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Is your data foundation a house of cards?

By Jim Canterucci on May 11, 2012

Is the data you use to make decisions as a leader accurate? You’ve probably had the same experience as I did earlier today. I made a purchase and at the end of the transaction the clerk said, “You will be receiving a survey and ...

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• The Synchronization Conductor

  By Jim Canterucci on October 11, 2011 | No Comments

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  

  Monday Morning Motivation:
  Steps to Energize Your Team, Customers, and Profits

  From:

  David Cottrell
  New York: HarperCollins Publishers (2009)

  • Without synchronization, your organization will be paralyzed, and forward movement will come to a halt.
  • Synchronization can effectively conduct energy only when everyone clearly understands what you’re trying to accomplish.
  • Confusion creates corporate attention deficit disorder. Clarity and simplicity lead to synchronization and the accomplishment of objectives.
  • If it takes you more than thirty second to recite your corporate mission, it is probably too complex.
  • What gets rewarded gets done (Cottrell, p. 62-63).

  Monday Morning Motivation is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• Keep Turnover Low

  By Jim Canterucci on October 4, 2011 | No Comments

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  
  Celebrating Failure:
  The Power of Taking Risks, Making Mistakes and Thinking Big

  From: Ralph Heath
  Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press (2009)

  • Provide opportunities for associates to grow and learn.
  • Maintain associate ownership in the company.
  • Create a warm, caring, and nurturing environment.
  • Empower associates to take responsibility for their own work.
  • Involve associates in the direction of the company’s growth and management.
  • Expect top performance.
  • Let associates know when they perform well and when the need to perform better.
  • Attempt to reduce the stress level by promoting a healthy lifestyle.
  • Seek out customers and clients who share the same belief system.
  • Be an open-book company. Share company financial information (except specific individual salaries.
  • Share the vision of the company.
  • Treat associates with respect and compassion when personal tragedies impinge on work responsibilities.
  • Pay associates the best salary possible based on the financial performance of the company.
  • Take great care in hiring, always taking attitude and character into account (Heath, p. 64-65).

  Celebrating Failure is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• Stop Voting

  By Jim Canterucci on September 29, 2011 | No Comments

  We can’t do everything. Yeah. So if we can’t do everything, what should we do?

  We’ve gathered all our managers here. Why don’t we just vote on the top three things to focus on next year.

  Vote. Really?

  OK, let’s take tired busy people, lock them in a hotel meeting room, read them 72 text intensive slides in a monotone voice, give them sugar, and have them use little colored sticky dots to decide what we should do to either attain sustainable growth or spiral the company into the basement. Really?

  A few years ago a company I worked with actually paid eight figures and thousands of hours for a training program teaching people to do just that.

  Democracy is a tremendous concept but not the best system in all cases. The alternative, the opposite of democracy – dictatorship, isn’t either.

  Instead of voting:

  Although a bit tricky to facilitate, the key is to tie each potential activity being discussed to your strategy.

  Step 1 – For each of your top strategic objectives identify all the actions to get you to your goal.

  Step 2 – For each action determine who would be responsible, and the the dollar impact.

  Step 3 – (key) For each action item associated with a strategic objective, identify the impact of that action item on the other strategic objectives.

  Step 4 – Point score each action item based on the number of strategic objectives it effects.

  Step 5 – Clean up the highest priorities (those with the highest score) based on dollar impact, resources to accomplish the actions, and dependencies.

  Step 6 – Move to laying the actions across time in a plan that everyone can follow.

  If you look at these steps we are directly pulling levers that impact our strategy and bringing real world consideration into our priorities. Things we hope voting will magically do because our team is so brilliant. But, what are the chances?

  Stop voting and get strategic!

  Photo credit: Daquella manera
• What Great Leaders Do

  By Jim Canterucci on September 27, 2011 | No Comments

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  
  Common Purpose:
  How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary

  From: Joel Kurtzman
  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass (2010)

  
  Four things great leaders do:

  1. They make certain the mood of the organization is positive and accomplishment oriented.
  2. They remove toxic emotions from the organization not being a Pollyanna but by focusing on the positive application of effort.
  3. They distinguish between chronically negative people and people who might engage in creative disagreements for the long-term good of the organization.
  4. If they fail at changing chronically negative people into people who are positive, they remove the negative people from their teams (Kurtzman, p. 169).

  Common Purpose is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• First Understand and Then Be Understood

  By Jim Canterucci on September 20, 2011 | No Comments

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  From: Michael Schantz, 75 Principles of Conscious Leadership: Inspired Skills for 21^st Century Business. Bandon, OR: Robert D. Reed Publishers (2008).

  A majority of leadership activity involves effective communication. The goal of understanding and being understood is to honestly communicate from objective personal experience. Leaders comprehend that understanding and being understood involves dual skills.

  To understand, leaders must listen effectively.

  To be understood, leaders must speak effectively.

  Effective leaders listen intently to understand, and they speak succinctly to express themselves. To engender mutual understanding, the communication is sincere and respectful. Leaders communicate positively, which fosters understanding; negative emotion or speech only lowers the energy of others and distorts communication. The entire purpose of communication is to further understanding (Schantz, p. 44).

  75 Principles of Conscious Leadership is available is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• 3 ways to train people to be curious

  By Jim Canterucci on September 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

  Here is a cross-over post from the Personal Brilliance blog.

  One trait of the innovator is to lead by example and there is no more important area for this than curiosity. We’ve talked about the negative training received throughout our lives that is designed to dampen curiosity to the point where the brain literally stops coming up with questions. We have to teach the people we work with to be curious. Here are just a few tips to enhance curiosity for your work groups and families as well.

  Ask questions yourself. By modeling curiosity you will show how important questions are. Coaching to anticipate questions when preparing to present any idea or plan also indirectly trains the curiosity potential.

  Hold a questions only session. When working on an opportunity or problem in a group setting have each participant identify and share as many questions as possible about the opportunity without trying to answer the questions. This process helps identify research and other to do items to move forward and clarifies the opportunity. The added benefits include not snuffing an idea too early with why it won’t work but also, you’re training the curiosity muscles.

  Lead the witness. This approach involves being vague on purpose (without being a jerk of course) so that opposite of an attorney leading a witness to answer a certain way you lead the person to ask the next logical question, building the capability to generate and ask questions. Give this a try in your next discussion and let me know how it goes.

  We spend a great deal of time with our CEO clients on the importance of the questions the CEO asks. How much stronger will the entire organization be if everyone is asking questions from a deep, engaged spirit of curiosity?

  Photo credit: The Divine Miss M
• Five Things About Trust Everyone Should Know

  By Jim Canterucci on September 13, 2011 | 1 Comment

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  
  Soup:
  A Recipe to Nourish Your Team and Culture

  From: Jon Gordon
  Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2010)

  1. People follow the leader first and the leader’s vision second. You can be the most optimistic person in the world and have the most inspiring vision, yet if the leader is not someone people will follow, the vision will never be realized.
  2. Trust is the force that connects people to the leader and his or her vision. Without trust, there is a huge gap between the leader and the vision.
  3. If your team trusts you and your optimism causes them to believe in you, then your vision will inspire them to follow you. When leaders gain the trust of their team, then their beliefs, optimism and vision are much more persuasive, and people will follow you.
  4. Trust generates commitment; commitment fosters teamwork; and teamwork delivers results. When people trust the leader and their team members, they not only work harder, but they work harder for the good of the team.
  5. Trust is built one day at a time, and yet it can be lost in a moment. The one thing in life you don’t want to throw away is the trust people have in you (Gordon, p. 65).

  Soup is available is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• How can you move forward?

  By Jim Canterucci on September 8, 2011 | No Comments

  Tomorrow you will be offered the perfect next step in your career. The catch. You can only take the new job if you have someone to take your current position with minimal drop off from your performance.

  Can you take the new job or not?

  Having a succession plan in place is certainly in your self-interest. Opportunities will be closed to you if you if you can’t be replaced.

  Let’s look at this from a leadership perspective.

  Identifying and grooming your replacement is pure leadership – the development  of people.

  Why doesn’t this grooming take place as often as it should?

  It takes time. Yes, so are you saying you don’t have time to lead? Are your people developing?

  You’re irreplaceable. Really? You’re also stuck where you are?

  Even if you don’t plan to go anywhere right now, you could probably use some thinking and strategy time that only will become available after you become obsolete. More time for leadership and development of your team, your product, or your processes.

  Groom your replacement today!

  Photo credit: SunnyGoel
• What Exactly is a Peak Moment?

  By Jim Canterucci on September 7, 2011 | 1 Comment

  The following is a short book preview contributed by the Ohio State University Leadership Center.

  From: Michael Bungay Stanier, Do More Great Work. New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc. (2010)

  A peak moment is a time when you could see and feel yourself doing something more than what you typically do, when you stepped beyond where you normally stay and did something new, tried something different, and made an impact. It’s a time when you felt fulfilled and present in your job, when you felt most like yourself.

  How our peak moments look and feel is unique to each of us. That’s one of the paradoxes and complexities of Great Work.

  A peak moment can be like that scene in the movie Titanic when Leonardo DiCaprio leans into the wind and yells, “I’m the king of the world!” It can be like that intense fist pump that Roger Federer does when he wins a point. It can be like that look on the face of a gymnast when she “sticks” a landing in the Olympics.

  It can be a quiet certainty that your contribution to the meeting was the one that tipped the balance and made it click. It can be the moment when you finally untangle a challenge that you’ve been trying to figure out for a long time. It can be the time when the work you’ve done on a project that excited you and kept you involved and engaged and at your best for the last few months finally comes to fruition – the culmination of a project, the moment when you press a literal or metaphorical “go” switch and it (whatever it is) starts.

  It can be an hour when you rise to a challenge and sort out a crisis that’s causing disruption in your workplace. It can be when you have a sudden moment of realization, almost as if you’re floating outside of yourself – Wow, I’m doing this and I’m doing it well and I’m thrilled to be doing it.

  It can be about a big, public project or a small private triumph. But whatever the context, it is a moment of certainty, a moment of insight when you say to yourself, Yes, this is something to remember. This is me at my most essential, most authentic, and best (Stanier, 2010, p. 30-31).

  Do More Great Work is available is available on loan from the Ohio State University Leadership Center. To borrow this resource or any other resource, please go to the resource search page.

  Click here to learn how the Ohio State University Leadership Center is strengthening tomorrow’s leaders today.

  The OSU Leadership Center is home to a wealth of resources to help you and the people you work with improve your leadership and interpersonal skills. Please check the materials in our Lending Library (available to you for a small annual fee), Leadership Publications (absolutely free), and links to other leadership-related information.
• Cut the red tape

  By Jim Canterucci on September 1, 2011 | No Comments

  We’ve said here many times that rules are for simple minds and lazy leadership. See, A new rule – Really?, and The Problem with Rules,

  Your task for the next week – What red tape can you cut? Yes, cut – eliminate. Start small with the red tape your area generates and then move to cross-boundary influence to cut the red tape that others bestow upon your department.

  What regular meetings can you eliminate? At least cancel a few iterations and see if anyone misses them.

  Regular publications? Are there regular reports you compile that you know no one reads? Miss a few publication dates and see what happens.

  Service Level Agreements? How many can you beat regularly but use the entire negotiated time?

  Customer Support habits? Can we do better than the norm?

  It’s the (your company here) way? How much of your burned in way is valid?

  Surprise people with less red tape from your team. Perhaps you will be the recipient of less red tape in the future. Let us know how you cut the red tape.

  Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik