Humbly standing among the leadership giants

I'm excited to announce Lead Quietly has been named a finalist for the 2008 Best of Leadership Blog competition hosted by Kevin Eikenberry at the Remarkable Learning blog.


The contest runs through the month of July, and I hope you’ll take a look at the nominees and cast your vote.

I am humbled by the attention for Lead Quietly. When I started blogging just over one year ago, I set out to explore two new areas for me. First, I was new to blogging and I wanted to get a feel for the tools, approaches, the social learning and explore the revenue stream of blogging. Secondly, I wanted to study leadership and learn about this "new" style of leadership that seemed to be getting more attention and was certainly more compatible with my own personality and style. From these two notions, Lead Quietly was launched.

It has been a fun journey and today, 74 posts later, I stand in front of you (OK, I'm actually sitting at my keyboard) and proudly and humbly accept the nomination. I'm actually asking for your vote.

So, you're asking, we would I vote for Lead Quietly? I submit this top-ten list.

Reasons to Vote for Lead Quietly in the Best of 2008 Leadership Blogs

1. In the spirit of the blogosphere, a vote for Lead Quietly is like a vote for all of the other blogs that I have cited in the past year. This is probably about fifty in total including over half of this year's "best" nominees. I could not have succeeded with the knowledge and insight of the army of leadership experts who blog and write.
2. Lead Quietly is a basement blog. I literally write my posts from the basement of my home. There's no corporate suite, no ivory tower here. It's me, my laptop, and my little basement window. And, of course, quite a bit of help from the blogosphere. From this basement position, a vote for Lead Quietly can take you nowhere but up.
3. Lead Quietly should be competing in the amateur division. It is purely an amateur effort. I may be the only nominated blogger who is not a published author, consultant, speaker, or trainer. I am a practicing leader with strong emphasis on the word practicing. I humbly stand alongside the pros. I'm asking for a few votes to avoid embarrassment.
4. Voting for Lead Quietly is like cheering for your favorite small market baseball team without money to pay for free agents. You gotta love a low budget effort and Lead Quietly is truly low-budget using a free host (Blogger), free Blogger template, and open source editor. (ScribeFire). I have to confess to the authors among us that most of the books I cite were checked out from our local public library. My only expense is my domain registration.
5. Regardless of how you vote, it's a Cinderella Story for me. To be placed in the company of Tom Peters, Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner and the entire nominated list is like qualifying for the US Open as a amateur, playing one good round of golf and finding yourself in a twosome with Tiger Woods. It doesn't get any better then this.
6. Vote for Change. A vote for any of the nominated blogs is a clear vote with a mandate for leadership change or leadership period. My name is Don Frederiksen and I approve this ad.
7. No commercial interruptions. Lead Quietly is presented in full without commercial interruption. You will not find advertising or other promotion on the sight. I have to make one disclaimer. My book references are done with text hyperlinks to my Amazon Associate account. Total earnings to date: $1.44. Thank you to the two people who clicked through my book links and bought a book. Five more books and I've paid this year's domain registration.
8. Support education. I'm a student of leadership. It only took me a few weeks to realize that I was not going to replace my day job with blogging. Since that time, my only real motivation for the blog is learning and growing. I love to learn and a vote for Lead Quietly is a vote for education. OK, I still read and dream by reading Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.
9. Voting for Lead Quietly is a quiet vote in support of the kind of leader and manager that we all want to work with. This leader is humble, a "we", other-oriented person who loves to learn, has great vision, builds community, and keeps it all in balance. Don't we all desire to work with great leaders?
10. A vote for Lead Quietly or any of the nominated blogs is a vote for the community of bloggers, whether nominated or not, who keep the space moving and churning (Nobody churns better than Tom Peters). Any vote advances leadership as a course of study within the blogosphere. Thanks Kevin Eichenberry for your sponsorship of this campaign and your Remarkable Leadership.

Please visit all of the blogs to learn and advance leadership.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and vote for your favorite leadership blog.
Humbly,
Don

Quiet Leader Presidents Rank Highly

My leadership study this past week found me pausing on a recent post on Michael McKinney's Leadership Now blog. What Makes a President Great was an terrific post where I encountered new leadership insight through Michael's review of the book The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game.

In the book, author Alvin S. Felzenberg devises new criteria and standards for ranking our former presidents. As Felzenberg described in an interview on National Review Online,

What I attempt to do in my book is to provide six criteria and assign each president a grade in each — just as educators do students on report cards. My categories are: character; vision; competence; management of the economy; handling of national security, defense, and foreign policy; and whether they extended or restricted liberty, especially at home.

As I read the Leadership Now post and reviewed the ranking of Felzenberg's top presidents, I was ecstatic to find three Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" selections in the top 12 list. The Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" represents my personal choices of quiet leaders who achieve greatness while exhibiting quiet leader attributes including humility, vision, balance, learning, and quiet purpose. The Quiet Leader "Hall of Fame" includes these top 12 presidents:

Rank	President/ Hall of Fame Selection
1	Abraham Lincoln
5	Dwight D Eisenhower
8	Ulysses S. Grant

A fourth president, Harry S. Truman, is ranked number 10 on the list and his nomination to the Quiet Leader Hall of Fame is currently under consideration.

Bottom line: Our quiet leader presidents rank highly and this causes me to reconsider,
In this age, could a Quiet Leader be elected president?

Read the Leadership Now post. It's very insightful in this presidential election time.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and be presidentially humble.
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

Manifest Team 1: Characteristics of High Performance Teams

In my last post, I announced my plan to share my current study of team building and collaboration that coincidentally happens to be somewhat list centric. Manifest Team is my title of this series of posts that will summarize these lists. Manifest Team 1 is the first of several such posts.

A team and collaboration list that I encountered a few years ago, continues to influence my thoughts about team building and collaboration. The list comes from the book, Interpersonal Skills in Organizations. Authors De Janasz, Dowd, and Schneider provide research background and a very concise list of the "Characteristics of High-Performance Teams." Here is their list with my comments and summary:

Common purpose and goals: Leaders need to ensure that all team members clearly understand the mission of the team. It's an obvious characteristic and on the surface seems easy when there is a single mission. However, in my work environment, many team members are engaged in multiple projects and clarity and priority becomes challenging in the face of multiple projects.

Clear roles: Team members need to understand their roles and assignments. And it's better when the understanding includes the big picture, task interdependence, and how one members work affects other members.

Communication processes: High performance teams use extensive communication methods. A variety of approaches (in person, phone, email) are used and updates are frequent.

Accepting and supportive leadership: High performance teams have leaders that function more like coaches than managers. These are leaders who look to influence and not control. This is quiet leadership at work.

Small size: High performance teams range in size from 6 to 10 members.

High levels of technical and interpersonal skills: The members of the team have both people and technical skills. The team is able to apply these skills to areas like problem solving, feedback, and conflict management.

Open relationships and trust: High performance team develop cooperative behaviors, assist each other, are approachable and dependable.

Accountability: The members of the high performance team understand that performance matters and that members share a mutual responsibility for the success of the team. The perfect scenario is when all team members feel accountable to the team rather than accountable to a project or resource manager.

Reward structures: High-performing teams are rewarded for team accomplishments in addition to individual performance. Team success needs to be celebrated.

One characteristic of this list that seems very compatible with Lead Quietly principles is that none of the "Characteristics of High-Performance Teams" cited by HeJanasz, Dowd, and Schneider recognize a dependency on the work of a project or resource manager. A team comprised of quiet leaders, who have a clear mission and roles, communicate well, and are generally accountable to each other and the team can self direct and achieve great success.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Team Building and Collaboration - Let's Compare the Lists

I like lists. To me, a good list, for example, a David Letterman-like top ten list of the key elements or points of a topic are all that I need to get started. I often pick out a key point or two and then drill into the details. Kind of like, reading a Wikipedia entry where you might pick up a point or two in the narrative but what you really want is to get an overview of the topic and then drill into the "Further Reading" or "External Links" at the bottom of the entry.

I stated my affinity for lists in an earlier post, For the Love of Learning, you gotta love a good list. I like a good list. Two of my favorites that I refer to for affirmation include:

Rosa Say: Twelve Rules of Self-Leadership

Tom Peters - Change this Manifesto: This I Believe

The power of lists also hit my Google Reader this past week in a post by Tom Davenport on the The Next Big Thing blog on Harvard Business Publishing. Professor Tom Davenport is a coauthor of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. A good book on the power of analytics and business intelligence as used in winning companies.

Last week he posted Top Ten Reasons for Top Ten Lists where, with a touch of sarcasm and humor, he lists the top ten reasons why we like lists.

My list of reasons might be different (maybe a later post) but I like a concise list that you can interpret as marching orders or a call to action.

Coincidently, my current review of books and literature on collaboration and team-building happens to be list centered.

So over the next few weeks, I plan on sharing these lists as I aim to expand our knowledge of a quiet leader's role in team-building and collaboration. After we have reviewed and commented on the lists, I'd like to aggregate the lists into a single uber list of key leadership elements for collaboration. I haven't compared the lists yet. However, I suspect that we will find some intersecting points as we compare the lists.

Here is my list of list-centered books that I plan to review:

6 Habits of Highly Effective Teams
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork

For good measure, I plan to also review a couple of additional lists that I have referenced in the past.

Also, please contribute any other team-centered lists that you have found interesting. As the information consolidates, I use this information to compile a Lead Quietly list high performance characteristics. Your contributions are priceles.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Quiet Strength, Quiet Leader, Quiet Winner

Tony Dungy, quiet leader, coach of the Indianapolis Colts and the winning coach of Super Bowl XLI, is the fifth leader to take a place in my personal Quiet Leader Hall of Fame.

With this profile, Coach Dungy joins a distinguished group of leaders that includes:

• U.S. Grant
• Abraham Lincoln
• Robert Greenleaf
• Dwight D Eisenhower

Granted, it feels like an unusual choice to me to propose a sports hero as a Quiet Leader of note. Nevertheless, I was moved by his leadership and approach when I read his autobiography, Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, & Priorities of a Winning Life. He may be the ideal Quiet Leader role model, a contemporary figure who is very public about his quiet approach, his faith, and his success. I'm not alone in my admiration. Time Magazine in 2007 named Dungy to their list of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World."

In 1972, I was a student at the University of Minnesota when Tony arrived on campus to play football and basketball. As a member of the U of M Football Marching band, I watched from the sidelines as Dungy grew as the quarterback/leader of the Golden Gophers. I was a Dungy fan in those early days when I knew nothing of his leadership approach. I only knew that he was a winner.

Dungy reconnected with Minnesota in 1992 when he returned to become the defensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings. I remember thinking at the time as I enjoyed listening to Dungy on sports talk radio thinking how I would prefer Dungy to be the Vikings head coach. It wouldn't happen at Minnesota.

Dungy left Minnesota to become the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and it was in this this role where his style, unique in the football world, become public and prominent. Let's explore his leadership from using snippets of his book.

On Vision
"The first step toward creating an improved future is developing the ability to envision it. Only vision allows us to transform dreams of greatness into the reality of achievement through human action."

On his quiet approach
I don't yell a lot. In fact yelling will be rare," ... if my voice at this level won't get your attention, and you believe you need someone to yell at you to correct you or motivate you, then we'll probably need to find you another team to play for so that you can play your best."

Accountability
"Take Ownership No excuses, no explanations."

Family Balance
In his book, Tony stresses the importance of family and life balance. He cites that football is only a game. But tells the team directly at the beginning of every season, " I want each guy to understand this his family is his first priority."

Albert Eienstein provides a quote that nicely underscores the Dungy approach,

Try not to become a man of success but rather a man of value.

A great summary of the quiet leadership style of Tony Dungy.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly.
Don

Be a good leader. Be incomplete. Don't be perfect, don't even try.

There is evidence that the best leaders are distinctly far from perfect and simply incomplete.

Woohoo. When I look at my personal skills, this is the best news I've heard in some time.

An article in the July 2007 volume of the Harvard Business Review caught my attention this past week as I continue my exploration of collaboration and leadership. In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, is the collaborative work of a group of authors MIT that includes Peter Senge, author of the previously cited business classic, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization.

The article resonated with me from the first read of the summary tag line:

No leader is perfect. The best ones don’t try to be—they concentrate on honing their strengths and find others who can make up for their limitations.

The authors state that it is time to stop visualizing the complete leader as a person at the top who has all the answers. They go on to say that leaders shouldn't even try to fill the gap. As they say,

... the sooner leaders stop trying to be all things to all people, the better off their organizations will be. In today’s world, the executive’s job is no longer to command and control but to cultivate and coordinate the actions of others at all levels of the organization. Only when leaders come to see themselves as incomplete—as having both strengths and weaknesses—will they be able to make up for their missing skills by relying on others.

A quick summary of the author's findings suggests that a leader, although incomplete and imperfect, should focus on four essential capabilities:

• Sensemaking - trying to understand the contexts in which in which an organization and its people operate. Sensemaking is similar to creating a roadmap that the team can follow.
• Relating - building relationships within and across organizations. Building a community of confidants who can collaborate to solve problems.
• Visioning - creating a compelling picture of the future. A leader should be able to articulate what the team wants to create.
• Inventing - developing new ways to achieve the vision. Similar to the innovation skills required of entrepreneurs, this is more about execution than creativity.

These capabilities are very compatible with my principles of Quiet Leadership, i.e. community, vision, learning, and balance. I also couldn't help but relate the findings of this article to a previous HBR article I referenced in What Leaders Really Do where author John Kotter proposed distinct differences between leadership and managment.

Once again, we quiet leaders are going to disappoint people around us who feel that we should have all of the answers. In fact, I shouldn't even try. Instead we should focus on sensemaking, relating, visioning, and inventing.


One final thought for Quiet Leaders
You know how one might struggle in an employment interview when the question is, "What is your biggest weekness?"

The standard recommendation for this response was to either present a weakness that was inconsequential, e.g. I am addicted to brushing my teeth, or present a weakness that you could turn into a positive, e.g. I'm a workaholic.

Well, now quiet leaders have a response.

Hiring manager: "What is your biggest weakness?"

Quiet Leader: "I am imperfect and have given up trying to be perfect. Fortunately, there is research that says that I am a better leader because of it. I forces me to "cultivate and coordinate the actions of others."

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and woohoo for imperfection.
Don

June 2008: I humbly ask for your support in the Best Leadership Blogs 2008 competition. Here are the top ten reasons why you should vote for Lead Quietly. Thank you.