Category Archives: strategy

Leadership Decisions and Organizational Thinking

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What can smart leaders do to avoid making decision errors that lead to business and career bloopers? You can start by reading Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath – as well as Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Working with an executive coach can raise your level of awareness about your own thinking. It can be helpful to dissect some previous decisions and look at how they could have been improved.
Organizations can avoid decision errors by requiring leaders and managers to use checklists, while fostering a culture where people watch out for one another. Team members should be taught to guard against biases and develop a sophisticated awareness of decision-making obstacles.
Every organization is essentially a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions. It must therefore work to ensure the quality of its ‘products’ at every developmental stage, to include:

  • Framing of the problem to be solved
  • Collection of relevant information
  • Consideration of alternative points of view
  • Reflection, forecasting and pre-mortem reviews

Setting up decision processes and ensuring quality control are alternatives to conducting a postmortem review in the wake of a disaster. We truly need a better vocabulary for decision-making processes. As Kahneman writes:

Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism. Much like medicine, the identification of judgment errors is a diagnostic task, which requires a precise vocabulary. Similarly [to diagnostic labels for diseases], labels such as ‘anchoring effects,’ ‘narrow framing’, or ‘excessive coherence’ bring together in memory everything we know about a bias, its causes, its effects, and what can be done about it.

Leaders will make better choices when they trust the decision-making process and their critics to be informed and fair, and when their decision is judged by how it was made – not only by how it turned out.
What about you in your company? How do you approach important decisions? Do you have a trusted mentor or coach who can help you broaden your perspective? Maybe we should talk?

3 Types of Trust

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There are three different forms of trust, according to “The Enemies of Trust,” a February 2002 Harvard Business Review article by leadership experts Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau:

1. Strategic trust – the trust employees have in the people running the show to make the right strategic decisions. Do top managers have the vision and competence to set the right course, intelligently allocate resources, fulfill the mission and help the company succeed?
2. Personal trust – the trust employees have in their managers. Do managers treat employees fairly? Do they consider employees’ needs when making decisions about the business and put the company’s needs ahead of their own?
3. Organizational trust – the trust people have in the company itself. Are processes well designed, consistent and fair? Does the company make good on its promises?

Clearly, these three types of trust are distinct, but they’re linked in important ways. For example, every time a manager violates her direct reports’ personal trust, organizational trust is shaken.

The Trust Crisis

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A Watson Wyatt Worldwide study of 12,750 U.S. workers in all major industries found that companies with high trust levels outperform their low-trust counterparts by 186 percent.
Nonetheless, organizations are woefully slow to realize the bottom-line implications of trust deficits.
Despite trust’s importance, few leaders give it the focus it deserves. Misunderstood as a nebulous “feeling”, trust is earned through consistent, positive behaviors practiced over time, making it ultimately manageable.
“Trust always affects two outcomes – speed and cost,” confirms leadership guru Stephen M. Covey in The Speed of Trust. “When trust goes down, speed will also go down and costs will go up. When trust goes up, speed will also go up and costs will go down. It’s that simple, that real, that predictable.”
I’ll bet there’s a trust deficit in your company, and you may not even realize it. Maybe it’s part of the culture, and it’s not talked about. It’s a hidden cause of lack of engagement. What do you think?

Foresight: Survival of the Optimists

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“Optimists have a sixth sense for possibilities that realists can’t or won’t see.” ~ Warren Bennis, leadership professor.

There is a dramatic difference between people who react to roadblocks with a sense of futility and pessimism and those who react with determination and optimism.

Psychologist Martin Seligman has validated that the most successful business leaders are inspired by a sense of optimism. I can say that of the corporate coaching clients I’ve worked with , the ones who succeed most often display a sense of realistic optimism. They are grounded in reality, but see things in a positive light. Setbacks are temporary, impersonal, and challenges to be overcome.

Those who learn to be optimistic about life and work are far more likely to be successful than those who view a current event through the pessimist’s lens. Being optimistic doesn’t mean ignoring reality or the hardships required to get great results. Leaders can define a business reality, yet defy a negative verdict. By being optimists, leaders give people the hope, energy and strength needed to carry on.

The more you understand reality, the more prepared you are to endure hardships and adversity. Optimism, and a vision for what’s possible, supplies the energy to keep going, persist through challenges and come out on the other side.

One of the best ways to expand your potential leadership abilities is to work with an executive coach, who can help you see what you don’t yet see. An experienced coach will stimulate your thinking and conversations about what’s possible.

You Can See Forever

To become a better leader, or to be seen as a high-potential leader, spend more time in the future. At some point, a future focus will permeate your thinking and saturate your communications.

Everything you do and say will remind people of the future you want to create – for yourself, your colleagues, your customers and the organization. You will draw upon your past experiences, your core values and your guiding purpose.

You will become well-read about trends as you study the future and talk with other people about the exciting possibilities. There’s no doubt that we live in interesting times, and game-changing ideas, products and services are popping up all the time.

Being part of the future allows you to contribute to its creation. You can’t do that without taking time to develop your capacity to be future-focused. And you can’t become future-focused without discipline and action.

What are you doing to express a future orientation in your communications? Where can you interject more forward-thinking and anticipatory thinking? How are you asking your people to think about the future, for your products, services and customers? I’d love to hear from you.

3 Ways to Grow Your Future-Focus

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When I’m working with clients through corporate coaching, we look at ways to expand leadership qualities, and in particular, their ability to become more future-oriented. The answer is to spend more time thinking about the future, but this is harder than it may seem at first.

There are three ways to expand your ability to become more future-oriented and hone your leadership effectiveness. In The Truth About Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), Posner and Kouzes urge readers to spend time learning about the future through:

  1. Insight
  2. Outsight
  3. Foresight

Insight: Explore Your Past

This exercise that follows will help you connect your past experiences and values with your current work. When you look backward, you can see farther ahead and imagine future possibilities.

Look for repeating themes in your life – the recurring messages that keep reminding you of what matters most. For younger leaders, there’s less past to recall; however, it’s still important to use the richness of your life experiences to uncover ideals.

Here are some questions to explore:

  • Identify the recurring theme in your life.
  • To which topic do you return again and again?
  • What story do you keep telling and retelling?

Search your past to find a theme. It will probably form the basis of your core values and higher purpose. When you know more about yourself, your dreams and your purpose, it will be easier to visualize the future.

Outsight: Imagine the Possibilities

To be a credible leader, you need to spend more time reading, thinking and talking about long-term possibilities. Develop the discipline to spend more time studying the future.

Establish a “future committee” dedicated to collecting ideas, articles, information and resources about trends affecting your organization. Track publications, both off- and online. Circulate these ideas to stimulate discussions and innovative thinking.

For example, The World Future Society recommends examination of six distinct business-trend categories:

  • Demographics
  • Economics
  • Government
  • Environment
  • Society
  • Technology

Improve your understanding of the world around you, not just in your industry. A game-changing product in an unrelated field could impact your customers and their need for your services. No one can afford to be short-term oriented in today’s globally connected marketplace.

These are two ways to become more future-oriented, a key leadership trait. In our next post, we’ll discuss a third way.

How to Develop Future Focus

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How do you develop your capacity to be future-focused? In the work I do in healthcare coaching and other areas, I recommend they carve out some time each week to peer into the distance and imagine what may be out there.

Start with 30 minutes a day, using the time to learn about what’s going on in your industry, with customers, and with the potential future of your products and services. You can read magazines, books and/or online research.

Top executives estimate they spend only about 3 percent of their time thinking about, and getting others on board with, the critical issues that will shape their business 10 or more years down the road. It’s simply not enough time.

Sparking Energy for What Really Matters

Here’s the problem: In tough economic times, everyone hunkers down on tactics. They focus on survival and results. Decisions become pragmatic. After a while, however, this short-term approach grinds us down, and we lose sight of the big picture, the business strategy.

In today’s difficult times, people need to be reminded of why they are doing what they do – and why it matters. This is when leaders can step up and make a difference. Leadership is more than encouraging high-performance; it’s about reminding people of what they are trying to build and why it matters.

In many ways, leadership supplies oxygen to keep the fires going. When people are mired in day-to-day work details, they can lose their bearings. An effective leader makes a difference by helping people see their role in building a better future.

It’s your job to connect the dots for people in the work they do. Show them how their work contributes to the results of the organization. Map out how what they do today ties to what the company is trying to build for the future.

What are you doing to keep the fires of engagement burning in your people? I’d love to hear from you.