Author: ksanew

Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else. – Peter F. Drucker

A leader’s professional universe can be broadly defined in terms of:

1. Down and In: All those actions and activities devoted to the internal matters of the organization, its employees, especially direct reports, and the mission.
2. Out: The attention and effort that is directed laterally to advance organizational interests. Partnerships, contemporary relationships, organization-to-organization collaboration, professional peer relationships outside the leader’s domain, both internally and externally to the parent organization.
3. Up: The undertakings that deal with those higher in the organization’s chain of command, the leader’s direct manager or boss, those above this level, and their staffs.

It’s an important concept to understand because grasping and applying it can help leaders to focus and apportion their scarce time and attention on the things that matter most and avoid the common trap of misdirecting most of their effort up the chain of command.

What matters most for leaders is caring about their people in authentic, genuine, and action-based ways, in truly believing that employees are the foundation of their businesses and organizations. Understanding that without a professionally successful, self-actualized, productive, creative, satisfied, and engaged workforce, their business, products, mission, and profits are all at risk. If their employees are successful, they’ll be successful, and the organization and business will too.  From this elemental realization, we come to understand that leaders should allocate their time, attention, and effort mostly on the “down and in”.

Next in precedence for the leader’s time, attention, and effort is the “out”; lateral relationships, issues, processes, and matters that affect and relate to the organization’s and leader’s peers, contemporaries, partners, and collaborators.  It is within these relationships that a healthy organization solves and prevents the problems that they do not directly control.  Common causes are made, mutual self-interests are advanced, resources are shared and bought to bear, and genuine collaboration and compromise is conducted.

Lastly should be the “up”; the relationships, interactions, time, attention, and focus expended on the leader’s immediate bosses and managers and their staffs.  Much of this should be in keeping them informed, seeking occasional clarifying guidance, and gaining support for the work of subordinates.  Generally, organizational problems are solved laterally and by subordinates and not above in the hierarchy.  Experienced leaders find that most of the problems that are solved or prevented by interacting with those above in the organization were created there to begin with.  Those must be dealt with, but they should be relatively infrequent.

It’s unfortunate, but many leaders invert these priorities and expend the majority of their time and considerations up the chain of command on the personal relationships that advance their own social connections, but do little to solve and prevent organizational problems.  These leaders quickly lose touch with what matters most; their employees, mission, organization, and partners.

This style is an open invitation to manipulation of and by leaders above in the hierarchy.  “Yes people”, opportunists, and self-promoters are rewarded with promotions, privileges, and status and in turn create and support others who operate in the same way.

Employees motivated by the greater good, a self-directed purpose to excel on behalf of the organization, a bed rock mission and business sense are driven away by those who are focused on currying favor.  The former correctly see that a not so subtle form of discrimination and corruption is at work as their own talents are marginalized, even punished.  A company that is wired this way will eventually fail.

A leader’s time is her/his most valuable and perishable resource.

If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got. – Lee Iacocca

Keith Stalder, #40

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

The future starts today, not tomorrow. – Pope John Paul II Leaders create and own their organization’s future.  It’s not enough to excel every day in the activities of the moment; organizations must relentlessly build a better future.  A future that advances the greater good of the company or business, its people, and the purpose and value proposition they provide within their domain(s).  It is surprising how many organizations go through life doing the same things they have done for years, even decades, with literally no thought or effort being expended on building better circumstances in the days and years ahead.  It is as though the leaders were parents who never allowed their infant to leave the crib.  It is a terrible abuse of the those who depend on a parent’s (and leader’s) responsibility to guide, nurture, teach, and develop them so they can succeed in the difficult days beyond.  Yet it is common place in organizations.

The effects are all around us in the news.  Respected, established, and once vibrant organizations whose environments were changing around them while they continued to do the things they had always done: The US Postal Service, The US Secret Service, The Department of Veterans Affairs, Borders, Kmart, Sears, and others.   An organization without its eye on the future will inevitably decline and eventually cease to exist in its present form.  Of course there are other reasons for organizational distress and failure but it’s essential that leaders guide their organizations with an eye on the future.

The key to the future is hidden in the organization’s and leader’s daily routines.  Like almost everything that matters in business and life, the key to everything is what we do every day. I’ll spend much more time on this in a later post, but these are key leader actions to guide their organizations into the future.

• Understand and embrace the vital responsibility to understand, define, and develop the organization for a successful future.
• Devote daily time to thinking about, understanding, and shaping the company’s future.
• Minimize as much as absolutely possible involvement in the day-to-day “current operations”; the crises, pop up events, and near term issues that are time bandits for every leader.
• Have a vision.
• Have a world view of your organization’s domain; where does your mission and purpose intersect with the forces of your environment? Between now and five years from now.
• Have a viable strategy that is informed by your mission and the forces within your environment. Ends, ways, and means.
• Have a planning process that takes the company from strategy to planning to resources and operational execution.
• Execute your plan.
• Continually assess your execution against your plan.
• Adjust and refine your plan and execution.
• Communicate these things continuously to your people and engage them deeply in developing and doing all of these things.

The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.  It is the job of leaders to look farther than they can see.

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. – Abraham Lincoln

Keith Stalder, #39

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“The very essence of leadership is [that] you have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.”— Theodore Hesburgh. Where an organization comes from and where it is now is not nearly as important as where it is going.  It is the responsibility of the leaders to imagine big things, articulate them, to make all the small things go in the right direction, to translate the vision into reality.  The greatest threat to organizations is not that they aim too high and miss, but that they aim too low and achieve it.  And many don’t aim at all; they simply do every day what they have done for years.  Nothing dooms an organization to mediocrity faster than people who believe that the way they worked yesterday is the best way to work tomorrow.

It is enlightened leaders who imaginatively see the future in tangible, exciting, and realistic ways that appeal to employees. The vision must align the organization’s leaders, processes, people, and structure, as well.  I work with a variety of organizations and most have no vision at all.  Some have vague and ethereal statements that are forgotten by everyone, including the authors, as soon as they are written. A very few have really invested the intellectual energy that visions deserve.  Here are the attributes of the best ones I have seen:

• The organization actually has a leader inspired vision (not one that the staff or PR department developed).
• It is exciting, aspirational, and challenging, not mundane and routine. It aims high, but is achievable and can be imagined as the organization’s future reality.
• It is specific enough to be understood and embraced by every employee; “this is where we are going”.
• Employees can visualize their own role within the vision; this is how I contribute…
• Leaders articulate it relentlessly and forcefully, it becomes a mantra, a unifying theme with which all identify.
• It is specific enough to inform strategy development (ends, ways, and means).
• It is consistently used, referred to, and serves as a working reference point for decisions, activities and planning.

During the Apollo space program in the ’60s and 70s, it was said that if one were to ask any NASA employee from the Administrator to the janitors what they did, they would reply: “My job is to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth.”  Or words to that effect.  And they lived it every day.

That’s vision.

“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.” — Alvin Toffler

Keith Stalder, #38

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” – Robert F Kennedy

It is remarkable to me that physical courage is so common and morale courage is so rare. Policemen and policewomen, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, firefighters, law enforcement men and women of all types, and others risk their lives every day against very real and mortal dangers to protect us. By contrast, my experiences at senior levels of the military and government have been that very few are willing to venture even the mildest opinions outside the party line and almost no principled opposition or competing visions to move initiatives toward a greater good, a larger purpose.

There are very few honest debates at these levels, no direct challenges to the conventional thinking, no calling into question the preconceived determinations of those above, there is “going along to get along”, and avoidance of the difficult job of solving and preventing the institutional problems that define a leader’s duties. These timid and comfortable souls are avoiding their responsibilities at the most primary level. They believe that nothing is their fault, that they can’t change anything anyway, that they don’t have to care, something or someone else had ordained the chosen path, and there is no such thing as personal failure.

The effect on organizations over time, especially large ones, is truly dismal; an acquired taste for congenial and superficial personal relationships, the continued patronage of seniors, and a general air of acquiescence in important matters dooms the mission and people to perpetual mediocrity. Reform, change, growth, and robust organizational health cannot find purchase in such a place. Imagine what America would be like today if, during the civil rights struggles of the Sixty’s, men like John E. Lewis had not asked? “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking; doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe.

It’s not enough to know what’s right, leaders must do what’s right. Even when it’s difficult. Especially when it’s difficult. And it always will be. If it were easy, someone else would have done it already.

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Good men don’t become legends,” he said quietly. “Good men don’t need to become legends.” She opened her eyes, looking up at him. “They just do what’s right anyway.” ― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

Keith Stalder, #37

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Ductus Exemplo” is a Latin phrase for which the meaning is: “You are the example.” It is the motto of the US Marine Corps’ Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico Virginia which imparts the phrase to aspiring Marine Officers as “Leadership by example.” or “Lead by example.” For a Marine Officer Candidate who is able to survive the many harsh tests of OCS and be commissioned a Second Lieutenant, it is the north star of the rest of her or his leadership career. As an officer closest to the brutal savagery of ground combat, it is only by doing that a young officer can persuade subordinates to prevail against the steepest odds and in the face of certain injury and death. For the subordinates, the power of their leaders’ examples is greater than the most primal urges to preserve their own lives.

This simple motto is the synthesis of nearly all we need to guide our behavior as leaders. The motto tells us many things beyond its literal meaning. It tells us that deeds (behavior), not words, are the true exemplars of character, loyalty, trust, honesty, truthfulness, wisdom, and all the highest attributes that inspire employees and even colleagues.

It tells us to do the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons. To follow the Golden Rule. To always do our best. To never give up. To value the mission and team above the individual and self. To listen, be grateful to followers, help subordinates, tolerate mistakes, support the employees, be selfless, and much more.

It is the single most influential determinate of employee willingness to be led at all, perform at maximum efficiency and effectiveness, and empower the full potential of the organization. It applies to the leaders of every organization in exactly the same fashion as it does to military leaders.

“What you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you are saying.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keith Stalder, #36

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Leadership is not so much about technique and methods as it is about opening the heart. Leadership is about inspiration—of oneself and of others. Great leadership is about human experiences, not processes. Leadership is not a formula or a program, it is a human activity that comes from the heart and considers the hearts of others. It is an attitude, not a routine.”— Lance Secretan, Industry Week, October 12, 1998 It’s possible that more has been written comparing and contrasting leadership and management than almost any other aspect of organizational behavior and development.  After reading a great deal of it, it’s quite possible to come away with less understanding than you had when you started.  I hesitated a bit to add to this ambiguity, and hopefully I won’t.

But, it is important to say a bit about it, because so many people focus on the distinctions and want to cleanly separate the two.

This is how I see leadership and management:

• People must be led.
• Processes and projects are managed.

• Leadership is deeply personal and all encompassing.
• Management is largely procedural and focused on discrete aspects of operating the organization.

• Leaders connect their organization’s management functions to the hearts and minds of the employees.
• Management is vital to smooth organizational functioning, uniformity, standardization, fairness, policy formulation and implementation, order, consistency, and institutional habits.

• Done properly, leadership contributions are new and fresh every day, connecting employees to the mission, organization, and each other by energizing and motivating the very hearts of employees in ways that all human beings crave and need. Done improperly, there is no more harmful force in an organization than lousy leadership. The best people leave, the wrong people stay, the performance and morale of the organization spirals to the very depths of mediocrity. Unless the organization is infused with free money (government or not-for profit, for example) it will eventually fail.
• Done properly, management contributions are quickly absorbed by the work force and taken for granted. Done improperly, they become institutional dis-satisfiers that negatively affect the entire workforce. Organizations can limp along with sub standard management, but they will never reach their full potentials.
• Both leadership and management are vitally necessary and organizations of all sizes can’t have one without the other and be successful.

• Leaders must both lead and manage,
• Management is an enabling skill set of successful leaders.

• Leadership is more art than science, although it’s not entirely art. Successful leadership requires genuine character and a deep understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of human behavior and motivations.
• Management is more science than art.

“Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.”— Ross Perot

Keith Stalder, #35

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility . . . . In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility.”— Michael Korda, Editor-in-Chief, Simon & Schuster

Leaders are not only responsible for achieving the results that their organizations and missions demand, they are responsible for everything their organizations do and the manner in which it is done.  Personally, totally, and absolutely responsible for all that the organization does and accomplishes.

This understanding of the complete and personal nature of the leader’s duty to the organization, mission, and its employees is a crucial starting point from which almost all successful leader actions emanate.  Leaders need to internalize their role on this scale to succeed; it’s deeply personal and they are responsible at every level.

My essential premise that the pre-eminent role and fundamental job of the leader is to solve organizational problems and prevent new ones demands that leaders personally accept, even embrace, those problems.  They will never be solved or prevented, unless leaders are willing to do this.  At the most basic level of human behavior, we solve our own problems, we don’t solve the problems of others; it works the same way with organizations.  And it causes leaders to truly care when they feel personally responsible.  Leaders who really care about the organization, its people, and mission have taken the first steps toward success. It’s an imperative connection from all leaders to the organization and its people.

Without this assumption of personal responsibility, problems don’t get solved or prevented.  Without it leaders don’t really care in the deep and serious way that good leadership demands.

I have worked with several organizations whose leaders don’t grasp this basic concept and it manifests itself in a distance and detachment from almost every aspect of their behavior and performance as leaders. Their employees sense it immediately and adopt a similar outlook on their own roles; “stuff happens”, “not my job”, “someone else does that”, and other attitudes that separate employees from the effects and results the organization must produce to succeed. The overall effect is one of deep and chronic organizational mediocrity, stagnation, low morale, and sub par performance.  As consumers and customers we deal with organizations like this every day.  Nobody is responsible….

In the context of this vital precept, it’s also important to understand that leaders are responsible without being able to directly control every event and outcome.  This is one of the many dilemmas and contradictions of leadership and part of the richness and reward of leadership done well.

But leaders are still responsible.

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Keith Stalder, #34

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“Leadership is difficult but it is not complex.”— Michael McKinney Millions of words have been written to define, describe, clarify, illuminate, and give meaning to the word “leadership”.  Tens of thousands of books, articles, and other media forms are devoted to the behaviors, styles, traits, attributes, and mannerisms of leadership and leaders.  All of this, while valuable in its own way, also has the effect of obscuring what I think of as the pre-eminent role and fundamental job of the leader; to solve organizational problems and prevent new ones.  This is the bedrock “what” of leadership, an effects based view of the role of the leader that pin points her/his primary responsibility in a broad and all inclusive way, while still making it possible to visualize and take the specific actions to achieve the definition’s aim.

As Colin Powell said: “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

From this seminal starting point, all that a leader must do follows. The “how” is comprised of leadership actions to solve problems by, for, and with/within the leader himself or herself, the followers, and the organization.

Success at the “how” requires the leader to:

• Do the right things, in the right ways, for the right reasons.
• Understand that the most important aspects of leadership involve the follower; it is they who determine success or failure, who create the foundation upon which rests organizational and leader success.
• Comprehend at an elemental level that employees are invested in self, team (because they receive gratification from the team), and mission, in that order, and that leaders must invert this precedence to one of mission, team, self.
• Grasp that all organizations work relentlessly to optimize the personal convenience, circumstances, and betterment of those in the organization and in doing so sub-optimize all other things, especially the aims of the organization and its customers.

Not complex, but difficult to do, nonetheless. I’ll write all about how this framework is put into action in subsequent posts.

“Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values.” — Mike Vance

Keith Stalder, #33

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

“The fields of industry are strewn with the bones of those organizations whose leadership became infested with dry rot, who believed in taking instead of giving . . . who didn’t realize that the only assets that could not be replaced easily were the human ones.”Le Roy H. Kurtz, General Motors There are ample recent examples of monumental organizational failures in the news.  A recent, particularly well-done, Washington Post article describes the organizational transition of the U.S. Secret Service in the years since the 9/11/2001 attack and how their missions and priorities grew and evolved.  It is a case study in several important organizational concepts; the evolution of Secret Service culture, organizational capacity versus mission, and the need for strategy to resource development to mention a few. Most importantly, it is a case study of a large organization with important missions that, over time, stopped valuing its people, didn’t heed the voices of warning and change, failed to support the reformers, promoted the wrong people, undervalued the best employees, and came to behave as though their people were merely commodities to be replaced whenever needed.

The effects over time have been devastating to the Secret Service. Several catastrophes have been narrowly averted more by good fortune than with organizational expertise.  The Department of Veterans Affairs is another example of a large government organization that did many of the same things with the same disastrous results.

People matter in organizations.  They really, really matter.  Leaders who don’t understand that, who don’t genuinely care about her/his people, and don’t behave to support and sustain the employees will eventually pay a steep price.

A fundamental leadership empathy that considers and understands how organizational actions, leadership decisions, and messaging will be perceived and acted on by employees is a starting point. Surprisingly it is a basic starting point that is completely missing in many large companies and especially in government organizations.

Stopping to think:

• What will this mean to our people?
• How will they perceive it?
• What will concern them?
• What are their views and priorities?
• Is the company and this action aligned with our most precious asset, our people?
• How do we effectively communicate this issue with them and receive their feedback before taking action?

This kind of organizational empathy is born of the personal empathy that enlightened leaders have for the individuals in their charges.  It is about sincere and authentic caring about people in a genuinely personal way, not just professionally.  About listening to their concerns, ideas, suggestions, and opinions.  About informing them, knowing them intimately; their backgrounds, families, children, checking on them, and more.  It is about promoting the true “people people”; the ones who know and behave in ways that show an understanding of the organization’s most precious asset; its people.

Only when a leader REALLY understands the importance of people and cares about them in this way will she/he be able do the necessary and difficult things every leader must do for the greater good of the organization and ultimately its people.

When that time comes for those difficult choices, employees will recognize and support a leader who has truly understood and cared.

“Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.”— Immanuel Kant

Keith Stalder, #32

Copyright © 2015 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

In the late 17th century King Louis XIV of France attached his nobles to the royal court at Versailles. Apartments were built to house those willing to pay court to the king. Pensions and privileges necessary to live in a style appropriate to their rank were only possible by waiting constantly on Louis. An elaborate court ritual was created where the king became the center of attention and was observed throughout the day by the public.  He developed rituals of reception in his state bedchamber, to which only a handful of his court were invited. Louis could then see who attended him at court and who was absent, facilitating the subsequent distribution of favors and positions.

In the modern age, we see vestiges of these behaviors in senior leaders and in the responses of employees to this “leadership” style; a style that rewards obsequious personalities, promotes manipulators, creates opportunists, and propels self promoters to the highest levels of the company or organization.  It is the style that values personality over character, tolerates only “happy talk”, and revels in relationship connections and cliques.  These leaders believe that their personal touch will resolve any issue, manage any conflict, defuse any disagreement, achieve consensus, ensure harmony, and by the power of her/his personality create coordination and compatibility.  The more senior they are, the more they believe this to be so.

For some employees, this style is an open invitation to manipulate their leaders. Sycophants, yes people, social virtuosos, opportunists and self promoters recognize and respond in kind by providing the leader what she/he needs most; validation, personal contact, praise, deference, and submissiveness.   They are amply rewarded with promotions, privileges, and status in this hierarchy of form over substance and in turn create and support more who operate in the same way.  Soon, leaders at almost every level operate in this fashion.

The employees who are motivated by the greater good, a self directed purpose to excel on behalf of the organization, and a bed rock mission and business sense are driven away by those who are more focused on currying favor in order to advance their own interests.  The former correctly see that a not so subtle form of discrimination is at work and their own talents are marginalized, even punished.

The king’s bedroom style of insidious and ultimately destructive behavior is particularly prevalent in government at senior levels.  Those who “go along to get along”, the “hail fellows (or ladies) well met”, and schmoozers find themselves at the very top. The employees who are willing to tell it like it is are marginalized, punished, and eventually eliminated.  Personalities dominate good character to the detriment of the mission and organization.  Tough decisions are avoided, difficult choices are made in favor of personal chemistry, the absence of decisions become default decisions and the entire organization suffers.

The very culture of the organization can be fundamentally altered, and not for the better.

“Privileged groups work for greater power consolidation through favoritism.” ― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

Happy New Year, Keith Stalder, #31

Copyright © 2014 Keith Stalder & Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.