Enemy of Corporate Communications

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Lesson 17

"What my boss doesn't know can't hurt me."

- The Filter Builder's Motto

Everyone has a comfort zone.  There is a point at which individuals become nervous and uncertain about the security of their positions.  This is only natural.  Losing a job or a reduction in job status impacts a lot more than someone's pride and ego.  Throughout a person's professional career, she has built a lifestyle that closely reflects her professional success.  The house he lives in, the car she drives, the neighborhood where the kids go to school, the golf or tennis crowd he hangs out with, or the church she attends.  As a leader, you need to understand how much a person's life and lifestyle are tied to his or her position in your organization.

           

A person tends to become a filter builder over a long period of time with a company, although it can also happen quickly under the right circumstances.  The filter builders know that they can avoid rocking the organizational boat by making sure that the top decision makers don't get upset hearing bad news or by problems they might find disturbing.  If you are a top decision maker, you need to be careful this doesn't happen to you. Make sure that the information you should be receiving from the lower levels of your organization is not being filtered.

Everyone has a bigger fish just one stop up the food chain.  In management situations, everyone has a smaller fish one stop in the other direction.  If true, accurate, and factual information is being filtered or, worse yet, misrepresented, as it makes its way through the ranks, the top leaders are likely to be left in the dark about what's truly going on with their internal and external customers.  How dangerous is this problem?  There are some companies we used to hear a lot about that are now gone.  They were filtered to death.

To be an effective leader you need real information, whether the news is good or bad.  You have the power to fix problems and to help your people grow and develop.  You can't do either of those things if you're operating with limited and/or inaccurate information.  Filter Builders are everywhere, protecting their backsides.  Don't think your organization is immune.  You must identify them and deal with them.  If not, you are putting yourself, your organization, your customers, and all of your stakeholders at risk.

Here are some things you can do to reduce filtered information:

·      Develop a mobile management style of, "Management by Walking Around."

·      Ask all levels of management and team members' questions, act on their ideas, and let them know what you've done.

·      Let everyone on all levels of management know in no uncertain terms that filtering information will not be tolerated.

"Weed out filter builders"

Take Steps to Grow as a Leader

	Lesson 8

You shouldn’t wait to start learning how successful leaders think and act until your boss tells you he or she is looking for your replacement.  If I had known then what I know now, my boss would have never come in and set my pants on fire.  I would have paid $10,000 for a single copy of this book back then.  Maybe even twice that.

The way others successfully handle pressure can be an education and ensure that you’ll never have to experience similar situations.  When we observe someone who never seems to be on the hot seat, it might well be that, while we were scrambling around with our nose to the grindstone, that person’s head was up where he or she could look around and learn a thing or two from other people’s experiences.  A head that’s up and looking around means:

• Attending seminars, live or on-line
• Reading books, magazines, and newspapers
• Taking to lunch people from whom you can learn
• Monitoring your own people for things you can learn
• Gobbling up audio/video multimedia training programs
• Regularly analyze what’s working and what isn’t

      

It’s not enough to merely study.  True learning is the application of knowledge.  Things get exciting for everybody when successful techniques are put into practice.  Keeping all of your great new knowledge in your head won’t do a thing to increase productivity.  I speak three to five times every week, all over North America plus a few other countries, and I've never been in front of an audience that didn’t have at least a few educated failures.  Some of them possess enormous amounts of information about the latest leadership methods, yet they’re stagnated or failing.  When I ask them how many of the new techniques and strategies they have incorporated into their organization’s daily routines, they hesitate to answer.  The truth hurts.  The fact is that most of us leave a gap between how we do our jobs and the way we know how to do our jobs.

How did you score yourself on the ten earlier leadership characteristics?  Using a scale 1-10 with 10 being highest, go back and score yourself again the way your people would probably rate you as a leader.  See yourself through their eyes.  If you’re gutsy, you might want one or more of your people who have read that chapter to do the rating.  The score your people give you is the real one.  You're only as effective as your people’s perception of you.  The rating the staff gives their leader is always the most accurate measure of effectiveness. 

Here are three tough questions to ask yourself.  Journal your answers:

• If I were to ask my team members to graph out the improvement they've seen from me as a leader of people in the past year, what would the graph look like?
• What do I need to start planning in order to grow as a leader in the next twelve months?
• Where has my leadership solved a problem and what did I learn from it?

"Take a mentor to lunch before somebody else eats yours!"

Go Fly a Kite: The Problem-Solving Process

The Niagara River gorge is 800 feet wide with a 400-foot-wide river channel. Water rushes through the channel at 24 miles per hour. Engineers in the middle of the nineteenth century faced a major challenge when assigned the task of building a railroad suspension bridge across the chasm. No boat could withstand the current and drag a cable across the rushing waters. There was no helicopter in those days to chopper a cable across.

So, creativity came to the rescue. A contest was held in which the first young person who could fly a kite across and have someone grab the kite string on the opposite cliff would receive a prize of ten dollars. Homan Walsh, nine years old, flying his kite from the American side, was the first to have a companion secure the kite string on the other side.

In 1915, Edwin Markham told the rest of the story like this:

The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,

Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,

Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite

Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands

To grasp upon the further cliff and draw

A greater cord, and then a greater yet;

’Till at the last across the chasm swung

The cable--then the mighty bridge in the air!

By 1855, trains were crossing the

1160-foot-long bridge, 230 feet above the river, and it all started with a kite string. Can the difficulties we face be that insurmountable? We have many more resources available to us now. Symbolically, we need to get more kite strings across our problems. Don’t wait for the kite that will fly the bridge across. Nevertheless, now, as then, long journeys begin with small steps. More than anything else, we must not lose our perspective or, more importantly, our sense of humor in the face of problems. At a glance, the six-step problem-solving process looks like this:

Step One—Identify the problem.

Step Two—Gather all relative information.

Step Three—List all possible solutions.

Step Four—Test possible solutions.

Step Five—Select the best solution.

Step Six—Put the solution into action.

A Thought to Ponder:

1. Decide

2. Begin

3. Don't Stop

Creative Problem Solving in a Tough Market

“The world is a grindstone. Life is your nose.” Fred Allen

The 1200 MPH fighter I flew for several years had a bad flight characteristic called a “pitch up” which could cause it to tumble right out of the sky. At twenty miles per minute, things happen fast.

My pitch up started at 56,000 feet (that’s eleven miles up). In this violent tumble I lost 30,000 feet of altitude. That’s almost six miles! This was the 9th pitch up experienced in this kind of a fighter and three pilots had survived. Not good odds! My goal? Be the 4th one!

The experts said that what saved my life was neutralizing the controls and popping the drag chute on the rear of the plane. This got the air flowing normally over the wings and I was able to recover.

That’s good advice for anyone. If you’re facing a major problem neutralize your controls and pop the drag chute. In other words, take a deep breath and don’t panic.

Out of conflict comes creativity. Expect your creativity to kick in. That’s when you come up with some amazing solutions. A perfect example follows:

In the mid 19th century there was a project to build a suspension bridge that would carry trains back and forth from Canada to America. This bridge would cross the 800-foot wide Niagara gorge and 230 feet below this structure would be the turbulent river formed by the Niagara Falls close by.

Keep in mind this is the mid-1850’s. What would you do to start this construction?

The engineers came up with an ingenious solution. They launched a kite-flying contest. Whoever got the kite string to the other side first would win a $10.00 prize. A nine-year-old boy, Homan Walsh won the prize!

His kite string was pulled across and it was tied to a heavier string, which was tied to a rope, which was tied to a cable, and thus the bridge was started.

We need to get more kite strings across our problems and not wait for the kite that’ll fly the bridge across!

Point to Ponder: It’s always too soon to quit!!!

The best is yet to be!
Danny

24 Lessons in High Performance Leadership

Lesson Twenty-two
Create a Creativity-Inducing Environment

I developed what I came to call “imaginars” in place of seminars. These weekly meetings with my managers were, appropriately, held in our district’s Imaginar Room. While most companies were having seminars, we were having imaginars. A sign hung in our imaginar room that read: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

Our theme was a constant reminder that no one individual could offer as much as the corporate effort of the entire group. My people went in there with the express purpose of discussing solutions to problems and creating new ideas to put into action. Creativity was not only allowed, it was encouraged. Creativity was our first order of business. When we really wanted to dig deep into ourselves for ideas, we rented a room at a local resort and got away from the clutter of daily activities. We covered the walls with flip chart sheets, filled with thoughts and ideas we later verified and put into practice.

Creativity Calls for Experimentation.
Creativity can create heat. A leader is likely to meet resistance from his or her team members as well as those higher in the organization. The thought of doing something new or different terrifies some people and makes the rest nervous. Yet the leader courageously asks, “Why don’t we try this?” The answer is almost automatic from his or her people: “Because we’ve never done it that way." To me that’s just not a valid reason to block creativity. Yet, you’ll hear it nearly every time a new idea is mentioned, if not in so many words.

Creativity Calls Playfulness.
An environment of playfulness simply means an environment that grants permission to have fun. In fact, it encourages people to have fun with what they do. Urge your people to play the "What if?" game and kick new ideas around. Some bosses will catch people brainstorming a new idea and demand they quit goofing off and get back to work. What poor, misguided souls. Their people were engaging in one of the most valuable exercises to improve production, and they were nipped in the bud.

Creativity Calls for Spontaneity. Take the "What if?" mind set seriously. Keep the door to new ideas open constantly. Encourage innovation whenever possible. I know a retail merchant, Stew Leonard, who started what he calls the One Idea Club. Each month, Stew selects about a half-dozen employees, making sure every job level and description is represented regularly, and drives them as far as two hours away to observe a store where customers are served well. The next day, the team that traveled together meets and each team member stands up and shares one new idea learned on the trip to use in their own store.

Try these creativity-enhancing techniques with your team members:

Encourage experimentation by praising "successful failures."

Encourage playfulness by relaxing old rules of conformity.

Encourage spontaneity by publicly recognizing new ideas and insights.

"A leader never forgets that creativity is contagious and can build inertia."