BoggedDown

At our ranch in west Texas, we rarely have issues with mud.  Very rarely.  Like once a year.  Maybe.

However, I know from the experience of others (and a few of my own) that mud can bog one down, inhibit the work flow.  Or worse, completely bring progress to a halt (as you dig, pull, winch, and jack yourself out of the muck).

Same thing happens in organizations.  What are some common bogger downers?

• Egotists - who seem more focused on their progress than that of the team.
• Deniers - who seem never to grasp, or take seriously, troubling data trends.
• Yakkers - who spend most of their time talking and little of it doing.
• Blamers - who are adept at identifying problems and quickly assigning responsibility, to others.
• Puds - who don't want the waters stirred, the boat rocked, or their comfort disrupted.
• Plodders - who resist working too hard, doing too much, thinking too deeply.

Every organization has 'em.  That's not news. 

That list fundamentally betrays the way individual and organizational energy is being used.

Some organizations manage to re-direct energy toward a few, common, worthy, meaningful goals.  They're the ones least likely to get bogged down. 

WhatToDo

I attended a memorial service yesterday for a dear friend and mentor, Jerry Gibbs.  Mr. Gibbs was the first principal I worked for as a young teacher-coach.  

God must have known I would need such a powerful and positive force to get me moving in the right direction as a fledgling educator.

Some of the most impactful learning I garnered from Mr. Gibbs:

• Students first, always.
• Have high expectations for yourself, for those who work with/for you, and for the students you serve.
• Be fair, be honest, be forthright, be forgiving.
• Do the right thing, and don't get wobbly when circumstances would make it easier not to.

In relation to that last bullet, one of the speakers at the funeral referenced a sign he has in his business, for all employees and customers to see.  It reads as follows:

Do what needs to be done.
Do it when it needs to be done.
Do it as well as it can be done.
Do it as often as it needs to be done.

Those words aptly fit the way Mr. G lived.

RIP, Mr. G.  And, thanks.  (I owe you debt I can never fully repay.)

ExquisiteAttention

The best parents do it.
The best teachers do it.
The best preachers do it.
The best mentors do it.
The best physicians do it.
The best leaders do it.
The best coaches do it.

They pay exquisite attention to those over whom they have influence.  

They notice thoroughly, they watch carefully, they ask probingly, they listen deeply, they engage fully.

And when they do, we grow - well and rightly.

GrowthPlan

When my boss told me and her other direct reports back in 2005 that she wanted all of us to develop a personal growth plan for ourselves...............Well, I was not a happy camper.  

The connotations I had always associated with growth plans were negative - a compliance document foisted upon less-than-optimally-performing subordinates.  I failed to see the need for us to engage in such a meaningless waste of time.  After all, we were in leadership positions, heading up divisions of a high-performing organization.  WHAT???  REALLY???

We dutifully complied with the boss's wishes.  That boss was my boss for only one more year.  A tough boss, but a good one.  She made me better.

I am now in year 12 of crafting and re-crafting my own annual growth plan.  No need for a boss to push it on me.  I intend to keep up the practice until they put me six feet under.

There is great power in reflecting on our performance, assessing where we need growth and improvement, and making a plan to get better, every day, on purpose.  There is also great power in sharing those intentions publicly.  

My current version is HERE, if you care to peruse.

What might yours look like?

Bulldozing

Moe (my lovely bride of 40 years) and I learned early in our experience as stewards of the land the unintended consequences of bulldozing.  We purchased several acres of land and promptly had some bulldozing done, to create the aesthetic effect on our property we desired.

That was over 20 years ago and we still see the negative effects of that carnage in these ways:

• Compromise of the life systems in the soil, which is ultimately the feeder of all life above the soil.
• Reduced availability of water/moisture (the life-sustaining medium) in the ground.
• Lessened evidence of wildlife (birds and animals), who both feed and feed from the plants that grow on that ground.
• Diminished diversity of plant life and of animal life that does manage to grow on that plot.

With years of hindsight and experiences in trying to regenerate life on that acreage, we have learned that gentle embellishments, that work WITH the natural systems, would have been a much better path to take in trying to increase the health, wellbeing, and long-term productivity of that land.

Leaders who think they want to "bulldoze" perceived negative elements in their organizations........................take heed.

PowerOfPull

I recently read The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Hagel, Brown, & Davison, 2010).

This is one of the best books I've read on the topic of leadership - moving others and ourselves - in several years.  It would make a great resource for team book studies. 

My biggest takeaways:

• Success can be defined as making sense while making progress.
• In current contexts, our ability to tap knowledge flows is more important than tapping archives of knowledge.
• We should think of our environment as a creation space, something we have power to shape.
• Talent development MUST be a top priority.
• Push models lead to heightened resistance, boredom, and stress.  Pull models stoke curiosity, innovation, and energy.
• Seek out and engage the folks who have the tacit knowledge - the know-how - rather than the know-what group.
• Connect with smart, talented, capable others, and make the most of those "serendipitous" encounters.
• Leaders should be trying to pull the core to the edges rather than the edges to the core.
• Senior (seasoned?) leaders ought to be seeking out "reverse mentors," in order to stretch their own thinking.

My favorite quotes:

• “As a billboard along Highway 101 in Silicon Valley put it, '1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?'” (p. 12)
• “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.  If we are serious about developing our own talent, we must find more ways to connect with and collaborate with all of those smart people outside our organization.” (p. 189) 

A superb book!

Heartless

I've been reading a lot lately about the advent of artificial intelligence (AI).  Machine intelligence, driven by powerful software and computer algorithms, is progressing at warp speed.  This opens up worlds of possibilities for supplanting human work/thinking, not just in the manufacturing realm.

The assumption is that these AI thingywhoppers (droids?) will begin thinking on their own.  Not only will they be able to compute, search, disaggregate, and decide much faster than us humans, they can do so more effectively, more efficiently.  Doubt it?  jWhen you start shopping for something online, you get some nifty little "suggestions" to one side of your screen about other things you might like to consider buying.  Those suggestions are NOT coming from a human; it's AI at work.

What happens, however, when these powerful AI solution crafters start making decisions and feeding us "answers" to our problems that are completely void of compassion, of judgement, of heart?

Then we'll get automated solutions to complex problems that have some of these features:

• No concern for the human collateral damage of the decisions.
• Solutions driven solely by data, ignoring contextual elements.
• Decisions completely devoid of values.
• Purely transactional processes, disregarding the contributions of those who do the work.
• Zero accountability for the decision maker (in this case, AI).
• No interest in the development of others on the team (they're only humans, you know).

I've already worked with a few boss-humans that think and act like that.  Heartless.  Don't wanna do that anymore.