12 Ways to Connect and Mobilize People

Young leaders often explain their aspirations in self-centered language. They focus on themselves and neglect others. Individual contributors are great, but leaders always connect and mobilize people. Leadership is about them.

12 ways to connect and mobilize:

1. Highlight need – explain why things can’t go on as they are.
2. Make them know they matter – show how they can help.
3. Include everyone in crafting vision – engage people if you expect them to be engaged.
4. Create channels for service – build organizational structure.
5. Call people to rise up – great work isn’t convenient. Disrupt established patterns.
6. Establish enabling relationships – build confidence by connecting the inexperience with the experience.
7. Honor effort – express gratitude along the way.
8. Rotate tasks and offer training.
9. Track results – tell everyone what’s getting done.
10. Point out more need – more to-do makes people matter more.
11. Celebrate success – dance because you’re making a difference.
12. Identify and leverage forward looking leaders.

Six roadblocks to success:

1. People tensions. Inexperienced leaders wrongly believe good causes and great needs solve interpersonal tensions. Connecting people, not completing projects, is the great challenge of leadership. Good people collide.
2. Power struggles.
3. Confusion. Begin with simple behaviors that express big vision.
4. Underutilized talent. People walk away when you waste their time and talent.
5. Diverse values and motivations. Accept that what’s important to one isn’t important to another.
6. Losing purpose. People lose motivation when they feel their efforts don’t make a difference.

How can leaders mobilize people?
What hinders effective mobilization?

How Pretending Develops Leaders

Your brain knows gibberish when it hears it. You can’t fool yourself. “I think I can,” sounds like a lie to someone who believes they can’t.

Pretending you can doesn’t help, but pretending does.
Expand skills and develop behaviors by pretending.

Example:

Fred’s performance stalled. It’s time for a tough conversation that you dread. Worse yet, tough conversations often end with you comforting rather than challenging. You’re a softy.

Invite a member of the leadership team for a walk. Tell them it’s time for a tough conversation with Fred. Say, “I’d like to run something by you.” Pretend you’re having the conversation with Fred.

Guidelines:

1. Don’t violate privacy by talking about Fred with his colleagues.
2. Find someone on the leadership team who knows Fred, if possible.
3. Use fellow leaders who have emotional intelligence.
4. Approach someone who handles tough conversations well.
5. Step outside your organization, when necessary, but protect privacy by changing names.
6. Begin with the end in mine. Always explain the goal of the conversation, first. Describe how you want Fred to feel and behave after the conversation?
7. Invite immediate feedback during practice. Ask, “How did it feel when I said …?”
8. Try several approaches. Adapt your approach to Fred. What works for him?
9. Seek alternatives from your partner. Ask, “How would you handle this situation?”
10. Visualize positive results but practice the process.

Repeating, “I think I can,” while sitting in your office, won’t change a thing.

You tell yourself you can because you fear you can’t. 

“I think I can,” adds stress when you fear you can’t. On the other hand, pretending builds confidence and develops skills.

When I pretend, I often ask someone, “How does it feel when I say…?”

How has pretending helped your leadership?

How can leaders use pretending to develop leadership in others?

The Secret Power of Vulnerability

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The power of  vulnerability is lost
when you don’t dare or don’t know how.

Bill Treasurer, author of, “Leaders Open Doors,” said, “I used to drink too much. Way too much. … Three years after getting sober … I decided to reveal to my boss, a partner at Accenture, that I was in recovery. …

I didn’t expect my boss to pat me on my shoulder and say, ‘Good for you; you’re a drunk!’ I expected more of a reaction than I got.

After I told him that I was in recovery, my boss looked at me quizzically, and muttered, ‘I see.’ Then he made some small-talk and hurried to another meeting.”

“I regretted having told him…”

If you reveal your real self, what’s left if it’s rejected?

Selective vulnerability:

1. Not all the time with everyone. “I gotta be me,” is self-centered, weak, and self-indulgent.
2. Not everything. No one wants to hear it all.
3. Not helpful. Before vulnerability ask, “Is this helpful.”
4. Not only weaknesses. Vulnerability includes telling your personal story.

Another story:

Bill told me another story. He was scheduled to spend two hours riding alone with a tightly wound, military style boss. He said, “I wasn’t looking forward to it.”

Surprisingly, the boss turned the radio to a rock station where Creedence Clear Water Revival was playing. After that, “My boss told me stories of when he fought in Vietnam.” After hearing his stories, Bill said, I judged him less and respected him more.

Vulnerability builds connections.

 Back to recovery:

Two weeks after telling his boss he was in recovery something amazing happened. Bill’s boss was on the board of the Georgia Council of Substance Abuse and Accenture had volunteered to do a research project. The boss asked Bill to lead the team. “It was the first time as a new manager that I got to lead my own project team.”

Vulnerability creates opportunities.

Recommendation: 

Read, “Leaders Open Doors.” It’s about WAY more than vulnerability.

What are the dangers and opportunities of vulnerable leadership?

What principles guide vulnerability?

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10 Ways to Stand Up for Your Great Idea

Your idea got shot down. Give up, play safe, or push forward?

Courage and boldness create your future.
Cowardice solidifies your past.

Leaders don’t give up quickly.

Boldly advocate.
Courageously stand up.
Tenaciously push forward.

How to stand up for your ideas:

Courage and boldness don’t have to be rude, irritating, and adversarial.

Jerks aren’t courageous they’re fearful.

1. Build alliances. Boldly support the ideas of others as much as you support your own. Stand with others if you expect them to stand with you.
2. Forget defending. Adversarial relationships emerge during defensive conversations. You defend and they shoot down. It’s lose – lose.
3. Explore. Defending pushes away; exploring invites in. “I’d like to explore an alternative outreach program. What if …”
4. Choose private first. Don’t put people on the spot in front of colleagues. Introduce and explore ideas in one-on-one conversations.
5. Align with current circumstances and organizational values. When values collide, conversations move from pros and cons to who’s right and who’s wrong.
6. Be firm and nice. Weakness gets angry when it doesn’t get its way.
7. Listen if you want to be heard. Don’t dismiss counter-points, say, “Good point,” instead. Go slow to go fast. Patience is courage not cowardice.
8. Suggest pilot programs. Say, “I’d like to test this in our marketing department,” for example. All or nothing often ends up with nothing. A small piece of pie is better than no piece.
9. Ask, “What are the benefits of staying the same?”
10. Ask, “What are the dangers of staying the same?”

Bonus: Never make your ideas about you. Always pursue what’s best for your organization.

Successful leaders find reasons to step forward,
not stay the same.

Warning:

New ideas meet opposition. You’ll hear reasons it won’t work before reasons it will. Listen and understand, but don’t play dead.

How can leaders stand up for their ideas without unnecessarily pushing others down?

What strategies work well for exploring innovative concepts?

The Surprising Path to the Top

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Top tier leaders develop their leadership; bottom tier leaders don’t. Lousy leaders don’t develop their leadership.

Those who need it most – want it least.
Those who need it least – want it most.

Simple test:

Ask yourself, “What am I doing to develop my leadership?” Lousy leaders don’t have an answer.

Number one:

I talked with Marshall Goldsmith, yesterday. Harvard Business Review named him the number one leadership thinker in the world. Marshall said the best always strive to be better.

Surprising path to number one:

Marshall said I always learn more from the people I coach than they learn from me. He’s not minimizing his value. It helps that he only works with top leaders of top organizations in the world.

Grow your leadership by growing others.

Help yourself by helping others. Teachers learn more than students.

The surprising path to the top is helping others to the top.

Unselfishly develop yourself by unselfishly developing others.

Tip:

Know less. Even if you think you know, listen and learn.

In and out:

People ask me how I come up with a leadership post six or seven times a week. I always answer the same way. I’m putting more in my cup than I’m taking out. A conversation with Marshall Goldsmith is one example.

Keep filling and pouring out of your cup.

Writing Leadership Freak is part of my leadership development. You think I do it for others and that’s true. I also do it for me. What I take in, I give out.

Tool:

Here’s a tool to help you develop others and yourself: “Managers as Mentors,” by Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith.

How are you developing your leadership?

Why Teams Fight and What to Do About It

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Nothing is more frustrating, from a leadership point of view, than a group of individuals circling each other like vultures. In-fighting wastes time, energy, and resources.

Incompetent leaders have teams who turn on each other.

Focus:

Lack of focus invites conflict. Teams who don’t know what’s important can’t focus. Leaders focus teams by showing them what’s important, now. Focus generates energy, unleashes creativity, and fires urgency.

Personal agendas:

Everyone knows Mary wants her way because it makes her look good. She cares more for her career than the team’s success. Immature people think only of themselves. Mature managers manage for the benefit of others.

People, who need control or credit,
fight to get it and refuse to give it.

It’s time for a tough conversation. Reform or remove her. If you can’t remove her, make her insignificant to the team.

Naughty or nice:

Teams flounder when they don’t know how to fight nice. Advocating for ideas isn’t naughty until it becomes personal.

Naughty fighting focuses on people.
Nice fighting focuses on issues.

Naughty fighting is filled with “you.” But, blame and accusation never solve problems.

Past tense conversations never create the future.

Fit:

Those who don’t fit, fight. Give team leaders a voice in forming the team.

Team formation establishes team potential.

High performers, who don’t fit, ruin teams. Creating fit:

1. Identify purpose. Why are we here? Know who you are before identifying those who fit.
2. Authorize teams to choose new members.
3. Interview for team positions like you interview for new hires.
4. Establish your code of conduct. How will you treat each other?

Will we interrupt each other during discussions?
What happens if someone is late or doesn’t follow through?
Will we have fun or be serious?
How will we solve disagreements?
What does candor look like?

Why do teams fight with each other?

How can leaders deal with conflict in the team?

Where Passion Comes From

Passion is longing to be what you could be, but aren’t.

Passion for leadership is the combination of falling below your imagined leadership potential and longing for exceptional leadership – at the same time.

The gap between longing and attainment is passion.

You:

ABC’s of finding your passion:

1. Accept disappointing performance. You read leadership books, blogs, and articles because you long to be better. You aren’t there yet. Pain gives birth of passion.
2. Believe improvement is possible and worthwhile. Hope makes you bold.
3. Create a Picture of the preferred future. Think about ultimate goals not the process. You aren’t sure how to get there. But, when you close your eyes and dream, you see the end.
4. Deliberate steps – action. The whole path is never clear but a step is always possible.

Others:

People fuel our passion when they make us feel we matter.

Recently, people fueled my passion, again. It happened during a presentation to a group of Human Resource professionals.

I paced the back of the room like a caged animal while announcements were made. A participant came back and said, “Can I do anything to make you more comfortable?” I’m not sure if my pacing invited the question but it made me feel I mattered.

A participant asked me to sign their program. I felt awkward and didn’t respond well. “Really?” I said. I regret saying that. After reflection, it makes me feel I matter.

About half-way through my presentation, someone asked, “What’s the future for you, Dan?” That wasn’t the topic. I almost brushed it off. Instead I gave a short reply and moved on. It made me feel I mattered.

Leaders make others feel they matter.
Any fool can make others feel they don’t matter.

Passion – the courage to act on dreams – comes from within and without.

How are you making people feel they matter?

Where does your passion come from?

Too Afraid to Matter

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Fear binds to the present.

Paralyzing fear pats you on the back when nothing changes.

Fear cheers for the status quo.

Fear says; don’t stand out because you’ll:

1. Look foolish.
2. Screw up. (You will)
3. Get in over your head.
4. Lose what you have.
5. Seem arrogant. Others aren’t standing out. What gives you the right to think you can?

Fear of loss and criticism prevents you from doing what matters.

How to matter most:

Forget and shift:

1. Forget about being in charge. Stop thinking leadership is authority, power, command and control. Shift to serving. Bring benefit. What’s the good thing you can do for others?
2. Forget about final results. Focus on the path forward. Meaningful results never happen all at once. How can you make a difference today?
3. Forget about one. Think two. An ancient proverb says, “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor.” Everyone needs a “with.” Who can you stand with? Who can stand with you?
4. Forget about old guard leaders who are fear-driven, controlling, and self-protective. Pass them by. They need you to be like them.
5. Forget about fanfare and recognition. Do things quietly. Spotlights come later, if at all.

Bonus: Forget about permission.

Courage:

Above all, doing what matters takes courage.

Courage is taking action while thinking of reasons not to. 

Deep courage is bringing you to opportunities and challenges. People who matter, ask:

1. What does better look like?
2. How does my story apply to this challenge?
3. What can I do?
4. What can we do?

The path:

1. Start small.
2. Start now. Starting is the most important thing you’ll do today.
3. Start “with.”

Courage needs a next step; fear needs a guarantee.

How can people overcome paralyzing fear?

How to Bring Out the Best

Bringing out your best is child’s play compared to bringing out their best.

Leaders who bring out the best in others make courage possible. Nothing meaningful happens without courage.

Encourage courage.

Everyone is still unlearning the necessary fear parents taught us. Leaders have the courage to develop courage in others.

Who before what:

Bringing out the best in others begins with “who” not “what.” Know who you’re dealing with, before thinking about what you want them to do. Are they…

Deep or shallow:

Some respond well to being thrown into the deep end. Throw them in. Others prefer the shallow end. They prefer to learn courage gradually.

In either case, successful leaders grow the courage muscles of others.

History:

Bring out the best in others by knowing their past. The past directs the future.

1. How did they responded to new assignments?
2. What have they learned from failure?
3. What motivated them in the past?
4. Who did they mesh with?
5. Who rubbed them the wrong way?

Heart:

Bring out the best by knowing their heart. What are their values and aspirations. Are they working for advancement, for example.

You know what makes you tick.
Leaders know what makes them tick.

How can leaders bring out the best in others?

Facing Reluctance

Don’t waste yourself. You can – you must – lead.

Every connection, challenge, problem, pain-point, opportunity, or exchange, opens doors to leadership – to make things better.

Reject:

1. Embarrassment with your desire to make things better.
2. Waiting for titles or position. Leadership isn’t a title.
3. Beat-down from do-nothing detractors.
4. Traditional command and control leadership.

Every time you stifle your longing to matter,
you lose a piece of yourself.

Terminology:

Are you uncomfortable with the terms leader and leadership? Redefine them. Leadership is:

1. Influencing. Ask, “What’s important?”
2. Seeking a step toward better. Ask, “What’s next?”
3. Bringing value to others. Ask, “How can I help?”
4. Solving problems with others. Ask, “Can we fix this?”
5. Bringing yourself to challenges and opportunities. Ask, “What can I bring?”

If you can’t say, “I’m a leader,” say I’m an:

1. Influencer.
2. Collaborator.
3. Solution seeker.
4. Simplifier.
5. Liberator.
6. Next step taker.
7. Value adder.
8. Improver.

Don’t let others define you. Define yourself in terms of  your passion. Stop muffling your inner longing to make a difference.

8 tips for finding your leadership:

1. Give yourself permission. It’s always OK to do good.
2. Be you. If you like organizing, then organize, for example.
3. Help others know they matter. You matter most when you help others know they matter.
4. Step toward better.
5. Thank critics. “Thanks for telling me I can’t make a difference!” (sarcasm) Losers want you to lose too.
6. Tell a friend you want to step up.
7. Do something every week that develops you.
8. Bring others in. Leaders connect rather than retreat.

Following:

If everyone leads, who follows? Leading includes following, supporting, and enabling. Leading isn’t fighting for power and control. Great followers have hearts of leaders.

Listen to secret, stifled yearnings that whisper, “You matter.”  You’re surrounded by “ordinary” people who lead. Be one. Do something.

How can reluctant leaders find their leadership?