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Wisdom

"I want to move more toward Love and away from Fear!" the words of a recent coaching client echoed in my ears as I wrote this newsletter. What does moving toward Love look like? How do we do it? How can we know that we are progressing or can we only rely on the words of others?

Some of you may be wondering what this has to do with leadership, or even the business world, but according to current authors of literature on leadership and change, it is "Everything!" In countless books, from Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, to Leadership and Self-Deception and magazine articles in Fortune, the business world has been rocked by leaders coming from fear. The impact has been enormous from Enron to scandals in politics, siloed organizations, and exploitations of people and resources.

None of these things is new or surprising. What is surprising is that it is becoming popular to talk about the softer side of leadership, emotional intelligence, and the use of it to lead. It is new to be considering these as essential, rather than peripheral, to the process of leading. People are becoming more accustomed to naming their own behavior as coming from fear or anger. There is an increased dialogue of authenticity in the workplace and beyond.

In this newsletter, we will explore what this looks like and welcome a guest contributor, Kim Wilson. Connecting with the unlimited potential in each person and organization aligns us with our true purpose and the results are powerful and effective.

Happy exploring,
Debra J. Gawrych

This newsletter focuses on the many ways we teach, coach, mentor, and learn from others in unique way. In this way, all of the elements of Lead From the Inside Out are included: Self-Awareness, Courage, Active Creation, and Coaching and Mentoring. My hope is that you find something useful in what you read.

One more thing for your list

by Kim Wilson

Sometimes you just have to slow down to speed up. Sometimes it’s not that you’re so busy you can’t take a break, but that you’re so busy you have to take a break.

And sometimes it’s not what you need to get off your list, but what you need to add to it

Those statements sound counterintuitive, but they’re absolutely true.

I have a big job and a big life with lots of responsibilities. My list goes on and on: managing employees, developing strategic plans, and maintaining a travel schedule that keeps me on the road 75 percent of the time plus there are the personal things I need to give my attention to—my husband just retired, our home is up for sale, we’re renovating our “new” primary residence 300 miles away, and we’re becoming grandparents.

But time and time again, I’ve discovered that it’s not what I need to take off my list to get me sane, it’s what I need to put on it. Each one of us engages in activities that both take and give us energy. Sometimes those activities are one in the same, but even then, the balance tips back and forth constantly. The swing to the draining side happens easily. Too many meetings at work, too many social events, and the house needs cleaning. You get the picture. Swinging to the energizing side takes work. It requires planning, boundary setting, and usually a bit of separation anxiety from those things we’re so tethered to every day.

Recently I took a couple of days off to spend a long weekend with my best friend. We've known each other for twenty years, but lately it's harder and harder to find the time to get together. She has two children and a new law practice of her own. We live 3,000 miles apart and are committed to seeing each other. We planned and carved time out of packed schedules. In the end, we were rejuvenated, reenergized, relaxed, reconnected, and refreshed. It was a pleasure to spend time together leisurely; to go to the spa, wander the shops, watch the sun set over the hills, and play with children who think their fairy godmother's wings are folded neatly underneath her sweater.

It was hard for walk away from the things I do. However, adding doing nothing to my list was just what the doctor ordered. I returned to my "regular" life with a greater sense of possibility. I was able to get things done quicker than before. I was more effective and felt physically better; my headache finally went away. The most surprising thing of all was that nothing went disastrously wrong simply because I made time for something important to me.

Returning to the things that make you tick—the things that are the big truths and the big needs in your life—is not a distraction from your long “Get It Done” list. Rather, reconnecting to those things, frequently and in a real way, is the power in our ability to accomplish much. Spending that time reminds us of the answers we already have inside each of us for the questions we face every day. It clears the cobwebs from what we already “know” and lights the path to those answers. When the path is clear, the work is easier, more natural, more productive, and more successful.

What are those important things in your life that you have neglected for too long? How are you moving slowly because you’re running so fast? What’s missing on your to-do list?

Kim Wilson leads an internal consulting group for Wachovia Wealth Management in North Carolina. She’s also a dedicated wife, sister, mother, grandmother, friend, author, board member, and avid gardener who currently lives on Lake Lanier in Buford, GA. She can be reached at kwwilson2001@yahoo.com.

One-Minute Idea
Ask your staff to write personal mission statements
Many companies have mission statements—documents where the goals of the company are outlined, as well as the means by which it hopes to achieve them. Why not have individual employees write mission statements of their own? Ask them to write out a paragraph describing their professional ambitions and goals. It’s a good way to find out where your employees want to go, and how they plan to get there.

Having Authenticity

“Love is the prerogative of the brave,” said Gandhi.  It takes courage to tell your colleagues how much you love and appreciate them. It takes courage to love them enough to confront them, in a respectful manner, when they are off the mark.

Courtesy of Mark Anderson

When you become angry at work, you have a choice. You can swallow your anger and let it fester, forget about it, or confront the other person and clear your thoughts and emotional issues about the situation. Denying your anger is not the answer. Anger eventually surfaces in an angry comment, an underhanded remark, in your physical body, or even in your behavior (i.e., sabotaging a process or being slow to do something that involves the person with whom you are angry).

When you have the courage to confront a problem and do so respectfully, you enable the other person to do the same. You may find out something in your behavior that is also off the mark. People who don’t confront respectfully are not as effective as leaders. In the long run, people, companies, and teams that confront respectfully are higher functioning because they are able to drive for results.

Kevin Salwen, editor of Worthwhile Magazine, discusses this in the October 2005 issue:

• “Research shows we’re far from alone. Increasingly, people want a heart and soul connection to their careers—and if we don’t get it from corporate America, we’ll create it ourselves.
• “Second…whatever fictional contract companies once had with employees is long gone, a victim of downsizing, outsourcing, productivity, and internationalization. It’s all up to us as individuals and teammates now, and the smart organizations (Safeco, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and others) use that to empower us and build great businesses.”

Salwen’s points were reiterated in an article by Lance HK Secretan, author of Managerial Moxie and founder of Manpower Limited. Secretan maintains that society has embraced fear as a weapon to coerce others to do its bidding. He sees fear as the base operating system in marketing, leadership, coaching, politics, education, healthcare, parenting, and religion. However, he points out that we have a choice between fear or love. We can act because we are afraid not to, or because we love to.

The truth of the matter is that no one is inspired by fear. Everything that inspires us comes from love—without exception. If this is the case, why is it so difficult for many people, including leaders to incorporate the world “love’ in their vocabularies? For many people, it is because they have grown up with the belief that if they express love outside of the context of family or romantic relationship, people will think they are weak, flaky, or lacking in resolve, purpose, or strength.

A leader who has the courage to come from a place of “love” and be humble and forgiving—and therefore authentic—is much more inspiring and effective.

Telling the truth could be the single greatest profit generator in corporate history. Secretan estimates that 20 percent of the workforce today is involved in checking up on the other 80 percent, making sure that company rules and regulations are followed, that the law is respected, and that expenses are authentic. In an organization of 10,000 people if 2,000 people are responsible for accountability issues, and each one of these people costs the company an average of $50,000 a year, the total cost would be $100 million annually. If a corporate-wide initiative on truthfulness was initiated and 50 percent on the people doing accountability work could be freed up that would be worth $50 million dollars to put toward growing or supporting line business functions.

Mary Cusack, a manager with Procter & Gamble instituted a truth-telling process in one of her plants. The process was inspired by Brad Blanton’s Radical Honesty and Will Schutz’s The Human Element. Cusack stated that the impact was, “We got people to look each other in the eye, share their appreciation, state their resentments, get over them, and move on.” The result was a dramatic improvement in productivity and decision-making speed at the plant. Within six months, the company saved $10 million by discovering efficiency gains.

In Secretan’s words, “Imagine the impact in our world if we all infused our passion and purpose with the proof and power of loving one another and telling the truth. It would be quite simply inspiring, and therefore revolutionary.” This successful leader of an international business empire and prolific author says, “…it’s really very simple. The world would be a better place if we loved each other and told the truth.”

One of the most striking bits of news that I’ve read recently was the Fortune article on the lack of leadership talent that is available in the U.S. at the highest levels. In his February 6, 2006 article, “Catch a Rising Star,”Geoffrey Colvin points out a shortage of C-class executives (CEO, CFO, and COO) and how they are in demand. Major companies are competing for a limited talent pool for their top management positions. They are looking elsewhere for their top talent because either they have not or cannot develop leaders within their own organizations.

The following companies are noted to be CEO machines and companies often go to them to find top quality leaders:

Company	# of CEOs	Distinguished Alumni
Procter & Gamble	11	Steven Ballmer, Microsoft W. James McNerney Jr., Boeing
General Electric	10	Robert Nardelli, Home Depot Lawrence Johnston, Albertsons
General Motors	7	E. Stanley O'Neal, Merrill Lynch George W. Buckley, 3M
IBM	7	John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems Patricia F. Russo, Lucent Technologies
McKinsey	7	John C. Malone, Liberty Media Kevin Sharer, Amgen

The two most valuable traits that companies look for in their leadership has changed from what it was five or ten years ago. Leaders still need to deliver knockout results; but they need to go about it in a different way. Tom Neff of SpencerStuart, an international recruiting agency, says, “The style for running a company is different from what it used to be. Companies don’t want dictators, kings, or emperors. Instead they want someone who asks probing questions that forces the team to think and find the right answers.”

Top leaders need to score high in two areas:

Their ability to motivate and engage others.

Courtesy of Mike Lynch

Effective communication skills. In the current global market, it helps to be able to communicate in at least one other language.

The majority opinion is that there are not many people available who possess the ability to lead at such a level.

Therefore, companies are now getting serious about growing their own leaders. Noel Tichy, a University of Michigan business school professor and author of several books on change, states, “Companies want to find their future stars in their own farm systems rather than have to buy them from competing teams. Trouble is, most companies aren’t good at leadership development. The number of companies that have had to go outside to find top leadership is staggering—Boeing, Helwett-Packard twice, Sara Lee, 3M twice. The leadership pipeline is broken.”

Seventy-seven percent of companies (taken from a Tichy study) say that they don’t have enough successors for their current senior management. These companies are beginning to realize that they thought it was HR’s job to develop leaders. Successful companies know it’s actually the job of all the managers. Companies that integrate leadership development throughout the organization have the best results.

Sponsorship from the top is the key. One of the best ways to ensure success in development of leaders is to have the leadership team devote a significant portion of its time in development of others, and to include real-life experiences (on the job coaching and training) as an adjunct to classroom experiences.

If you’re an up-and-coming leader, what would you need to do to prepare yourself for the top positions?

Go global. Get involved with customers, manufacturing technologies, and employees in different cultures.

Embrace Sarbanes-Oxley. If you want to get ahead, you have to talk intelligently about it.

Stay squeaky clean. Have the highest and utmost integrity and authenticity. Don’t hedge or buff up anything.

Get on the board’s radar. Figure out who is driving revenues and profits in various business units, and get close to them. Get known outside your area. Once this happens, the board will hear about it and begin to see you as someone who can handle more than what’s on your plate right now.

Manage down. SpencerStuart’s Tom Neff says managers on the verge need to have the “common touch” and be a “team leader rather than a drill sergeant.” When your people shine, you shine.

The best-kept secret in motivational management

It’s not money, or recognition, or praise. One of the best-kept secrets in motivating employees is this: People really care about their careers. Managers sometimes forget that when it comes to motivating employees. Until retirement age nears, the average workers care more about where a job is going to lead them than whether or not it’s “fair” or “pays enough.” That’s why so many workers are willing to tolerate jobs that leave a lot to be desired if they really believe it will “lead to something better.” Remember this when trying to motivate employees. Offer them training, opportunity for advancement, and career guidance, and employees will work harder and smarter.

 How we can help you

Common Boundaries Consulting & Communications

Promoting powerfully authentic leadership for the organization and for the individual.

We support active planning to attain individual and organizational goals.  Our programs can support either with a curriculum that includes:

• Team-learning
• Leadership Skills I and II
• Consultative Skills I and II
• Team Learning and Conflict Management
• Cultural Change and Cultural Transformation 
• Individual and Group Management Coaching
• Women’s Leadership Skills: Gender-specific Leadership Issues
• Personality Assessments:  Myers-Briggs, Kiersey Temperament model, SDI, and others
• Outdoor Motivation/Education Coaching
• Image Studies, Individual and Group Coaching (Long and Short-term coaching available)

To find out more about our consulting and programs, please see our Web site www.commonboundaries.com, or contact us at 954-385-8434.

For details see www.commonboundaries.com

We are considering an open enrollment Authentic Leadership Intensive in North Carolina, if there is any interest, in August or September of 2007.

Also, we are asking for interest and feedback on those who are interested in participating in The Role of Spirituality in Organizations Conference to be held in North Carolina, South Florida, and possibly New York City later this year. This conference will be a “think tank” for people who work in organizations and/or businesses and have a desire to bring a spiritual focus to the work they are doing. The intent will be to ask and discuss questions such as:

How do you incorporate spirituality into your organizations?

Where do you see areas of possibility?

How do you nurture yourself as a practitioner? Where do you gather support and best practices? And more.

Why are you so unhappy?
Why are we so unhappy?
Because everything you do
And 99 percent of what you think
Is for yourself, and there isn’t one.

—Wu Wei, 12th Century

A Whale of a Story

Sometimes we forget how close in our DNA we are to some in the animal kingdom. Whales are mammals, and some believe they and the porpoise have great intelligence and a great capacity for affection for those who do not threaten them.

If you read the front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, December 14, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her—a dangerous proposition. One slap of the tail could kill a rescuer. They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.

When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them gently. She thanked them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eye was following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate—to be surrounded by people who are willing to help you get untangled from the things that are binding you.

Books to read:

• Creative Action: The Making of Meaning by Edward Matchett
• Presence by Peter Senge
• Radical Honesty Brad Blanton
• The Human Element by Will Schutz
• Managerial Moxie by Lance Secretan
• The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald M. Weinberg