Month: October 2011

Some of the best leaders I know
are also
some of the most accessible people I know.
They talk to everyone,
whether they’re in an elevator
or on a plane.
They’re constantly gathering
ideas and information and insights.

In a New York Times interview,
David Barger,
president and chief executive of JetBlue,
shared

“…I really believe in giving people
the opportunity to have access.
There’s got to be other people within JetBlue
who can run this company
who are not just my direct reports.
They’re in the organization
and they’ve got great careers ahead of them.”

Look for talent and ideas and information
everywhere.

In primary school,
we’re taught that
the correct way to take a class/course/workshop
is to sit quietly through the presentation,
waiting for the question and answer period
at the end
to ask questions.
Of course, when you DO ask a question at the end,
your buddies scowl at you
because you’re prolonging the class.

So you don’t ask questions.
You aren’t proactive.
You merely GET the information
you’re given.

Newsflash…
You’re not in primary school anymore.

Successful folks don’t GET information.
They TAKE information.

When I present to a successful person,
I know they have a reason
for attending my presentation.
They’ll have a list of questions
(part of presentation preparation
is trying to guess these questions)
and they will take the information
they need from me.

I can tell within the first five minutes
who are the successful people
and who aren’t.

You’re in the real world now.
Ask the questions you want answered.
Take the information you need.

Micah has an absolutely wonderful
post on how to mentor entrepreneurs
(a must-read for entrepreneurs
or ANYONE working with entrepreneurs).

One of his tips?

“Ask, dont tell.
Its not your company.
Be respectful of that.”

I suck at this,
brutally suck at it,
and knowing this,
I tend to mentor more over email
than person to person.
With email,
I can say what I want to say
and then go back
and replace all the telling with questions.

If you’re mentoring entrepreneurs,
you can’t tell them what to do
with their own companies.

As Micah states
“The biggest value
you can ever provide
as a mentor
is helping the entrepreneur
discover their path for themselves.
Being a mentor is
an act of supportive self-discovery
not one of explicit direction.
Its hard to not just tell
the entrepreneur what to do
— after all, you’ve gone down that path
and have succeeded or failed,
so you should know
— but fight that instinct,
and instead, help them
become better leaders,
dot connectors and problem solvers.”

Ask. Don’t Tell.

Recently,
I was asked to
help a driver navigate
to a friend’s house.
The first thing I asked was…
where are we currently?

It sounds like a no-brainer
but when setting strategy,
many leaders forget to ask this question.

Richard Rumelt
talks about how important
it is to diagnose
the current situation
before coming up with solutions.

“A good strategy has,
at a minimum,
three essential components:
a diagnosis of the situation,
the choice of an overall guiding policy,
and the design of coherent action.
Many attempts at strategy
lack a good diagnosis.
At the star of most consulting engagements,
the client wants an appraisal
of a particular course of action
or wants advice on what to do.
I almost always back up
and try to create a better diagnosis
of the situation
before getting into recommendations.”

If you don’t know where you currently are,
you can’t figure out
how to get where you want to go.

Sasha Dichter recently
performed a generosity experiment.
For a month,
he said yes
to every single request.

He did this because
he feels
“If I want the world to be
more open,
more action orientated,
and more generous,
then I have to be more open,
more action orientated
and more generous.”

Change is contagious.
If you want to see change,
be the change.

Little ol’ me has quietly and slowly
changed the atmosphere
in huge corporations
by simply wishing everyone I meet
a cheery good morning.
I say it to one person.
She, being polite, says it back.
Then when she sees the next coworker,
it is easier for her to repeat it.

If you don’t love the world you’re living in,
change it.
It REALLY is that easy.

I see it all of the time
in both business and writing.
Someone has a bit of success,
and they stop listening
because they believe they know everything.

This stage usually comes
before a professional failure
because, of course,
no one knows everything.

Mary Jo Asmus shares
that subject or technical knowledge
can be a bad thing.

Why?

One reason is…
“Listening stops:
When you believe you know
all of the right answers,
you stop listening to other’s ideas.
This stifles creativity,
and can be a source
for flawed decision making.”

Knowledge is a great tool.
However,
thinking you have ALL of the knowledge
can be very, very dangerous.

I’m a moderator on a writing loop.
A moderator on a busy loop
only has to moderate.
A moderator on a slower loop
has the additional responsibility
of being a facilitator.

My biggest challenge
is to keep the loop from being the K show.
I do this by sourcing information
from other authors,
by quoting other authors,
and by asking questions
rather than replying with comments.
I step back,
and wear my facilitator hat.

Create Learning
has a great post on
the 10 Sins of the Facilitator
and one of those sins is
“Interprets or modifies
the words spoken and
records the “spin” on the input
rather than documenting
what is actually said.”

A good facilitator will be
as invisible as possible.