The conference room was a mess. Participants were starting to arrive and the tables were scattered haphazardly about the room. Our materials for the two-day session were still in boxes in the corner of the room. My partner Rob had been there since 7:15 and he had not touched a thing. I was surprised. I started to sweat. This was a really important client. Okay, it was, in fact, 7:40 when I arrived even though we had agreed to meet at 7:15. But I had a 45-minute drive and he didn’t. And, yes, when I arrived, he was engaged with the tech support person setting up the projector for our power-point slides. But I had been late before—I’m “reliably” just a few minutes late. And Rob is “reliably” on time, and takes care of details. That was our pattern: I would be late, arriving with apologies and justifications; explanations I had rehearsed and honed during the time I should have already been there. Meanwhile, he would cover for me and have everything set up. Why was this time different? My answer arrived at the end of the day, after co-facilitating an especially challenging leadership program with a group of demanding
Fast Company recently featured CEOs from major corporations like 3M, Pepsico, Starbucks, and others sharing lessons from 2012 and describing how these lessons will apply in the coming year. While we don’t roll in the same company as these folks, we still learned a lot from our clients this year, and have some exciting ideas for the year ahead. We asked journalist Corrie Lisk-Hurst to help ‘organize our insights.’ Here are some highlights from our conversation… Corrie: What are the biggest challenges and changes your clients faced this past year? (David) Today, technological change has created many situations where young professionals who are masters at emerging technologies are being put into senior roles with really broad scope. So, on the one hand you’ve got more tenured people whose technical expertise may be less than cutting edge, and on the other you’ve got younger people with technical expertise but with less maturity, wisdom, and people management skills. This creates both tension and opportunity that many of our clients are trying to manage. [Rob] And this year we’re still seeing the lasting impact of the recession. Our clients have always asked themselves how to best invest in their people. But
Too many leaders make fast (and wrong) decisions in the face of disagreement. They trust their own thinking, and then justify their decision based on what they interpret as positive results. Yet they fail to consider the cost of rejecting an opposing view that would have led to a different decision or additional insight. I recently learned this firsthand: The story starts two years ago, when in a moment of weakness my wife gave me a helmet for my birthday and permission to buy a scooter. As most men might predict, after 15 months I required an upgrade. A friend was leaving the country, and needed to sell his four motorcycles (it seems you can’t have just one). After a brief email exchange, I bought his biggest, heaviest, and most purple cruising bike. I bought it sight unseen AND sound unheard. The first time I cranked the beast I was shocked. It didn’t purr as expected. Rather, it started with an apocalyptic blast, and then settled in to an endless series of deafening explosions. My friend called this “running smoothly.” He drove it first and I could still hear him 9 blocks later. As I waited, disheartened, I reviewed my
Recently, some friends in Asheville, NC introduced me to the River Arts District where I discovered an unexpected nugget of wisdom. Here, amid a collection of art studios down by the French Broad River, I had an encounter with a prolific, internationally known painter at his studio / gallery. He was preparing to take the stage to demonstrate his craft. He chatted with a few members of the audience as he set up. “What are you going to paint today?” asked one. Without batting an eye, the artist confidently replied “I don’t know.” I don’t know. Too often, this thought stops me in my tracks. Like many of my clients, it is easy for me to convince myself that I’m being paid as an expert; or, if they are bosses, to always have the answer. Admitting I don’t know is something we’ve learned should be avoided because it brings up feelings of inadequacy and incompetence. Yet for this artist, I don’t know had unusual meaning and power. It expressed his openness to creativity and to collaborating with his brushes, paints, and canvas. He was constrained neither by self-criticism nor by expectations of pre-ordained results. He was not made weak by
We cannot help be but who we are. This hit home recently when I reviewed a 360-degree feedback report with the new president of a high tech company. Catherine’s vice-presidents viewed her as a passionate, brilliant, credible yet compassionate leader – a rare and wonderful person and executive. Yet she was also perceived as a self-righteous, opinionated micro-manager, who communicated emphatically and quickly that she was always right. Maybe not so good… I thought we were making progress after an hour or so of wrestling around the issues, and finally getting beyond her self-justifications. All of a sudden one of the verbatim comments from the feedback report caught her eye and she said, “I vehemently disagree with this. How can he say I’m not 100% committed to the company because of my external board participation? It’s important that we are represented in the community, blah blah…” Her comment stopped me cold, and I re-stated what she said – “you vehemently disagree?” I asked. “Catherine, couldn’t you just disagree regular, without the vehemence?” She stared at me for a moment, and started to crack up laughing, at which point so did I. The moment encapsulated for her more than any other
In a recent leadership development workshop, our participants were contrasting how much time they spend these days collaborating across functions on complex issues vs. earlier in their careers. As the group worked to define what collaboration today really means, one of the participants blurted: “For the first 25 years of my life, including getting my graduate engineering degree, if I did the things that you are calling “collaboration,” my teachers would refer to it as “cheating!” As this comment illustrates, true collaboration sometimes runs counter to our mind-sets, habits, and even training. In our consulting partnership, we have been learning about, and teaching how to overcome the challenges of true collaboration for a long time. It is in this spirit that we are committing to our new blog, the primary purpose of which is to collaborate with each other and with our readers to develop unique insights in several areas we work in and are passionate about: organizational, team and individual leadership development, to name a few. We have been in partnership for 13 years and spend much of our time operating from individual offices, navigating lonely airports, and working independently. So the secondary purpose of this blog, the selfish
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