Leadership Challenge

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