The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

Communication - Two Definitions to Consider

Communication - a fairly long word, a complex subject to discuss, and a hard term to define. But allow me to take a "leap of faith" and offer two definitions for your consideration (and, hopefully, comment).

Communication is first of all about interpretations. Nothing comes to us with its meaning inscribed on its back. What something means to you or to me is always in interpretation. As you read this, you are interpreting what I have written. As I wrote it, I was interpreting a lifetime of thinking about communication, of studying it, of researching it. Beyond that, I was faced with how best to package my interpretations so that your interpretations could possibly be of optimal value to you. No mean trick.

Consider that if you and I are to "communicate," each of us has to reach across the chasm that separates us to consider how to deal with the interpretations you might make of what I write.

Communication is also the process that creates (and maintains or changes) the minds we have. And our minds are the sources of all of our ways of "minding" the world - all of our ways of seeing it and dealing with it, and all of our ways of being affected by it and by each other. That process is not self-correcting. By and large, we go where our minds lead us, where and what they make possible - and necessary. It is our minds that control what we see and feel, not us.

Everything of which we are conscious got there via communication with others or with ourselves.

Nobody is Born to be a Racist

In a recent interview about her new book, A Mercy, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is quoted as writing in her book: "Nobody is born a racist."

I have the greatest respect and admiration for the mind of Toni Morrison, but maybe not the interviewer. But just so other readers won't be misled, it should be added that "Nobody is born to be judge of a racist."These are both cultural roles that have to be learned. Just because an anti-racist says so doesn't make "racism" a crime.

I can recall a research study back in the 50s that concluded there is evidence that racism is perpetuated as much or more by the victims of racism than by the racists who victimize them. This is along the lines that "it takes two to tango." There may have been some anti-antiracism in our recent election. Jack Welch assumed that Obama "won". One could still defend the position that Obama would not have won unless lots of voters wanted Bush to lose.

I would suppose that "Nobody is born a poet" or a celebrity either. Is a racist to be criticized for being a victim of his culture any more than a celebrity is to be celebrated for being tagged as a "celebrity?" We idolize our celebrities. We demonize (in the recent past) our racists. Fashions of mind change. if we hadn't had so many racists, Martin Luther King couldn't have been recognized for having his "dream."

Racism is not wrong because Nobel laureates or other celebrities say so. There are deeper reasons. Or is it all a war of popular opinion?

Hiring the "Bright Boys"

In his Execupundit.com blog (always worth reading) of November 19 of '08, Michael Wade observes how those "bright boys" who fail, rise again out of the ashes (so to speak). It leads one to wonder if the wrong hiring criteria are being used.

I'd bet that "education" and "experience" are two of the expedients. Still, I don't know who has nailed down precisely what education and/or experience has to do with future success in a future role.

An that, in turn, makes me wonder if the organizations or institutions doing the hiring are using a forward-looking role description for such positions as the "bright boys" might be hired into. I'd guess not. In which case, the fault likes with the organizations doing the hiring.

Here's another thought: Such people as the "bright boys" are hired to "make decisions" and to carry out other such activities. They are not held accountable at the outset for the consequences of their actions.

A pity, perhaps, but entirely consistent with the drift of our pop psyc culture.

Leadership Is a Role, Not a Person

Here's a rather remarkable fact that may deserve your attention.

Those who have most frequently risen to the top ranks of leadership in past history have done so without a current recipe book to guide them. Neither Genghis Khan nor Tecumseh ever attended a John Maxwell seminar or read a Tom Peters article on the subject of leadership. At the same time, there seems to be little evidence that those who take courses and attend seminars or read books on leadership ever gain much of a reputation for having changed the course of history - in large or small ways.

What's the lesson here? That those who made their mark didn't have the "advantage" of our 10,000 or so books on the subject, but did it anyway? That those who have available the world's accumulated "wisdom" about leadership don't seem to be able to make much of a difference even with all of that hyped advantage?

The lesson may be this: If you're faced with a circumstance that requires a leader, and there is either no one else to do it or perhaps the others seem less qualified, you may be it.

But, consider these two prerequisites. One is that there has to be an opportunity for the kind of leadership you could uniquely provide. The other is that all of the other possible candidates for the role would have to be viewed by potential followers as less desirable than you are. Leadership is a role, not a person.

Being placed in a position of authority does not guarantee anyone's ability to provide leadership. In fact, the ways in which people get to those positions guarantees that a great many of them will fail as heads of whatever they are heads of.They fail for the reason that when their leadership was required, they smiply didn't have what it took to provide the leadership needed.

What's important to remember is that you will not be chosen to be the leader as a result of how much you want to be the leader - or the result of how many leadership books you have read. If there is a need for leadership, and there is no better choice than you, you just might get the role.

Performance and the Inescapable Logic

One of the most reliable of ancient wisdoms is this: Don't challenge the inevitable. If there is an infrastructure logic to something, go with it. Don't go up against it.

Organizations may succeed for many different reasons. But many organizations fail for one reason - they did not adapt to the logic of the situations in which they found themselves. The logic of situations, from the interpersonal to larger economy, is always implicit - hidden, tacit. You have to figure it out without having the code book in your hand. If one of your lieutenants is gung-ho for your mission, and another expresses overt hostility to it, the logics of the two situations are quite different. If you play them the same, you may lose both ways.

Consider poker or bridge. Each game has a certain logic to it. If you can read it better than your opponents, you might win. It is the same for every competitor in every marketplace. The logic of the situation will always win. It pays to be on the side of the forces that are going to win.

Three concepts to ponder:

1. How good you are at what you do is revealed solely by how well you perform under adversity. Make the logic of adversity your ally.
2. What doesn't make you the best at what you do, makes you ordinary. What makes you ordinary can never make you the best. You can't beat that logic. People have been trying to do that for years.
3. There is no necessary correlation between what people say and what people do. That's the logic. You can play it the other way - but, if you do - you will lose.

Barack Obama's Victory

On their website, Jack and Suzy Welch recently posted a short piece about Obama's "Victory" and the lessons top executives could follow to have their own victories.

You might think that someone as seasoned as Jack Welch would be well aware that all outcomes are produced by many factors beyond the person. Any one of us could have made the observation that people in large numbers wanted to change the policital leadership of this country. So they voted against the status quo - as it usually happens after two terms in office. It's likely they would have voted for anyone who promised "Change." If you happen to be standing in the right place at the right time, that would be good advice for executives. So was the "victory" his or theirs?

You might think that the era of the "great man" was over. But egomaniacs and celebrity explainers would like to keep it alive.

You might think that emulating the person who had become the president-elect would be a good idea. It's never worked in the past. But we would like to believe that there's a recipe out there somewhere just waiting to make you rich and famous. You would be wrong.

You might think that the overwhelming evidence suggests we can learn far more from failure than from success, and that the "lessons" distilled by the Welch's would be more useful if they had been derived from the losers.

You might think that Jack Welch became rich and famous by using the lessons that magically arose from Obama's campaign. Hmmm...

But knowing how anyone became "victorious" doesn't enable anyone reading the "lessons" to do it. Are we saying that Obama could have defeated Reagan at the time, in those circumstances, in the context of that zeitgeist?

It is thin broth, indeed, two parts hubris and one part greed. It must be awful to feed on one's celebrity, even when undeserved - as evidenced by the effort to identify with the "victor - indeed to pose as official explainer of success in the cauldron of politics.

The test, of course, is how many people will become wildly successful by taking the lessons to heart. Obama was "victorious." But suppose he fails in office. What would be the lesson in that.

Accountability and the High-Performance Organization

Talk is not an accomplishment. It is typically what people do in lieu of an accomplishment. The more accomplishment-minded people in an organization are, the less they have to talk about. Consider these thoughts.

• The less people achieve, the more need they feel to talk about it.
• Communication fills the void left by having no clear purpose, or by failing to accomplish what needed to be accomplished.
• Much if not most communication in organizations is in lieu of accomplishment. Or it may simply be as irrelevant as are the people who engage in it as a substitute for purposeful performance.

Accountability means owning the outcome - not the talk. Accountability requires the competencies required to accomplish what needs accomplishing, and for avoiding those consequences that ought not to occur. To develop a high-performance organization, accountability is the tool that you, as the leader, must wield. You are, and the people in your organization must be:

• accountable for statements made.
• accountable for the promises that were made to anyone inside or outside the organization.
• accountable for an implicit promise.
• accountable for every accomplishment you and they sign on to, explicitly or implicitly, and for the ramifications of whatever occurs as a result of your or their failure to perform.
• accountable for developing all of the competencies required to accomplish what you have signed on to accomplish.

There is no accountability where there are no consequences for failing to accomplish what was agreed to. An excuse is the opposite of accountability. Every hour of every day there are "Moments of Truth" in every organization, as Jan Carlzon (then head of SAS) wrote some years back. In the outcomes of those moments of truth, there is either accountability or there is not. Making it necessary for people to be accountable is simply indispensable to making a high-performance organization.

Six Obstacles to Extraordinary Performance - Do You Know What They Are?

If you don't want to be tripped-up or blindsided by the most common obstacles to extraordinary performance, it helps to know what they are. Consider these:

1. One of the most basic of these obstacles is our compulsion for short-term thinking. We are a quick-fix society. However, becoming really good at anything requires a commitment to whatever it takes - and that includes the investment of time and effort required.
2. A similar obstacle that bars anyone's entry to world-class performance is recipe/panacea thinking. This kind of thinking culminates in your belief that somehow, there is a magical solution to your problems that merely has to be applied - the less effort, the better. Call it modern magic.
3. Closely related is the belief that words can be used to change people. That is, if you use just the right magic words, you can "motivate" people from being merely adequate to being truly masterful at what they do. This is a widely-held myth.
4. If you believe that the answer to your prayers is some how-to-recipe, then you must necessarily assume that people are interchangeable with respect to that recipe. They are not.
5. If you "go with the flow" - the conventional mindset - you will see the world as far more linear than it is. And you will see human behavior as far more controllable by you than it is.
6. Across the range of people we look to for leadership, such as the managers of our organizations, there is a significant shortfall of courage, of vision, of passion, of commitment, and of competence. All these are required for those who would either lead themselves or others. Such shortfalls function as obstacles.

As you consider these obstacles, ponder also these relevant thoughts:

• Most people are okay with the notion of change - as long as it does not involve them personally.
• Most people are satisfied with their mediocrity. In fact most people will work harder at preserving their mediocrity than at anything else. What do you think motivates them to do this?
• And finally, people and their byproducts are perverse. What sort of logic, therefore, is required to provide leadership to them?

Remember, realizing obstacles that can block extraordinary performance is the first step on the path to acheiving it. Would anyone like to add to the list?

Leadership - Having the Right Tool for the Right Task

A Phillips screwdriver won't work on a slot-head screw. It's tough to drive a staple with a hammer. A master carpenter has a tool for every purpose. An amateur has a few standard tools and tries to make them work for every purpose. So what's this got to do with leadership?

Leaders acquire or invent the tools they need to fit the circumstances. They let the situation or the problem define the tools or techniques needed, rather than defining the problem by the tools they happen to have available. The look at problems as an opportunity to learn something, rather than merely as an opportunity to apply something they already know.

So a leader is a tool-finder as well as a tool-maker. A leader realizes that unconventional situations require unconventional tools. Unlike amateur managers, who let the tools they happen to have define the situation, leaders let the situation define the tools required.

But, consider also this thought. A tool is the right tool only in the right hands. A master carpenter and the tool he or she is using are interdependent. They each enable the other. That's the way it needs to be with leaders.

By itself, a hammer does nothing it was designed to do. In the hands of an amateur, expect damage. In the hands of a master craftsman, expect superior results. No tool or technique can compensate for the inadequacies of their users. We are led - easily on our part - to believe that we can buy smarts, or at least buy something that would compensate for our own or others' incompetencies. However, you cannot. I cannot. No one can.

The right person is the person who is fully capacitated - fully competent - to combine with that tool or technique what can be achieved when each is "right." Consider these closing points:

• A poor tool in the hands of a fully competent person will produce results far superior to a magnificent tool in the hands of an incompetent person.
• Who is the "right" person? The one who is fully competent to make use of the right tool.
• Any shortfall in competence lessens the value of the tool.

A leader is someone who has the right tool for the right task - and knows how to use it.

Perversity and the Stock Market

Perversity is an obstacle to real achievement. If you look it up in the dictionary, you will find that preversity refers to the illogic of what goes on in the world. Best interpretation: if refers to the common experience of living in a world that frequently does not coincide with your expectations about it. (Hello, Wall Street.)

     Perversity refers to the fact that people are inconsistent, always improvising, changing their minds, putting a spin here and there on what they heard or what they saw. It refers to the obvious; that in the real world things are forever evolving - not randomly, in a technical sense - but with no predictable pattern. Our imaginations about the future are as flawed as our recollections of the past.

So, perversity arises in the disconnect between outcomes we believe will occur, and the realities that do occur. Our preceptions may be full of wishful thinking. Our predictions even more so. What we call perversity derives from the fact that the actualities of the world - past, present, or future - are not obligated to be consistent with our hopes, our fears, or our mental models of the way they should be.

Consider this. Perversity has three fundamental sources:

1. Neither the people nor the world you co-habit with them is obligated to be the way you think they are, or to behave in the way you expect them to.
2. The way other people see the world and think about it, and the way other people make decisions and take actions in the world, is something you can neither control nor predict with much accuracy.
3. The world you live in with lots of other people is forever generating happenings and outcomes and effects other than what you intended.

Perversity is what can be said to be at work behind every situation where your reaction is: "I can't understand how that happened!"