Quiet Leaders Prove Better Leaders

There is new research about the effectiveness of introvert leaders that validates many of the concepts I discuss here. 

As I have written before,  I'm an introvert and contrary to the belief of some, being an introvert isn't crippling.  It is more about energy and how you gather and use it.  As an introvert, I gain energy with solitude and expend energy with people.  

I have proposed in previous posts that quiet leadership is effective.  For example in The Best Leaders Are..., I cited the work of  Executive coach Jennifer B Kahnweiler who wrote on Forbes.com about the strengths of the introvert leader.  She proposed key characteristics that  make an introvert a better leader: 

1. They think first, talk later.
2. They focus on depth.
3. They exude calm.
4. They let their fingers do the talking.
5. They embrace solitude.

This topic and related research was explored recently on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge blog.  The post,  Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees reviews the work of Business School professor Francesca Gino.  Professor Gino's research will be published next year but the early results indicate that:

• Extraverted leaders can be a liability if the followers are extroverts, tending not to be receptive to employees who make suggestions and take initiative.
• Introverted leaders are more likely to listen to, process, and implement the ideas of an eager team.
• Leaders need to adapt their style depending on the type of group they are leading. With proactive employees, leaders need to be receptive to the team's ideas; with a more passive team leaders need to act more demonstratively and set a clear direction.

The notion that leaders need to adapt their style is the biggest takeaway in the post for me.  I'm looking forward to reading about the research when it is released later this year. 

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

The Learning Zone - Everyday Action for Learning

Learning is key to leadership. It's a simple idea. However, we also know that learning is complex with many styles, approaches, and theories. It is easy to propose that learning is essential but how does one simplify the concept into everyday action.

Everyday action about learning recently came to me as I read Monday Morning Leadership: 8 Mentoring Sessions You Can't Afford to Miss by author David Cottrell. Monday Morning Leadership (MML) is a short book of practical advice that is set as a story where a manager named Jeff becomes a student of leadership through weekly discussions and coaching with his mentor. Tony, the mentor, takes his student down a journey of sage and practical advice for leaders and managers.

Tony's advice throughout the story is solid and accessible. His advice is consistent with the insights offered here on Lead Quietly. However, no section of MML reasonated more than Cottrell's exploration of "the Learning Zone."

As leaders, it is easy to become stale. Cottrell cautions leaders to avoid becoming complacent within your comfort zone, a space that he proposes is a "forceful enemy to your potential." He proposes that you avoid complacency by entering the "Learning Zone."

Cottrell's Learning Zone is comprised of three rooms, the Reading Room, the Listening Room, and the Giving Room. These three rooms present an approach for everday action from the Learning Zone.

The Reading Room

Your everyday action that brings you to the reading room is simple. Read every day. When you commit 10 minutes per day, you will learn from over a dozen books every year. I'd propose that books are important but that a regular scan of the leading leadership and management blogs will also serve you well. My action plan is simple, set aside time everyday for reading.

The Listening Room

Listening is key to learning, leadership, and collaboration. Listening is inexplicably linked to learning, conversation and sharing which as noted by learning expert Jay Cross, become the "stem cells for learning." Your everyday action? Take time to listen and learn. Listen intently to every conversation.

The Giving Room

Give back by teaching and helping others succeed. By teaching others, you become more accountable for the approaches that you are teaching. Aristotle wrote, "Teaching is the highest form of understanding." Your everyday action from the Giving room? Take the time to give back by teaching other.

I like simple learning actions. Learn by reading, listening, and giving. With these daily actions, we don't need to think that learning has to be complex.

Thanks for reading. And don't forget to read, listen and give.

don

Influence, An Introvert's Perspective

I am an introvert and unfortunately, live in a world that tends to like heroes. But I treat it as a challenge. I feel that I can lead and influence without the power, charisma, or advantage that extroverts commonly seem to possess.

In the book Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time to Get Busy, book contributor Don Frederiksen, (I heard of that guy) provides six recommendations for introverts who want to quietly influence without leaving their introvert zone. The essential message; leverage your introversion. Use your natural tools to talk less but communicate and influence more.

1. Be friendly. Say hi and bye. Don’t forget to smile. People will say yes to people they like.
2. You are an expert in silence. Use it. A pause in your words adds powerful punctuation.
3. Look people deeply in the eye. People will nod in agreement.
4. Communicate on paper. Think of the times you go to meetings lacking an agenda? Influence the discussion by outlining your thoughts and distribute the paper as a discussion aid. And because you bring paper, volunteer to record and summarize. As Tom Peters says, whoever “writes the summary…wields great power.
5. Follow-up fastidiously. Simply put, do what you say.
6. Show gratitude, say thank you. Go a little out of your way with this simple message.

Influence doesn’t have to be loud. Influence can emerge from someone who is not the life of the party. Introverts can leverage their introversion to wield more influence. As Jonathon Rauch wrote in Caring for your Introvert, “If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place.”

Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time to Get Busy is a crowdsourced, collaborative effort of 171 contributing authors on topics such as influence, social medea, innovation and more. Proceeds of the book benefit the mission of charity:water, a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

charity:water is also a participating partner in Blog Action Day. Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.

I encourage you to purchase Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time to Get Busy. Your purchase today will bring improvement to you and the greater good.

Change.org|Start Petition

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly,

don

Would you cover your leader's back?

Would you cover your leader's back? And what was it that formed this bond and trust?

It's a complicated pair of questions that says much about the relationship that you may or may not have with your manager.

In contemplating these questions, I encountered a humorous test of leadership in a story shared by authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan in the book Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results

The test is similar to the test I identified in Leadership Acid Test where the test is based on a concept orginally inspired by Michael McKinney at Leadership Now. In my earlier post I wrote,

Pick a Leader with a title. If that Leader no longer had a title, would you still follow him/her.

The Katzenbach story is based on the tale of two very different Navel officers with whom Katzenbach served. Officer Inskeep was a straight-up, command and control officer. He led strictly between the lines. Officer Stewart was more informal in his approach, leading outside the lines.

The story describes the plan for a full-dress Admiral's inspection that included a sword salute by the officers when the admiral arrived on deck. However on the day of the inspection the captain announced that the officers would NOT do the salute. Neither Inskeep and Stewart were on the ship at the time of the announcement.

If you reported to Inskeep (the command and control officer) and knew about the sword announcement, would you tell him? His men didn't and his sword salute was not only the only one but the clumsy action also knocked the Admiral's hat into the water.

On the other hand Steward had been informed about the plan by his reports, they covered his back.

Would you cover your leader's back? Would your reports cover your back?

This makes for an interesting test of leadership and clearly highlights a key benefit of informal leadership cited by Katzenbach.

The "Cover your back" story is depicted in the video below. It is recommend.

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and informally.
Don

The Magic of Showing Up

A Woody Allen quotation says,

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Like many, I generally chuckle when I see this quote. Maybe it's because the bar seems to low. Nevertheless, it's a quote that you see applied to many contexts including success, motivation, dedication, friendship, even love. Woody Allen in an MTV interview in 2008 seemed almost embarrassed about the quote when he said, "That thing has been quoted 20 million times. It's one of the least-witty things I've ever said."

A recent experience caused me to consider the magic of showing up. My team was approaching a deadline and I frankly had little to add to the project. Nevertheless, I showed up, to support, to eliminate distractions, to encourage focus. It was all that I could do. Did it have an impact? You can't really tell. Any impact was immeasurable. But the team was successful.

But I was curious so I sought out experts who had written on showing up and found several.

For example, leadership consultant and coach Tim Porterhouse concisely summarized the magic of showing up when he wrote in Leadership is Showing Up:

By Showing Up you send a message that says:

• This is vital to me and the company
• I care about your work - and I want to be part of it
• I won't ask you to do something that I would not do myself
• I want to lend a hand - no matter how small my contribution.

Even management guru Tom Peters added a twist to the notion when he wrote about the impact of showing up. He cited a modification that he sourced from the PersistenceUnlimited blog.

So increase you chances by 80%. Show Up!

The twist in the Allen quotation makes a compelling case for the magic of showing up.

Thanks for reading. Please show up and lead quietly.
don

Newness Calls for Renewal of Principles and Values.

My current situation calls for renewal. Newness abounds.

I recently started a new job with a new company, new team, a new role, and new responsibilities. My daughter recently graduated from high school and planning and preparation for her new life at college is in full swing. My family's health is good, the best that it has been in years. That's a great new feeling. Finally, we just celebrated the first day of summer. The new season, and the newness of my current situation calls for renewal.

I'm not talking about major reconstruction. But it is a great time to revisit the values, rules, and guiding principles that I believe in. Some of these principles may have gotten lost during the recent busy and stressful season.

It could be a big task. However, I'd like to reach into my past and remind myself of my core principles through two of my previous posts.

Quiet Leader Commandments - a Redux

I originally presented this list of commandments as a simple list that requires no additional explanation. I believe the list still stands without elaboration.

1. Always learning, always improving, always practicing.
2. Stay balanced.
3. Be resourceful, be a problem solver.
4. Show vision.
5. Be nice, be decent, be fair.
6. Serve.
7. Show gratitude.
8. Communicate well.
9. Listen always.

In this I believe! I feel renewed already.


Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps!

Another great list for renewal is cited in 2008 comes courtesy of author, consultant, and entrepreneur, Raj Setty. Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps!. The eBook is available for FREE from Setty's web site.

It is a great list of reminders about how to set yourself apart. If you are looking to distinguish yourself, just reading the table of contents provides a motivating list of suggestions and reminders.

1. Learn
   
2. Laugh
3. Look
4. Leave a Lasting Impression
5. Love
   
6. Leverage
7. Likability
   
8. Listen
9. Lead

As Raj explores each "l" item, he offers suggestions, insights, quotes, and an accountability assessment. Even if you feel that you have mastered the idea, Raj's reminders and assessment can bring new insight and renewal. The Amazon reviews on his printed book validate my sentiments; it is an overwhelming five-star selection. Did I mention that the ebook is FREE?

Thanks for reading. Please lead quietly and renew with me.

don