The Path Isn’t Always Clear

Like the great Bilbo Baggins navigating Mirkwood en route to the Lonely Mountain, when the path has been disrupted, a leader takes another vantage point and perspective to find the new path.

Position Power

Leaders with power granted by their position have an opportunity to control and influence others. A leader can choose to use a crisis to divide - by building barriers, creating an out-group, and making others groups appear as a a threat. The easy road to create loyalty is to do it at the expense of others. An ethical leader, however, chooses the hard road in building loyalty, like Black Panther.

Good or Great Leadership?

Leadership is not on a continuum. According to James R. Bailey’s Harvard Business Review article, The Difference Between Good Leaders and Great Ones, great leadership requires a balance of force and direction. The vital leader, as in the one that can achieve that balance, is the ideal leader.

Developing Leadership Styles

The HBR article, How to Develop Your Leadership Style, explores how one can project leadership through ‘markers’ - actions and behaviors that make up leadership style. By experimenting with a blend of "powerful markers" and "attractive markers," one can alter how others perceive him or her. My leadership styles are heavily slanted towards "attractive markers," meaning I could benefit from blending dynamics from the "powerful markers" side.

Maybe ‘hitch’ is on to something

We get trapped by our history in some ways, because when someone asks us to talk about ourselves, we reflect on past versions of ourselves. Hitch says to start with your future self - the person you want to be - and let that version guide your past definition of self. We can control our behavioral approach to leadership despite our past experiences/upbringing.

Be able to change leadership style and behavior

With contingency leadership, we must be able to process information and react with the appropriate leadership style for that situation. The Office Space example perfectly reflects this theory, as boss after boss approached Ron Livingston and gave him the exact same spiel about seeing the memo. None of the managers adjusted their leadership style upon hearing that Ron’s character had, in fact, read the memo, and simply made a mistake.

Understand the human spirit

“Understanding the human spirit is key. You have to understand the teams you’ve built around you, have to understand how to mobilize them, how to give them respect, how to create a climate where they can question you, how to share success with them, how to shoulder blame for them, and keep them going with morale and productivity. And then, you have to mobilize the human spirit of that larger constituency.” ~ Doris Goodwin

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

The best strategy is to put the best people together on the highest priority project. Then the next level priority you put your mid-quality people on. At the lowest level you put your lowest quality workers together. The idea with the lowest quality is that these people may have always been working with the brightest and therefore were overshadowed or didn’t feel the need for so much effort, but if you put them together they will either take control or realize the work isn’t for them.

Avoid Team Silos

Thinking back to the Edward Snowden example with silos. None of the intelligence agencies wanted to share their intel about a plot (9/11) because they were all fighting for budget. They didn’t realize the extent of what was happening until it was too late because they all lacked the big picture. Silos cause organizations to misdiagnose the severity of situations, so we should work towards collaboration.

The Motivation as Emotions Principle

Primary responsibility of a manager is to create Drive, Determination, Enthusiasm, Excitement, and Engagement. Businesses often promote the highest salesperson to manager (even if they lack leadership skills), they don’t find or teach people to be the best leader. The rational side of the brain is overdeveloped by the MBA. The emotional side is ignored.

The Expectancy theory

Motivation results from employees believing that they can perform and that the performance will be followed by a reward they value

Expectancy (individual effort) x Instrumentality (individual performance) x Valence (organizational rewards) = Motivation/Choice (Individual Goals)

Punishment Can Leave Unintended Scars

Use punishment as a last resort when dealing with difficult individuals. Like in the example of trying to shoot an apple off of a shoulder, you can’t just shoot it off and that’s that. Punishment will also hit the shoulder and hurt. Reinforce the good things that people do.

Taking a System View

Research shows that when you look at your employees and see a performance issue, your brain looks for a story to explain the issues. It will look for the simplest answer that the cause is a person — when in truth it is a system that is failing. If you want quality, you must understand the broad array of things that made poor quality happen. Force yourself to map out your organization and try to detect the breakdowns that led to poor performance.

Romance of Leadership

We often make the mistake in thinking that one person is the problem in an organization, or that one person can save the day. We see this in sports a lot, where the head coach is sacked or the QB is traded in an attempt to fix the team. The reality is that the system tends to be the problem, and it won’t be fixed by replacing just one person.

Visionary & Charismatic Leadership

Organizations need visionary & charismatic leadership. These people paint visions that the world/things can be better. They are willing to suffer with their people to get to that better world. We discussed LeBron James as an example, he says “we walk the same streets; we breathe the same air.” He knows that things are tough, but he creates a vision for students that if they do well in school, they have a future.

Nominal Group Technique > Brainstorming

Brainstorming is not the best way to generate alternatives. Nominal group technique, where everyone brings a list of ideas, is more effective and creates better ideas. In a brainstorming session, one or two people can dominate a conversation, whereas NGT encourages all to generate ideas.

Avoid Biases and errors

“It’s a huge mistake to theorize before you have data. Inevitably you’ll twist data to fit the theory instead of theory to fit the fact.” We feel best when we understand how the world works, so we try to fit facts to confirm what we believe.

Nimble Leadership

Architecting Leaders - Respond to external threats and opportunities, caretakers of internal operations. (Kevin Costner)

Enabling Leaders - Coaching, Connecting, Communicating (Taraji Henson)

Entrepreneurial Leaders - Self-confidence and a willingness to act, strategic, able to attract others. (Octavia Spencer)

A Few Bad Apples

In the business world, it’s common to excuse unethical practices as ‘bad apples.’ The reality is that we need to take a systems view and see what enables these corporations to act in unethical ways. In a lot of cases, these ‘bad apples’ are merely trying to be profitable by any means possible — which is a tenant of the capitalist system. It’s up to the people to ensure the organization acts ethically.

Switch to Manual Mode

We’re nice to in-group people, but vindictive to out-group people. So when we’re dealing with out-group people, we need to switch from automatic mode into manual mode to process the system and reason with it. We shouldn’t use our gut moral judgement.

Avoid creating moral delimMas

Do not create scenarios in the workplace where people have to choose between moral judgment/ethics and their interests. Like in the die simulation, people would lie about their choice of top of die or bottom of die if it meant a big enough financial gain for them, or if they morally perceived it as being for a good cause (the die money going to charity).