Gratitude is Powerful and Contagious

Gratitude is a powerful attitude. 

I have written about gratitude  many times.  You can review summaries of three Lead Quietly gratitude posts below.

“Show Gratitude” is also Quiet Leader Commandment #7.   It is an important leadership tenet.

But it takes discipline. When the stress of our situation causes us to work with our heads down and a focus on our mission, it is easy to forget.  As is often quoted: "We are so often caught up in our destination that we forget to appreciate the journey, especially the goodness of the people we meet on the way." - Source Unknown

This past week, two of my colleagues, Jason and Keith, provided me with two  lessons and a reminder about the power of gratitude.  I don’t have to share details other then that their dialogue reminded me of the power of gratitude, and,

1. You double or triple the impact if you go out of your way to deliver the message.
2. It is hard to receive thanks without passing it back.  It’s contagious.  

Here is a quick summary of some of my previous writing on the topic as a further reminder of the power of gratitude.

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Building Community:  Thank you as a way of leading

from the Lead Quietly Archives

Gratitude is an easy and remarkably powerful step in building the type of community that is essential for successful teams. As I have written before, "Building community is hard. However, it is easy to start quietly and simply with thanks and smiles.


First, I'd invite everyone to read the wonderful work of Rosa Say. I have employed Rosa's insight several times in the past including, 12 Rules for Leadership and It's All About Learning.
This week, her Managing with Aloha Coaching blog introduced me to the concept of "mahalo" which means thankful living. The most striking suggestion for a quiet leader is,

Say “thank you” often; speak of your appreciation and it will soften the tone of your voice, giving it richness, humility and fullness.

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Transformational Gratitude

from the Lead Quietly Archives

Gratitude is transformational. Russell Bishop writes this past week on the Huffington Post that gratitude is a key to personal transformation. I'd like to share two of Bishop's thoughts and encourage you to read the full post.
Bishop writes, "given the stressful times in which we live and the apparent instability, unreliability, and fear wracked nature of our social and economic systems, it seems to me that the counterintuitive notion of Gratitude is needed right here, right now, for each and every one of us."
He goes on to write beautifully about the transformational force of gratitude.

Gratitude is a kind of seed that survives even the most devastating of circumstances, one that can germinate with the slightest amount of care. And when the gratitude seed germinates, the grateful typically experience an expansion of well being - emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
The seed typically sprouts in small ways, and yet the observant amongst us will notice that the tiniest sprout slowly grows into something more substantial. Gratitude is not just a seed, but also a form of nourishment that enables us to find our way out of difficult circumstances, to find choices that others might miss, and to craft an improved life experience.

This is a powerful sentiment for a simple concept.

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Practice Gratitude - Increase Happiness, It's Official

from the Lead Quietly Archives

The research data is in. Gratitude builds community and increases happiness.
I have written in earlier posts that a simple thank you does much to build community. In Build Community - Start simply with smiles and thanks, I quoted Carmine Coyote who wrote at Slow Leadership, that gratitude is "major constituent in the glue that holds together groups of all sizes, from a few friends to society as a whole."


Leaders can use thanks and gratitude to start building a community of leaders.
The value and effect of gratitude was cemented in "Practicing Gratitude Can Increase Happiness by 25%" on the PsyBlog. The post cites the work of Dr. Robert A Emmons of the University of California, Davis in his book, Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. In studies referenced in the book, Emmons found that people who focused on gratitude felt fully 25% happier and more optimistic about the future.


Additional research by Emmons and Dr Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami discovered that the benefits of gratitude extended to a variety of emotional, interpersonal and life gains.

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Thanks to my colleagues for the lesson and reminder. 

Thanks for reading.  Lead quietly and don’t forget gratitude.

don

Collaboration Is a Team Sport - Three simple ideas for a collaborative foundation

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The advantages of collaboration on innovation and success is clear.  Correspondingly, a challenge of any workplace is to foster collaboration. 

A recent series on the Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog reminded me that many of our simple, Lead-Quietly ideas help make collaboration happen.

In Embedding Collaboration from the Start, HBR senior editor, Jimmy Gutterman reminds us that collaboration needs to be cultivated.  He writes, 

Of course we all need to collaborate more and better. Yet it's also one of those functions that many companies hope will just happen. Let's put a bunch of good, motivated people together and the collaboration will take place, right? It's not that easy — leaders must create conditions in which collaboration is inevitable.

I'm sure that many of us can cite examples of groups that were thrown together and couldn't find the path to collaboration.  So what can leaders do to create a collaborative environment?

In a followup post on the HBR blog entitled, Collaboration Is a Team Sport, and You Need to Warm Up, author Adam Richardson, answers the leader question by employing some themes that have frequently been explored here on Lead Quietly.  Those themes are community, trust,  and communication.  

He writes, 

Sustainable collaboration is best when the people know and trust each other. Ideally they have met in person, know a bit about each other personally as well as professionally, have a sense of communication and work styles, and what the individual strengths, weaknesses and points of view are.

Leaders should ask themselves if they are creating opportunities "to consciously and actively help people get to know each other in these ways as much as possible before they are put together on projects."

Here are three simple Lead Quietly ideas for building a collaborative environment.

Know your team.  It starts with knowing  about your team and their lives, including spouses, children, and passions.  As Linda Hill and Kent Lineback state in their book, Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader

If you don’t know your people, you cannot make intelligent decisions about assignments for them, and you cannot capture their commitment or decide how much to trust and delegate to them.

Build Trust.  Work on trust every day.  Remember that trust begets trust, and that building trust is easy.  Follow the simple tips I cited in Building Trust Every Day - It's Important, It's Easy

Show Gratitude.  Gratitude in the form of a simple thank you may be the simplest and most powerful community building tool available.  I wrote in Building Community: Thank you, as a way of leading, "Look at your team members or coworkers directly in the eye and say thank you. I believe you'll instantly realize the power of gratitude."

The HBR articles remind me that good collaboration starts with a foundation based on good community.  I believe that good community starts with three simple tips:

1. Know your team
2. Build Trust
3. Show Gratitude

Thanks for reading.  Please lead quietly.
don

Building Trust Every Day - It's Important, It's Easy

Trust is an essential element of leadership.

To me, there is a solid link as validated in some of my previous explorations where I cited the work of James M.Kouzes and Barry Z.Posner from The Leadership Challenge and discussed the absence of trust as note as one of five team dysfunction in my review of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.

This post expands my reflection on trust from a couple of recent discoveries on the blogosphere. First, exploring the importance of trust in collaboration and work performance, and secondly, to offer easy quiet leader-like tips for trust building. You can work on trust every day.

The Importance of Trust

Bret L. Simmons in a post "Why We Trust" at the Leader Lab site, cites two compelling studies that link the role of trust to collaboration and general task and job performance. Two quotes from Bret's post summarize the study's findings:

Trust increased an individual’s task performance, risk taking behavior, citizenship behavior (doing more to help others at work), and decreased counterproductive behavior.

If teamwork is important in your organization, then ....you should select and promote individuals with a high propensity to trust.

The Simmons post validates my previous thinking on the importance of trust. Good information from the LeaderLab. You can get more from Bret Simmons at his Positive Organizational Behavior site, both great leadership resources.

Building Trust

The importance of trust is clear. Now how do you build trust? Are there quiet leader-like approaches for building trust?

I discovered a very nice trust building tip list from the Thinking for a Change blog of Pascal Van Cauwenberghe. In the post, he summarizes a 2007 presentation from David Anderson titled, Building a high trust culture in your software engineering organisation.

In the post, Pascal suggests, "Do you want to work better, faster and get more satisfaction out of it? Increase the trust level in your team."

He offers a quiet leader-like list of tips for building trust, an actionable list that reminds me that you can work to build trust every single day.

Here is Pascal/David's tip list:

• Trust begets trust
• Be humble and respect the other
• Vulnerability disarms
• Apologize for poor results; take responsibility, even if you weren’t involved in the delivery of the poor results; promise better; deliver.
• Keep delivering, regularly, predictably.
• Deliver daily on your personal commitments; deliver daily or weekly on team commitments
• Demonstrate competence; rehearse and practice for perfect delivery
• Be transparent
• Encourage learning from failure
• Get rid of command & control
• Build up a reputation
• Define clear values and principles; let them guide decision making

I like this list. There is something on this list that you can work on every single day. The result of this daily attention will be the expansion of trust and the increase in job performance.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and build trust every day.

Don

Learning: Make it Informal

I have a question for leaders who recognize that learning is a critical element of a team's success. "What can leaders do to cultivate learning across their teams?"

It is a broad question with a complex answer. As I wrote in a previous post, the space is vast and multi-dimensional. This is illustrated in my exploratory mindmap.


I can't pretend that I understand the entirety of this space. However, I discovered a single learning concept that resonated with me. Relative to my question, I found Informal Learning a compelling, thought-provoking and amazingly accessible concept. Simply stated, leaders should build and cultivate informal learning on their teams.

What is Informal Learning?
As Jay Cross writes on his Informal Learning blog, "People acquire the skills they use at work informally — talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know."

Informal learning can characterized as learning that:

• Takes place outside educational establishments.
• Does not follow a specified curriculum.
• Will likely be sporadic, incidental, and problem-related.
• Experienced directly as a function of everyday life.

Cross goes on to say that "informal learning is the unofficial, unscheduled, impromptu way most people learn to do their jobs." If you'd like to hear Jay describe informal learning, here is a video he supplied in 2007.

Informal learning is the Rodney Dangerfield of learning. It just doesn't get respect. In fact, Allen Tough in his paper, The Iceberg of Informal Adult Learning suggests that about 80% of learning is informal and quite invisible like the iceberg. However, the other 20%, this is learning that is formal, and institutionally organized, get the lion's share of the attention and the largest share of most organization's training budget.

Some even go so far as to suggest that organizations are spending 80% of their training budget to accomplish a mere 20% of their learning. There is clearly some debate about the validity of this comparison. Despite this, in my experience, organizations don't give much attention to the power and potential of informal learning.

The question for leaders is, "How can you support the growth of informal learning in your team?

In a Lead Quietly manner, I decided to look for common threads and identify a handful of principles where leaders could focus their attention in their effort to build informal learning.

Here are the Lead Quietly Principles of Building Informal Learning:

It's Personal
We've always known that different people have different learning styles. My approach to learning; as much as I attempt to build this skill, is not necessarily the optimal approach for anyone else on my team. First and foremost, a leader trying to expand team learning should recognize that any program or learning initiative should account for differences in learning style.

Secondly, leaders should look to understand how their colleagues learn. Although numerous learning style theories exist, I'd encourage leaders to pick a single framework like Fleming's VARK model which divides leaders into four groups:

1. visual learners
2. auditory learners
3. reading/writing-preference learners
4. kinesthetic learners or tactile learners

Recently, I've started asking applicants during hiring interviews, "How did you learn what you know?" The varied responses led me to believe that you can simply ask and observe in order to build understanding.

With information about personal learning styles, you are in a better position to build informal learning opportunities across your team.

It's Social, It's Networked, It's Collaborative, It's about Community.
A paradox of the study of informal learning is that despite the fact that learning style is personal, informal learning is more likely to flourish in an environment based on strong community. Teams easily form communities of practice where they share a passion for a topic or solution. Teams will build community to help each other, share, and learn from each other.

The Lead Quietly blog has focused extensively on approaches to building community and collaboration across teams. And the not-so-surprising finding about community is that the identical community-building approaches apply to both collaboration and learning. Teams that excel at learning, collaboration, and community are teams with a foundation on personal relationships, gratitude, trust, passion, and sharing. The recommendation for leaders, build a strong community for active learning.

It's about Sharing and Conversation.
Jay Cross says in his video, "The most powerful instructional technology ever invented is human conversation." In his book, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance (Essential Knowledge Resource), he defines conversation as the "stem cells for learning." Through conversation, learning is created and shared in a single process.

As a leader, you simply want to encourage sharing and conversation. As Catherine Lombardozzi writes in Breathing Life into an Informal Learning Strategy,

Sharing expertise and collaborating with others needs to be encouraged, recognized, and rewarded. Reaching out to others for support of learning needs to be viewed as a savvy strategy for getting up to speed and getting ahead. There has to be some room for informal conversation and sharing experiences. In an economic environment where time is increasingly scarce, interpersonal interactions my be undervalued and underutilized, and that will have serious consequences on learning in our organizations.

Leaders should not only participate in the conversation but should mentor, model, and coach with those conversations. I now recognize that when I sit with a co-worker and spend time discussing and exploring, I am creating an informal learning opportunity for both of us. I need to do more of this.

Support Informal Learning with Tools and a PLE
Almost any discussion of modern trends in learning, be it defined as informal learning, social learning, network learning, or e-learning will end up talking about the tools. As a leader, we should encourage the use of tools that support the discovery, sharing and conversation about learning.

When I propose this, I am not suggesting that your team needs to purchase a sophisticated learning management system. I'm really saying, use the common and readily available tools that are already at your disposal. Jane Hart on her Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies site surveys both learners and learning professionals to identify "Top Tools". Hart's top ten list for learning tools includes common and popular tools like:

• Google Search
• YouTube
• FireFox
• Twitter
• Wikepedia
• Delicious
• Facebook
• Google Reader
• Gmail

The list is likely familiar. As you use these tools they collectively evolve into a Personal Learning Environment (PLE), a set of tools that you can use to support and manage your learning. Your encouragement and modeling will grow the tool and PLE concept across your team. My PLE is based on tools like FireFox, Google Reader, YouTube, ScribeFire, Twitter, BigTweet, and iGoogle.

Final Thoughts
Informal learning doesn't require big investments, a budget, or even a formal plan. With awareness, modeling, strong community, and support of a team's leader, informal learning can become viral. It's all about learning. A team of learners can tackle any challenge.

Thanks for reading. Learning? Make it informal.
Don

Quiet Leaders Needed to Keep Companies Balanced

If you are a Quiet Leader, your organization is counting on you to be "soft part" expert. And unfortunately the soft part is not only the hard part, it is very difficult to keep it in balance. You can't do it by yourself. You need a leader mob.

You are probably saying, huh?

The concept occurred to me after watching a presentation on Ed Oakley's Leadership Made Simple blog. Ed is another finalist in the 2008 Best Leadership Blog competition. He is also the author of the book Leadership Made Simple .

The post that that offered me new insight was Management Skills vs Leadership Skills, or is it AND…? where Ed's video presentation identifies two parts to any organizational process, the hard part and the soft part.

The Hard Part and the Soft Part

The hard part is comprised of the processes, procedures, measurement, metrics and structures. Think of your reporting, forms policies, budgets, and estimates as part of the "hard" part. The hard part is comprised of items that are design to control the efforts of the organization.

The soft part is comprised of the people related components. Think of the ideas, fears, excitement, resistance, attitudes of the people. You might add a dash of politics and fear of change to make it a little more interesting.

In the presentation Ed asks two questions that establishes the essential message of this post:

First Ed asks, "Which is more challenging in your experience?" The answer is immediate. The soft part is clearly more challenging. The hard part represents those somewhat mechanical elements that are generally easy to understand and learn. Most of us would associate the hard part with the tools and approaches used by management to steer the work of your organization.

Most will say that the soft part is clearly more difficult. There is more nuance and variation in dealing with "people" concerns. It's hard. It requires leadership.

Ed's second question is more challenging. "Which is more importance?" Both the hard and soft parts are important and balance is key. As Ed states, "It all about balance." There needs to be a balance between Management and Leadership.


Out of Balance
As I watch managers respond to the management "crisis of the day", I see the soft part, people centered issues suffer. Give a manager unending requests for reports, budget reviews, schedules, justifications, presentations, and project updates, that manager will not have time or energy to lead. The balance between management and leadership is lost.

An "out of balance" situation is serious and not uncommon. I've described this before in What leaders really do? where I quoted the work of Professor John Kotter where he said, "Most U.S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled."


Another leadership giant who has written extensively about "overmanaged and underled" (Google book search) is Warren Bennis. Miki Saxon at Leadership Turn wrote an insightful series of posts that revisits classic Bennis thinking about management versus leadership. The series reminds us that the mission of a leader is very different than the mission of a manager. As leaders we must:

• Do the right thing
• Challenge
• Originate
• Keep an eye on the horizon
• Inspire trust
• More of the Bennis Leader Mission .......Click here for the complete list at Leadership Turn.
  

How do we keep Soft and Hard in balance?
Quiet leaders need to focus on their leadership mission and leverage their leadership skills to keep our organizations in balance. Individually, we strive to grow and apply our leadership skills. But, a single leader can't do it alone.

Quiet Leader Mobs
A quiet leader mob, a community of leaders, can add mass to the soft/leadership end of our balance challenge. More leaders equals more mass equals balance. My colleague Tom recently stated the challenge eloquently when he described the need for a "groundswell" of leader activists in order to keep balance. Quiet leader mobs can balance overmanagement. We need more leaders, grassroots leaders, we need that groundswell.

Quiet Leader Call to Action
Keep the soft parts and the hard parts in balance by:

1. Building your personal leadership skills. Its about learning and growing. Be a soft part expert.
   
2. Use your leadership skills to build leadership and community around you. We need quiet leader mobs.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Team Manifest 2: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In a recent post,I announced my plan to share my current study of team-building and collaboration that coincidentally happens to be list centric. Manifest Team 2 is the second in this series that explores the lists of collaboration and teams.

Manifest Team 1 identified the Characteristics of High-Performance Teams by DeJanasz, Dowd, and Schneider.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable is a national best seller having appeared on the best seller/best business book lists of the New York Times, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. In the book, author, speaker, and consultant Patrick Lencioni spins a fable about a new CEO who takes on the challenge of transforming a dysfunctional executive group into a cohesive, high-performance team. Along the way, the group explores and confronts the pitfalls and dysfunctions that can inhibit teamwork and performance. I found the book compelling and gripping as a good fable can be.

The core instructive content (the list) presented in the book centers around the five dysfunctions that Lencioni presents in the form of a pyramid model.

Absence of Trust

The first of the dysfunctions, absence of trust, stems from teams unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group. Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.

Fear of Conflict

This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets a tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.

Lack of Commitment

A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment. without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.

Avoidance of Accountability

Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability, the fourth dysfunction. Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.

Inattention to Results

Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.

A List with a Positive Twist

A list that positively states the desired characteristic or behavior would be more compatible with my growing insight into high performance teams and collaboration. Fortunately, Lencioni provides a positive list in his summary of the book.

The members of truly cohesive teams:

Trust one another.
They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
They commit to decisions and plans of action.
They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
They focus on the achievement of collective results.

The list seems pretty simple but we know in practice it is difficult to achieve. It requires new team insights and consideration from every team member. And, of course, it takes a leader to set the stage.

Next Manifest Team: 6 Habits of Highly Effective Teams

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Beyond Community to Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

I have previously written on the importance of building community in our team environments. Several posts have focused on community building. For example:

Building Community - Trust Begets Trust
Cites the work of Kouzes and Posner in The Leadership Challenge where the authors identify trust as a foundation for community and teamwork.

Building Community: Thank you as a way of leading
Proposes gratitude as an easy and remarkably powerful step in building the type of community that is essential for successful teams.

Building Community with Giving
Suggests that giving and service are key ingredients to building community across teams.

I stand by my previous work. Community is important but as a friend of mine suggests, simple community, as described in my previous posts, is "bumper sticker" material. The real objective for teams is to move beyond community to collaboration, collective action, and collective intelligence . Community might be part of the foundation but your real intent is to lead your team to great collaborative accomplishment and creativity beyond the capabilities of a single individual.

In future weeks, I plan to focus my attention on collaboration, collective action, and collective intelligence. I intend to share the findings of my journey with my fellow quiet leaders.

One of the stops in my journey this past week validated the importance of collaboration for the modern organization and the leadership that is required in order to foster collaboration. Linda Dunkel and Christina Arena in the white paper, Leading in the Collaborative Organization describe the importance,

Collaborative leadership is at the center of an important shift in a business world increasingly moving away from autocratic leadership to more decentralized models.....collaboration is an essential tool for the new kind of business leader — the facilitative leader — one who engages relevant stakeholders in solving problems collaboratively and works to build a more collaborative culture in his or her organization or community.

In their work, Dunkel and Arena also dispel the common myths of collaboration. They refute four myths:

1. Collaboration slows everything down. They maintain that the prework and consensus that naturally accompanies collaboration reduces churn and roadblocks and will speed innovation and time to market.
2. Collaboration makes leaders soft or weak. Collaborative leaders actually share power and recognize that the best decisions are "often made with the input of others with specialized expertise."
3. Collaboration cannot be taught. "If people embrace the underlying assumption that collaboration is valuable and desirable, then the behaviors and methods for collaborating can be taught."
4. Collaboration can't be sustained. The authors recognize several high and sustained growth companies that cultivate collaboration. Companies like IKEA, Starbucks, and Eileen Fisher are recognized for the collaborative environments.

I'd like to reuse a great quotation from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu that speaks to the relationship between collaborative action and leadership,

As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.... When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!

I hope that Lead Quietly readers will collaborate with me on this study. Please comment and contribute.

Thanks for reading. Please collaborate and lead quietly.

Don

Leading from Below

Anyone can lead. An element of leadership that I have stressed previously is that you can lead from anywhere on the organizational chart. You do not need a title to lead as I suggested in Leadership - No Title Required. Anyone can lead and you can lead from anywhere.

This notion was validated by an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Leading from Below. The article offered a bevy of suggestions for the leader who makes a deliberate choice to lead from any position in the organization. The article is recommended. Here are a few of my favorite elements.

Make the decision to be a leader.
Make a conscious decision to lead and move beyond your current service role. Make the decision on your own. Take the risk and you'll thrive in your job and get that next promotion.

Focus on influence, not control.
Enlist people around you to work on a common cause. Try to get people to act on their own. Adopt the perspective of the people around you. Don't hoard information. Share it. Keep things simple and clear and win the devotion of the people around you. Think influence not control.

Make your mental organizational chart horizontal rather than vertical.
Ignore any traditional organizational charts. View your colleagues as a focus group and connect and collaborate to solve your teams challenges. Even extend your connections to customers, suppliers and other external to the company. Your personal org chart can be simply flat.

Work on your "trusted adviser" skills.
Try to obtain the role of "trusted advisor" to the people that surround you. Listen more than you talk. Ask questions. Turn conversations into meaningful discussions.

Don't wait for the perfect time, just find a good time.
Don't wait for an invitation to lead. Perhaps look for an opportunity where change is eminent and people are looking for new approaches. Mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations might create an easy opportunity for new leadership.

Leadership can occur from anywhere in the organization and is available to anyone who makes a conscious decision to lead.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.

Don

Practice Gratitude - Increase Happiness, It's Official

The research data is in. Gratitude builds community and increases happiness.

I have written in earlier posts that a simple thank you does much to build community. In Build Community - Start simply with smiles and thanks, I quoted Carmine Coyote who wrote at Slow Leadership, that gratitude is "major constituent in the glue that holds together groups of all sizes, from a few friends to society as a whole."

Leaders can use thanks and gratitude to start building a community of leaders.

The value and effect of gratitude was cemented in "Practicing Gratitude Can Increase Happiness by 25%" on the PsyBlog. The post cites the work of Dr. Robert A Emmons of the University of California, Davis in his book, Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. In studies referenced in the book, Emmons found that people who focused on gratitude felt fully 25% happier and more optimistic about the future.

Additional research by Emmons and Dr Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami discovered that the benefits of gratitude extended to a variety of emotional, interpersonal and life gains.

How can leaders capture and maximize the benefits of gratefulness. A follow-up PsyBlog post cited Emmons' tips for become more grateful and happy:

1. Keep a gratitude journal.
2. Ask yourself three questions, consider someone you know and "first consider what you have received from them,
   second what you have given to them and thirdly what trouble you have
   caused them. This may lead to discovering you owe others more than you
   thought."
3. Use visual reminders to remember to be grateful.
4. Swear an oath to be more grateful.
5. Act grateful to be grateful. Remember "Thanks begets thanks."

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and gratefully.
Don

Great Insights on Building Trust and Community

In December I wrote Building Community - Trust Begets Trust where I discussed the research of Kouzes and Posner in The Leadership Challenge that promotes the role of trust as a foundation for leadership and collaboration. The key phrase was a catch phrase, "Trust Begets Trust. Trust is a two-way street where you need to trust others just as much as you need others to trust you. Trust works both ways. Trust is needed to build community.

I was delighted when the post was included in the January Carnival of Trust. The Carnival of Trust is a monthly blog carnival which focuses on the role of trust in business and other relationships. The compilation is sponsored by Trusted Advisor Associates and the January carnival is hosted by Ford Harding of Harding and Company.

The Carnival of Trust offers lots of insight into trust as a key leadership components. Here are some of my favorites from the carnival.

• Trust is the business word for love -Feld Thoughts

• Do you trust your boss - Wall Street Journal:Independent Street

• David Anderson on Trust - Thinking for a Change

For quiet leaders who strive to build community, trust is a key requirement. Read and enjoy the Carnival.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Building Community - Trust Begets Trust

I am very fond of any catch phrase that allows me to easily remember or convey a principle. I apply catch phrases in technology, leadership, or even home life. Here are some of my favorites in my technology space, i.e., business intelligence and data warehousing:

• Touch a table, take a table.
• Nulls are evil.
• Let the ETL do the heavy lifting.

At home, there is a separate set of catch phrases that I use with my teenagers. For example:

• Make good decisions
• Learn a lot
• No Bs, No Keys

These catch phrases are great because once they are explained and used, they serve as easy reminders and statements of guiding principles for a team or a family. You gotta love a great catch phrase.

In my leadership vernacular, one of my favorite catch phrases comes from Tom Peters, "It begets it". I've referenced it before and I have usually applied this phrase to smiles and thanks, as in, Smiles begets smiles. This refers to the notion that as a leader, if you smile, your team members will smile back.

I was studying the The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner looking for new insight on building community and fostering collaboration across teams and was ecstatic when I found the perfect catch phrase focusing on trust, "Trust begets trust."

The research of Kouzes and Posner exalts the role of trust as a foundation for leadership and collaboration. In speaking of trust they convey,

It's the central issue in human relationship within and outside organizations. Without trust you cannot lead. Without trust you cannot get extraordinary thinks done. Individuals who are unable to trust others fail to become leaders.

The work of Kouzes and Posner clearly suggests that trust is a two way street, you need other to trust in you just as much as you need to trust others. So how do you develop trust within your team.

You can start easily with "Trust begets trust." You need to demonstrate that you are open to influence and value other peoples alternative viewpoints. Trust is built when you make yourself vulnerable. You simply need to demonstrate trust in others before asking for trust from others. And finally, listen, listen, listen in order to demonstrate your respect for others and their ideas.

Thanks to Kouzes and Posner, I have taken these simple trust concepts and have now associated them with the phrase, "Trust begets trust."

I'd love to hear other catch phrases from you that effectively allow you to package a leadership principle or concepts. Please comment.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Quick Leadership Test - Are you a we or me leader?

A book that I have wanted to read since last spring was The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. More recently, I was reminded by the "Top Five Leadership Book" recommendations by fellow leadership blogger Ron Hurst at the MaterialLeadership blog. This was a book I had to read.

I connected with the book almost immediately in chapter one while reading about the "we" test for leadership.

Readers of this blog might sense that I like simple concepts. Simple concepts are ideas that resonate with a straightforward definition, a life hack, a list, or a quick test. I love to carry a few of these simple concepts in my pocket as a quick reference guide to good leadership. A simple concept inspires me and serves as a reminder that won't get lost in the complexity of everyday living.

Kouzes and Posner's "we" test for leadership is a perfect example of a simple concept.

In chapter one, Kouses and Posner introduce the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. The fourth practice cited by Kouzes and Posner is "Enable Other to Act." As they write,

Exemplary leaders enable others to act. They foster collaboration and build trust.

This is an idea that is perfectly consistent with the "Build Community" principle of Quiet Leadership. It was the "we test" that resonated with me. Here is their test:

Leadership is a team effort. After reviewing thousands of personal-best cases, we developed a simple test to detect whether someone is on the road to becoming a leader. That test is the frequency of the use of the word "we." In our interview with Alan Keith, for instance, he used the word "we" nearly three times more often then the word "I" in explaining his personal-best leadership experience.

It's a simple concept. "We" is the leadership pronoun.

The test is simple. When you review your work or provide a status report to your manager, are you using the leadership pronoun.

I had previously recognized the "we" concept in my June post that recognized former President Eisenhower as a quiet leader. Historian and author Stephen Ambrose stated,

Eisenhower never used the word "I". It was always "we," except one time when he wrote out the message that would be handed to the press in the event the landings failed. And there he used the personal vertical pronoun, it's my fault, I did it. Otherwise it was always "we".

Its a proven idea and a simple concept that resonates. Are you a "we or me" leader? We is the leadership pronoun.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Building Community: Thank you, as a way of leading.

Gratitude is an easy and remarkably powerful step in building the type of community that is essential for successful teams. As I have written before, "Building community is hard. However, it is easy to start quietly and simply with thanks and smiles.

The power of gratitude was twice validated for me this past week.

First, I'd invite everyone to read the wonderful work of Rosa Say. I have employed Rosa's insight several times in the past including, 12 Rules for Leadership and It's All About Learning.

This week, her Managing with Aloha Coaching blog introduced me to the concept of "mahalo" which means thankful living. The most striking suggestion for a quiet leader is,

Say “thank you” often; speak of your appreciation and it will soften the tone of your voice, giving it richness, humility and fullness.

My second validation on the power of gratitude occurred this week during a family member's hospital stay. Nurses and care givers in any health care setting are asked to do a lot. Their role in recovery is huge and the responsibility ranges from comfort to advocacy, from medicine to management.

I had many opportunities this past week to look a nurse or care giver directly in the eye and say "thank you."

No two response were the same, but the power of the phrase was clear. In one case, my perception was that amidst the pain, groaning, expectations, and entitlement, gratitude wasn't expressed very often. In another case, the response led to a "I love nursing" conversation. In a third case the response suggested the partnership between patient and nurse. The responses, although varied, will forever etch the power of gratitude in my mind.

My suggestion to leaders; leverage this wonderful power. Look at your team members or coworkers directly in the eye and say thank you. I believe you'll instantly realize the power of gratitude.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Build Community - Start simply with smiles and thanks

Good leaders build community. Building community is hard. However, it is easy to start quietly and simply with thanks and smiles.

In a recent post at Slow Leadership, Carmine Coyote wrote about The Power of Gratitude. The post suggest that gratitude is a "major constituent in the glue that holds together groups of all sizes, from a few friends to society as a whole."
This definition places gratitude, which generally starts out with a simple thank you, in a very exalted role. You might debate as to whether gratitude is more or less important than honesty, trust, or service in building community. However, we can immediately agree there is nothing easier than a simple "thank you."


Nothing easier than a simple thank you, except for a simple smile.

A Smile Costs Nothing,
but gives much.
It enriches those who receive
without making poorer those who give.
It takes but a moment
but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.
None is so rich and mighty
that he can get along without it,
and none is so poor that he cannot
be made rich by it.

A Smile creates happiness in the home,
fosters goodwill in business,
and is the countersign of friendship.
A smile brings rest to the weary,
cheer to the discouraged,
sunshine to the sad,
and it is nature's best antidote for
trouble.

Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed or stolen,
for it is something that is of no value to anyone
until it is
given away.

Some people are too tired to give you a smile,
Give them one of yours,
as none needs a smile so much
as he
who has no more to give.


Anonomous
(but believed based on the work of
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch)

The combination of thanks and smiles lays a very powerful foundation for great community. And it is so easy to start. As Tom Peters says,

It begets it.

Thanks begets thanks.

Smiles begets smiles

Thank for reading. Please lead quietly. Keep thanking, keep smiling. It's contagious.

Don