Last week President Barack Obama stood before the Republican House of Representatives caucus and took direct questions. This is a group that, from the President’s perspective, has been opposing his agenda adamantly at every turn. This fascinating event is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to what people with parliamentary systems know as Question Period (Canada) or Question Time (England).

Leaving aside the political issues and possible motives ascribed to each side for engaging in the event, I think Obama modeled an important element of leadership. This is the willingness to seek out and engage in dialogue those who oppose your ideas or have yet to buy in to your agenda and vision.

Many leaders do this as part of their strategy for implementing change. They hold all-hands staff meetings to explain their vision, share the rationale and benefits of the change, and then respond to questions from the troops. It is even more effective if, at the outset, the leader makes it clear that he/she welcomes expressions of concern and disagreement.

There is tremendous power in putting yourself out there among your fiercest skeptics, listening to and honoring their points-of-view, acknowledging their heartfelt concerns, and then responding with the goal of assuaging their fears and inviting them to see things from your perspective.

In a recent workshop I ran on Interaction Styles I had the group working collectively at a case problem to solve. There was a lot of information and idea sharing and a lot of cross-talk, some of it in sub-groups around the table. At times it became rather chaotic and the effectiveness of the group’s process dipped. Nevertheless, they persevered and managed to complete it accurately just as allotted time expired.

During the facilitated debrief discussion an interesting issue emerged. One woman said that, when the process seemed to hit its highest point of chaos, she sorely wanted to get up, grab a marker, approach the flip chart, and start leading her colleagues by capturing what they were saying and organizing it into a coherent strategy to solve the problem more quickly.

I asked her, “Why didn’t you do that?” She replied, “Because I didn’t want them to think I was being too controlling. I wanted them to see me as a team player.” Notice the assumption she had made about how they would perceive her well-intentioned act to contribute her particular strength (organizing) to the success of the group effort.

I turned to the group and asked them, “If she had stepped up and done this, (1) would you have seen it as controlling and not being a team player and (2) would it have helped you solve the problem faster than you did?” They all agreed that they would have appreciated, not resented or judged, her action and that it would indeed have helped them perform better.

This was what we in the training field call a “teachable moment.” The woman who had hesitated to step forward in the exercise learned to question her assumptions and, if her spirit of intent is genuine, to take the risk of contributing where she has a skill. The group learned the importance of making it OK (i.e. safe) for individual members to step forward and take such risks. Both innovative thinking and improved group performance requires this.

Have you made it clear to your staff that will support them when they bring their particular skills and perspectives forward when they have an idea or a better way to proceed? You may think you have but don’t assume that they have received the message!

Scads has been written about how to lead your people, keep them motivated, and mitigate the stress-and-worry effects of the recession. Here’s a really comprehensive article from Workforce Management, entitled, “Managing During the Downturn.” They do a great job of providing managers practical strategies to deal with four realities of work life right now:

1. Fear of becoming unemployed
2. Emergence of “us vs. them” behavior in your company
3. Pervasive, ongoing, unfocused anxiety
4. High stress that can turn into distress

This lengthier article is worth your time to read in its entirety. As the authors point out, your organization is not a counseling clinic. Nevertheless, they offer some solid, doable ideas that you can implement to help your employees cope with the psychological impact of this cursed economy through which we are all trying to find our way.

Janice Stein, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, said a key indicator of a successful political leader is that he/she takes people to a place they don’t necessarily want to go. I like this, on a macro scale. Think Lyndon Johnson on civil rights legislation, Helmut Kohl on embracing the eastern part of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, or Nelson Mandela on healing a nation divided (see the film Invictus for a vivid portrayal of the latter).

Now take this concept micro, down to the one-on-one relation between you (the boss) and one of your employees who is listless, sloppy, and clearly underperforming. You want him to change…to a new way of working: doing the job asked of him. If this individual is, in fact, capable of doing the job well, the problem is one of attitude, of lack of motivation.

The best leaders at the mid level are able to turn around this commitment thing. They:

• Clearly lay out what they expect from their under performer
• Raise for discussion current gap in his performance
• Express their belief in his ability to do the job well
• Lay out the benefits, to both the employee and the organization, of a solid job performance
• Involve him in identifying the obstacles to his performing better
• Get him (i.e. not the boss) to come up with a plan to turn around his performance
• Reach agreement on the plan, with specific actions, measures and time frames

Going deeper, the leader might probe into what the employee wants from his job, what motivates him, and what’s missing for him as a motivator in his current work. All the while, in the background hangs the potential for consequences if the staff member chooses not to change. The leader brings tough love to the situation.

The best bosses foster a mindset of high performance in their unit. They get all of their people to want success and want to perform at a level of which they can be personally proud. Almost all of your people want these–success, pride, accomplishment. You can count on this because they are human beings. When you first confront a poor performer, however, they just don’t realize that they do.

It amazes me how often when considering a leadership development initiative, a prospective client will ask us for “something new.” They will say, “Oh, we did the Myers-Briggs before. Haven’t you got something newer?” Or, “Communications skills, that’s much too basic for our managers.” I once had a prospect company that put a huge leadership training program out to tender, selected our company, and then proceeded to tell us they wanted something “more sophisticated.” This was learning material, mind you, that had worked successfully with (quite sophisticated, thank you very much) mid-level and senior managers in numerous other organizations.

If you are charged with selecting development programs, particularly in human interaction areas, be careful that your own level of  knowledge and mastery of the skills to be taught doesn’t blind you to what your trainees really need. I encounter this particularly with Human Resource professionals and well-read line managers. They have attended all the conferences, heard all the latest gurus, taken all the feedback assessments and instruments, learned all the latest concepts and jargon, read all the books by Tom Peters, Pat Lencioni, John Maxwell, Stephen Covey,…

The fact is most of your managers who came up through professional, technical, administrative, sales, and blue collar labor streams often have not been exposed to even the more well-known approaches and skills of leadership. Instead, they have been busy in their career honing their functional, specialized knowledge and craft.

Don’t be afraid to deliver the fundamentals around people management. Your people still need to master the “blocking and tackling” of management: listening, using questions, setting expectations, delivering feedback, handling conflict, articulating a vision, motivating employees, managing priorities, confronting poor performers, etc. It may be old material to you and you may be a seasoned role model in these areas but most of your managers have a good way to go yet before they master these skills.

The classic management and leadership skills are archetypal success skills for the human species. Now, we may present some of these at a deeper level and demand more from a group of your experienced managers, but the topics are the same. Take listening, for example.

• You can learn how to listen to someone and minimize your attention drifting while you do. That’s at the basic level.
• At a deeper level, you can listen for what’s not said or gestured but might still be part of the person’s deeper message and feelings.
• At yet a deeper level, you can listen to what’s going on inside you as you receive the other person’s message.

Any one of these skill levels could be taught under the same title, “Mastering Listening Skills.”

So, don’t be seduced by the latest “in” thing around leadership and management. Look at what your target managers really need to get the results you want in your organization. Even if they have been exposed to a particular skill before, how well are they demonstrating it? Could they benefit from a refresher or rather from a more advanced application of this competency?

Exemplars in any field never stop revisiting and practicing the basics.

Hewitt Associates has just announced the results of their 2010 Best Employers in Canada study and it has some useful message for all companies.

They assessed three factors:

1. STAY – Willingness to remain with your current employer
2. SAY – How positively you talk to others about your employer
3. STRIVE – How motivated you are to go above and beyond to contribute to the business success

Among the 50 “Best Employers,” the average employee engagement score (i.e. % of employees who responded positively to all three factors) was 80%.

Particularly important, I think, are two key findings. First, there was two-way communication. To quote the Hewitt news release:

One characteristic common to all organizations with high engagement is open, transparent, complete and timely two-way communication. During the last year, employees were well aware of the challenges the organization was facing, understood the possible solutions, proactively offered input, and committed to the course of action the organization’s leaders decided to follow.”

A second finding, employees in these high-engagement companies exhibited:

• Support for improving productivity
• Willingness to make trade-offs in benefits over the shorter term (e.g. reduced salaries and work hours to enable colleagues to be retained on the payroll)
• High trust and confidence in their leaders.

So, once again we see the impact of excellent leaders who foster open communication leading to trust. Especially in tough times, your people will demonstrate greater patience, resilience and discretionary effort when they trust you and your colleagues in management.

Brian Hayman, one of our associates at Fulcrum Associates, has penned some wisdom that I would like to quote:

We write stories for ourselves in which we cast ourselves in leading roles and assign supporting parts and cameo appearances to others. It’s their job to love and admire us, promote and give us raises, laugh at our jokes and take our side against our enemies, figure out our needs and satisfy them.

At some point, however, when we go public with our imaginings and raise the curtains on our plays, we find that we are sharing the stage with 6.5 billion other leading men, women and children who have cast us in supporting roles and given us cameo appearances in their stories.

It is so easy to forget that, even though you are the boss and are dealing with higher level challenges and larger responsibilities, in your employees’ version of the “drama” you share you are not the star. They are! While they want you and the unit to succeed, the core theme in their “play” is that they get what they want.

In my leadership development workshops I frequently field complaints about staff who don’t care enough about the fortunes of the unit or the organization. These employees aren’t sufficiently jazzed about the bottom line or the new product launch, or about finding ways to work more productively. From the perspective of the manager, the supporting cast isn’t supporting enough (“Don’t they know their role? Haven’t they learned their lines?”).

My advice is to these managers is to remember that in the employee version of the play called “My Job” the boss does not have top billing and the organization/office/job site is but the stage upon which the employee’s personal saga unfolds.

How do you engage this employee leading man (or woman), since in their play it’s first and foremost about them? Consider what you want them to value and actively support and link it to what is important to them, to their expressed needs and concerns, and even to their sense higher purpose and spirit of contribution.

We’re all employees (or have been). It’s not that we are (were) self-centered prima donnas concerned only about our personal gain. It’s just that, when the credits roll, our name appears at the top and we naturally expect that to mean something special.

How often do you jump in and solve your employees’ problems for them? Probably more often than you would like and, if you are like most other bosses, more frequently than you should. Whether your employee brings you a problem/question or you are addressing a performance shortfall on his or her part, it is really, really tempting just to give him/her the answer and get on with life.

I touched upon this phenomenon in my last post. Here now are four reasons for managers’ tendency to adopt a directive style in these situations. See if you can relate to any of these in yourself and perhaps in other managers where you work.

1. Managers have previously developed the “take action” habit. Most of them are promoted from the ranks of individual contributors where they worked in a technical, professional, administrative or blue collar activity. Here success came from organizing and controlling inanimate “things,” such as reports, data, concepts, materials, and so forth. Their job was to take some kind of action or make some decisions around these items. They come to management having already developed a “default,” action-oriented response to their work.
2. A manager’s key success factor is his or her ability to identify and solve problems. Managers are constantly being presented with urgent issues. When they solve one they feel good, feel like they have added value to the operation. So, it’s not surprising that when an employee brings forward a problem the manager’s default response is either to solve it himself/herself or tell the employee how to solve it.
3. They most likely already know the solution. Managers typically have been around longer than many of their employees and have learned a lot about working effectively. Furthermore, if they came up from the ranks, they understand the front line work from personal experience. Often the solution is a no brainer to them. Without duct tape to cover their mouth, it is hard to keep from blurting out the answer.
4. Managers are busy people. It is simply quicker to give the answer, check it off mentally as another problem solved, and send the employee on his/her way. Any other response, such as coaching the staffer to come up with a good solution, will take more of the manager’s limited time.

If you can see one or more of these forces operating within you, you have reached the first step toward changing your default behavior to one of coaching and getting your employees do the mental heavy lifting around problems they encounter in their work.

More to come about this in my next post.

One of my favorite quotes that gets at the essence of leadership comes from Stephen Covey. I often open with it in my leadership workshops and keynotes:

You can’t “lead” things. You can’t lead inventories, cash flow and costs. You can’t lead information, time structures, processes, facilities and tools. You have to manage them.

Why? Because things don’t have the freedom to choose. Only people do.

So, you lead (empower) people. You manage and control things. The problem is, the organizational legacy we’ve all inherited says you do need to manage and control people.

Now, isn’t this simply the nub of it all?

To start with, it’s in our psychological DNA, as humans, to want to control–manage–our immediate environment. That includes the people with whom we come into contact. Add to this the expectation of companies that managers control their departments. That includes their employees. Add to this that most managers started their careers in a professional, technical or hands-on capacity where it was their job to manage “things” (e.g. deliveries, numbers, data processed, hamburgers flipped).

Our biggest obstacle to being their “best boss ever” is our default need to control our employees–what they do, how they do it, the attitude they bring into the workplace, and their level of job satisfaction. Until we let go of this need and realize that we can’t make them do anything or feel any particular way or be satisfied and keen  we will never ascend to that level of effectiveness that we read about in all those best seller leadership books. For some managers, letting this go becomes a life-long journey and some never succeed in it.

A large focus of our management and leadership programs is teaching participating managers how to engage, challenge and inspire their employees, rather than how to “get” staff to perform and feel positive about their job and the organization.

Are you still clutching on to the need–and responsibility–to control your people? Consider, if you will, gradually relaxing your grip and opening up to a way of leading that really gets results.

I’m returning to the work of Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman one more time. They found a significant relationship between the degree to which a manager is strong in the leadership competency, “Inspires and Motivated Others,” and the percentage of their employees who have thought about quitting.

Only 17% of staff working for the most inspiring & motivating leaders considered quitting, vs. 51% of those who report to the least inspiring managers.

In a recent blog post Zenger and Folkman lay out this connection and share six ways that you can connect emotionally with the members of the team you lead.

Check it out. It’s well worth a read.