Leadership and Millenians

Millennials: too many companies you will work for are not built to take care of you. Until that changes, please take care of each other. But are companies of today really companies that do care about you (no matter if you are millenians or not)?

You hear about Millennials, Generation X, and the Baby Boomers all the time, but it’s not always clear who’s a part of these groups. In fact, all of these terms are fairly unofficial social constructs outside of the Boomers. This is what they’ve come up with (source New Guidelines Redefine Birth Years for Millennials, Gen-X, and 'Post-Millennials'):

• The Silent Generation: Born 1928-1945 (73-90 years old)
• Baby Boomers: Born 1946-1964 (54-72 years old)
• Generation X: Born 1965-1980 (38-53 years old)
• Millennials: Born 1981-1996 (22-37 years old)
• Post-Millennials (or generation Z): Born 1997-2010 (8-21 years old)

• Generation Alpha: Born after 2010

I have sons in millenians time range and have to admit that a good example of current situation on millenians question has been given by Simon Sinek in his video: This Is Why You Don't Succeed.

Reasons your Focus is or isn’t going to Work

“If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable to him” by Seneca.

Yes, we have to focus!

The so-called Y (or better interrupt) generation has big difficulties to handle it what I see daily in my classroom.

Focus is the thinking skill that allows people to begin a task without procrastination and then maintain their attention and efforts until the task is complete. Attention is a mental muscle and like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise.

During my university years I spent many hours practicing ballroom dancing on the competition level. Vienna waltz was our warm up procedure but not just one round, but ten or more in a raw. I have learned that the secret to not get disoriented is to focus on a point far in the distance and visually always following the spot (or your partner’s face) extracts the entire surrounding environment. The same goes if you lead a company: you must find a beacon and drive your organization passionately in that direction.

Organizations and countries need people with strong focus on (important) goals. They all need a talent to continually learn how to do things better or best. Without such high-innovative performers there is no innovation, productivity and change.

Therefore, focus is the state or quality of having or producing a clear visual definition – a center of interest or activity we do. So, being focused means thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. It is an important tool that can and will shape your life. In a longitudinal study tracking the fates of all 1,037 children born during a single year in the 1970’s in the New Zealand city of Dunedin particularly compelling results came out (Source: The Focused Leader, by Daniel Goleman, 2013):

For several years during childhood the children were given a battery of tests of willpower, including the psychologist Walter Mischel’s legendary “marshmallow test”—a choice between eating one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting 15 minutes. In Mischel’s experiments, roughly a third of children grab the marshmallow on the spot, another third hold out for a while longer, and a third manage to make it through the entire quarter hour.

Cross-Culture Will Radically Change Your Leadership

All of you have probably visited places where you sensed that “things” are different than those at your home place?

Paradoxically, we set our knowledge and belief as a reference / universal point when judging other cultures. We compare what we know or believe to new and different views sometimes curiously wondering how wrong they are. You are basically trapped in stability issue of which I have written in Leadership and stability, such stability that you have fallibly perceived as security due familiarity with your ‘not changing’ home place culture.

Unfortunately, in this you are wrong. There is nothing stable in this Universe. Changes and differences are all around us, also when meeting other people, cultures or leadership styles.
Differences are the outcome of Gerhard Hofstede project when asked to unify IBM corporate culture across the globe. The study was conducted within IBM between 1967 and 1973 and covered more than 70 countries. Hofstede built a methodology of different countries and cultures and how they interact based on six different categories of cultural dimensions:

• Power Distance that expresses the degree to which the less powerful members of a society accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. 
• Individualism vs. Collectivism which focuses on the questions about whether people prefer a close knit network of people or prefer to be left alone to fend for themselves. 
• Masculinity vs. Femininity where masculinity represents a preference in society for achievement, heroism, assertiveness and material reward for success; and femininity, stands for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. 
• Uncertainty Avoidance that expresses the degree to which the member of a society feels uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. 
• Long-term vs. Short-term Orientation where Long-term orientation dimension can be interpreted as dealing with society's search for virtue and are careful how they shape today not to distort tomorrow.
• Indulgence vs. Restraint that identifies the extent to which a society allows ‘relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun’.

Commonly used and cited methodology unfortunately is a perfect “Descartes model of dualism” so appreciated in Western hemisphere way of thinking (see: Dualism vs. Yin-Yang). With different dimensions it brings some diversity but does not allow or imply the changes within cultures.

Is there a solution that may contribute and add change to cultural dimensions methodology?

The Difference between Helping and Fixing

Leaders are there to help, managers to fix.

Agree?

Probably hard to claim this could be the final truth.

When helping someone then (obviously) you have to know better or more than the person you are helping. So, helping in ‘the wrong way’ demonstrates non-equality of the people involved thus becoming a relationship between non-equals.

There are times when we help a friend or co-worker during tough times. Does this kind of help require (owe) a favor in return? Or, is this help a sincere one with no expectation of returned favor?

Trying hard to help someone has it happened to you that you have inadvertently ‘helped’ in a way that it actually took away from people more than you could ever “give” them?

I remember my first weeks arranging my life in Seville. I was so many times lost and had to ask for help. And most of the times I got it only to discover that people, in their desire to help, sent me in the wrong direction.

There’s another way to help: we could help in a way that the receiver will eventually develop new abilities or knowledge and not just receive your help and your past knowledge.

And what would a help with a sincere and open approach be like?

Picture a small kid playing with toys: trying all over again to build a tower with bricks and it keeps collapsing all the times. After a while you step in and demonstrate how to do it. What exactly have you thought the child by your action? That depends on the way you have helped: you may have as well diminished kid’s self-esteem, sense of worth, integrity and/or wholeness. But, the help could be given with the right stimuli, motivation and by asking what goes where … it is a proactive way of helping that ultimately builds trust and knowledge.

With a sincere help you simply share your knowledge or you figure out what’s your help’s value to other person or when you give a transparent feedback. You do not expect anything in return. You just help the other to grow and learn. Help is also when (good) leaders take the time out of their busy day to help a follower or co-worker in need but unable to solve a problem. They’ll sure remember your help.

What about ‘fixing’?

Can Obedience nurture Trust?

Someone told me that blind obedience nurtures trust (my post Disciplines of execution). Let me elaborate this a little more.

I was told once that obedience is the basic issue to foster trust in organizational structure!

I was kind of surprised by such unilateral thinking and explanation of the working environment and could not figure out where from this way of thinking comes. In all my years of working experience I never thought that obedience can or may nurture trust. Just the opposite: I believe that obedience is a one way communication. And trust is definitively a two way issue.

Let me review what I have already written about to clear my position on the subject.

In the post Loyalty at work I stressed that in strictly traditionally hierarchical organizations (companies or even countries) there is only one way of implementing the will or preferences of the leader or owner - it is called a command!

Well I can argue that even in such hierarchical organizations at different incidents employees should always be (are) treated with respect. It is the obligation of the organization to see that individual leaders or managers do not abuse their power or mistreat their subordinates.

In another post Leadership and trust I expressed that trust is vital and is one of the fundamentals of any kind of cooperation between two living beings! I can definitely claim that it is very difficult to expect the trust in leaders that are practically squeezing last drops of effort out of employees with a command.

If we look even on broader scope – our environment – my post To trust the Capital? goes even beyond trust of any living being: can we trust the systems we are implementing and having as the only solution today?

Storytelling tool in leadership

What is the perfect tool to connect with, inspire or motivate another? If you are trying to sell something, present it, give a speech or you are just the audience, the difference between interesting and boring is storytelling.

Stories are changing the way we think, act, and feel and can capture our imaginations, illustrate our ideas, arouse our passions, and inspire us. If a story is well told it can create an intense, personal connection between the audience, the idea and the teller. Think just how you have been listening to them as a child.

What exactly is a good storytelling - the art of using communication: verbal, tone and also gesture to tell components and metaphors of a story to an audience? Throughout human history stories were the actual building blocks of knowledge and by teaching them we learned to anticipate the possible consequences. Stories formed the foundation for memorizing events, persons or other data and to learn about them. That is why we could say that stories connect us with past, present, and future...

Could this tool be used in a business environment to form the foundations of a different workplace culture where hard facts failed to? Could this tool communicate and connect employees, customers, partners, suppliers, colleagues, and more?

Participative Leadership

When I first encountered the term “participative leadership” I was kind of puzzled. What kind of a leader cannot or does not participate? Is it possible to lead at all without participation?

The search offered some answers on the topic, nevertheless I was amazed that most authors won’t distinguish two important but different roles, managers and leaders: “… as it is within the managers' whim to give or deny control…” or “…in the participative leadership style, effective managers solicit input from subordinates …”.  Participative leadership pertains to leaders, doesn't it? (see: Leader vs. manager).

Another statement “a participative leader, rather than taking autocratic decisions, seeks to involve other people in the process” was pretty much familiar - the same definition was ascribed to charismatic leadership (Charismatic Leadership).

Among many more publications about participative leadership I came across the definition “… the leader turns to the team for input, ideas and observations instead of making all decision on his or her own.”  Well, can a leader really lead without inputs from his team? I sincerely doubt it.

Authentic leadership

In the post ‘Servant leadership’ I touched the meaning of added attribute(s) to the word ‘leadership’. Let me continue the subject with another example.

‘Authentic leadership’ puts an important stress on building leader’s legitimacy through honest relationships with followers (their input is appreciated) and is built on the ethical foundation thusly being able to improve individual and team performance (from: Wiki).

Authenticity has been explored throughout history, already in times of Greek philosophers. The ‘Authentic Leadership’ book written by Bill George in 2003 got the highest level of acceptance as part of a modern management science.

Loyalty at work

In working environment have you ever wondered about:

• Does a mutual feeling of trust within the organization increase productivity and commitment to set goals?
• Why can’t you handle an employee that frequently appears to undermine your authority or sabotage your projects?
• What is wrong when you entrust to employee and still, because of him, in team there is no teamwork attitude?

Most of the times the answer to the above questions is about loyalty: the quality of “faithfulness” to you as a leader or your principles, your country, organization, work, your vision, your superiors and subordinates.

Loyalty is a two-way street. Majority understands it as being loyal to those above forgetting those below. But, a leader depends on team. All of them should be committed, productive and reliable so that the entire department, company or country could be successful.

Leadership and Martial Arts – Anything in Common?

The globalization process has an impact on all of us and almost everything we do. It impacts the environment and consequently the way how organizations are structured, teams lead and managed. People work together and embody a variety of personalities, as well as a range of ways of doing things. A modern leader is supposed to grasp all of it to lead forward and to predict behaviors, but never to give or take offence due to misunderstanding the cultural issues.

Can such an old wisdom that is hidden in martial arts philosophy point to the culturally independent way in the leadership? Why, precisely, martial arts? Because martial arts do not differentiate! Being thought all over the globe philosophy remains the same regardless of personal believes, skin color, gender, ability …

Effortless leadership

In the Nature everything seems to be done effortlessly, or with the smallest effort, the same that is genuinely used in martial arts. Nature, in spite of dealing with extremely huge things and events, conserves ‘energy’ e.g. big tree growth with little ‘effort’, the seas do not get tired of waving, birds fly with ease, an ant can hold 100 times its weight and appears to carry it effortlessly. The same principle is used in martial arts: in a fight there is simply not enough time to recuperate unwisely spent energy. You tire, you lose.

Overexertion is damaging also in the leadership process: to spend more energy that is needed is often harmful not only because it represents a physical and intellectual hindrance. When things are done effortlessly the impression is that everything runs smoothly and harmoniously, there is no stopping, no fuss, no dissatisfaction. Most importantly, all and everything is achieved without resorting to give orders or spend time on extensive persuasion. A well led team should not be a battlefield of egos. In teamwork there is no place for individual ‘victories’ or ‘defeats’.

For more please read at: http://www.toddnielsen.com/international-leadership-blogathon/leadership-virtue-martial-arts/

Related articles

• Leadership By Virtue ~ book trailer
• Tai Chi Quan Leadership
• Learning Leadership from Martial Arts - III

Atypical views on Leadership - 1

An outstanding Leadership for cross cultural team(s)

Have you met a person that was thinking in a completely different way to yours? What kind of impression does it leave on you? Do you dismiss it immediately, or you find it worthy, erroneous  …? 

For me it is exciting, definitely because my life path is somehow atypical, too. In our core we people are similar no matter where we come from. Not long ago I had a TEDx talk about the human behavior that surpasses “the cultural background noise” – “the noise” that accompanies us throughout our life and normally influences our values, ethics and morals, mentally and subconsciously. Unfortunately, this kind of reasoning I find that is still missing in common stances and leadership practices. Let me try to show some examples which are going to be based on atypical views.

From the management’s perspective, managers perform tasks, manage people and do business. Accordingly, there are numerous methodologies and tools helping to manage business and people: Just In Time Production, Kobayashi’s 20 keys, Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering … to name some. In business environment, do all these methodologies and tools really come out the way we need them to? Current economic and financial situation makes us doubt it. If these tools were as efficient and as great as claimed, then we should not see companies struggling and vanishing. Why it is then so?

Leadership and conflict

Searching for a good definition of a conflict I found on Internet:

• a conflict is a serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one,
• a state of mind in which a person experiences a clash of opposing feelings or needs,
• a fight, battle or war, or struggle, especially a prolonged struggle; strife
• a psychic struggle, often unconscious, resulting from the opposition or simultaneous functioning of mutually exclusive impulses, desires, or tendencies,
• a state of opposition between ideas, interests, etc; disagreement or controversy.

Therefore, a conflict is inevitable natural occurrence; it is a part of our experience demonstrating that we all have our respective ideas. Also at workplace a conflict is an integral part of leadership and management process. Definitively, if all conflicts were erased from the workplace, there would be a feeling of unease, because the atmosphere might appear a bit too sterile and unrealistic. In literature there are different types of conflict(s):

• Intrapersonal conflict occurs within an individual,
• Interpersonal conflict refers to a conflict between two individuals,
• Intragroup conflict is a type of conflict that happens among individuals within a team and
• Intergroup conflict takes place when a misunderstanding arises among different teams within an organization.
• Grouping them, literature suggests that at workplace there are (only) two types of conflict: healthy and un-constructive. So, it is said that a healthy conflict can benefit a business and leads to a more innovative, inclusive and learning mind-set around disputes.

Free will and entanglement

I watched Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational, TED talk: “Are we in control of our own decisions?”. It triggered a huge amount of my discussions with people. Mine definition on our control over decision was so radical that most just could not accept it. I spoke in favor that “our free will (and decision-making) is not only  created by our conscious mind” but also by our unconscious. Bottom line is whether it was ‘I’ that decided and no ‘someone else’!  I strongly prop as a true that ‘I am’ conscious and unconscious part and my gens and cultural impact of environment and more together in all I do, think, decide.

Most people, due to their “background noise” (see my TEDx talk) generated by the philosophy of René Descartes (1596) believe that only conscious mind is a seat for our “free will” decision. It is due to Descartes who clearly identified that the mental and the physical—or mind and body or mind and brain—are, in some sense, radically different kinds of thing. Therefore, only the mind ‘holds’ consciousness and self-awareness. It was supported by theology to impose believes that Good and Evil—or God and the Devil are independent against more pragmatic views of Blaise Pascal (1623). Pascal’s development of probability theory and his ‘Wager’ were more systematical approaches and therefore closer to pluralism, which is the view that there are many kinds or categories. This last idea is also much more in accordance with Far East ‘Yin and Yang’ principle. The principle where there is always something Good in Evil and some Evil in Good.

Back now to my understanding of “free will”. According to David Hume, the question of the nature of free will is “the most contentious question of metaphysics.” Minimally, to frame “free will” would be in the ability of agents to have the capacity to choose his or her course of action unconstrained by certain factors. But animals seem to satisfy this criterion too, and we typically think that only persons, and not animals, have “free will.”

Leadership and emotions

Is a leader supposed to show emotions?

To answer this let look at what emotions are. If you “google it” you get results such us:

• a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others;
• a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body;
• an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness;
• a mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.

So emotions are “we” and we consciously or unconsciously show them. Emotions are chemical reactions between specific combinations of the levels of the signal substances dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin. Emotions can likely be mediated by pheromones… so there seems no way to hide them. Often, one of the reasons we don’t show emotion is because we are not even aware or we mingle what emotion we have. In most situations when we are angry, frustrated, or upset we suppress it or “by mistake” mix it for some other emotion. And we tend to hide them when we want to stay in control or look strong. Well, in reality, doing so diminishes our control and weakens our capacity to lead. And we end up not saying what we mean or not meaning what we say.

Leadership and public speaking

Is it necessary for a leader to be a good public speaker?

There shouldn't be any dilemma about the answer to the above question. Leader talks at team meetings or presents a company facing internal or external audience. And especially with the latter good public speaking skills can open doors, whereas poor ones will most probably close them. And leaders are not the only one.

Does there exist “a magic formula” for good public speaking? No, there is no magic to successful speech, in fact, everyone is unique and has different strengths that can be used. But nevertheless some guide lines can be offered if you would like to have a winning speech.

Social vs. Economical system

If these two systems could or not be compared we should first lay out some definitions.

The social system is represented by people or groups of people. It is a social structure that refers to entities or groups of people that are definitively in relation to each other by having different functions, characteristics, origin or status. A social system is comprised of interdependent set of cultural and structural elements understood as a unit. Sociology is the study of human social behavior and especially the study of the origins, organizations, institutions and development of human society.

The economic system encompasses the production, distribution or trade of goods and services and consumption by different individuals, businesses, organizations, or governments. Economy as a study deals with the production and consumption of goods and the transfer of wealth and explains how people interact within markets to get what they want or how they accomplish certain economical goals.

To understand if the systems are comparable or not we should probably dig even more and try to outline also the basic differences between socialism and capitalism.

System thinking

Nature itself is a system with all parts entangled. Systems are like a human body: they are consisted of parts, and those same parts affect the performance of the whole. All the parts are interdependent. Just like a team of players during a game. But the team is not alone. They have the counter-party, there are judges, there are physical constraints engaged, and also spectators may be present. All of this forms a system. Times and circumstances may change, but systems tend to endure. If we don’t understanding this, wrong decisions, sometimes disastrous, can happen.

Also an organization is a system – a “living” system that performs by its own “will”. Rather than focusing on organizational goals and values, the management practice, when complying with the bureaucratic processes, sets the latter as the ultimate objective. Systems take on a life of their own and seem immune to common sense. When members of an organization feel as though, by circumventing established rules and procedures, they must constantly fight the system, the result can lead to cynicism, poor ethical climate, or forces them to jump from one urgent matter to another instead of worrying about important ones.