More Than Virtual Action!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Have you noticed how the Internet can be a good place for discussion? With all the social sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other virtual communities, it is really easy to spend days and nights just staring at a computer reading or discussing with virtual friends. This is all good, but I find that what is missing from all these sites is action. It is so easy to live inside our brain, sharing ideas, photos, and telling people what is going on in our life in 140 characters or less that we often forget to do something!

Social sites bring together people with enormous possibilities! But the sad thing is that this potential rarely translates into actions that are beneficial to the real world. It is not true of all the sites and what I want to do today is to highlight an exceptional event that happened on 09/09/09. I announced this leadership webathon on this blog last Tuesday. Can you imagine 21 consecutive webinars about leadership delivered in 21 hours? Isn’t it INCREDIBLE? It was incredible! The special thing about this webathon is that its organizer, Kwai Yu, and all presenters are part of 2 related virtual communities.

The first of these communities is the Leaders Cafe Foundation that has a virtual presence as a very active group on LinkedIn. You can find it here. The second one is the Differencemakers virtual community led by Ian Berry. It can be found here.

So, if you want to join virtual communities that are doing more than just chatting on the net, you should definitely consider joining these two special communities. I am certainly glad and proud I am part of them. They are dynamic communities, dedicated to DOING something to make this world a better place.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Invitation to Attend a Leadership Webathon!

Dear Managers and Leaders,

today, I will not give you new contents to read, but I will invite you to a very big international event that is hapening on 09/09/09. Starting at 7am GMT, leadership specialists members of the Leaders Cafe Foundation (LCF) will give 21 free webinars! 21 FREE WEBINARS from leadership specialists coming from 6 different countries. You have never seen so much contents delivered in a single event, I'm sure!

Note that I will give two hours of presentation, the first at 23h GMT (7pm EDT) and the second one right after at midnight GMT (8pm EDT). I hope you will all join me for these two presentations. The first one is explaining 3 complementary models of a team and the other one will talk about some symptoms a leader cannot overlook. The latter is inspired from the series of posts I did on this blog.

The link to attend all webinars is

http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?meetingRoomName=leaderscafe

The official communication with a lot more information now follows. I really hope you can join me and attend these presentations!

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WEBATHON - CELEBRATING THE WORLD DAY OF INTERCONNECTEDNESS ON 090909 THROUGH LEADERSHIP

On 9th September 2009 Leaders Cafe Foundation group and differencemakers community will celebrate World Day of Interconnectedness with a 24 hour webathon (all free). There will be a leadership webinar starting every hour with a great line up of presenters from 6 countries.

The probable program is listed below. Final program will be updated at

http://leaderscafefoundation.webs.com/wdi090909.htm

Fellow LCF member, Ian Berry has the honour of kicking off the webathon at 8 am London time 090909 (07:00 GMT)

All times listed are GMT (EDT.

07:00 Ian Berry from Australia What Real Leaders Do and fake ones don't

08:00 Heather Davis from Australia "Taking it personally: Small ‘l' leadership"

09:00 Krishna Kumar from Australia You've planned your holiday but have you planned your life?

10:00 Sangeeth Varghese from India Defining moments that can change your life

11:00 Krishna Kumar Growing Roses and Chrysanthemums

12:00 Don Dunoon from Australia Leadership mode: Leadership as grounded in learning and relational work

13:00 Gino Federici Harmonious Oneness

14:00 Rhea D'Souza from India Leadership through storytelling

15:00 Rhea D'Souza At the edge of innovation

16:00 Kwai Yu from United Kingdom Why Should Anyone Be Led By You

17:00 Kwai Yu Finding Purpose

18:00 Kellie Frazier from USA Speak and Write With Intention

19:00 Joel Graham-Blake United Kingdom To Be Announced

20:00 Richard Norris from Scotland 7 Steps To Success

21:00 Ian Berry Standing out from the crowd - how to do today what others will be thinking about tomorrow

22:00 Ian Berry Differencemakers - how doing good is great for your life and work

23:00 Remi Cote from Canada 3 complimentary models of a team

00:00 Remi Cote Symptoms a leader cannot overlook

01:00 Jane Chin from Los Angeles Leaders Cafe Foundation launch in LA

02:00 Jane Chin Personal Branding including the launch of the ebook Who am I? the power of a personal brand by Ian Berry, Jane Chin, Remi Cote, Shelley Dunstone, Joel Graham-Blake, Pat Nautin, Leo Sonneveld, and Kwai Yu.

All participants in these webinars receive a copy of this ebook.

03:00 Jane Chin Personal Branding

You can participate in any of these free webinars by clicking on the following URL at the appropriate time

http://webmeeting.dimdim.com/portal/JoinForm.action?meetingRoomName=leaderscafe

For more on the World Day of Interconnectedness visit http://www.interconnectedness090909.org/

Your Vision in 7 Quotes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

We already discussed a few times the importance for a team leader to have a clear vision and to share that vision with his entire team. Today, I want to share a few quotes about vision with you. Some of these quotes are taken from the book "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork" written by John C. Maxwell.

I hope these quotes will inspire you to define a clear and articulated vision, to broadcast it around you, and to live it fully.

"To have a vision gives motivation and assurance to team members."

- John Maxwell

"Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole."

- Bernard Montgomery

"Leaders do not need to be visionaries themselves. The vision can come from anyone."

- Ezra Earl Jones

"I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

- Michelangelo

"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs."

- Vance Havner

"You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures."

- Charles C. Noble

I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes and found some wisdom in them.

I also want to invite you to a free webinar I'll give on 09/09/09 from 7pm until 9pm EDT. This is part of a larger event hosted by the Leaders Cafe Foundation for the World Day of Interconnectedness. I will present two different topics:

• 3 Complementary Models of a Team
• Symptoms Leaders Cannot Overlook

But the event is a 21-hour leadership presentation marathon If you want to join me or learn more about the other sessions, send me an email at remi@innovachron.com and I'll send you all the details.

Remi Cote

4 Ways to Improve Your Team

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I am reading a very good book from John C. Maxwell titled “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork”. In this book, John Maxwell emphasizes the fact that as a team leader, you must ensure that your team meets the highest performance standards possible. Your team must perform or it is bound to fail. You do not want your team to be caught underperforming because at that point, you will lose control over your team. Someone above you is likely to overtake your team and do what is necessary to correct the situation. At that point, it usually requires some serious actions that could even mean lay-offs of team members or even the elimination of the entire team. You really want to notice that situation before someone else detects it so that you keep control and do what you decide to do to correct the performance problem yourself.

To help you with improving your team, Maxwell suggests 4 ways to improve your team’s performance. I’ll share them with you here.

• Improve the performance of your team members – If you see that your team does not perform as well as it should, the first thing that you need to check is whether the team members can be trained to perform better. You must always look for ways to train and improve the people forming your teams. Note that you also must not forget to improve yourself in the process!
• Add competent people to your team – Sometimes, your team members are performing well, but you discover that you will not succeed with the current team as it stands. Maybe you lack some specific competences. Maybe it is just the sheer number of people that is insufficient to do everything that needs to be done. In those cases, you will find that you need to adjoin more competent people to help you achieve what you need to achieve. You need to grow your team!
• Change the leader – When a team is composed of the right people but still does not progress, maybe it is time to look for a new leader! Or maybe some people on your team would be better suited to lead certain aspects of the project. This is tougher to do when you are the team leader yourself. You have to look at your delegation skills and see how you can use some better suited people to help you with leadership. You can keep the control of the overall project, but delegate the leadership responsibilities of certain parts to someone else if you feel it will be better for the project.
• Remove inefficient members – Finally, sometimes you need to remove inefficient members from a non-performing team. A single member can change a winning team into a losing team! In that case, you have to put the interests of the team first and remove that person from your team. For you as the leader, the team is what counts. You need to compose the best possible team and this should be your focus.

Those are the four elements that Maxwell suggests in his book. I would add things around processes and relationship myself. We might look at those in some future posts!

What about you dear leaders? Do you always focus on your team’s interests first? Do you have your own suggestions as to how team performance can be improved? Please add your comments below. I’m always happy to see them coming!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

The Leadership Cycle

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I feel starting a company, even the smallest solo company, is pure leadership. You need to create and clarify your vision, define your mission, set clear objectives, plan for action, and then take action. This can be a very stressful situation if you try to do everything at once. It can be overwhelming at times, since you feel responsible for everything. Observing myself as I start my solo company, I came up with a crude, back-to-basics description of the leadership process to help me focus on the right things. It can be summarized as follows:

• Set your objectives
• Plan for actions
• Advance according to your plan for a while
• Assess where you are
• Correct course
• Advance according to your new plan for a while
• Assess where you are
• Correct course
• Advance a bit more
• ...

As you can see, this process is a cycle that repeats itself until you reach your objectives. As you assess where you are, you also need to evaluate whether the objectives you are pursuing are still valid. Things change rapidly and you must have an open mind towards changing your destination.

The time between the planning phase and the assessment can vary greatly from one individual to the next, between one methodology and another. For instance, the Agile software development methodology says that this “action time” must be very short. Other software development methodologies are not asking the same pace for assessing projects. I personally favour short action time periods because it is more forgiving. It allows you to correct course before the deadline is reached!

To assess where you are, you need to be able to measure where you are. Qualitative objectives must be turned into measurable goals to ensure that you know when you reach the objectives or when you go astray. This is essential to the success of any enterprise. If you cannot measure when you meet your objectives, when will you be able to celebrate your successes?

The one thing that this leadership cycle breaks is the illusion that everything must always be perfect for you to succeed. You can always correct course and repair your mistakes as you advance in your project. Of course, some mistakes will be tougher to correct than others, but until the deadline, you still stand a chance to succeed. Your success will be better measured by your resilience than by the amount of mistakes and problems that you encountered in your journey. I would even say that mistakes are not that important; how you, as a leader, respond to the challenges encountered is what really counts. I personally feel that this thought is reassuring and allows me to take action despite my fear of doing something wrong.

What about you dear leaders? Have you ever noticed this leadership cycle in your practice? Are you accepting mistakes and correcting course as you go? Let us know what you think by adding your comments below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Authenticity

Dear Managers and Leaders!

As a leader, you are asked to get in front of the pack, to distinguish yourself by your ideas, actions, and energy. This has the potential to impact your current life and change yourself in many ways. Tackling a leadership position also means that you are responsible for the work and life of a number of people. So you cannot only think about yourself anymore. Other people are now part of your life. It is somewhat similar to raising kids. You are responsible for the people you lead just like you are responsible for the kids you raise.

Because of this high impact on you and others, the decision to tackle a leadership role should not be taken lightly. It needs to be done for good reasons. It should not be done simply to get a promotion or to get a higher pay check. Neither should it be done to impress your family or your friends. Those types of motives based on image and social standing will likely lead you and your team to disappointment, loss of purpose, failure, or even burn out! People would also see through those motives and would not really be ready to follow you in your endeavours. As Kevin Cashman is writing in his book “Leadership from the Inside Out”, the question is “Do you want to look good or do you want to make a difference?”

Genuine, authentic motivations are essential to succeed in leadership. Leadership must come from inside yourself and be authentic. It should not be guided by external desire. Leadership for leadership leads to nothing. To be effective, leadership must be grounded in reality and needs to originate from an internal movement towards an external change.

What about you dear leaders? Why are you leading? Why are you putting yourself in a riskier position? Is it to get more recognition or because you have a profound desire to make a difference? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools: Being Asked Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last four posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. I also looked at implicit and explicit questions to say that implicit questions can be dangerous for leaders and urged you to be as explicit as possible with your requests. I then talked about constructive questions. Today I conclude my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by looking at questions from a different angle: people asking you questions!

So far in our analysis of questions as leadership tools, we have only looked at one side of the coin. We only looked at the leader asking questions to various people, in various formats. But is the questioning supposed to go in a single direction? Should it always be the leader asking questions? I personally feel that it is crucial for a leader to be constantly questioned, challenged. A good leader should be open to comments because being questioned and challenged means that the resulting ideas or plans will be stronger, better thought out.

A good leader is not there to win an argument or to crush his opponents. A good leader exists to achieve his purpose in the best way possible. He welcomes, even invites, constructive feedback, critiques, and challenges from everyone to reinforce his ideas, to fine-tune his plans.

Some leaders feel threatened when being questioned by their teams. However, I feel that it is quite re-assuring when your ideas are questioned by your team or others. Having multiple people discussing the best way to attack a problem always leads to a better solution, one that encompasses a broader spectrum of possibilities. A team questioning what is happening also shows a lot of interest and concerns. This is huge for a leader! You should be grateful when it happens.

What about you dear leader, do you feel good when being questioned by your teams and others? Is your commitment to your purpose and mission so strong that you openly accept input from everyone? Please question my thoughts by adding comments below.

This concludes our series on questions as powerful leadership tools. I hope you enjoyed the last five posts on that topic. Thanks for following!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools: Constructive Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last three posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. I also looked at implicit and explicit questions to say that implicit questions can be dangerous for leaders and urged you to be as explicit as possible with your requests. Today I continue my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by providing an analysis of constructive questions to help you find the right questions to move your team forward.

For a team to move forward and go beyond what they are usually producing, it needs to be able to get out of their normal ways of thinking about problems and shift their paradigm. As a leader of the group, you need to lead your people into doing this. You need to move them along the way of innovation.

Telling people exactly where you think they should go, or exactly how you think about a given situation may help, but it will generally not produce lasting effects or allow the team to actualize the thinking. A far more powerful leadership technique is to bring people to find their own solutions or shift their paradigm by themselves. Asking the right open questions allows a leader to do just that. It stirs the group in the right direction, but the group still finds its own answers, its own solutions.

According to the book “Savoir innover en équipe” from Sébastien Beaulieu and Luc-Antoine Malo that I already discussed here in a previous post, there are three aspects that can be used to create constructive questions that will bring a team further:

• Situation logical levels
• Time
• Perceptual positions or the position of the observer

There are 6 logical levels that can be used to look at all facets of a situation:

• Environment – where and when, what is the context
• Behaviour – what, which actions
• Strategies – how, in which way, with which tools
• Values and beliefs – why, according to which values
• Identity – Who am I, how do I perceive myself
• Purpose – For who, for what

Time means past, present, and future. You can play with time as you ask questions to your team to place them in different context and to make them understand and focus on the timeline of events. To move people on timeline, simply change the verb tense.

The perceptual positions are more subtle. The first position is what I see, how I look at the world. The second position is how you see me. The third position is how an observer would see us while we discuss. The forth position is how someone would look at me, you, and the observer. As you can see, there are different ways to look at a situation depending on who looks at it. There is what I see, what the other see, what the other thinks I see, what I think the other sees, what an observer thinks of our relationship, etc. There are multiple ways of looking into a problem depending on where you put the observer.

Now let’s look at a how you can use these three elements to create constructive questions that will move your team along. The first thing you can do is to mix and match time and the logical levels in the first position to ask your team things like the following:

• What belief led me to think that way? - (past, values and beliefs)
• For what, for whom do I act this way? What purpose does it serve? – (present, purpose)
• What will I do to achieve that goal? - (future, strategies)
• In which context will I make this presentation? Who will be part of the audience? - (future, environment)
• What did I do to make that person cry? – (past – behaviour)
• How will I feel if I took this leadership role? – (future, identity)

As you can see, there are multiple ways to mix time and the 6 logical levels in the first position.

Let’s now look at a few examples in the second position to give an idea of what this looks like.

• Why did you do that? What was the purpose of this action? – (past, purpose)
• What role do you think you will have in this situation? – (future, identity)

You can also place yourself in the second position to explore the impact you have on others.

• Why does he think I’m doing that? What values does he think drive me in that direction? – (present, values and beliefs)

If you place yourself in position 3, then your question forces people to take a look at the entire system at play, but you are still part of the system. It is not about you or I in our relationship, but rather about our relationship itself. Here are two examples:

• Why are we always fighting? – (present, behaviour)
• What will be the essence of our team in five years? – (future, purpose)

In position 4, you observe the system and you are external to it. You look at it from a bird’s eye.

• What position should that team have in the context of the entire enterprise? – (present, identity)
• Why are they still fighting? – (present, behaviour)

As you can see, helping your team analyze their situation using constructive questions built around time, position of the observer, and the logical levels can help them advance to the next level of understanding. It can clarify their vision of the present and help them create a better future. Have you used similar questions in the past? Were they successful at engaging people in a constructive dialog and at looking into the future with clarity?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools 3: Implicit Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last two posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. Today I continue my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by exploring a different classification of questions: implicit and explicit questions.

According to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition), explicit means

“Fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity.”

Explicit questions are thus questions we ask directly to people. For instance, we meet with someone and we ask him or her how that project is going, or when that product will be delivered to a customer. Or we send someone an email asking if she wants to go for lunch at noon today. Explicit questions can be open or closed, but explicit questions are directly asked to your interlocutor. They can be live during a face-to-face meeting or written in an email you send to someone.

On the other hand, implicit questions are just implied. They are never expressed, never clearly stated. `For instance, you may want to know as soon as possible when a task gets delayed in a project you manage. However, you take for granted that people know about that requirement and never said it clearly to your team. This becomes an implicit question for your team, a behaviour you expect people to have even though you never explicitly required it from your team. How will you react when a task is delayed but no one tells you about it? Who would really be to blame in this situation?

As you can see, implicit questions are tough for leadership. If a leader’s requirements or expectations are not clearly expressed to the team, it inevitably leads to disappointment and hardened relationships. The leader expects something implicitly but never explicitly formulated his requirement. When the requirement is not met, the leader might get upset although he has no real right to be. It can then be quite disconcerting for the followers who did not know they had to meet an expectation they never heard about.

Leaders should be as explicit as possible!

To avoid problems with implicit questions, Thomas Kolditz in his excellent book “In Extremis Leadership” urges leaders to be as explicit as they can with their communication expectations. He tells leaders to make it crystal clear what needs to be communicated to them, especially for critical situations. As an example, he gives a list used in the US army called “the commander’s critical information requirements”. Here is the list he provides:

• Death or hospitalization of an organization member or immediate family member
• A life-threatening, lost time accident occurring within the organization
• Major theft or felony crime committed in the organization
• Significant threat to the organization’s core mission
• Legal action or credible exposure to legal action, such as damages caused by an employee in the conduct of duties
• Organizational exposure in the media, such as a positive or negative newspaper story mentioning the organization, or a visit to the organization by a journalist

The list is a bit biased towards a military setting. However, it has the benefit of making clear what some leaders would have taken for granted and left as implicit questions for their team.

I invite you to take a look at this list and to build your own list. What events in your organization should trigger immediate communication to you? Are you sure that your team is clear about those events? Do you need to make it clearer so that no one will ever wonder whether such and such information should be communicated to you? How often do you repeat this message to your team? Are you sure that people still remember your questions? Are you sure they have not turned implicit?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions Analysis: Vision Clarification

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last post, I classified questions into two broad categories: open and closed questions. I also promised that the next few posts will also discuss questions as tools for leaders. So, today, I continue our exploration of the world of questions, but looking at a very practical issue this time. You have a vision of something you want to accomplish. I will present a list of open questions that you can ask to clarify that vision.

Note that this set of questions is taken from the book “Savoir innover en équipe” (Know how to Lead your Team to Innovation – my translation) by Sébastien Beaulieu and Luc-Antoine Malo. It is an excellent little book, full of practical advices, that explores the concept of generative collaboration of Robert Dilts. Unfortunately, I do not think it has been translated into English yet.

OK, so you have a vision of something that you want to accomplish. What would be good open questions to ask to make sure that the vision is clear and that you stand a chance to succeed? Here is the list:

1. What do you want to accomplish? – The answer to this question represents where you want to go. It describes the final future state you want to accomplish.
2. What will tell you that you successfully accomplished your vision? – This will provide you with a way to clearly establish objective criterion for success. Often times, we start an enterprise without knowing how to define success. This can lead to never ending projects, ill-defined goals, and lack of motivation towards accomplishing the goals. If you want to know when you’ll arrive at destination, you need to draw the finish line first.
3. What resources will you need to accomplish your vision? – This is the list of things you need to bring with you for the journey. What do you need to be able to accomplish your vision? What are the people, the material, the knowledge that you need to successfully reach your destination?
4. What are the advantages and downsides for your team members, your team, and other actors of the system? – What will be the impact of this vision on the people you lead, on your team, and on other people important to your organization?
5. What will happen if you do not accomplish your vision? – Answering this question should bring you a sense of urgency and gauge the importance your vision has for you. This question should help you bring purpose into your project of accomplishing your vision. Without a clear understanding of the purpose of your mission, it could be quite difficult to keep your motivation and the motivation of your team up in face of adversity.
6. What are the steps to accomplish your vision? – This is the project planning per say. The fact that you understand the steps required will allow you to define clear milestones along the way and secure early wins. This is important for motivation and control.
7. What minuscule change can you do today towards your vision? – This ensures that you turn your plan into action as quickly as possible. It ensures that you will not postpone until tomorrow what you can do today. It also enhances your accountability and checks that you really want to implement your vision now.

What about you dear leader, are you asking these types of questions before you jump into a new endeavour? Do you make sure that you put everything in place and thus ensure success before you commit yourself to a project? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Asking good questions is crucial for a leader for many reasons:

• It allows the leader to monitor the various actions that are under his control and ensure that everything gets done on time and meets expectations.
• Good questions also direct people in the right direction, ensuring that everyone works towards the leader’s vision.
• It allows a leader to correct course and highlight mistakes on the fly, but by making the people realizing their mistakes themselves which is less confronting.
• Questions also constitute a powerful tool to show team members that a leader cares deeply about what they are doing and wants to understand where they are, what they are doing, how they are doing it, and where they want to go.
• By asking questions instead of giving all the answers, a leader gives his team a lot of autonomy and respect. The team members must come up with their own answers instead of waiting to be told what to do.

Since questions are so central to a leader's life, I think it is important for the Manager's Corner to spend some time studying the question (punt intended). So, this and the next few posts will explore the world of questions as leadership tools. This first post of the series is a quite simplistic view of questions. We will dig deeper in subsequent posts.

I think questions can be divided into two broad categories: closed questions and open questions. Closed questions are used to check or monitor. They are often about facts finding. They can be yes/no questions. They are more related to the world of management. The following questions are examples of closed questions:

• Have you completed this assignment?

• Is it going to be ready on time?

• When will you arrive at the meeting?

Open questions, on the opposite, don’t have a right or wrong answer. They are used for investigating opinions or exploring the mind of the person in front of you. Open questions are more related to the world of leadership. For instance, the following questions are open questions:

• What do you think of this process?

• How can we improve this situation?

• What do you think would be needed to achieve this?

It is important to note that both types of questions are very important but they cannot be used interchangeably. Some situations ask for closed questions and some ask for open questions. As a leader, you must be careful not to mix up the two types of questions. When you want facts or a yes/no answer, don’t ask an open question because you will not get what you want as an answer.

It is also important to note that your attitude when receiving the answer has to be different whether you asked an open or a closed question. For a closed question, you need to get all the facts you need or a yes/no answer. You can be strict about it, and you should be. If a question demands a yes/no answer, do not accept anything else. It is your right and your duty.

On the other hand, if you asked an open question, you need to listen carefully to what the person will answer and analyse the answer, possibly asking further questions. You need to respect the answer given to you. For instance, if you ask someone his opinion about a process you are using, you need to respect the answer even if it does not go in the direction you wanted!

What about you dear leader, are you asking a lot of questions to your team? When being led, do you prefer being asked questions or getting all the answers from your leader? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Finding Your Purpose

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I’m back from vacation today. It was good to be out for more than a week, but I’m now really happy to be back to the grind! I’m rested and full of ideas and energy for the year to come! It is great to be with you again!

I think the way you feel when coming back from vacation tells a lot about how you feel about your job. This year feels so great in comparison to the past couple of years. Back then, coming back from vacation was less than exciting for me! All the energy gained back during vacation was gone the minute I entered the office. All the positive thoughts and good intentions I had about work while on vacation suddenly vanished when faced with the barrage of emails and the meetings I faced the first morning. I think this attitude clearly shows the number one problem I had back then: lack of purpose.

When working is “just a job”, when you do not feel energized to go to work in the morning, you should question your purpose. Do you know WHY you do all that work? Are you able to link your actions to some higher level mission or intention? What are you trying to achieve? If you cannot answer these simple (actually tough) questions, you will likely not be really motivated by your work. If, on top of that, you work really hard and are under a lot of stress, then you will face burn out soon.

As a leader, I think it is your own responsibility to find your purpose and then communicate it to your followers. Without purpose, you will not be able to create a vision for yourself and for your group. Without that clear vision, it will be very difficult to motivate yourself and your followers, and drive you all in a good direction. It is essential to have a strong purpose and clear vision to be able to prioritize your tasks and be able to say no in a positive way. Your purpose should always drive your actions. Without purpose, people will drive your agenda and you will lose ownership of your life.

So, how do you find your own purpose? I am reading a book called “In Extremis Leadership” written by T.A. Kolditz and I find one of his ideas really interesting. He says that to find purpose in what you do, think about how your business impacts people’s lives, how you change the life of others by your actions, by the work you do. So, when asking yourself why you are doing the job you do, look for answers in the way your job or you impact the lives of others. You will likely find a powerful purpose and regain motivation. This purpose is what will fuel your energy and secure your focus in tough times.

What about you dear leader, do you feel energized when coming into work in the morning? Do you have a strong sense of purpose for the work you and your team are doing? Do you know how your work impacts other people’s lives? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Small Management Glitch

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I am writing this post from a waiting room in a medical clinic. Nothing life threatening, don't worry! I fell from my bicycle on Sunday and now my right shoulder hurts badly. I need to know what is going on before I leave for the USA on Friday.

As you can imagine, I had thousands of things to complete before leaving, but now, I can see my to-do list being compromised: the time I spend with doctors is time I will not be working! Health is at the bottom of the Maslow pyramid and I can't ignore the fact that I hurt.

So, what do I have to do to still be successful despite this change in plan?

• Review my to-do list and add "DOCTORS" at the top of it
• Analyse what will fall off the list and evaluate the impact
• Review priorities to make sure that the most important items will be done before I leave

So, as you can see, there is nothing major, here, just a small management glitch to face. I should be able to get over it without too much problems!

Now... what is so wrong with my shoulder?!?

What about you, dear leader? How do you usually deal with unforeseen events that wreck your plan, your schedule? Do you deal with them with extreme distress or with philosophy and method?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Give the Gift of Time

“If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”-- Fred Harburg, senior VP of leadership and management development, Fidelity Investments Company

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I was talking to someone this morning about the necessity for a leader and his team to work on important things that are not necessarily urgent. The important but not urgent things are the ones that will bring a lot of return to you and your team, not necessarily today, but down the road. As a leader, the best and most important gift you can give your team and yourself is the gift of time, time to reflect and work on important but not urgent things that matter to your team.

What are those important things that you should be working on? Well, I cannot list everything here and some items would be very specific to your situation. But let me list a few generic things that, I hope, will get you thinking some more about what is the important elements that you should spend time on. If you feel like it, please add more elements in your comments. This will help everyone with this “important” topic!

• Improve processes used by your team
• Refine your team’s sense of purpose
• Refine your team’s and team members’ specific objectives
• Better planning for your projects that includes risk analysis and mitigation
• Ensure you develop a culture for your team
• Ensure that workload is well balanced within your team
• Social bonding within the team
• Learn new skills or perfect ones that you possess
• Listen more to your team members
• Think about the next few brick walls that your team will have to face in the near future and define strategies to work around them or to tear them down before your team gets to them (that means less fire fighting!)

Now let’s face it, most leaders already have their hands full just dealing with what is urgent. Extinguishing fires every day takes up a lot of time! How can they even think about working on things that are not urgent, just important? Well, the paradox lies in the fact that, without spending time working on what is not urgent, a leader will always be stuck in fire fighting mode.

So, how can you get out of the fire fighting spiral? The first advice that I can give you is to make a conscious decision to work on important things that are not urgent. This is the first event that must occur before anything else can happen. Then, you must reserve some time every week in your agenda to work on important aspects of your work that are not urgent. Label these reserved time slots “IMPORTANT MEETING” and write them down in your agenda. Make the commitment to never remove them. My advice here would be to start small. You will see improvement even if you have a single one-hour IMPORTANT MEETING with yourself every week. This would probably be a good place to start.

Once you have the IMPORTANT MEETINGs reserved, I’d say that the next step is to come up with a plan as to what to attack first. However, don’t be too structured during those sessions. Give yourself time to brainstorm and think without too much structure. Dreaming about the future is also an important aspect of leadership...

Note that I’m definitely not the first to discuss this topic. Stephen Covey is covering this in great details in "Habit 3" of his excellent book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

What about you dear leader, are you spending time working on important but not urgent elements of your work? Have you ever come to realize that this was an essential part of your work and changed your ways to “make it happen”? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn how to best approach this problem!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

The Power of Teams!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I wanted to share something I found last night. It is, in my opinion, one of the jewels you do not find often on YouTube. Of course, it struck me from a highly emotional perspective because it reminded me of things I did in the past and team experiences I had in the past.

When you will follow the link at the end of this post, you will see a video of a jazz choir that simply does amazing things together. They sing the song Africa from Toto, without a single instrument, and they use their hands and body to simulate a storm (close your eyes at the beginning for a stunning effect). Go watch it after you’ve read this post as I’m sure you will be impressed!

So what does it have to do with leadership, management, and the power of teams, you’ll ask? Well, a choir is a team, and a very good example of a team. It has a leader (the conductor); it has team members; and the group shares a clear common objective and challenge: to perform a music piece that will impress their public.

As I was watching the video, I felt that group was a very good example of a team. So please be attentive to the following details as you will watch the video:

First, look at the singers:

• It is clear that they like what they are doing
• They have fun
• They are highly focused
• They had a tough challenge and they did it - together!
• They are proud of what they have produced (look at their faces at the end!)

Then look at the conductor

• He does not sing, but he let his people do it
• He coordinates the various movements of his team – but he does not over do it
• At times he dances at the front, more like someone who wants to raise the emotion level in his people than someone who is worried of the result
• He shows he is confident in his people. He trusts they will succeed.

I firmly believe that teams can do great things, a lot more than what individuals can perform alone. I think this choir is a great example of a team doing great things together and I wanted to share that moment with you!

What about you dear leader, have you ever led one of these super teams, the ones that truly exceed expectations? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn about what it takes to assemble such a team!

Here is the link. Enjoy, it is Summer after all :-)!

Africa By Perpetuum Jazzile

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (6)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my six previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first five symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", "Team is operating from fear", and "No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now". Today, we come to a conclusion with our analysis and tackle the sixth and last symptom: Resistance to change.

“Change is constant, direct, and temporary, for once things change, you can bet they are going to change again. Learning to thrive on constant change is the next frontier.”

-- Michael Dell, Direct from Dell

When I started to reflect on leadership, it struck me how leaders must be initiators of change. They must constantly be on the look out to find ways to improve the performance of their team and then implement these changes to ensure their team is always running at its peak performance. Without this constant search for improvement, the team can have good performance, but will never strive and will eventually lose momentum. That means that on top of improving the product that the team produces, a good leader always works on his team, trying to perfect every aspect of it.

What that constant search for better performance means to the team is that it will often, if not always, be in a state of change. Improving team performance means changing something to make the team better. So change needs to become a second nature, a part of the team’s everyday life.

You can see how a leader’s success is closely tight to his ability to successfully implement change in his organization. Without this capacity, a leader cannot improve the team’s situation or performance and will slowly but surely lose his leadership. The team will not follow him for a long time if he constantly fails at implementing change. So, as we can see, change management is very crucial to leadership!

For a leader, if team members or the entire team resist change, it is a serious condition that must be dealt with promptly. When you feel the team is not engaged or energized by a proposed change, then you need to investigate and correct the situation rapidly.

Causes

So, what can cause people to resist change? Here is a list of potential causes of resistance to change.

• People disagree with the change – If people think that the change will not bring them to a better situation or that the improvement is not worth it, then they will not accept the pain of changing easily.

• Too many changes, too rapidly – As a leader, you must know your team enough to understand their acceptable “change pace”, the pace at which they can accept change. If you go beyond the change pace of a team, you risk losing people, driving people to burn out, or de-motivating your team members.

• Fear they are unable to adapt – Change actually means that something needs to ... change! People will have to adapt to a new situation. Resistance can be triggered if people are afraid that they will not be able to adapt to the change. For instance, if someone has never used a computer and the change requires her to use a computer, then the difficulty to adapt will be seen as really high and will trigger fear and resistance.

• Threat to their security – We have already talked about security being the second level of the Maslow pyramid. If people feel that the introduced change is a threat to their sense of security, they will definitely resist change. For instance, if the change consisted of using a computer to do a task that someone was actually doing manually in the past, that person might resist change because she feels it is a job security threat.

• Dear-to-heart changes – It is possible that you are trying to change something that is important for the team. Maybe the team is proud of what it accomplished in the past using their old way of doing things. Maybe they are not ready to change because the old way is their branding so to speak.

• Failure of past change initiatives – Maybe people resist the current change because of a bad history with change. Maybe the previous initiatives were failures or did not bring the promised improvements.

Solutions

To help limit the resistance to change in your team, I would offer the following strategies to guide you in your implementation of change initiatives.

• Listen – You first need to listen carefully to your team members and understand all their concerns, fears, and objections. Don’t see them as negative; see them as different points of view that will allow you to refine your ideas, to improve your plans.

• Communicate – You need to be totally transparent with your team members if you want your change initiatives to be successful. You need to explain to them why you think that this change is required and what improvement it will bring to the team. Always talk about the positive and negative impacts that a change will have on the team members themselves and link them to the importance the change has for the team and the rest of the organization. You need to calm people and make them feel secure. Ensure that you understand the possible threats that a change can represent and the fears that your team members could have facing the proposed change and address them right from the start.

• Validate – You should always validate your change initiative ideas with at least some people on your team to ensure you are going in the right direction. You do that before going public with your idea so you have time to refine the initiatives.

• Engage – The easiest way to ensure there will be no resistance to change is when the change initiative comes from your team members themselves. In that case, people will immediately feel compelled by the change, understand why it is required, and they will be willing and eager to implement it.

What about you dear leader, do you see a lot of resistance to change in your team? Also, if you see other causes or other solutions, please share them with this group by adding a comment below so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, and improve their performance. To find out how to generate change initiatives from your team, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (5)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my five previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first four symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", and "Team is operating from fear". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the fift symptom: No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now.

As you lead your team, you really want to have all your team members on the same page. You want them to build the same ship, to march to the same drum beat; you want them all to be aligned with your vision. This is what you want. However, reality can be quite different from what you want! Leadership deals with human beings and human beings are diverse, understand different things even when listening to the same source, have their own agenda, and sometimes forget. To succeed in having everyone on your team focused on the same end goal requires your constant effort and attention.

That means that you must always be aware of where your people are really going, not where you think they are going. You must also constantly re-enforce communication of your vision, of where you want them to go.

Signals

So, what are the first few signals that should alert you about an alignment problem within your team? I would say the following should compel you to re-state your vision and priorities to your team:

• Bad priority call by one of your team members – If one of your team members makes a priority call that goes against what you would have made yourself, you should be alerted and try to understand why it happened and align the team member right away.

• Lack of focus, or the focus is not important to attain the vision – When you see people on your team going in all sorts of directions that are not important to the achievement of the vision, you should definitely have a talk with them and re-focus their efforts.

• Team’s ideas are going in wrong direction - In team discussions, ideas brought up by your team members are not going in the right direction. You can see that if you followed them, they would not lead the team in the direction set by the vision.

It is probably impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of signals, but you should understand the general pattern and apply it to your particular situation.

Causes

Causes of this lack of alignment in your group can be multiple. Here are a few possibilities to help you sort out what is happening in your team.

• Lack of vision from the leader – if the leader himself does not know where the team is going, then the team will have problems following the leader. As soon as the vision becomes blurry, you will see the team members actually creating their own vision, consciously or not, and follow this vision.

• Lack of communication of the leader’s vision – if the leader has a clear vision of where the team is going but if that vision is not communicated clearly to the team, then it is equivalent to not having a vision at all.

• Team does not share or embrace the leader’s vision – here we are in a situation where the leader has a good vision of where the team is going and he has communicated that vision clearly to the team. Now, if the team does not share that vision, if the team members never bought into the direction where the leader wants them to go, then the leader will always have to fight with the team to make them go where he wants.

• Vision is clear but the plan is ill-defined – everyone agrees here on a clear, well-communicated vision. However, that vision is far and away and the path to get to the vision has not been clearly established. That means that the goal is defined but has never been actualized. People see the goal but no one knows how to get there. In this case, you are not facing misalignment but rather confusion as to how to make the vision real.

• Leader did not set priorities clearly – if the team is not clear as to what the priorities are, or if everything has equal importance, then it is really difficult for the team members to make the right calls by themselves when faced with a difficult situation.

Solutions

As you can see above, your team will lose its sense of direction when a vision for the team is not clearly established and shared by your team. When team members do not know what the collective vision for the team is, they will define their own vision and act upon it. This might not be conscious, but this is what will happen because a certain vision needs to be created before action can take place. You cannot really hammer a nail if the shape of the house to build is not well defined in your mind. The problems come when people building the house together do not have the same vision of the shape of the house. The house will likely never be finished if everyone working on it had a different vision of the completed house.

Leading a team is like building a house. The team needs to share the same vision of their end product or destination otherwise nothing will be achieved despite all the effort put into it. The team needs to share a collective vision. As the leader of the team, you own that collective vision. You are responsible to make sure that the collective vision is created, shared, communicated, and acted upon.

Note that I’m not saying that you need to define that collective vision on your own. Please do not get me wrong here. It is OK, even preferable, for the leader not to create everything himself. Have your team help elaborate the vision! Have your team find solutions to their own problems as a team. This is actually extremely powerful! If you have your team participate in defining the collective vision of your team, you will see that people are suddenly engaged and the vision will be automatically shared by everyone on the team. On top of that, your team’s vision will then be anchored in reality because your team members are on the floor every day. They are connected with reality.

What about you dear leader, does your team have a clear collective vision? Do you have all your team members acting in concert and going in the same direction? Also, if you see other causes, other signals, or other solutions, please share them with this group so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, or improve their performance. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (4)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my four previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first three symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the forth symptom: Team is operating from fear.

For your team to function at its full capacity, it needs to feel safe to take risks and work at its limits. It needs to operate through synergy and collaboration to go beyond what each individual can achieve. A team operating from fear will not have the right environment and confidence to push its limits, transcend its capacity, and deliver on their promises.

Detecting that a team is operating from fear is probably tougher than detecting the symptoms that we discussed in earlier posts because it involves feelings. We will try below to help you detect this situation with more accuracy and then we will discuss how to turn the situation around.

What type of fear?

I am not a psychologist so I cannot give you an authoritative list of fears that people can have in the workplace. However, here is a list of what I consider when I think about fear in the workplace:

• Fear of losing a job (the number one fear, especially in the current economic climate)
• Fear of losing a position
• Fear of being embarrassed in public
• Fear of being hurt emotionally
• Fear of impacting one’s family (if working too much or losing a salary for instance)

How to Detect Fear?

Here are a number of things to check when you are wondering whether your team is operating from fear.

• Lack of Sharing – When people on your team keep information to themselves or refuse to help each other, then there might be fear involved. It is possible that the people keeping information for themselves want to avoid being surpassed in skills by others which would mean a fear of losing one’s job, or at least losing the capacity to advance in one’s career. Information is power and sharing information could mean losing some power over the others in the minds of those protecting information.

• Yes Sir! mentality – When your team never questions your decisions, when you are alone at the top making all the calls and never encountering any criticisms, voiced opinions, or positive feedback, then it is possible that your people fear the consequences of speaking up.

• Finger pointing – When a problem occurs and people immediately try to find the culprit rather than focusing on solving the problems, then you most likely have a fear issue to deal with. It is necessary to find the root cause of a problem, but not in terms of finding the culprit. If your team is in that mode, then you should definitely look into this as a serious symptom that will generate more and more problems down the line.

• Protect-your-back mentality – This often goes hand-in-hand with the finger pointing. If your organization is caught up in a finger pointing match every time a problem occurs, obviously, people will do everything they can to protect their back so that fingers will point in other directions should problems occur. When team members have a protect-your-back mentality, they will not want to push their limits and operate at full capacity. They will also lose a lot of time just protecting their back instead of doing productive work!

• Risk avoidance – If people on your team avoid risks, it likely means that they do not feel safe in their environment as we already discussed in yesterday’s post.

• Mania to have everything in writing – When people ask that everything be captured in writing, it means that there is lack of trust and fear that things can turn bad. This is why people who do not know each other well will sign contracts to close their deals while family and friends might just talk about doing things together. The level of trust is higher. If people on your team constantly ask that things be written down, you should consider that a serious symptom that is likely related to fear or lack of trust.

What Should You Do?

So what should you do if you detect that your people are operating from fear? First, I’d say that you need to discover the root cause of their fear and eradicate it. If the fear is not grounded in reality, then you need to tell your team clearly that there are no reasons to be afraid. For instance, if people are afraid of losing their job because of the economic climate and you do not see any potential layoffs in the making, then you must reassure your team. On the other hand, if their fear is real, then you need to work differently and minimize the impact of their fear.

Second, as a general rule, you must create a safe working environment for your team. Your team needs to be a place where people don’t feel threatened to lose their job at the slightest mistake. It needs to be a place where people are not judged or found culprit but rather a place where they can learn and experience more and more things, where they can be recognized for the risks they are taking and praised for their ideas. Your team must be a cauldron where the magic potion of trust and coaching will drive your people to develop and produce more than the sum of what each team member would have done alone.

What about you dear leader, have you ever felt that your team was driven by fear? Have you ever found yourself protecting your back or finger pointing every time a problem occurs? Please help me complete the picture by adding your comments!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (3)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my three previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first two symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting" and "Team members are not coming up with new ideas". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the third symptom: Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries.

As a leader, it is really important to grow your team. If you don’t, then your team will become stale and you will not be able to grow your vision, aspire for better things for your team. A dynamic team, just like a dynamic individual, is a team that grows!

You can grow your team by bringing in more people. The new people will bring fresh ideas and energy on to the table and will help expand your team further. But bringing in new people is not always possible due to political or economical reasons.

Another way of growing your team is by growing your team members. As a leader, you need to ensure that the people on your team are challenged and involved in a constant learning process. You have to give stretch objectives to your people that will help them go beyond what they have accomplished up until now. This will keep them interested, focused, and challenged. Also, it will allow your team to tackle more and more difficult tasks and thus take more and more space in the larger organization.

But what do you do when someone on your team does not want to grow anymore? What if someone constantly refused your stretch assignments and only wanted to be confined in the same tasks over and over again? That person comes in, does his job, and leaves, without showing a desire to succeed and to go beyond what was accomplished yesterday.

As this person’s leader, you need to have a serious discussion with him to understand why he is not willing to go beyond his boundaries. It may very well be caused by personal reasons (divorce, illness, ...) and you may have to accept the current situation while the personal conditions persist. If personal reasons are not causing the situation, I would next explore these environmental conditions as potential factors.

• Compelling vision for the team - When the team spirit is really low and when people don’t feel they are part of a real team, when people do not share a common compelling vision, people will not feel like going the extra mile and pushing their limits. If you feel your team is not pushing hard, look at how people perceive their team and how motivated they are to make the team succeed. To accept to grow, people need to feel they are part of a bigger something that becomes more important than their own comfort.

• Accept mistakes - Pushing our own limit means taking risks. It means going beyond what we have accomplished so far, with no proof that we can actually do it right the first time. For people to accept to go beyond their boundaries, they need to feel they are in a safe environment where mistakes are allowed. Safety is at the second level of Maslow’s pyramid. Most people will not take risks if they do not feel it is safe. So, support people you have stretched by accepting their mistakes.

• Incentives and rewards - People need to have a reason to grow, to go out of their comfort zone. You must make sure people understand why you are asking them to achieve these stretch objectives. You need to explain why these goals are essential for them, for the team, for the larger organization. You can even explain the process of growing and why you are asking them to grow. Also, you need to celebrate growing successes more than any other accomplishments. Do not forget awards and public recognition of your people’s successes. This is very important.

• Realistic stretch - People will follow you and work on your stretch objectives as long as they believe they are attainable. If they feel they will fail even before they start, motivation will not be there, people will not feel safe, and they are then likely to give up before they start. Your first job as a leader is to carefully choose assignments so people will be able to achieve them. Your second job is to convince your people that they can and will achieve their stretch objectives.
  
  
• Coaching them to success - Once you give a stretch goal to someone on your team, you cannot leave him alone with it. You must feel responsible for his success. You need to follow what he is doing and help him along the way. Not that you should do the job for him, but you must support him and guide him towards success. If someone on your team fails a stretch objective, he will be less likely to tackle your next stretch assignment with enthusiasm and could soon become one who refuses to push his boundaries.

What about you dear leader, have you ever met people who did not want to go beyond their boundaries? Have you ever felt like not going beyond your boundaries? Please help me complete the picture by adding your comments!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (2)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my two previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first symptom: A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting. Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the second symptom: Team members are not coming up with new ideas.

For a leader, getting a lot of fresh ideas from his team members is crucial. Without a good flow of new ideas coming from team members about the team’s portfolio, about the positioning of the team in the larger organization, about processes, or about the way the team is run, the leader is left alone with all the creativity. In this situation, the leader himself will have to diagnose the problems and find the solution. This is a big task for a single person. It is also likely to fail because the leader cannot know his team enough to understand every aspect of it as well as his team members do.

I believe it is natural for people to diagnose problems that are happening to them and find their own solutions to these problems. It is also natural for human beings to find ways to improve their situation. It is probably a trademark of the human race to always want to do better and always want to feel better. What that means is that the ideas are probably there in your team members’ mind even if they are not bringing them up to you.

Culture

So, how do you go about finding what is causing the problem? The first thing that I would question is the culture of the company. In some cultures, the leader has absolute power and it is not well seen for an employee to speak up, or help. If you have been leading your team for some time and your team members never came up with a complaint or an idea, then it is possible that you are in this situation. Are you bringing up issues and ideas to your boss yourself? If you do not feel comfortable to do so, it can tell you that the company culture does not allow for that at the moment.

Changing a culture is not easy, but at least this is something you can talk about openly with your team members. You can mention to them what you have observed and tell them that you would like things to change. Note that you are part of the culture and you will have to be ready to change and value the ideas that people will start to bring forth. Your reaction to the first comment that people will make will be extremely important. You will have to be open and treat this first idea with a lot of respect. You should probably publicly recognize the person who brought up this first idea to reinforce the importance of the action. Also, be patient. Cultures take a long time to change.

Bad Past Experience

The second thing that I would investigate is history. Is it possible that people brought a number of issues and ideas in the past and you did not take them seriously, ignore them, or did not take action? Is it possible that your vision is so strong that you are not open to suggestions that question its validity? You need to create an atmosphere where bringing ideas or issues is valued and show that you care and will take action when people bring up ideas.

To turn this situation around, I think you should talk to your team openly. Tell them that you recognize what happened in the past and mention that you will make sure that every idea will be treated with lots of respect from now on. Create a framework where ideas are recognized and welcome. For instance, you can keep an open list of ideas on your team’s web page with a list of actions, decision, and ROI for each of them. You can then have a contest where you recognize the best idea every quarter.

Lack of Responsibility

The third thing that I would measure is whether my team members feel responsible for the success of the team. Sometimes, team members do their job OK but don’t really value the success of their team. It is also possible that you, the leader, do not involve your team members in the team’s decision making and solution finding, not allowing your team members to take ownership of the team's success.

It is your role to make your team members feel responsible for the success of their own team. You need to give them a vision that they buy into for the future of the team and start involving them in the solution finding and decision making for the team. You need to create a sense of urgency around the success of the team and ensure that people feel their team is important and real. Challenge them to improve products or the team itself and then put the people in a context where they have to find problems and solutions. Open the door to getting help from people and you will see your team members unite to help you.

What about you dear leader, do you see other reasons why people would not bring up issues or propose ideas? Do you have other suggestions to stimulate team members to bring more ideas to the table?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that create a great framework to involve your employees and get their ideas. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (1)

Editor’s note: This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=1764277&trk=anet_ug_hm

And the specific discussion can be found here:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers&discussionID=3686766&gid=1764277&commentID=3976276&trk=view_disc.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my previous post, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously. Today and in the next few posts, we will analyze what a leader should do when he notices that these events are happening in his team. Here is the complete list again.

• A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting
• Team members are not coming up with new ideas
• Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries - Mediocrity is the norm, lack of motivation to move beyond their comfort zone
• Team is operating from fear - Lack of transparency, sharing of knowledge, or voicing of opinions. People start saying "yes" instead of questioning your decisions
• No one seems to know what’s urgent and what’s crucial, or at which point we are right now
• Resistance to change

A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting.

You will notice this situation when one of your team members misses a deadline, or when the work is not done to your satisfaction, or when elements are missing from the work that was done. This is a serious situation, but one that is easy to diagnose and correct.

The very first thing that needs to be done is to handle the current situation. If the deadline was missed, you need to correct the course and see what can be done to deliver the task as soon as possible and deal with the impact of being late. If the quality is poor or contents are missing, you also need to deal with that first.

Once you have dealt with the problem at hand, you need to understand the causes of the failure so that you can correct the situation and ensure that it will not be repeated in the future. I would first check with the person whether all the elements of the assignment were well understood (timeline, contents, quality). If they were not, you have to look at your way of delegating tasks to your team members and make sure that you are doing it in a very clear way for your staff. Maybe things are clear to you, but the real goal is to make them clear for your staff. Make sure that when you delegate tasks to your team that these four elements are perfectly clear for the people who will have to perform the delegated tasks:

• Nature of the assignment (what needs to be done)
• Boundaries of the assignment (how much decision-making power is given to the employee)
• Quality expectations (what you expect in terms of quality)
• Timeline (what is the deadline for the assignment or the deadlines if more than one milestone needs to be met)

You also need to make sure that the person you delegate the task to has what it takes to perform the delegated task. Yes you want to stretch people ability to develop their talent but you do not want to set them up for failure!

If you check with the person who did not deliver and every aspect of the delegation was clear to him and yet he failed to deliver, then you have to investigate some more.

• Maybe the person did not have the right skills to be able to accomplish the task properly. If this is the case, it is tough to blame the person except for one thing. He should have told you earlier than on the deadline. You have to make it clear to your team members that people must tell you quickly if they feel they cannot perform a task or will miss a deadline.
• Maybe the task got pre-empted by another one. In that case, you have to make it clear that you need to be consulted prior to switching tasks when there will be an impact on schedule or quality. You do not want to micro-manage your people, but you need to control the impacts on the schedule.
• Maybe the person did not take the task seriously. Although this is a rare event, you need to make sure that there will be a consequence for the employee who did such a thing. You need to make it clear to him (and the rest of the group) that this will not be tolerated and reinforce the importance of what the team does.
• Maybe the timeline was just not realistic in the first place. Once again in that case, I would question the fact that the employee did not tell you ahead of time that he had problems meeting the deadline.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it can help you in your search for the root cause of your problem.

On the next post, we will look at the next symptoms.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.