Leadership Challenge

Seven Steps to Becoming a Shovel Ready Leader

We've heard quite a bit lately about "shovel ready" projects usually framed as "construction projects ready-to-go" but just in need of a bit of "stimulus."

Well, in these difficult times, with perhaps more to come, the hour has arrived for our leaders to become shovel ready. It's time for you to get shovel ready. It's time for all of us to become a part of the stimulus.

To me, the term shovel ready means that some advanced thought and effort has precipitated the ability to be ready.

With that in mind, I have devised Seven Steps to becoming a Shovel Ready Leader^TM.

1. Passion: Even amid all of the chaos swirling around you, your family or your organization, you must find a few moments to reflect on what you really are passionate about. Ask yourself why you care about this? Without knowing this key ingredient, you might dig in the wrong direction. Write your responses down. Reflect on them often, especially during moments of hesitation.

2. Presence: This does not mean propping yourself up with your shovel as others do the work or plopping behind your desk in your favorite pinstripes. Leadership is a moment-to-moment choice. To be a Shovel Ready Leader^TM you must be authentically present to those around you at all times. You need to completely close the gap between your beliefs and behaviors. To do this you must be aware of what you stand for and why. Your core values are key to your success. Dig too far away from your core and a bottomless pit of dismal outcomes awaits you. Please not, presence includes listening, not just hearing. Shovel Ready Leaders^TM are active listeners.  They use questions as teaching tools. When you listen deeply, you create a credibility path so others not only want to join with you, but lobby for the honor.

3. Voice: This is not about raising your voice over the din. It's about discovering your true voice and helping others find theirs. Storytelling is the key. Shovel Ready Leaders^TM find elements from past stories about overcoming adversity that help him or her make sense of what is ahead and how to frame the future Vision Story. Moreover, your Vision Story must offer a terrain map of a positive future and everyone's role in it. Speaking from your heart will attract others who will join you in this new quest moving them away from chaos and towards commitment. However, in your workplace, where change may be greeted with anything but open arms, people my need to be personally and warmly invited. Just because they work in the same organization doesn't mean they feel a part of what's next. Invite them personally and share the benefits of picking up a shovel with you.

4. Action: Grab your shovel, dig a deep trench and shove those "never been helpful" limiting thoughts deep into the ditch and bury them for good. Your mind is your most valuable ally. Yet, it can be your most ardent adversary. When you take charge of your mind, you begin to take charge of your life. Shovel Ready Leaders^TMunderstand leading is about doing not just talking. Question everything, especially those redundant systems and those deep potholes potentially masked as your policies and procedures. When you do that, you will help others see obstacles as opportunities.

5. Service: Being of service is a way of life. Choose it. Being a Shovel Ready Leader^TMmeans not looking at those around you as tools in your "Tim the Tool Man" belt. You don't call them "my people." You are note the "boss" of them; you are their servant leader. You honor them as individuals and refuse to use them as a "most pit" of automatons. You purposely create a diversified cast of talented fellow leaders. Many of them should be smarter than you and preparing to succeed you if you're lucky. When you recognize and reward, you think about it in advance. You don't just toss thank you bouquets to the masses as you mosey down the hallway. You acknowledge them meaningfully, and not with an "Attaperson" print out from the copy machine either. Learn about the people who have rolled up their sleeves with you and acknowledge them personally. Your goals should include focusing on helping them create their masterpiece.

6. Evolve: Incremental or giant leaps. You choose. The Shovel Ready Leader^TMis a rabid learner. SRL's never plateau. They are always stretching themselves and others. Read voraciously and encourage others to do the same. Seek out other learners as well. Create a Book Club at work and use all types of books (like The Offsite) to ignite a leadership conversation with your team. Always be ready to try new things. "It's the way we've always done things" is not the battle cry of Shovel Ready Leaders^TM.

7. Demonstrate: Exhibit the above behaviors every moment by using my simple but effective The Four Commitment Questions^TM "What Can I Do More Of? What Can I Do Less Of? What Can I Start Doing? What Can I Stop Doing?" Commit to this new way of living. Without commitment, nothing changes. Not you. Not them. Nothing.

Well, there you have it, The Seven Steps to becoming a Shovel Ready Leader^TM. I'm sure there are more. Let me know if you come up with an eighth, ninth or tenth. I'd be glad to post them. Send to Robert@leaderinsideout.com

Robert H. Thompson is the author of The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable. You can reach him and subscribe to his Leadership Path newsletter at www.leaderinsideout.com.

New Year's Resolution: Get Into Better Shape

Happy New Year, everyone! This is the week we start acting on all those resolutions we made on New Year's Eve, right?  You know, the one's about getting into better shape. Make sure that you include on that list getting into better shape as a leader.

And that means practice, practice, and more practice. I've written about practice five times in the last three months, and I can't resist beginning the new year with yet another reminder about its importance. 

I'm delighted that this topic is finally getting some attention. Two new books that address the subject—ones I have recommended previously—Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, are both on the Wall Street Journal's bestsellers list.  Bill Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company, wrote a blog about it for Harvard Business Online calling deliberate practice "The Secret to Success in a Failing Economy." 

I also want to thank readers of LeaderTalk for engaging me in conversation about the issue. I've received more comments about deliberate practice than about any other topic. In response to a couple of our readers I attempted to clarify how we can build deliberate practice into our daily schedule.

Deliberate practice is not the same thing as daily execution. It's not about what we do routinely during the 8, 10 or 12 hours we're at work. Deliberate practice, as the phrase implies, is about intentionally engaging in an activity that will improve how we execute and how we lead.  (See my November 12 blog for more on the elements of deliberate practice.)

Let's say you get feedback that you're not listening attentively to others and that you'd be much more effective if you'd do a better job at really paying attention to what people are saying. How, then, can you "deliberately practice" listening without having to add another 2 to 3 hours onto your already full and busy workday? What can you do to intentionally improve your listening skills using a designed learning activity while you are at work?

It might look something like this.

1. Set a purposeful stretch goal. The goal of any practice is to improve performance. It's about learning something new or fine-tuning an existing skill. And, it should push you to the next level, not just be something that repeats over and over what you do well. For example, you might set a goal to always clarify your understanding of what others are saying before you respond to them.
   
2. Design or select a method for improvement. You need a process for improving— steps that you will repeat in order make sure that you do something correctly. You could, for instance, devote 30 minutes of a regular daily meeting to practicing my listening skills. You could use the technique of "active listening" during the meeting. (Active Listening is a structured way of responding that requires you to briefly restate the key points the speaker makes and to check with the speaker to ensure that you are hearing her/him accurately.)
   
3. Get immediate feedback. You need to get feedback on how well you execute on the method and how close you get to your goal. In a meeting that feedback can come from the other attendees in the meeting—you can ask them, "Am I hearing you correctly?"—you can get it from a coach or someone else you've asked to observe you, or you can video tape the meeting and watch it afterwards.
   
4. Focus. To benefit from practice, you have to pay attention to what you are doing. You should not be on autopilot during practice. You need to concentrate. Stay focused and use this technique for the entire 30 minutes. While it might feel a little awkward, the point is to stick with the routine until it becomes second nature. As a practice aide, for example, you could have a card in front of you as a reminder of the correct steps in the process.
   
5. Get support. Studies of top performers strongly suggest that a supportive environment is critical to developing expertise. Engage a coach from HR, OD, or even another line manager who is accomplished in this skill and ask her/him to observe you in the meeting. After the meeting, s/he can give you feedback and tips on listening. Also, let other people in the meeting know what you are doing. They can help you stay focused, give you feedback, and offer their encouragement. Generally, people like to help others improve, so enlist their support.
   

This is just one example of how we can take a routine activity— a meeting — and turn it into a "practice field" for leadership. There are many, many other ways you can bring "deliberate practice" into the workplace. Case studies, for instance, are a terrific way to safely practice how to respond to critical incidents. Role plays are another methodology that can be more effectively utilized at work.

The best leaders are the best learners.  They are curious about what is going on around them, always seeking to better understand how things work, how they are leading, and how they can improve their own behavior and the functioning of the organizations. A learning mindset is critical to becoming the best in any field.

I'd love to hear more from you about ways in which leaders can deliberately practice during the available hours at work. Please share with your practice routines with us.

I wish you all a year of continuous leadership improvement.

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Are You Practicing Like Lang Lang?

A couple nights ago in Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco my wife, Tae, and I had the gloriously uplifting experience of listening to a solo recital of Lang Lang, the 26-year-old Chinese pianist and music world phenomenon. It was an awe-inspiring performance by an incredibly skilled artist whose technical ability is unsurpassed and whose dramatic flair and showmanship generates an electric charge in the audience. 

After the performance, we had the opportunity to attend a reception for Lang Lang, and I couldn't resist asking him a few questions about my current obsession, the role of practice in talent development. Part of the conversation went like this:

Jim: When did you start playing the piano?
Lang: At 2 ½ years old.
Jim: How many hours a day did you practice?
Lang: For the first 15 years, 8 hours a day.
Jim: And now?
Lang: 3 hours a day.
Jim: Every day?
Lang: Yes.

Lang's response confirms what I've reported in prior blogs. Research by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues concludes that it's deliberate practice that produces great performers, not simply their raw talent.

Recently two popular writers have published books that discuss Ericsson's research.  One is by Geoff Colvin — Talent Is Overrated — and the other — Outliers — is from bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell. Colvin's is the more practical of the two, but Gladwell tells a great story, and he adds some intriguing research on the importance of context. What we learn from them both is that many longstanding assumptions about giftedness and talent are substantially incomplete and can even be unnecessarily limiting.  I urge you to read both books.

A recent blog by Michael McKinney on LeadingBlog also discusses these books, and you'll appreciate his summary of what you can do to apply lessons from the research on expertise to talent development in your organization.  Check it out.

Back to Lang Lang for a moment. His statement that he practiced 8 hours a day for the first 15 years, and now practices 3 hours per day, makes me to curious to know how many hours a day organizational leaders practice their craft.  Whenever I've asked audiences this question in my more recent speeches, the answers I've gotten have been roughly....."Zero."  That is not exactly the route to a great performance, is it?

If leaders don't practice 3 hours per day, can we expect the kind of virtuosity we experience from Lang Lang? Of course not. By his standards, most leaders are amateurs. While it may not be realistic to expect the majority of our leaders to practice as Lang Lang does, I'm convinced we should expect more than zero. What do you think?

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Deliberate Practice

When our son Nicholas, now a sophomore at UC Davis, was being recruited to play collegiate tennis, my wife, Tae, and I had the chance to talk with quite a few men's tennis coaches.  One of them was Glenn Michibata, head coach at Princeton University.  In the course of our conversation with Glenn, one of the questions we asked him was: "How much time do your players practice every day?"  Glenn responded, "I tell them they need to practice two hours every day if they want to stay the same; more if they want to get better." His comment has stuck with me ever since. It has become a mantra when I work with leaders on their own practice routines.

Glenn's experience taught him that becoming the best player took more than an annual weekend retreat, more than a monthly coaching session, more than a weekly tune-up, and more than a brief daily reflection on what it takes to excel. He had learned that it requires hours a day of practice. But it's not any kind of practice that works. "To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades," write K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely, leading researchers in the field of human performance. "However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. Not all practice makes perfect. You need a particular kind of practice—deliberate practice—to develop expertise."

Ericsson and his colleagues aren't just talking here about athletes or performing artists. Their research has examined "…top performance in a wide variety of domains: surgery, acting, chess, writing, computer programming, ballet, music, aviation, firefighting, and many others."  I think it's about time that we apply the findings from their research about deliberate practice to the development of leaders.

And just what is deliberate practice? Using the key elements Geoff Colvin describes it in his new book, Talent Is Overrated — a book I referenced in a recent blog in LeaderTalk — here is what it looks like. (The editorial comments are mine!)

1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. Going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls is definitely not deliberate practice. It may be fun, and you may get a bit better, but it's not the route to becoming the best you can be. The key word here is "designed," meaning there is a methodology and there is a very clear goal. More often than not a coach or teacher selects the goal and the method.
2. It can be repeated a lot. Engaging in a designed learning experience just once or twice doesn't cut it. It has to be done over and over and over again until it's automatic. That takes hours of repetition. The norm is about two hours of practice per day every day! Anders Ericsson also adds that during repetition you need to pay as much attention to the methodology as to the goal. Sloppy execution is not acceptable to top performers.
3. Feedback on results is continuously available.  Every learner needs feedback.  It's the only way you know whether or not you're getting close to your goal and whether or not you're executing properly.  While there may come a time when you're accomplished enough to assess your own performance, you'll need a coach, mentor or some other third party to help you analyze how you did. "The development of expertise," writes Anders Ericsson and colleagues, "requires coaches who are capable of giving constructive, even painful, feedback. Real experts are extremely motivated students who seek out such feedback."
4. Deliberate practice is highly demanding mentally. It requires intense concentration and focus. Even when the type of activity requires intense physical effort – as in athletic sports – the limiting factor is often more mental than physical.  It seems that we are more likely to tire from mental strain than physical strain. That's why deliberate practice sessions are often only about two to three hours.
5. It isn't much fun. While we should absolutely love what we do, deliberate practice is not designed to be fun. What keeps the top performers going during the often-grueling practice sessions is not the fun that they are having, but the knowledge that they are improving and getting closer to their dream of superior performance.

And there are a couple other critical elements that emerge from the research:

6. During deliberate practice experts work on their weaknesses and not just on their strengths. These days we hear a lot how we should ignore our weaknesses or find someone else who's good at what we aren't. That message is not consistent with what those who study expertise have found. To quote Anders Ericsson: "Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become." We'll have to rethink our interpretation of what it means to lead from our strengths.
7. It helps to have support. Studies of top performers strongly suggest that you have to have a supportive environment in order to develop expertise. A supportive family is very common in the stories of world-class performers. Coaches, mentors, and teachers, while tough and demanding, are also important sources of support.
8. It helps to start young.  The world's top performers more than likely started when they were children. Because it takes years of continuous deliberate practice to become world-class, it makes sense that if you want to make the Olympics at eighteen you have to start when you are six.  That doesn't mean we are doomed to being average if we don't start until we are in our twenties. But it does mean that we can't expect to perform at an expert level until we're in our thirties, assuming we practice every day. It takes practice, and practice takes time.

All of this great research is well and good, but how can we put it into practice at work? How can we each use these guidelines to become better leaders? After all, if you're like me, you don't have two extra hours a day, every day, to add deliberate practice into our already overloaded schedules. Precisely. That's why we have to learn to turn our workplaces into practice fields and to develop practice routines in which we can engage during the normal eight to twelve hours we're at work.  Next week I'll offer some tips on how you can do that.  I also want to hear from you. What are you doing to incorporate deliberate practice into your leadership agenda?

Jim Kouzes

Talent Is Overrated

I've been ranting and raving about the myth of talent and the reality of practice for the last couple years.  It's been a hot button for me — one that gets pushed a lot these days.

Now Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, and one of the most respected business journalists writing today, has done all of us a great service by writing a book on the topic, entitled Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. While there are still a couple months left in 2008, it's likely that this gem will be my pick for the best business book of the year. It's a brilliant piece of work, and it deserves to be studied by anyone involved in human development.

 Colvin's new book actually grew out of an assignment at Fortune. A couple years ago he was asked to contribute a piece for a special issue on great performance in business. "The resulting article," according to Colvin, "provoked a more intense response than anything else I've written."  It is meticulously written, and the assertions made in the book are based on rigorous scientific research. The principal researcher who informs many of the findings discussed in the book is Professor K. Anders Ericsson, Conradi Eminent Scholar at Florida State University. Ericsson and his colleagues have been conducting study after study on expert performance for over thirty years, and their work may just revolutionize how leaders are developed in the future. At least, I hope so.

 Colvin's provocative title neatly summarizes the premise of his book. Here are a few of the key messages from Talent Is Overrated:

1. Natural gifts and talents, if they exist at all, aren't what we think they are and they are not enough to explain world-class performance in chess, music, ballet, medicine, golf, business, or any other endeavor.
2. Staggeringly high IQs also don't characterize the great performers. Sometimes they champions have higher than average intelligence, but in many instances they are just average.
3. Years of experience don't necessarily make someone a high-performer, let alone the greatest performer. And, as startling as it might sound, sometimes more years of experience can mean poorer performance compared to those newly graduated in a specialty.
4. If natural talent, high IQ, and even years of experience don't explain greatness, then what does? The factor that best explains great performers is what the researchers call "deliberate practice." 
5. Colvin admits that "Deliberate practice is a large concept, and to say that it explains everything would be simplistic and reductive." Therefore, if we are going to become experts in anything, it's essential that we understand what deliberate practice is and what it isn't. What most of us do when we "practice," it turns out, often does not lead to great performance at all, and it may just contribute to being mediocre and could even make us worse.

 Colvin does a superb job of providing us with insights into what deliberate practice is, what it isn't, and how it works.  He also applies the concepts to our personal lives, our organizations, and to innovation. In blogs over the next couple weeks, I'll share with you some of the key components of deliberate practice and propose ways in which we can apply these concepts to the development of leaders. In the meantime, if you'd like to join me in the dialogue, I urge you to read Talent Is Overrated.  I'm certain it will influence how you think about what you can do to become a better leader and what you can do to develop those with whom you work. If you aspire to world-class performance, this will be time well spent.

 Posted y Jim Kouzes

CLO Magazine Website

I've been reading the CLO Magazine e-Newsletter for a couple of years now, but I hadn't spent time on the website until this morning.  Wow!  It's a fantastic source of information for leadership development professionals.  I just listened to a CLO-Radio interview with Tom Griffin from US Cellular.  In just a few minutes, Tom described his organization's approach to leadership development and shared quite a few specifics on what they do and how and why they do it.  I also read an interesting article by Brandon Hall on Social Media and Training Implementations.  While the information was fairly basic, the real world examples from Jet Blue University, IBM's Center for Advanced Learning, Sun Microsystems, and HP got my creative juices flowing.  I've been thinking a lot about how we might integrate some of the Web 2.0 technologies into the next edition of The Leadership Challenge Workshop materials.  Let me know if you have any suggestions.

- Posted by Lisa Shannon

Leadership and Modern Media: Game On!

I’d like to submit that being in the arena of leadership development today requires a healthy respect and open mind about the role that media and communications plays is leading effectively. In facilitating the process we tend to focus on the individual, in helping them identify their values and their unique voice. But if we don’t also discuss the vessels through which these will be expressed, we are severely limiting leaders opportunities to be effective. In a wonderful article in the American Psychologist, January 2007 special issue on Leadership, Warren Bennis explores the importance of developing knowledge and understanding of communications and media tools, both their power and biases. He makes the point that leaders today rarely if ever rely solely on face-to-face interactions with their followers. I believe this is clearly demonstrated in our own presidential election. Trying to wrap your head around all the ways a leader can have a presence with followers, real or potential, is tough. Bennis does it beautifully.

“Is a leader whose message is accessed on a Blackberry different in kind from one whose message in read in the pages of the New York Times? Is a politician’s vision described in the news pages perceived differently from the same vision presentedin the op-ed page? Do viewers of the Daily Show have a different relationship to the political candidates they favor than listeners to public radio or talk radio? Does the stature of an interviewer change the perception of the candidate? If Matthew Brady helped to create our heroic notion of Lincoln, what role do today’s news photographers play in our choice of leaders?” *

Think of all the layers of opportunity to communicate. So how is a someone supposed to master all these? How do we who are already in the arena of leadership development help them? I think it happens by learning to recognize the opportunities and jump in ourselves. Practice, practice practice.

So I challenge those of you in the arena. If leadership development matters to you, lets hear about it. Jump into the game with comments and thoughts and explore for yourself the power and bias of this communications device. Let’s talk about it.
Posted by Beth High
*January 2007, American Psychologist, Vol.62, No. 1

Leadership in uncertain times

A question I like to pose to participants of Leadership Challenge workshops is: "Did your Personal Best take place in your current organization?" The answer is often no. The next question is why not? During a recent class, this question revealed that fully 1/2 the class had brought stories that took place outside their current organizations. The interesting part was that these stories shared something in common. All of them took place when the participant was thrown into a situation that they were unprepared for. Each found themselves in circumstances that demanded action and they took it. One woman talked about forming a rescue team to drive across the country to New Orleans to rescue animals that had been abandoned in the shleters there. Another talked about creating a college advisory team to help students when the teacher who filled that roll became to ill to work. They found their way to success, evaluating options at each turn and drawing on deep seeded values and a strong sense of commitment to help. If these types of uncertain situations lead to exemplary leadership, doesn't it make sense to embrace the unknown and recognize that how we lead in times of uncetainty can show us a lot about ourselves as leaders. How can we best leverage this learning? I'd love to hear other stories and how you've capitalized on the lessons learned. Got any good ones?

Poker Practice

I was listening to an episode of This American Life today.  The piece, called "Meet the Pros," included a second act about professional poker players.  This "profession" has intrigued me in recent years.  Probably because I actually know someone who, after becoming wealthy during the dot com boom, quit his lucrative job, trading in the daily grind for writing and poker (what a combination!).  Learning that host Ira Glass secretly wondered about his chances at the World Series of Poker made the piece entertaining enough, but then a comment toward the end made me think of Jim's recent posting on "Practice, Practice, Practice" (November 7th).  Trying to get a handle on what it would take to play at the Bellogio with the big boys and girls, Glass asked a professional player how long it would take to become "competent at poker."  The answer:  2,000 hours of practice.  And that's just competent....not good, not great.  Then I remembered back to a little piece of poker trivia I had picked up.  The average age of professional poker players is getting younger and younger.  Why?  It's because of the internet poker sites.  This younger players can practice 24/7, three or four hands at a time, learning at warp speed compared to the generation before who only played during their weekly buddy game or when they manager to get to Las Vegas.

Is there an equivalent leadership practice regiment?  Can we get better faster by practicing more and more everyday?  Let me know your thoughts and ideas.

- Posted by Lisa Shannon

Practice, Practice, Practice

A few years back we did some research with Lillas Brown of the University of Saskatchewan on learning and leadership. We were looking at whether there was a relationship between how leaders learned and how effective they were at leading. What we found was most intriguing. We discovered that it didn’t really matter what the learning style was. Someone could be an active experimenter, an observer of others, a person who engages in emotional dialogues, or someone who loves to read or be in the classroom. The style is not the thing. What did matter was the extent to which individuals engaged in whatever style worked for them. The more they engaged in learning the more successful they were as leaders.

This probably doesn’t come as any surprise, but here’s the rub. Organizations these days seem to want us to develop leaders in two days or less. It’s all part of the trend to instant success. Well, guess what? It isn’t going to happen. There’s no such thing as instant leadership – or instant expertise of any kind. Those who are the very best at anything got to be that way because they spent more time learning and practicing, not less.

Regardless of whether we're talking about sports, music, medicine, computer programming, or leadership raw talent is not all there is to becoming a top performer. Florida State University researcher and expert on expertise, K. Anders Ericsson, writes: “Until most individuals recognize that sustained training and effort is a prerequisite for reaching expert levels of performance, they will continue to misattribute lesser achievement to the lack of natural gifts, and will thus fail to reach their own potential.” Ericsson raises the possibility that the search for talent may even mislead us into thinking that we can close the leadership gap simply be finding the best talent and putting them in the right jobs. I’m persuaded by the evidence that this is an illusion. Instead of chasing after a fantasy, I think we need to get back to the basics of skills training and hard work.

What truly differentiates the expert performers from the good performers is hours of practice. You’ve got to work at becoming the best, and it sure doesn’t happen over a weekend. If you want a rough metric of what it’ll take to achieve a modest level of expertise, the estimate is about 5,000 hours of practice over a period of ten years. That’s about two hours a day, every day, with time off for weekends, for ten years. So the next time someone says the organization ought to cut leadership development back to a couple days a year, show them that number and then ask them if they would rather have professionals or amateurs running the organization.

Posted by Jim Kouzes