at doing things that were once uncomfortable. We’ve also discovered new ways of building and fortifying human connections for living, learning, and leading in a time of unprecedented upheaval.

This experience has helped The Ken Blanchard Companies develop and refine a fresh, modern approach to effective, human-centered leadership development experiences at a time when effective leadership matters more than ever. Just like you, we’ve had to ramp up quickly to meet the changing needs of learners—and what a change it’s been, as we are now averaging over 500 virtual sessions per month! We’ve also accelerated our time to launch exciting new modalities designed to extend our ability to reach more leaders more effectively with human connections woven in. As industry has made the rapid-fire shift to virtual, in many organizations the human connection is diminished or completely missing. We saw this as the perfect opportunity to reach more leaders, to democratize leadership development, and to leverage what we’re best known for: building the most productive relationships between people at work using our timeless, enduring content that is beloved the world over.

It’s been a great opportunity to partner with clients to design new ways to reach individuals and leaders, distributed across locations and time zones, with the helping hand of smart technologies. The result has been learning experiences that are deeply rooted to our clients’ leaders and learners: who they are, what they do and when, and how they work. Together we’ve created experiences that improve awareness and capability, and move their businesses forward by imparting the skills their leaders need right now—not to survive, but to thrive.

I am a Solutions Architect, part of our Solutions Architecture Center of Excellence. We partner with our clients to co-create the perfect experience for your scale, timeline, technology needs, and budget. We begin our engagements with a design session that is collaborative and co-creative and incorporates the tenets of design thinking (specifically, Empathize, Define, and Ideate) to clearly understand your audience—in other words, who we are solving for. That who drives each set of decisions we make as we define the goals, craft the learning experiences for your various target groups, and determine how we will prove the value of our work together. Focusing on your audience early and often allows our design team to connect closely with the learner, develop relevant content, create context, and build world-class experiences for all levels of leaders.

We’ve been using this approach successfully with all of our content including our flagship offering, SLII^®, plus other core offerings such as Self Leadership, Blanchard Management Essentials^®, Building Trust, Leading People Through Change^®, Conversational Capacity^®, and Team Leadership. This approach allows us to create a common language and provide frameworks that are easy to apply from one level of leadership to another.

And we’ve packaged the content in ways that meet the demands of different learner groups:

• For small cohort groups up to 20 people, we’ve been suggesting Virtual Instructor Led Training experiences that will leave your leaders feeling as though they, well, went to class! Click here for a close-in view of how we “do” virtual learning at Blanchard.
• For larger audiences that need to learn new skills in a way that scales broadly and quickly:
  • We’ve developed a Collaborative Online experience that unfolds over time, usually six weeks, combining self-driven learning with the hallmarks of the best the classroom has to offer: peer discussions, application, and reflection, guided by a Blanchard expert. Click here to learn about our Self Leadership Collaborative Online experience and its impact on our most recent cohort.
  • Our new Interactive Keynote Collections target core concepts in a way that allows you to reach a large number of learners quickly.
• For more in-depth experiences, our Digital Learning Journeys provide a turnkey way for you to deliver leadership-level-specific learning, quickly. Many of our core programs are available in this format now and can be used individually or with intact teams.
• And to keep the learning at the forefront after the formal learning moments end, we’ve been layering in our sustainment offerings such as our multi-week SLII^® chatbot, called Kenbot^®, that extends the learning from the classroom into the flow of work. There is no easier way to reconnect and recommit than offering the chatbot as a performance support tool for your leaders.
• Blanchard’s Coaching Solutions provide additional rigor to all our offerings and turn newly formed skills into new habits and ways of working. Designs range from a peer coaching model that aligns to the journeys of different levels of leaders, to group coaching in groups of 8 to 12, to individual One on One coaching and executive coaching.

As we look to the future, it’s only natural to ask, “Will the classroom make a comeback?” That’s a question we all are asking. Our answer is, “Yes, in some form,” but what comes next will undoubtedly look different than it did prior to COVID-19.

We envision a leadership development experience that blends every modality, curated specifically to address the needs of your various audiences.

Perhaps it’s Building Trust in Virtual Instructor Led Training in small cohorts for your people in EMEA, the same content served up in Digital Learning Journeys with live group coaching sessions in the Americas, and again, the same content served up in face-to-face sessions in Asia.

Reaching further out into the flow of work, picture Interactive Keynote Sessions for your large, synchronous, global audiences on critical topics that resonate around the globe—or envision Blanchard’s digital licensed content served up in journeys your L&D team creates and presents on your LMS or LXP platform.

No matter what your learning platform, LXP, or LMS is, Blanchard can help you leverage your investment. We’ve incorporated much of our digital content and experiences in mainstream LXPs that scale the leadership development experience instantly. And for those of you with an LMS platform, we have a public API that can be used to integrate our content into your platform.

Learn more about offering our programs in plans and pathways on your instance. Together we can create a blueprint to build communities of connected, inspired leaders speaking the same language, as part of a unified approach to leading your people forward.

Our Solutions Architect team members are some of the most accomplished professionals in the industry. They can help you:

• Co-create a learning experience that meets your timeline, technology needs, and budget
• Develop à la carte options to fill in the gaps in your leadership development curriculum
• Create a leadership development journey that unfolds over time and incorporates Blanchard content, your custom content, and content from other providers
• Deploy a new leadership development experience on a learning management system, a learning experience platform, or other innovative learning technologies

I am ready to help. There’s a bright future of leadership development ahead of us. Schedule an initial design consultation with me or one of the other Solutions Architects to explore what the future of leadership development could look like in your organization. Or download our new Solutions Brochure. We’d love to share designs we’ve created for other clients and explore what your organization’s leadership development experience could look like.

About the Author

Ann Rollins is a solutions architect with The Ken Blanchard Companies. A modern learning champion with more than 25 years of industry experience helping form and execute learning strategy for Fortune and Global 500 companies, Ann always has her eyes on the technology horizon. Her passion lies in helping clients sort out the learning angles and attainability of technology in workforce learning and performance to build future-forward, human-centered experiences.

_{^1. Dynamic Signal, The Cost of Poor Employee Communication, 2018.}

Ken Blanchard says it is difficult for leaders to plan for the future while they are also managing the day-to-day. For that reason, he suggests organizations have two groups of leaders: one that focuses on the present and a second that looks toward the future. In their new book Lead from the Future, Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz recognize this same challenge and provide a playbook to help leaders envision the breakthrough opportunities that will drive long-term growth.

We often look at visionaries like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos as having extraordinary talents that can’t be duplicated. But Johnson and Suskewicz believe developing and deploying an inspiring and actionable vision of the future is a skill that can be learned. Many leaders use present-forward thinking, which focuses on extending the life of their existing business by way of continuous improvements. But Lead from the Future illustrates the idea of future-back thinking—a method of achieving breakthrough growth through anticipating and shaping the market of the future. Rather than approach business with a mindset of describing what is and how to sustain it, the authors ask readers to think about what could be and then transform processes and systems to support that vision.

Johnson and Suskewicz’s research indicates that 75 percent of organizations base their strategic plan no more than five years into the future. Organizations that extend their five-year plan to ten years, however, give themselves a competitive advantage. Planning for three to five years keeps a company in the same competitive market, while planning ten years into the future creates a new market where that company can be the leader that others want to emulate.

Future-back thinking consists of three major phases.

• In phase one, leaders develop a vision. This includes exploring what the future is likely to hold, understanding what customer needs will be, identifying threats and opportunities, and creating a point of view to serve that future.
• Phase two is where leaders translate the vision into a clear strategy by walking back in stages to create initiatives that need to be in place to achieve the vision, including explicit benchmarks and goals.
• In phase three, leaders implement the strategy. The authors emphasize the importance of creating new structures, processes, and norms to drive the new initiative rather than trying to roll out a significant change using conventional methods.

Ultimately, leaders who embrace future-back thinking must be able to deal with ambiguity while giving themselves time to explore, envision, and discover. According to the authors, they need to be “comfortable being uncomfortable.” And when these leaders develop a narrative that supports the company’s future, the passion and opportunity that now lie dormant will be unleashed throughout the organization.

An easy-to-read and engaging book, Lead from the Future is filled with examples of leaders who have successfully practiced the future-back thinking method.

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Mark Johnson, listen to the LeaderChat podcast and subscribe today. For more information on Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz, visit www.innosight.com.

In this age of fast-moving markets, fickle consumers, and unprecedented risks, we need leaders who think and act like entrepreneurs. In his latest book, Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff, Joel Peterson explains the important difference between an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial leader: Entrepreneurs can launch new ventures but can’t necessarily run them at scale. Entrepreneurial leaders act nimbly to launch new initiatives, inspire others, and champion innovative approaches.

We’ve witnessed the extreme success of entrepreneurial leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. The days of leaders who focus on keeping results consistent with past performance and balancing a budget are over. Peterson introduces a new set of skills that aspiring entrepreneurial leaders need to develop.

In the book’s introduction, Peterson describes a painful personal memory of the night his wife temporarily went missing on a mountain hike. He then uses the metaphor of mountain climbing to present a series of maps organized around four skills needed to navigate the path to the summit of entrepreneurial leadership.

1. Build Trust: Trust is “base camp” for any leader, but is especially important for the entrepreneurial leader. They must determine and live by their core values in order to behave predictably, which is a requisite for building trust. Being transparent, respectful, and consistently delivering on promises builds a personal brand that creates a trusting work environment.
2. Create a Mission: Creating and sharing a clear mission is similar to providing a map to the summit. It gives meaning, clarity, and priority to a collective set of actions. A team without a mission lacks focus and direction and will most likely fail. A team that is aligned on a mission understands exactly where it is going and what it will take to get there. The mission serves as the inspiration for the endeavor by clarifying specific goals so that everyone is aligned.
3. Secure a Team: Leadership is a team sport—and nothing is more important than ensuring the right people are in the right positions. Entrepreneurial leaders know how to recruit, onboard, coach, assign, and reassign—or when necessary, remove—people on the team. They hire people who share the same values and work ethic, then empower them to perform at their highest levels.
4. Deliver Results: With a foundation of trust, an inspiring mission, and a team in place, it is time to deliver results. Entrepreneurial leaders establish standards for decision making, negotiating, and communicating while they meet the challenges of driving change, overcoming adversity, and more. Peterson presents a series of maps to help leaders be prepared to meet challenges and juggle the competing claims of customers, shareholders, and team members.

Entrepreneurial Leadership is filled with compelling stories that support the valuable information provided in Peterson’s maps. In many ways, the book is a how-to guide that will help you make a quantum leap in your own success. If you want to effectively lead others and help them achieve their best, launch new initiatives, drive innovation, or create a legacy, this book will inspire you to start your journey.

To hear host Chad Gordon interview Joel Peterson, listen to the LeaderChat Podcast and subscribe today. Order Entrepreneurial Leadership on Amazon.com.

For more information on Joel Peterson, go to www.joelcpeterson.com.

Dear Madeleine,

About three months ago, I was promoted to COO in my organization. I wasn’t expecting it—a lot of changes happened at once. A large group of people were fired and the next thing I knew I was COO.

I have no real senior leadership experience, but here is the crazy thing: I’m pretty sure I can do this. I’m super organized and I have an exhaustive knowledge of the mechanics of the organization. My problem is that when I try to prioritize on what to tackle first, I get completely overwhelmed. I’m not sure where to start.

I thought about asking my new team, but they seem as mystified as I am about what I’m doing in this role. I really don’t want to reveal my ignorance to them but at the same time I don’t want my boss to lose faith in me. Any ideas would be helpful.

Unexpected Success

Dear Unexpected Success,

It’s obvious your boss also thinks you can do this—so you should absolutely play hard, and play to win. You have some leadership experience and you will figure out the senior part. You have nothing to lose.

Thomas Leonard, my mentor and a pioneer of the coaching profession, says, “Anything worth doing is worth getting help with.” The first order of business is to get help. The fastest way to bomb out would be for you to try to do too much, too fast, all by yourself. Do you have anyone from your past work life you might call to mentor you? Are there any COOs in your industry you could reach out to for advice? I suggest you hire a very experienced executive coach—someone with whom you can discuss everything you need to work through in total confidentiality. Your organization will probably pay for it. Also, lobby for an assistant to help manage your time and keep you focused. The more support you can get for yourself right now, the better off you will be.

Sit down with your boss and ask them to outline your top three to five priorities. Decide what you can do in what time frame and check it in writing with your boss so there is no misunderstanding. Focus only on your boss’s priorities and on building support for your leadership.

To succeed as a leader you need your team to trust you. Begin by spending what will feel like precious time getting to know each member of your team so that you can understand their strengths, experience, and expertise. The more you can empower them with crystal-clear goals to lead their own teams, the more you will be able to get done. Build trust and connectivity with your team by creating and sharing your Leadership Point of View.

You also need to understand your peers and your unofficial influencers in the organization. Create a relationship map to identify all of the critical players in your organization, and make a concerted effort to get to know them and understand their goals. Build a coalition of support by helping others achieve their goals and leveraging their help to achieve yours.

Once you have some clarity about your priorities, are moving toward your goals, and have started to build your network of support, then you can worry about building your own strategic point of view and influencing as a strategic leader. That day will come after your very high functioning operational machine is built.

You have a rare opportunity to take advantage of an odd situation. If you can keep your wits about you, get the right help, and stay grounded, you will be fine. Better than fine—great!

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

Think of a time when you experienced truly excellent service. It may take you a few minutes—I don’t mind waiting.

Got it? Now compare that to a time when the service you received was just acceptable, but nothing special. Which organization do you want to do business with again? I’ll bet it’s the one where someone made you feel valued and cared for—someone who understood what great service really means.

What we know from working with companies of all sizes is that most organizations recognize that they need to offer great customer service—but few really get it right. They zero in on specific tactics or trendy catchphrases, or they provide training to a small number of people in customer service roles. They don’t understand that the best companies create a culture of Legendary Service—where taking care of customers is the responsibility of every person, not just people who work in the customer service department.

Organizations that have a true service culture look at customer service from three equally important perspectives:

• Frontline service providers. Frontline people play a critical role because they are the ones who have direct contact with the customer. To the customer, these people are the company. If frontliners don’t know how to behave with a customer or how to answer a question or solve a problem, it can reflect badly on the organization in the customer’s eyes. On the other hand, if they serve customers with care, answer their questions, and solve problems on the spot, customers will happily return.
• Managers. Managers in a true service culture empower frontline people to provide exemplary service. They also act as role models as they demonstrate service excellence to both internal customers—the people who work in the company—and external customers—the folks who use the company’s products and services.
• Senior leaders. Top executives must fully embrace the service vision and communicate desired behaviors to the entire organization. Their goal is to create an environment where every person in the company feels cared for as a valued internal customer of the organization. Those folks, in turn, make sure external customers also feel cared for and valued.

You can see how, at an organizational level, creating loyal external customers begins by caring for internal customers—people who are empowered to create that loyalty with every direct contact they have with an external customer.

We use the CARE model to show the four qualities present in every Legendary Service provider: Committed, Attentive, Responsive, and Empowered. We’ve found that the lessons of this simple model, when applied, will have a profound impact on the service experience your customers—both internal and external—will receive. Here are descriptors for each quality:

1. Committed: Being Committed to customers means living the customer service vision by knowing and understanding the impact of poor service on your organization; acting on the belief that service is important; performing tasks with the customer in mind; and having goals and metrics for providing great service.
2. Attentive: Being Attentive to customers means listening to identify customer needs and wants by paying attention to customers’ verbal and nonverbal cues; being aware of surroundings and ignoring distractions; asking open-ended questions to draw information from the customer; acknowledging the customer’s needs; treating internal customers as if they are paying customers; and doing analysis on both internal and external customers.
3. Responsive: Being Responsive to customers means taking action that shows you care, such as listening actively to gain understanding; acknowledging feelings; offering solutions within your authority; gaining agreement; and expressing appreciation.
4. Empowered: Being Empowered for customers means unleashing the full extent of your power by practicing good self-care habits; being aware of the power you have to serve customers; continuing to increase your knowledge about your job; knowing your company’s policies and procedures; and personally handling all customer situations you may encounter.

I’ve always said profit is the applause you get for creating a motivating environment for your people so they will take good care of your customers. A true service culture creates an environment where people feel involved, appreciated, and cared for at work.

If you empower your internal customers, train them well, and care for them, they will take care of your external customers. Those people then tell their friends about you and become raving fans and part of your sales force. That takes care of the company shareholders or owners as well as the bottom line. And that’s how Legendary Service leads to great relationships and great results.

As a part of a 13-city servant leadership executive briefing series, Halsey has worked with leadership, learning, and talent development professionals to identify more than 60 skills and attributes that should be part of a comprehensive servant leadership training program.

“Of course you have to take this a step at a time,” says Halsey, “and recognize that some of your desired outcomes are part of a mindset—attitudinal, while others are part of a skill set—behaviors that can be learned and developed.”

“Topping the servant leader mindset traits is empathy, closely followed by selflessness and humility,” says Halsey. “This is the recognition that leadership is not about you and your agenda.  It is about leading others to achieve their goals in order to achieve larger organizational goals in a collaborative way.  It’s about assessing people’s needs and providing the right amount of direction and support to help them succeed.”

The top servant leader skill set behaviors are task- or goal-specific listening, asking questions instead of telling, and focusing on how and when to develop others.

“These are skills that can be taught,” explains Halsey.  “If you want to be a servant leader, you must focus your energies on developing and practicing the behaviors of a servant leader.”

Halsey recommends that L&D professionals conduct an audit of their current leadership development curriculum and compare it against the complete list of attributes identified by learning professionals.

“Most organizations have some of the components already in place as a part of their current leadership development curriculum. But there are often a few competencies not on the list, such as advanced coaching skills, building trust, and self leadership, for example.

“When you compare your list with the complete list, look for gaps and consider how they might be addressed. Don’t overlook leadership basics,” says Halsey.

“Performance management concepts such as collaborative goal setting, situational specific day-to-day coaching, and effective performance reviews are still critical.  You are covering the same content—just from a different point of view.

“Once you have all of the pieces in place, the next step is to organize the content in a logical flow where leaders learn and practice basic skills in and out of context and then move to more advanced skills.  Along the way, keep working on encouraging a servant leadership mindset as you teach the servant leadership skill set.”

The world needs a new leadership model, says Halsey—one that focuses on both people and results.

“Engaged people and great results are not mutually exclusive—you can achieve both.  With some good design and consistent application, you can create an organizational culture where leaders see their job as serving others and also see goal achievement as a shared responsibility.”

Would you like to learn more about creating a servant leadership curriculum in your organization?  Join us for a free webinar!

3 Keys to Building a Servant Leadership Curriculum

Thursday, November 15, 2018, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Servant leadership principles are being rediscovered by a new generation of leadership, learning, and talent development professionals. An others-focused approach where people lead best by serving first is being recognized as one of the best ways to unlock performance in today’s organizations.

In this webinar, instructional design expert Dr. Vicki Halsey, vice president of applied learning at The Ken Blanchard Companies, will share how to design, build, and launch an effective servant leadership curriculum. Drawing on her research and experience designing hundreds of training courses for clients worldwide, Vicki will share three keys to an effective curriculum:

Identify the key components of a comprehensive program. Halsey will share research on the attitudes, skills, and behaviors most associated with an others-focused approach to leadership.

Evaluate current gaps in existing training. A comprehensive curriculum includes self-awareness, listening, coaching, and performance management components. Halsey will show you how to audit your current classes and identify gaps.

Utilize effective design principles. An effective curriculum includes asynchronous and virtual training components as well as face-to-face components for interpersonal skills. Halsey will share how to match technology to content and how to create engaging learning experiences across all modalities.

Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions, explore options, and get answers about their own designs from Halsey’s expert instructional design point of view.

Use the link below to register.  This event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

REGISTER NOW

“One of the times companies need to review the quality of their customer service is when they are trying to create a culture of service across the entire organization. That could be because they’ve grown or because they are merging or acquiring other companies and want to make sure there is a consistent culture as they come under one umbrella.”

Another event can be the annual customer service survey.

“Most companies have some kind of measurement tool that they use to measure customer service. It’s either a survey they send out, a Net Promoter Score evaluation, or something internal they use to measure customer perceptions about their service.”

These scores can be incredibly important, says Cuff—especially in industries such as healthcare where set standards and rankings are published nationally.

“When companies have that kind of data and are measuring constantly, they have to make sure there is consistent performance and a consistent level of service from their employees,” Cuff says.

Although she is a big believer in traditional customer service training that teaches basic skills, Cuff also believes that organizations need to take a look at how their culture impacts service.  That starts by recognizing that everyone has internal customers.

“Many customers come to us looking to improve the relationships and culture within their organization. They recognize that when people aren’t engaged with a company’s vision, mission, and values, it translates into their not being willing to go the extra mile to work with each other to improve processes. This will have a negative effect on service.”

In their development of The Ken Blanchard Companies new Legendary Service program, Cuff and co-creators Ken Blanchard and Vicki Halsey have focused on both the mindset and skill set required to serve customers at a higher level.

“It’s about looking at the relationships and mindset within the organization.  We try to get to the heart and help people realize we are all in the service business—and serving others is just as important as getting that report done, or doing that research, or making that outbound call.”

It starts at the top, with managers and senior leaders turning the organizational pyramid upside down and embracing their role in helping the people closest to the customer succeed.

“We teach managers that their number one customer is their direct report and that creating a customer service culture is an inside-out process. You have to demonstrate the same commitment, attentiveness, responsiveness, and empowerment internally as you would externally. That’s the magic of our approach.

“Whether you’re an individual contributor, a manager, or the CEO of an organization, you must recognize that you can make a difference within your own realm of influence. You can impact external and internal customers in a positive way that will keep them coming back.

“Our four-step Legendary Service model is about showing people you care.  It goes deeper than simply using someone’s name or smiling and thanking them. It’s about letting people know you are here to serve them. Every phone call, email, and interaction is about letting people know they are important to you and to the company. If they are external customers, let them know you appreciate their business. If they are internal, let them know you appreciate their work.”

This approach can succeed in any organization, says Cuff. She points to customer success in industries as diverse as healthcare, education, insurance, and business relocation services.

“At a relocation services company, for example, our client has earned more best-in-class ratings than any other company in the industry. Their net satisfaction rating is the highest among the industry’s four largest global suppliers—in fact, three times higher than any of the other three.

“The company also ranked first among the four largest global suppliers in the Willingness to Recommend category, which is widely considered to be the truest indicator of brand advocacy.”

Cuff encourages leadership, learning, and talent development professionals to learn more about the Legendary Service program and its immersive experiential design.

“It’s a one-day training that causes people to look at customer service differently.  We accomplish that through a number of activities where people get to practice what we are teaching them in the moment. That is the differentiator from other training where people just sit and take notes. This allows people to practice as they learn—and own it.”

Seeing customer service training as a culture initiative that is everyone’s responsibility is a bit of a radical approach. But organizations ready to take service to another level should give it a try, says Cuff.

“It’s an eye-opener for people. At the end of the program I often hear participants say how important it was for them to recognize internal customers. People feel great when they can connect to the bigger picture of serving others. A participant at a recent session said, ‘I’ve never thought of my peers or coworkers as customers! It’s one of the biggest aha moments I’ve had!’”

Legendary Service training is a great way to create a better customer service experience for you, your organization, and your customers!

Would you like to learn more about creating a customer service mindset in your organization?  Join us for a free webinar on April 24.

Creating a Customer-Focused Mindset in Your Organization

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time

Great customer service, helpfulness, and collaboration are paramount to organizational success, yet few organizations have a strategic plan for building a service-minded culture. If you are responsible for creating a culture in your organization that’s focused on service, you won’t want to miss this one-hour webinar with customer service expert Kathy Cuff.

You’ll learn how to help the people in your company:

• Define a personal service vision
• Identify customer needs and wants
• Develop the skills needed to build customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Create a self-empowered action plan

Learn how to create a customer service mindset that teaches your employees how to deliver ideal service to internal and external customers in a way that creates a real competitive edge for your company.

Register today!

In a sense, developing a servant’s heart is a lifelong journey. It is my belief that you finally become an adult when you realize that life is about what you give rather than what you get. The shift from self-serving leadership to leadership that serves others is motivated by a change in heart. Servant leadership is not just another management technique. It is a way of life for those with servant’s hearts.

When some people hear the phrase servant leadership, they associate it with soft management—they think you can’t lead and serve at the same time. Yet you can, if you understand that there are two kinds of leadership involved in servant leadership: strategic leadership and operational leadership.

Strategic leadership has to do with vision and direction. This is the leadership aspect of servant leadership. The responsibility for this visionary role falls to the hierarchical leadership. Kids look to their parents, players look to their coaches, and people look to their organizational leaders for direction.

Once people are clear on where they are going, the leader’s role shifts to a service mindset for the operational leadership task, which is all about implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership.

How do you make your vision happen?  In a traditional organization, all the energy in the organization moves up the hierarchical pyramid as people try to be responsive to their bosses instead of focusing their energy on meeting the needs of their customers. Bureaucracy rules, and policies and procedures carry the day.

This creates unprepared and uncommitted customer contact people who are trying to protect themselves, and it leaves customers uncared for at the bottom of the hierarchy. This scenario doesn’t do much to move the organization in the desired direction toward accomplishing a clear vision. Servant leaders, on the other hand, feel their role is to help people achieve their goals. To do that, the traditional hierarchical pyramid is theoretically turned upside down so that the frontline people, who are closest to the customers, are at the top. Now the frontline people are responsible—able to respond—to the needs of the customers. In this scenario, leaders serve and are responsive to their people’s needs, training and developing them to accomplish established goals and live according to the vision.

Servant leadership is not soft management; it is management that not only gets great results but also generates great human satisfaction.

Interested in learning more about the relationship between servant leadership, customer service, and the role of managers and senior executives?  Join me for a free webinar on Creating a Culture of Service.  I’ll be sharing thoughts, strategies, and tips on how to create an organization with a servant leadership mindset and a servant leadership skill set.

But this isn’t true, says Paul Leone, senior ROI consultant at Verizon and author of the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact: Bridging the Gap between Training and Business Results. In Leone’s experience, financial executives are receptive when anyone in an organization shows that money being spent is producing a return.

“Senior executives just want to make sure money is well spent. They are not necessarily looking to reject the proposal. If it will generate results, it’s in everybody’s interest for the organization to do it.”

It’s important for HR and L&D professionals to realize that they are not the only ones coming in with proposals based on assumptions, says Leone. Even the most tangible projects are based on best-guess scenarios.

“Let’s suppose marketing is proposing spending budget making a commercial. They have to ask for budget just like any other department. So they do some predictive analytics and some research, but in the end they are making an educated guess that the commercial will produce an uptick in sales.”

L&D professionals shouldn’t feel that everyone else is going in with rock-solid assumptions and metrics, says Leone. Everyone is in the same boat more than they realize.

“Maybe it’s because we come from the social sciences or a more academic background. Maybe we tend to be harder on ourselves or hold ourselves to a higher standard—almost as if we think we need to write a thesis or a dissertation. That’s not the case. We just need to show value.

“I can honestly say that I think it’s safer to bet on a training experience to improve performance than to take a chance on a commercial. We are adding bottom-line value with training—it’s just that we never measure it.”

When Leone looks at the typical measurements organizations can use to measure the impact of leadership training—employee retention, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity—he recommends a rank order on how to use each of these common measures to make the case for training.

“Productivity is the best and most immediate indicator of training impact. If you send someone to training, increased productivity can happen as fast as the next week or the next month. That’s where your business case should focus. Key in on performance indicators that produce revenue, cut costs, or avoid future costs.

“Customer satisfaction is also good to show, but it’s second down from productivity. In many organizations, there’s not a dollar value assigned to customer satisfaction.

“Employee retention is number three because it is long-term. By the time you show that your training had a positive effect on employee retention, so many other things over the same period of time could’ve happened in the business that could take credit for that.”

When measuring programs designed to increase the effectiveness of leaders, Leone reminds practitioners to focus on improvements made by the direct reports of the leader in question.

“A leader’s productivity is really an accumulation of their direct reports’ productivity. I’m not talking about the leader’s ability to make better presentations, better speeches, or better contributions to teams—even though those things could be counted as gains in productivity. I measure the impact of leadership training performance by looking at increases in direct reports’ performance and productivity. I look to see how these leaders are impacting their frontline people who have the tangible Key Performance Indicators we are tracking every day—sales, repeat calls, phone-ins, customer satisfaction, and the like.”

Leone is also passionate about what he calls Level Six measurement—identifying factors that lead to high levels of ROI.

“After a training event, certain factors in a training participant’s immediate work environment can make or break your training initiative’s overall impact. These factors have nothing to do with your training content, or your trainers, or with how well you planned out your delivery. This is about the manager that the training participant is returning to in the workplace.

“We conducted a recent training where the overall return on investment was about 6 percent—a modest positive return.  But when we focused on a subgroup of 50 people who reported to one specific manager, we found that group had an 1800 percent return on investment! This was directly attributable to what the manager was doing with participants after the training—things like bursts, boosts, contests, and sit-downs, with the manager shadowing people to see if they were handling the calls in the way they had been trained.”

For leadership, learning, and talent development professionals still on the fence about including projected impact numbers in their training proposals, Leone offers encouragement.

“You always get the biggest bang for your buck with leadership training, because you’re sending one person through and influencing the ten people who report to that person. You’re paying for one person and influencing so many others.

“Don’t be afraid to measure the impact of your training. If you don’t, people will never know the value you bring to the organization. Speak up and show your value!”

Would you like to learn more about calculating ROI and measuring the impact of training?  Then join us for a free webinar!

Leadership Training—Calculating ROI and Measuring Impact

November 29, 2017, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Improving leadership skills is one of the best ways to impact your organization’s bottom line. Still, many leadership, learning, and talent development professionals struggle to identify the expected return on investment for training expenditures and to measure impact after an initiative.

In this webinar, David Witt, program director at The Ken Blanchard Companies, teams up with Dr. Paul Leone, author of the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact: Bridging the Gap between Training and Business Results to show you how to identify anticipated fiscal impact of a leadership training initiative and how to measure it in a cost-effective manner after the training is finished.

You’ll learn:

• How to calculate the return on investment for your leadership training initiative using Blanchard’s Leadership Training ROI Worksheet. (The worksheet will be provided to all registrants.)
• How to measure the impact of training using the methodology outlined in the book Measuring and Maximizing Training Impact
• How to improve the adoption of new leadership practices from the classroom to the work environment

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to quantify the impact of leadership training in proposals—and how to set up your training to deliver on expectations.

Register today!

Without a clear sense of the positive financial impact, it’s easy for a leader to dismiss a new proposal as being too disruptive, too expensive, or too time consuming.

An analysis of more than 200 organizations by The Ken Blanchard Companies found that every year of delay in improving leadership skills costs the typical organization an amount equal to 7 percent of their total annual sales.  This represents millions of dollars each year—because poor leadership behaviors not only increase the loss of high potential employees, they also lower the employee work passion and productivity of the people who remain with the company.

Employee Retention

Research originally conducted by Leigh Branham, a leading authority on turnover and retention and author of The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, identified that at least 9 percent and possibly as much as 32 percent of an organization’s voluntary turnover can be avoided through better leadership skills. Branham, who partnered with Pricewaterhouse Coopers in conducting the study, identifies that trust, hope, worth, and competence are at the core of most voluntary separations.  When employees are not getting their needs met in these key areas, they begin to look elsewhere.

Employee Work Passion

Research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies using its Employee Work Passion Assessment has found significant correlation between positive work intentions and a leader’s ability to build trust, use coaching behaviors, and create an engaging work environment. This environment includes high levels of Meaningful Work, Autonomy, Growth, Fairness, Collaboration, and Feedback, along with six other factors (see complete list here.) Failure in any of these areas on the part of the leader leads to lowered intentions on the part of employees to perform at a high level, apply discretionary effort, remain with an organization, endorse it to others, and act as a good corporate citizen.

Employee Productivity

Providing employees with the tools, resources, direction, and support they need to perform at their best is the key to creating a high performance work environment. Research conducted by Dr. Paul Leone with a large Fortune 100 financial services company involving 300 managers and 1,200 direct reports found a 5 to 12 percent increase in productivity among direct reports of managers who attended leadership development training and immediately began using the new skills they had learned.

Leadership Impacts the Bottom Line

Leadership matters! After all, leaders help employees set goals. Leaders make sure those goals are in alignment with overall corporate strategy. And leaders are responsible for providing the direction and support employees need to succeed on a daily basis.

Even though a leadership development initiative—like any change—can be disruptive, difficult, and financially challenging, taking no action is often the most expensive option of all.

Most executives instinctively know that strong leadership is essential for overall organizational success. By evaluating and improving leadership practices throughout their organization, leadership, learning, and talent development professionals can remove a persistent drain on financial performance and allow their organizations to grow and thrive.

# # #

Want to learn more about quantifying the impact of leadership training?  Join us for a free webinar!

Making the Business Case for Leadership Training

Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 9:00 am Pacific Daylight Time

Organizations lose millions of dollars each year due to poorly trained leaders. In this webinar, David Witt, researcher and author of The Ken Blanchard Companies eBook 7 Ways Poor Leaders Are Costing Your Company Money, will share how poor managerial behaviors negatively impact engagement, alignment, productivity, and employee retention.

Drawing on original research conducted by The Ken Blanchard Companies, Dave will explore:

• The 7 biggest gaps between employee expectations and leader behaviors
• The 3 ways to measure the bottom-line impact of leadership training
• The 5 keys to leadership training that works

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to evaluate your current level of leadership readiness, how to measure the impact of your leadership development, and how to get started on deploying training that makes an immediate difference. The event is free, courtesy of The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Register here!

In this model, leaders have to be prepared to play two different roles in the organization.

The first is a strategic leadership role: setting the vision and direction for the organization. As Blanchard explains, “All good leadership begins with establishing a compelling vision for your organization that tells people who you are (your purpose), where you’re going (your picture of the future), and what will guide your journey (your values).”

Blanchard describes how the traditional hierarchical pyramid works well for setting the vision and direction of the organization. While leaders should involve experienced people in this phase of leadership, the ultimate responsibility remains with the leaders themselves and cannot be delegated to others.

But once people are clear on where they are going, the leader needs to turn the company’s organizational chart upside down.  Mentally and symbolically, this illustrates the critical need of leaders to serve the people who are closest to the customer when it comes to implementation.

Many organizations and leaders get into trouble during the implementation phase, says Blanchard. “When the traditional hierarchical pyramid is kept in place for implementation, who do people think they work for? The people above them. All the energy of the organization moves up the hierarchy, away from the customers and the frontline folks who are closest to the action. When there is a conflict between what customers want and what the boss wants, the boss wins.”

Leaders Working for their People

Blanchard shares a great story about when his daughter, Debbie, was in college and working at Nordstrom. One day over lunch, she said, “Dad, I have a really unusual boss. At least two or three times a day, he asks me, ‘Debbie, is there any way I can help you?’ He acts like he works for me!’” Blanchard smiles when he recounts the story. “That’s exactly right, Debbie,” he said to his daughter. “At Nordstrom, you’re able to say ‘no problem’ to a customer without checking with your boss. That’s why they’re known for their great service mindset.”

Blanchard also points to a mirror vs. window metaphor Jim Collins uses in his best-selling book Good to Great.  When things are going well in an organization run by a top-down leader, that type of leader tends to look in the mirror, beat on their chest, and declare, “Look at what I’ve accomplished.” But when things go wrong, this leader looks out the window to see who to blame for the failure.

“Servant leaders approach it in the opposite way,” says Blanchard. “When things go wrong, they look in the mirror and consider what they could have done differently. When things go well, they look out the window to see who they can praise.”

“What kind of leader would you rather work for?” asks Blanchard in closing. By combining equal parts serving and leading, a servant leader creates a balance that produces both great results and great human satisfaction.

You can read the complete article in the July/August issue of Chief Learning Officer.

A visionary/direction, or strategic, role—the leadership aspect of servant leadership; and

An implementation, or operational, role—the servant aspect of servant leadership.

The visionary role involves establishing a compelling vision that tells people who you are (your purpose), where you’re going (your picture of the future), and what will guide your journey (your values).

When Walt Disney started his theme parks, he was clear on his purpose. He didn’t say “We’re in the theme park business,” he said “We’re in the happiness business.” Why the distinction? Because being in the happiness business helps keep Disney cast members (employees) aware of the company’s primary goal.

Disney’s clear purpose for his theme parks also helps his people understand the company’s picture of the future, which is “To keep the same smile on people’s faces when they leave the park as when they entered.” After all, they are in the happiness business!

The final aspect of establishing a compelling vision for Disney theme parks was to identify values that would guide staff and management on their journey. Disney parks have four rank-ordered values, called the Four Keys: safety, courtesy, the show, and efficiency. Why is safety the highest ranked value? Walt Disney knew if a guest was carried out on a stretcher, that person would not have the same smile on their face leaving the park that they had when they entered.

The traditional hierarchical pyramid is effective here in the leadership aspect of servant leadership. People look to their organizational leaders for vision and direction. While these leaders may involve others in the process, the ultimate responsibility remains with the leaders to establish a compelling vision and define strategic initiatives for their people to focus on.

After the vision and direction are set, it’s time to turn the organizational pyramid upside down and focus on implementation—the servant aspect of servant leadership. Nordstrom excels at this. Their leaders work for their people—and now the focus and the energy flows toward the customer, not toward leadership. This one change in mindset makes all the difference. Nordstrom’s servant leaders help their people live according to the company’s vision, solve problems, and achieve their goals.

Our daughter, Debbie, worked at Nordstrom when she was in college. After she had been there about a week, I asked her how the job was going.

She said, “It’s going well, Dad, but I have a really strange boss.”

“Oh?” I said.

“At least three times a day, he says to me, ‘Debbie, is there any way I can help you?’ He acts like he works for me.”

“He does,” I said to Debbie. “That’s the Nordstrom philosophy—they’re all about serving rather than being served.”

For years, Nordstrom employees were given a card with just 75 words printed on it. It read:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

I love to tell the story about a friend of mine who went to Nordstrom to get some perfume for his wife.

The salesperson said, “I’m sorry; we don’t sell that brand in our store. But I know where I can get it. How long will you be in the store?”

“About 30 minutes,” he said.

“Fine. I’ll go get it, bring it back, gift wrap it, and have it ready for you when you leave.”

That’s exactly what she did. And she charged him the same price she had paid at the other store. Nordstrom didn’t make any money on the deal, but what did they make? A raving fan customer.

So you see, servant leadership isn’t a strange concept at all. Large organizations like Disney and Nordstrom have been practicing it for years and doing pretty well. How about you and your company? Give servant leadership a try—you’ll be surprised at how it will help you achieve great relationships and great results.

Dear Madeleine,

I am a manager of a large team. I like my work, the mission of the company is meaningful, and we make a difference in the world. I have a reputation for being a good manager and getting things done on time and under budget. My boss, who is fairly new—and, frankly, in over his head—is constantly coming to me with new projects and never seems interested in the projects we are already working on. He says he trusts me to get it all done.

My problem is that the strategic direction and priorities are constantly shifting and I can’t keep up. I can’t possibly get it all done, and my team is maxed out. I am becoming demoralized by not really understanding the point of what we are being asked to do. I know I need to talk to my manager, but I don’t want to come off as a whiner. How to proceed?

Shifting Winds

Dear Shifting Winds,

This must be so frustrating. It sounds like you do need to talk to your manager and get some clarity on what to focus on and the timelines for each item. You appear to have a low opinion of your new manager’s capabilities—and you may be right about him—but you also don’t know what he is up against. Until you actually know what is going on, I’d suggest to start off by assuming the best of intentions.

In any case, definitely get a meeting on the calendar and set the context carefully. Make it clear to your manager that you appreciate his trust; however, there is more work here than can be done and you need direction in prioritizing the projects. Tell him that to set priorities you normally use your knowledge of the strategic focus for the company—but lately you have been confused about what that is and you need his help.

To communicate with your boss as effectively as possible, first you need to assess his style. Which do you think would work best: Charts outlining all of the different projects on a big whiteboard? An excel spreadsheet with all of the project plans? A presentation with a little bit of story? Your manager needs a quick and easy way to grasp all of the assignments you are working on and how many hours are needed to complete each project. That will help him see how overworked your team is and will help you make the case for getting another person on board to ensure you can complete everything.

Having each project visually represented might also make it easier for you to see the point of each one—but even if it doesn’t, it will make it easier to talk to your boss. You can explain that your people get inspired when they understand the reason they are working away at something. Most people—especially millennials, research is showing—want to know the context and meaning for their tasks.

Next, rehearse, prepare, and be succinct. You won’t be perceived as a whiner unless you actually whine.

You are going to have to stand up for yourself and your people at some point. Many managers are so overwhelmed themselves that they will just keep throwing work at their people until someone cries uncle. He may be waiting for you to do just that.

Good luck.

Love, Madeleine

About the author

Madeleine Homan Blanchard is a master certified coach, author, speaker, and cofounder of Blanchard Coaching Services. Madeleine’s Advice for the Well Intentioned Manager is a regular Saturday feature for a very select group: well intentioned managers. Leadership is hard—and the more you care, the harder it gets. Join us here each week for insight, resources, and conversation.

Got a question for Madeleine? Email Madeleine and look for your response here next week!

What do you need to say and do differently for your team to believe change is real? How do you demonstrate your commitment to achieving the change target? How do you personally demonstrate initiative to gain support for the resources needed?

Here are a few other coaching concepts to consider if you are a leader managing change.

1. Identify challenges. What needs to be solved? When we ask clients what problem needs solving they will usually identify what they see only through their lens. Who else and what stakeholder groups should also be consulted? Make sure you have clearly articulated the problem before you begin to focus on the change needed.
2. Listen. Listen and listen some more. In addition to asking questions, enter each conversation with the intention of learning something new and being influenced. Consider writing out your list of questions to help identify what you want to learn from the conversation.
3. Identify top areas for change. Narrowing a long list of potential change areas down to an important few is hard. When you look across the stakeholders your team serves, what change will have the greatest return? As an example, one leader I coached saw a need for information sharing that spanned across sales, project management, and professional services. This leader knew if she could create a system for information sharing across those groups, it would be a significant win. She focused on the problem and need for each group and worked with Information Services to create a system that gave everyone access to the information they needed, which saved time and reduced frustration.
4. Create goals that align with the new direction. It may go without saying that in order to have everyone aiming for the same bull’s eye, each person needs to understand their own role and responsibility for achieving the goal. Goal setting is often suggested; yet, in our research, alignment is rarely better than 80 percent. Spend the time to identify what each person on the team needs to do—their key responsibilities and goals—in order for the team to be successful.
5. Create a metric dashboard and manage to it. What do you need to measure to ensure you are succeeding in the change effort? What are the leading and lagging metrics that paint the picture of success? In team and one on one meetings, put up the top areas for change and discuss the metrics.

What I’ve focused on here are some tools a leader can use when managing a team through change. Note that all of these concepts require effective and productive relationships—because change happens through people. Take a coach approach to increase your success with your next change effort. It works well for individual change as well as organizational change.

About the Author

Joni Wickline is Vice President, International Growth with The Ken Blanchard Companies. You can read Wickline’s posts as a part of Coaching Tuesday here at Blanchard LeaderChat for ideas, research, and inspirations from the world of executive coaching.

In Edmonds’ experience, leaders—especially senior leaders at the highest levels in organizations, are often disconnected from their company’s culture as experienced by the rank and file members of the organization.

Wondering if you might be out of touch with what is happening in your organization?  Here are four questions to ask yourself to make sure that you are getting an accurate read of what is happening inside your company.

1. Are you overly insulated? Over time, leaders unintentionally find themselves depending on a select group of people closest to them at the top of the organization to give them information about what is happening throughout all the different layers of the organization.  Edmonds’ suggestion?  Increase the number of your sources inside the company. Get out of the office to learn from different people throughout the organization to ensure you’re getting a bigger, more accurate picture.
2. Are you genuinely connecting with others? Employees know which leaders are truly interested in them as people, not just in them as contributors or “cogs in a wheel.” Edmonds recommends that leaders connect at a personal level.  Engage in conversations beyond business.  Over time, these genuine connections will enable others to tell you their perceptions, concerns, and hopes.
3. Do you have truth-tellers? It is all too common for leaders to surround themselves with people who reinforce the leader’s current beliefs and perceptions. However, the most effective leaders also have truth-tellers included in their inner circle—people who aren’t afraid of sharing their perceptions of the reality of the leader’s plans, decisions, and actions. Knowing more people’s truths can help make the leader’s future decisions more effective.
4. Have you checked your assumptions lately? Edmonds recommends that leaders check their assumptions on a regular basis by sharing them with team members. Listen without defending and continue to refine your assumptions, plans, decisions, and actions.

Creating an uplifting and engaging culture begins by identifying where you are at and where you can improve.  The key is accurate information!

To learn more about ways to accurately identify and improve your corporate culture be sure to check out The Culture Engine microsite.  You can download a free chapter of Edmonds’ new book and see some of the additional questions he recommends for assessing your organization.  For a more in-depth look at the topic, join Edmonds and Weaving Influence host Becky Robinson for a free October 1 webinar on Driving Results With An Organizational Constitution

Alexander studied the knot, drew his sword, and slashed the binding, freeing the chariot.  He then went on to conquer the continent as the legend had foretold.

Over 2250 years later, at a plant owned by the Western Electric Company, a young statistician named Walter Shewhart worked together with W. Edwards Deming, another mathematician, to create a model for improving productivity. The end result of their effort was called the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle. They applied what they learned at a factory known as the Hawthorne Plant, whose major function was assembling telephone relays. It’s difficult not to digress about all that went on during that research, but suffice it to say it was groundbreaking stuff, at many levels. My guess is that readers of this blog probably have a good feel for all that.

The rest is history.

The Challenge of Doing

In most organizations, the Do portion of the Plan-Do-Check-Act model is the biggest challenge.  Instead of trying out an idea in a relatively small way and then drawing conclusions regarding how well it is working, most people end up studying an issue ad nauseum, delaying action that could shed light on the problem. Meetings lead to discussion, research, and requests for more information, but action is always delayed.  After a while the whole project begins to take on the complexity of a self-created Gordian knot.

Don’t let this happen to you. Instead, just try out the idea. Pilot it with a small group of people, then look at the results and make decisions around how you can improve them. In other words, experiment your way into improvement.

Four Things to Consider

You’ve got to get inside your own brain to be sure you can handle this kind of progress. Here are a few things to consider:

1. Be prepared for scrutiny and expect to look a little goofy when you’re going through the initial trials. It’s going to seem weird to colleagues and bosses. It’s likely to save everybody a lot of money, but … it’s still different, isn’t it? That makes it subject to much tighter observation.
2. Expect naysayers to find things that are wrong during the pilot. It’s easy to point fingers when someone is trying something new. Don’t let early criticism keep you from completing your initial pilots. Remember Seward’s Folly during the U.S. purchase of Alaska? I wonder what those critics would say now.
3. Be willing to change your mind during the pilot. A good mantra is No decision is final. That’s one of the reasons we call this a pilot. You can tinker with it.
4. When in doubt, err in the direction of taking bold action. Talk is cheap. The world expects and rewards action. As Albert Einstein said, “Nothing happens until something moves.”

Act as though it is impossible for you to fail. Don’t try to persuade the organization into making change. Simply pilot the idea, and then explain what happened. It’s better, cheaper, and much faster.

About the author

Dr. Dick Ruhe is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Immediately after the webinar, Dr. Blanchard will be answering questions here at LeaderChat for about 30 minutes.  To participate in the online discussion, follow these simple instructions.

Instructions for Participating in the Online Chat

1. Click on the COMMENTS link above 
2. Type in your question for Dr. Blanchard
3. Push SUBMIT COMMENT 

It’s as easy as that!  Dr. Blanchard will answer as many questions as possible in the order they are received.  Be sure to press F5 to refresh your screen occasionally to see the latest responses.

We hope you can join us later today for this special complimentary event courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.  Click here for more information on participating.