Leadership communication primer
My first term as a student at Cambridge University was rough. I grew up in the coal mining valleys of South Wales and spoke English with a thick Welsh accent, whereas the vast majority of my classmates at Cambridge had attended elite public schools (Eton, Harrow, Cheltenham Ladies) and spoke impeccable “Queen’s” English. In class-conscious England, my South Wales accent indicated I was from the lower echelons of society. I dropped my aitches, talked about “our mam,” and said “ta” instead of “thank you.” Back in the 1970s these colloquialisms were not regarded as charming or cute. Indeed, my first week at Cambridge I overheard my tutor describe me to a colleague as “uncouth”—a memory that still makes me wince. http://ift.tt/2an3Wq8At bottom my accent signaled that I was uneducated or “ill-bred” (to use a particularly demeaning English term). And in a sense I was. I had very little knowledge of the world. My father occasionally brought home a local tabloid called the Western Mail but didn’t see the point in buying a national newspaper, so I knew next to nothing about current affairs. Our household boasted a motley collection of nineteenth-century novels, courtesy of my mother, who loved the Brontë sisters, but outside of that I was not well-read. At eighteen I’d never been to the theater, shopped at a high-end store, or traveled abroad. We spent family vacations in a trailer park in West Wales. As a result I had no small talk or cocktail patter. It wasn’t a personality thing—I was friendly and outgoing. I was tongue-tied because I didn’t have anything to talk about that suited my new milieu. I had no way of joining in conversations about, for instance, the Tory leadership traits struggle, the skiing season in Austria, or the latest in bell-bottom jeans. My fellow students weren’t openly rude or hostile—after all, they were “wellbred” young people—but they kept their distance. I wasn’t on the invitation lists for sought-after freshman parties, and I found it impossible to penetrate the cozy circles that dominated the interesting clubs. I remember being the awkward, ignored outsider at the Cambridge Union (the university-wide debating society). I soon realized that to survive and thrive I needed to strip myself of my accent and lose the most obvious of the class markers that set me apart from my peers. By January of that first year I was on the case and set about a transformation. I started with voice and speech—which were, after all, how I “betrayed” myself. I couldn’t afford elocution lessons or a voice coach, so I bought a tape recorder and spent long hours listening to, and then attempting to copy, the plummy voices on BBC Radio. I sought out the newscasters on the BBC World Service since they spoke a particularly clear and neutral form of Queen’s English. It took months, but I nailed it. Concurrently I set about elevating my conversation so that it reflected the caliber of my thinking rather than my class background. I subscribed to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, bought cheap tickets to the Arts Cinema, and plunged into the literature on African liberation movements. I was about to spend the summer in Ghana participating in a professor’s research project, so why not develop some wellinformed opinions about this intriguing continent? Africa was very “in.” By June I was trying out my newfound cultural and political fluency on my slowly expanding circle of sophisticated friends. My makeover well under way, it was simply a matter of time before these improvements took and I could carry on conversations about a variety of topics without giving away my origins. This is not to say my struggle was over: For my family, my new accent was a different kind of betrayal, one that raised questions of authenticity. Yet the success I started to enjoy at Cambridge as a result of my transformation underscored for me two profound lessons. First, leadership communication is not so much what you say but rather how you say it. And this you can condition and control. The tone and timbre of your voice; your choice and use of words; your inflection, articulation, and delivery; and even your body language determine what and how much your listeners take in—and what overall impression of you they will form and retain as a result. Other people’s perceptions of you are very much yours to shape. Leadership Communication: ALWAYS ON
Most of us tend to think of communication skills in terms of formal presentation skills. But when are you not onstage? When are you not being judged? No matter what your job title or how junior or senior you are, you are always presenting. Whether it’s a quick email to your boss, a casual comment you make to colleagues in the hallway, or a pitch you prepare for clients, you’re conveying who you are and what authority is your due. In the real world and very much in the virtual one, every verbal encounter is a vital opportunity to create and nurture a positive impression. Your communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal, are what ultimately win you the attention and mindshare of colleagues, clients, and friends.Most of us tend to think of communication skills in terms of formal presentation skills. But when are you not onstage? When are you not being judged? No matter what your job title or how junior or senior you are, you are always presenting. Whether it’s a quick email to your boss, a casual comment you make to colleagues in the hallway, or a pitch you prepare for clients, you’re conveying who you are and what authority is your due. In the real world and very much in the virtual one, every verbal encounter is a vital opportunity to create and nurture a positive impression. Your communication skills, both verbal and nonverbal, are what ultimately win you the attention and mindshare of colleagues, clients, and friends.
In the arsenal of communication traits that confer executive presence from how you stand to how you deliver your message—superior speaking skills above all mark you as a leader. Assertiveness and an ability to command a room emerge as critical tools as well. But less obvious things—such as your ability to read the room or banter with colleagues, even the way you hold yourself—contribute to your effectiveness as a communicator. These six behaviors boil down to one thing, really: How powerfully do you connect with your audience? How quickly can you engage your listeners, and how long can you keep their attention? Effective communication is all about engagement. And new research shows that, among the tools you bring to this task, content is the least important aspect. A 2012 analysis of 120 financial spokespersons found that what makes a speaker persuasive are elements such as passion (27 percent), voice quality (23 percent), and presence (15 percent). Content matters a measly 15 percent.
Effective communication turns out to be about the medium and not the message. Your topic may be of intrinsic interest, but unless you minimize distractions for your audience—no easy feat in this age of the omnipresent smartphones—you’ll never manage to convey that interest. Look at the phenomenal popularity of TED talks, which spotlight some pretty arcane subjects. What makes a talk TED-worthy is not merely the topic but also the speaker’s ability to engage the audience, in person and online, for eighteen minutes without the benefit of notes, PowerPoint, music, or lectern. It’s no coincidence that what makes a great TED talk is a speaker who happens to employ masterfully all six of the core communication behaviors. To be heard above the din, to be seen despite the glitz, to be accorded authority and credibility, and to be remembered and heeded, you will need to master at least three of them. Leadership Communication: SUPERIOR SPEAKING SKILLS
Fundamentally, communication is about speech—a point made rather poignantly by Tom Hooper’s Oscar-winning 2010 film, The King’s Speech , which dramatizes the real-life transformation of Bertie (Albert), the stammering son of King George V, into King George VI after his older brother Edward abdicates the throne in 1936. Wife Elizabeth, keenly conscious of how her husband’s speech disability undermines England’s confidence in him as a leader, arranges for Bertie to work with a speech therapist whose tactics are decidedly unconventional. It’s an agonizing and humiliating process, but one that ends in triumph: Bertie overcomes his stammer to deliver the radio address that crystallizes the nation’s resolve to take on Hitler.
Most of us, thankfully, don’t have to contend with a crippling stammer. But most of us do suffer from verbal shortcomings that turn out to be just as damaging to our executive presence. Executives I interviewed cited inarticulateness, poor grammar, and an off-putting tone or accent as examples of verbal tics that undermine EP. Other executives objected to “uptalk,” the tendency of younger women (and some men) to end declarative statements on a high note, as if they were asking a question versus stating a point. Still others complained of people who punctuated every third word with “uh” or “you know.” Everybody, it seems, recalled an annoying voice, one that was too high-pitched or too mousy, too breathy or too raspy. In particular, those we interviewed mentioned “shrill” women: women who, whenever they get emotional or defensive, raise the timbre of their voice, turning off coworkers and clients, and losing out on leadership development programs opportunities. These are verbal cues that can be adjusted. The painful part is that you’ll probably need to be told you’ve got a problem before you can begin to address it. Leadership Communication: ACCENT
Top attorney Kent Gardiner, chair of law firm Crowell & Moring, recalls how, when he left his native Long Island, New York, to work for the federal prosecutor in Texas, his mentor took him aside to share some difficult advice. “You have to fundamentally change how you speak,” he told Gardiner. “You have to flatten your accent. You have to work on it; you have to videotape yourself. You have to change, or you cannot survive in this state.” Gardiner didn’t seek outside help: “Nobody had any money, and the government didn’t have a program for rehabilitating New York accents.” But he did work on modulating his Long Island accent, and in doing so he developed the habit of listening to his own voice as he spoke. “Every time I speak to my partners, I think about it before I get up,” he explains. “And as soon as I sit down, I re-listen to how the talk went. I just replay it mentally. It’s very conscious. I work at it constantly, because nothing is more important in this profession than oral communication skills.”
Sounding provincial can “destabilize your authority,” says Gardiner. A British accent, on the other hand, does wonders for your gravitas, according to our focus groups, perhaps because speaking the King’s English automatically sets you apart in global commerce, as a group of Standard Chartered managers told us in Singapore. “Maybe it’s the weight of history or the depth of ancestry, but a British accent adds to the impression of heft,” concurs Dr. Jane Shaw, former chairman of the board for Intel and former CEO of pharmaceutical giant Aerogen Inc. Before you rush out to acquire one, however, let me reference my own experience to point out that a British accent is complicated. There are good ones and bad ones, and even the good ones can get you into trouble, making you seem snobbish or even out of touch. Leadership Communication: GRAMMAR
Sounding uneducated likewise undermines your gravitas and marks you as an outsider to the inner circle, as I discovered. Indeed, 55 percent of our respondents identified it as a top communication blunder. And yet it’s the rare person who will risk correcting your word usage, as such correction calls attention to chasms of socioeconomic class, education, and ethnicity. Katherine Phillips, the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership qualities and Ethics at Columbia Business School, describes how thankful she was to have found a sponsor who, early in her academic career, stepped in to correct her improper English. “You’re saying the word wrong, Kathy,” her sponsor, who was her thesis advisor, told her. “It’s ‘ask.’ Not ‘aks.’ ” Reflects Phillips, who is African-American: “A lot of white people would be concerned they’d sound racist if they pointed these things out to an African-American colleague, but she realized the deleterious impact of how I spoke on other people—and on my career.”
Leadership Communication: TIMBRE AND PITCH
The research is overwhelming. Not only does the sound of your voice matter twice as much as what you’re talking about, as the 2012 Quantified Impressions study of financial spokespersons found,32 but a voice in the lower-frequency range will encourage others to see you as successful, sociable, and smart, according to a 2012 study published in the Journal of Voice.33 Our research confirms that a high-pitched voice, particularly for women, is a career-stunting attribute. Indeed, to hear our interviewees and focus group participants tell it, nothing is more destructive of a woman’s EP than shrillness. Crowell & Moring’s chairman Kent Gardiner told me of his travails with a female litigator whose tone was so strident and shrill that the client demanded she be taken off his case. Lynn Utter of Knoll described the “fingernails on a chalkboard” effect of a senior female leader who was well-spoken and effective until emotion got the better of her, causing her voice to rise to a shriek—“and then everybody tuned her out.” And here’s why: “Shrill voices have that hint of hysteria that drives men into a panic,” says Suzi Digby, a British choral conductor and music educator. “Women with a high-pitched tone will be perceived as not only unleaderlike but out of control.”
Margaret Thatcher was fortunate to grasp and act upon this insight early in her political career. As a new appointee to Edward Heath’s cabinet in 1970, she was pilloried for having, as one journalist put it, the “hectoring tones of the housewife.” When the BBC dropped her from a political spot because her voice was too harsh, Thatcher recognized her career might depend on fixing that voice. So she turned to Hollywood voice coach Kate Fleming, who’d given Laurence Olivier the lowerregister tones that established his gravitas in Othello. From 1972 until 1976, Fleming worked with her, transforming what biographer Charles Moore called “her annoying shrieking” into the voice that won her Heath’s seat as prime minister in 1979 and helped establish her as Britain’s Iron Lady, a woman renowned for “a smoothness that seldom cracked.” Modulating a shrill voice is not a matter of learning to sound more like a man, but rather of achieving what scientists at Duke University have discovered to be an optimally pleasing sound frequency of around 125 Hz. Human beings are apparently wired to tune into lower frequencies; and of course, we tend to pay attention longer to voices we don’t find irritating. Consider whom you’d rather hear speak at your son or daughter’s commencement: James Earl Jones (85 Hz) or Roseanne Barr (377 Hz)? And if that doesn’t incentivize you to bring down your pitch, this should: Optimally pleasing voices win the biggest leadership roles and earn the biggest salaries. Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of California, San Diego’s Rady School of Management analyzed recordings of 792 U.S. chief executives at public companies as they made investor presentations or earnings calls. They also gathered data on their salaries, length of tenure, and company size. After controlling for experience, education, and other influential factors, the scientists found that a drop of 22 Hz in voice frequency correlated with a $187,000 bump in compensation and a larger company size ($440 million larger, in fact). The implication? The lower your voice, the greater your leadership presence, which correlates to an increased likelihood of running a large company and making a substantial salary. You may think your voice isn’t very mutable. But as Thatcher’s experience demonstrates, with the right help you can modify it so that, at the very least, you don’t turn colleagues off or drive people from the room. Speech training and coaching can make a difference, often because they provide what your colleagues or superiors just won’t dare: feedback on how you sound. You may think you know how you sound, but you’re not the best person to judge, as a recent Wall Street Journal article pointed out, because you hear your voice only after it’s traveled through the bones of your head. You may also imagine there’s nothing wrong with your voice because no one’s told you there is. But as we’ll explore in chapter 6, unvarnished feedback is hard to give and hard to receive. Indeed, new consulting companies are springing up in response to client demand for feedback on just these sorts of matters; confronting a coworker or subordinate about speech issues is so fraught that few actually dare do it or manage to be constructive in their criticism. So ask for feedback. A sponsor or mentor should be able to give you a good sense of what you need to work on. Then get to work—because a lot is at stake. Leadership Communication: COMMAND A ROOM
Say what you will about Arianna Huffington’s politics, but she knows how to command attention—whether her audience is a room full of left-leaning movie moguls or a voting bloc of religious conservatives. With the Huffington Post, she commands a readership of some 5.7 million devotees per day. Powerful people as well as the hoi polloi hang on her every word. What exactly is it about Arianna that makes her such a commanding presence?
Erik Hedegaard, who profiled Huffington for Rolling Stone in 2006, suggests it’s her “capacity for intimacy.” Other profilers have stressed her seductive charm, a Bill Clinton–like capacity for making the listener feel as though he or she is the most interesting person in the room. And then there’s her voice and accent—that mesmerizing overlay of erudition, honed during her student days at Cambridge, commingled with Greek sensuality. But it comes down to this: Arianna is never boring. And if you aspire to lead, you, too, must mesmerize your audience—or, to use the language of our survey research, “command a room,” whether that room be a TV studio, a concert hall, or the team hang-out space. Nearly half of our respondents said it enhances a woman’s executive presence, and more than half said it enhances a man’s. So: How do you grab and keep an audience? Leadership Communication: ESTABLISH CONNECTION
According to British choral conductor Suzi Digby, you’ve got all of five seconds to “touch the audience,” or get them to invest in your message. It’s all about making yourself human, she says: not oversharing, not indulging in self-revelation, but unveiling just enough of your inner core that your listeners feel connected to you and start pulling for you. Ironically, this can prove difficult for women, who find it easy to be forthcoming in private but are often self-consciously withheld in public settings, Digby points out. But getting an audience to like you, to root for you, while at the same time giving the impression that you don’t need to be liked—this is the wire you want to walk.
I can speak to the power of this. At a large conference in Los Angeles sponsored by GE’s Hispanic leaders, I delivered a keynote that presented CTI’s cutting-edge findings about the challenges confronting Latinas in the U.S. labor market. While I was confident the research could withstand scrutiny, I was conscious that I might not: Here I was, an elite-sounding English speaker appearing before them as an authority on Hispanic issues. So I didn’t launch right into the research when I took the stage. Instead I shared my own story: how I struggled to overcome my accent and the issues I faced as someone born a girl child on the wrong side of the tracks. The effect this had was quite magical. In minutes I felt a palpable dissolution of tension as my audience put aside any reservations they may have had to join me in better understanding the research I wanted to bring to their attention. Leadership Communication: DELIVER YOUR WORDS AS A MUSICIAN DELIVERS NOTES
Phrasing, inflection, and pace are what distinguish you as a person worth listening to, says Suzi Digby. As in music, it’s important to deliver your words conscious of your narrative arc, lifting and dropping your cadence to emphasize key passages or points, paying particular attention to how you end a phrase—what musicians call “phrasing off”—so that your listener senses closure and consequently hangs on to the last word and retains it before making room for the next. The uplift that younger speakers impose on the ends of their sentences, she observes, “undermines their whole message” by denying this closure.
The speed with which you deliver words impacts, in turn, the effectiveness of your phrasing. Digby, who in addition to leading the Queens’ College choir coaches those selected to read passages from the Bible, says she’s always amazed at how often eminent leaders rush their delivery. “Ninety-eight percent of the time even a good speaker will go way too fast trying to cram things in,” she says. She coaches them to slow down, but also to surround the text with pauses and silences to heighten their power—again, a tactic composers employ to heighten drama and emphasize preludes and codas. “A musician’s impact lies in the rests,” she explains. “It’s the moment where you establish the tension and the seduction. Don’t be afraid of silence.” I’ve seen this advice put to powerful effect by Sallie Krawcheck, who has learned to command the room by not speaking. “There is nothing so powerful as silence to make people sit up in their seats,” Krawcheck told me. “It’s loud. It’s unexpected. It’s dramatic. And it’s confident.” Then to demonstrate the effect, she paused a full second before adding, “Very confident.” Deliberate silence is a trick she learned sitting at boardroom tables with titans like Sanford “Sandy” Weill, Vikram Pandit, Dick Parsons, and Robert Rubin, where men, she says, were accustomed to getting heard by being the loudest, most expletive-inflected voice in the room. To stand out as a woman, and to give heft to her thoughts, she started to punctuate her weightiest words with silence. “Those spaces give gravity to your most important pieces of advice, your most important insights, your most important messages,” she explains. “It heightens drama because people are literally hanging on your words.” Leadership Communication: USE NARRATIVE
Stories, not bullet points, are what grab and hold an audience. Ronald Reagan, an actor by training, earned the sobriquet “the Great Communicator” because he was a colorful storyteller and natural entertainer, not because he wielded facts like a policy wonk. Unfortunately, most newcomers to the stage attempt to establish their gravitas by aping the policy wonk rather than the actor. It’s a common mistake among both men and women, particularly young professionals, to assume that an exhaustive and factladen presentation will bolster their gravitas, when in fact it does just the opposite: Going by the book underscores a lack of self-confidence and highlights an absence of individual spark. Remember, it’s the TED talk, and not an MIT nuclear physics seminar, that you’re trying to replicate.
Leadership Communication: DON’T SNOW PEOPLE WITH DATA
Though she holds a Ph.D. in Asian studies, Rohini Anand, Sodexo’s global chief diversity officer, has learned to be highly selective with how she delivers her messages, especially the positioning of facts and figures when presenting to different audiences. In some parts of the world, including her native India, she says, “you build up to your conclusion with data,” whereas in the United States, “people just want your conclusion, the bottom line.” So rather than build to the point, she gets to it quickly and limits herself to just a few data points that support what she’s saying. Getting to the Q&A quicker, she finds, boosts interaction and ultimately provides her the platform to share her data.
Coming from academia myself, I experienced a learning curve similar to Anand’s. My communication style after years of teaching at Barnard College and Columbia University was to present lengthy, nuanced arguments supported by a ton of compelling facts in fifty-minute chunks of time. Unfortunately, that style, which had won me a Teacher of the Year award at Barnard, went over like a lead balloon in corporate America. Business executives, I belatedly understood, have short attention spans: It’s imperative you cut to the chase, be highly selective with your data, and whenever possible share an illustrative story. Leadership Communication: GET RID OF PROPS
Last year, less than a month after my friend Elaine was passed over for a C-suite promotion, I moderated a panel of executives that included the firm’s chief financial officer. He knew that Elaine and I had worked together, so I asked him why she hadn’t made the cut. After all, she’d been with the company twenty-five years and had an incredibly impressive track record.
He nodded, not in the least surprised by my inquiry. “She was one of the top three contenders for the job; indeed, in some ways, she was the most qualified,” he affirmed. Emboldened, I persisted. “So why didn’t she get it?” He sighed. “You’re not going to believe the real sticking point, Sylvia, but you and I have known each other a long time and I’ll come clean—the poor woman just makes too many lists.” I was bewildered—what was he talking about? Seeing the puzzled expression on my face, he tried to explain: “Picture this,” he said. “At our monthly executive committee briefing Elaine would always whip out a long list and meticulously consult it. Instead of looking you in the eye and talking compellingly about her team’s wins and losses, she’d have her head in lists, notes, or some dreary PowerPoint. It’s as though she didn’t command the material—or trust herself to remember the thrust of her presentation. Now, you and I know she’s as sharp as a razor and knows her stuff cold, but she doesn’t present that way. She comes across as some kind of glorified executive assistant.” My eyes must have widened, because he added, “We can’t put her in front of the board. We can’t trust her with our important clients. Don’t you see? It’s about her ability to impress as well as perform.” eighty-seven PowerPoint slides, shuffling papers or flip charts, and putting on your glasses the better to see what you’re reading are all actions that detract from your gravitas because they focus attention on your lack of confidence. If you cannot command your subject, you certainly won’t be able to command the room. Know your material cold so that you needn’t rely on notes, and needn’t rely on your glasses to read notes. This will free you up to establish eye contact with the audience. And nothing is more important than eye contact, says Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan, because it telegraphs to your audience that you’re utterly in the moment. “There are such multiple tugs on people’s attention that distraction is the norm,” he observes. “Eye contact shows I have your complete attention, which I deeply appreciate because it’s so very rare. In an important meeting, nothing boosts your leadership presence more than signaling that you’re totally present.” Leadership Communication: BE SUCCINCT
“Executive presence is not necessarily about being formal or abundant in your communication, but rather straightforward and brief,” says Kerrie Peraino, head of international HR for American Express. “The more you keep speaking, or explaining yourself, the more you cloud or dilute your core message.” Women seem especially prone to this blunder, she observes, perhaps because they’re less sure of how they’re perceived and seek to prove their expertise by overselling their case. According to Moody’s Linda Huber, women also feel compelled to validate what they have to say by invoking all the people they consulted. “They go through five conditional clauses before they get to the point,” she observes. “It’s okay to say, ‘I have a different point of view,’ and then back it up with two or three reasons you can support with data. Don’t start with, ‘I’ve spent hours staying awake thinking about this and talked to thirty-seven people.’ Get to the point, and then people will give you their attention.”
Leadership Communication: ASSERTIVENESS
When Barbara Adachi was promoted to regional head of Human Capital Consulting at Deloitte—the first woman to win such a position at the accounting/consultancy firm she asked a partner we’ll call Doug if she could sit on the firm’s management committee with the other business leaders of audit and tax. He told her the seat was occupied by the regional director she’d reported to, who wasn’t about to give it up. “We can’t have two people from Human Capital at the table,” he added. Adachi persisted. “But I’m a partner and now leading this region,” she said. The other partner shook his head. “But people just don’t see you as a leader, Barbara.”
It was like a punch to the gut, Adachi recalls. A million responses came to mind, she says, including just storming out of the room. Instead, she managed to retort, “That’s because I’m not on the management committee!” Doug laughed, and conceded she had a point. “That broke the ice with him,” she relates. “But I could see his point, too: I wasn’t viewed as someone who was well connected with other leaders in my region and office. I didn’t have a powerful circle of sponsors, either. I may have been a partner, but nobody perceived me as one because I did not project executive presence.” So Adachi, a Japanese-American woman who was raised to listen, not talk, made a decision that would change her life. She went back to Doug and delivered an ultimatum. “If the regional director won’t step down from the management committee, then I don’t want to be the leader in Northern California, because I’d have all the responsibility and none of the authority. To do this job well, I need to be respected as a leader. And if I can’t be on the committee, then I won’t be viewed as a peer by the other leaders.” Ultimately Doug put her on the committee. Being forceful and assertive is a core executive trait, for both men and women (as 48 percent of our survey respondents agree). But for women, it’s a decidedly more difficult trait to embody, as assertiveness in a woman often makes her unlikable (the B-word is rolled out and she’s seen as overly aggressive). We’ll explore this tightrope walk in depth in the blog; here let’s review some of the strategies that apply to both men and women in terms of being effectively forceful. Adachi feels in that moment of confrontation she proved herself a leader by arriving at a bold decision and showing she was ready to act on it. “I wasn’t making an idle threat,” she explains. “I was willing to walk away from the leadership role because having the responsibility without the authority would be comparable to being asked to hit a home run without a bat. And he saw and heard my resolve.” But she may also have prevailed because she framed her demand in the context of the good it would do the company, observes Rosalind Hudnell, vice president of human resources at Intel. “Push back,” she counsels, “but try and avoid the I-word. Come from a position that’s not about you, but about what’s best for the company. Don’t yell, and be careful about your tone. Because when you’re working for a company, you’re responsible to that company.” The challenge is to keep that in mind while finding your authentic personal voice. The executives I interviewed uniformly suggest you resist the urge to charge in and make known your demands. “You’re not going to get anything done by asserting, ‘This is what I want and I want it now,’ ” cautions a former Lehman Brothers executive who had worked with the company’s CFO. “[The CFO] was never one to lack voice: She was brilliant on so many topics, and she enjoyed letting others know it,” he recalls. “But in her new role, which she knew others begrudged her because she wasn’t an investment banker, she overplayed her hand. Maybe she wanted to prove she could be as tough as the boys, but she showed no respect, and given that these guys had built the firm, that was more than a little unseemly. I told her, ‘If you want to be heard, you’ve got to be a little more deferential to those sitting around the table with you.’ ” Sensitivity can spell the difference between sounding like a leader and actually succeeding as one, as one female executive discovered when confronted with a labor crisis that threatened to go nuclear. Some four hundred of her employees didn’t get their correct biweekly salary because of a payroll glitch. With her firm in the midst of union negotiations, she knew that this vendor mishap could trigger an employee action or work stoppage or devolve into a PR nightmare. So she got on the phone with the business leader, his team, and the local HR leader, and listened as they laid out the scope of the problem. Then she crafted a one-two punch. She laid out a nonnegotiable goal and assured the team she would support them in reaching it. “I am committed to seeing this through with you,” she told the team on the phone. But after the call, in a one-on-one conversation with her colleague in charge of the vendor relationship, she made clear that his job was on the line, as his and her reputations were at stake. “I knew that demolishing this guy in front of everybody would not get me the cooperation I needed to resolve the crisis quickly,” she observed. “So I allowed him to save face with his team, and then, behind the scenes, let him know that he was totally accountable.” Her approach succeeded. The employee pay issue was resolved. The best strategy for women may be what Linda Huber of Moody’s describes as “leading from behind.” In a room full of men, women often feel impelled to assert themselves by launching the first salvo. But far more effective, says Huber, an army officer who at age twenty-one had forty-five soldiers in her command, is holding off until others have fired off their best shot. “I learned a lot about military tactics from my father, who was a two-star general,” she explains. “Even so, when it came time to do sand-table exercises of moving units around and practicing tactics, I was careful to wait, step back, and let others go first before offering up my solution.” Having watched “a lot of cocky West Point types blow up,” she adds, she realizes that “sometimes it’s best to sit back and listen, first.” Just make sure, when all eyes are upon you, that you do, in fact, offer a solution. A health-care leader described to me how, early in her tenure, she tried to get a team of scientists and engineers to agree on a way forward by eliciting everyone’s opinion. Instead of reaching consensus, the room devolved into chaos. “Now I step up and say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to talk about this anymore,’ ” she explained. “ ‘Here’s the decision I’ve come to, and here’s why we’re going with it.’ It could be the wrong decision—I’ve made those, every leader does. But at least you’re making it.” And that, she adds, is what marks you as someone others will follow. Leadership Communication: ABILITY TO READ A ROOM
In early 2013 I was invited by Tulane University’s Newcomb College Institute to be its annual Alberto-Culver Speaker, an endowed lecture series that invites high-profile women leaders to campus to talk about cutting-edge issues facing women in business. Given the publicity and branding around this event, I went to New Orleans expecting to address a sizable crowd. And in fact the venue was an auditorium at Newcomb College that easily held four hundred. But minutes before I took the stage I looked out and realized, to my dismay, that given the paltry trickle of students entering the lecture hall I’d be lucky to have fifty attendees.
In fact, there were thirty-eight—I counted them. For any public speaker—politician or executive, professor or celebrity author—this is a sickening challenge. It’s hard to exude executive presence and engage a crowd when, having prepared a speech for the National Mall in Washington, D.C., you arrive on the Capitol steps to find that one earnest busload has shown up. Here I was, armed with a thirty-slide deck and a speech rehearsed for hundreds. What to do? I had minutes to decide. My host, oblivious to the size of the turnout, hastened to the podium, donned her glasses, and read a lengthy introduction of me from a script she’d prepared. Some of those in the back of the auditorium got up and headed for the doors. Realizing that the rest of the audience might well slip away, I walked resolutely to the front of the stage and asked that everyone gather themselves into the first few rows. I asked for a chair, and sat myself down directly in front of them. Abandoning my PowerPoint, I addressed myself to them directly, communicating the essence of my data but relying mostly on narrative to pass the hour. I told many more stories than I’d intended, and at each natural break, I invited the students to ask questions—which they did, with eager energy. By the time we concluded the session, I felt a powerful connection. They felt it, too, because the evaluations they turned in were uniformly hyperbolic with praise. To this day I recall that event at Tulane as one of my most effective presentations, not despite my extemporizing, but because of it. To command a room, you’ve first got to read it. Sensing the mood, absorbing the cultural cues, and adjusting your language, content, and presentation style accordingly are vital to your success as a communicator, and succeeding as a communicator is vital to your executive presence. Deploying your emotional intelligence and then acting on what it tells you absolutely boosts your EP—especially if you’re a woman. Indeed, 39 percent of respondents told us this emotional-intelligence skill mattered for women, whereas 33 percent said it mattered for men. Being oblivious to the needs of your audience will undermine perceptions of your authority. Here’s why: First, it intimates you’re a closed circuit, someone who can’t or won’t take in new information (the woman who introduced me at Newcomb College being a prime example). Second, it implies you don’t care about your audience, destroying any chance of connection, which is after all the foundation of any communication. Finally, and most damning, it implies you’re simply not nimble enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. Agility in a leader is increasingly prized in a global economy characterized by relentless change and persistent volatility. What does it take to effectively read a room? You’ve got to tune yourself out in order to tune in to the needs and wants of others, and then course-correct on the spot to establish connection. Demonstrating that willingness impresses people: It shows you have absolute command of your subject matter, and it signals to your audience that you’re so invested in the importance of your message that you’ll scuttle your carefully prepared speech to make sure they grasp it. That’s a recipe for engagement. Sodexo’s Rohini Anand recalls a particularly high-pressure meeting when she had one shot to convince the firm’s top leaders to let outside experts advise the company on an extremely sensitive workforce issue. She entered the boardroom prepared to share the evidence she’d amassed, but in the end she elected to make her pitch with a short summary of the benefits, as she sensed the room wasn’t interested in how she’d arrived at her insight. It was the right instinct: She made a convincing case, and within months Sodexo announced a new board of external advisors. “The tipping point in my career at this firm was when I figured out how to put myself in my audience’s shoes and to paint a narrative balancing facts and stories depending on the audience,” says this seasoned executive. In this regard, professionals of color may hold an edge. In focus groups we conducted, countless participants confirmed that being a minority is itself a relentless exercise in reading others in order to anticipate and overcome reflexive bias or unconscious resistance. Joel Tealer, an African-American senior vice president of human resources in the Strategic Business Units at Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, says that in order to maintain his EP, he adapts his speech to the culture of his listener and takes care to neutralize his political views, lest his mostly Republican colleagues take offense. “What you have to always do, as a multicultural manager, is make sure that you use the appropriate language for the appropriate situation,” he says. “And during tough discussions, you have to be a bit more balanced because your audience can become less comfortable if you are viewed by them as a little bit left of balance, or overly animated.” That’s not to say you compromise your views to pander to your audience, Tealer clarifies. “It’s about making them comfortable,” he says. “Reading your audience is all about winning their confidence so that when you speak, they really hear what you have to say.” Leadership Communication: HUMOR AND BANTER
When Sallie Krawcheck offers up her analysis of what ails Wall Street, she pulls no punches. Whether it’s the lack of oversight on money-market funds, the exorbitant executive compensation, or the absence of women in boardrooms, she serves up criticism heedless of blowback.
Yet precisely because she is dead serious, Krawcheck takes special care to leaven her critiques with humor. If women are stalled in their careers and need a leg up, for instance, it’s because they’re worn-out—exhausted by all the demands, professional and personal, placed upon them. “Do the math,” Krawcheck exhorts her audiences. “Women spend so much more time on personal grooming than guys do. Take me. I spend more, but let’s assume fifteen minutes a day, an hour and fifteen minutes a week, five hours a month, sixty hours a year, on hair and makeup, and I have not shaved my legs yet! I’ve not yet dyed my hair, there is no mani-pedi, the brows have not been waxed, I have not gone to yoga, I have not run, I have done nothing but my friggin’ hair and makeup.” I’ve heard this shtick from Krawcheck on numerous occasions, and I can attest that it never fails to break up the room in gales of laughter. However brutal her message in fact, especially when her message is brutal—Krawcheck’s reliance on humor endears her to her listeners, who then become open to some inconvenient truths. Not everyone can pull off a funny story at the lectern, but everyone can learn to banter at the water cooler. Many of our focus group participants affirmed the importance of mastering the art of small talk. “It’s the conversation before the meeting that establishes whether or not you’re worth listening to in the meeting,” one senior executive pointed out—a skill she refers to as “mastering the banter.” It shows, she explained, that you’re part of the larger conversation, someone who’s “one of the tribe.” To be sure, because the language and interests of the dominant tribe tend to dominate casual conversations, women and multicultural executives often find themselves at a disadvantage. In the words of one African-American focus group participant, “I don’t watch the same television shows as my colleagues. That makes it hard to chime in about the most recent episode of Survivor.” Well, watching Survivor isn’t likely to boost your EP. Yet as I found at Cambridge, it’s critical you strive to be conversant on a host of topics, if only because you’ll have the confidence to insert yourself into the casual conversations of your superiors. “You don’t have to say you’re a Giants fan or Democrat or a Republican; you just need to know enough to add to the conversation,” says Deb Elam, a vice president at GE. “It’s all about forging a bond with people one that you may need to lean on down the road.” Leadership Communication: BODY LANGUAGE AND POSTURE
On her second day of work for a leading insurance firm, one female focus group participant recalls how she was taken aside after a staff meeting and chided for doodling and slouching in her chair. “I don’t want to ever see that again,” her new boss told her. “You should be sitting up straight, pulled up to the table, making eye contact, and taking notes. You should be paying attention!” She tried to assure him she had been listening. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, waving a hand impatiently. “What matters is that your behavior told everyone that you weren’t.”
Never underestimate the communicative power of body language. While 21 percent of senior executives we surveyed recognize that how you hold and carry yourself affects your EP, anecdotally the evidence around body language suggests a much greater impact. “People gauge your EP the second you enter a room: how confidently you walk in, how firmly you shake hands, how quickly you make eye contact, how confidently you stand,” observes Deloitte’s Adachi. “In those initial seconds, you’re going to be judged on what they see, not what they hear, and your body language and poise are what they see first.” Consider how the U.S. presidential candidates conducted themselves while facing off during three nationally televised debates in 2012. Indeed, executive coach and body-language expert Carol Kinsey Goman actually called the election on the basis of President Obama’s body language alone, especially during the third debate. “He looked more comfortable and sure of himself,” she observed, “using the definitive palm-down gestures and wide ‘steepling’ gestures that show certainty. And he has a great genuine smile (a big likeability cue) that he flashed a couple of times tonight.” Governor Romney did well, too, Goman noted. “But he perspired, swallowed frequently, licked his lips, stammered, and (about 58 minutes into the debate) gave a slight shudder that showed in his shoulders and upper chest—all indicators that he was under a high level of stress.” Since people will be “reading you” the moment they lay eyes on you, take care to enter a room or take the stage with aplomb. Is your head up, your gaze focused straight ahead? Shoulders back but relaxed? Do you stride or shuffe? And do you look happy at this opportunity to engage? Or do you look like you’re nursing an ulcer? When Catherine, a corporate senior executive, enters a room, people don’t even need to know she spent more than twenty years in federal law enforcement to accord her awed respect. Tall and elegantly dressed, this African-American woman radiates gravitas in her posture, stride, and stance. “I’ve been told I don’t demand respect, that my presence expects it,” she says. “Some of that came from growing up in the South and having to fight and wrestle with a lot of issues. When you are the first black person in a school classroom or at a company meeting, you learn to walk in with that Condoleezza Rice attitude of having to be better than the best. That conditions everything. Because I walk into every meeting with that attitude, holding my head high, I leave a positive impression behind. People want me at their table.” An erect bearing also conveys respect for others. That’s why your mother told you to sit up straight at the dining room table: to show deference to those around you. In the fi l m The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg, slumped at the deposition table, telegraphs volumes to the attorneys assembled around him. “It’s hard to root for someone who makes you feel as though you don’t warrant his attention,” a young law firm associate told me. A number of recent studies find, however, that the most important benefit good posture confers is chemical: When you stand tall, feet planted solidly and somewhat apart, chest out and shoulders back, you actually trigger a hormonal response that boosts testosterone and lowers cortisol, the steroid released from your adrenal glands in times of stress, from your bloodstream. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, discovered this through a series of controlled experiments she conducted on her colleagues (findings she shared as a TED speaker). While the hormones last only about fifteen to twenty minutes, the rush of well-being and confidence may trigger “a physiological cascade that lasts all day,” says Dana Carney, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. While standing at attention bolsters your own self-confidence, it absolutely signals to others that you are paying attention—which, as we’ve discussed, is perhaps the keystone of all effective communication. To radiate presence you have to radiate that you are present. And as Brady Dougan points out, that’s where many a would-be executive stumbles. Virtually every executive I spoke to talked about enormously able men and women who sabotaged their chances at a top job by conveying in gestures large and small an inability to remain present when it mattered most. Kent Gardiner, chided early in his career for checking his watch too often during meetings, says he’s become a stickler about ensuring his colleagues don’t commit similar blunders of inattention, including pen-clicking, foot-tapping, paper-rustling, and device-checking. Jane Shaw told me one of the rudest things she recently witnessed was a board member turning his back on the meeting in order to deal with some emails. Tuning out to consult your smartphone elicited some of the most heated discourse in our focus groups and interviews, in fact. Sara, who works in derivatives and structured finance at Moody’s, told us, “I really get annoyed when I see a handful of managers who think their time is more important than everyone else’s, who don’t hear what I am saying after I’ve spent weeks preparing. This behavior really undermines their executive presence in my mind. How can you trust a leader to keep his eye on the big picture if he can’t keep his eye off his iPhone?” Leadership Communication: BLUNDERS
During her twenty-four years in Congress, Colorado representative Patricia Schroeder was lauded for her stalwart advocacy of work-family issues (she sponsored the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993) and her tough stance on congressional reform. However, for many her name will forever be linked with bursting into tears on national television when she announced in 1987 she would not seek the Democratic nomination for president. “Women across the country reacted with embarrassment, sympathy and disgust,” wrote the Chicago Tribune a week later. Saturday Night Live lampooned her in a skit on the presidential primary debates.More than two decades later, Schroeder told USA Today, she was still catching flak about it. The verdict: Wiping away those tears erased the perception that Schroeder might have been fit to be the country’s chief executive.
Crying is just one of a menu of communication blunders that, in a mere instant, can suck the executive presence right out of you. Others, as identified by our focus groups, include breathlessness or any other sign of nerves, constantly checking your iPhone for the latest messages, being obviously bored, being long-winded instead of getting right to the point, and relying too heavily on notes and other props. These flaws are fatal for one simple reason: Whether you’re speaking to a small group or a large audience you need to fully engage your audience’s attention, so that they both hear and remember your message.
Without helpful—although it might seem brutally honest—feedback from a colleague or boss, how can you tell whether you’ve buried your point in an avalanche of self-inflicted communications mistakes? There’s an easy indicator: Listen for the “cough count.” How many times does your audience feel compelled to cough or clear their throats? Similarly, check the “fidget factor.” Are you spotting people shifting in their seats, crossing and uncrossing their legs, examining their nails or cuffs, or adjusting their arm positions on the tables or chairs? All of these things are a dead giveaway that your presentation is making them wish they were elsewhere.
Establishing eye contact is particularly important. When you start speaking, you want everyone focused on you—and the way to do that is to focus on them. Every person in the audience should feel that you are speaking to them. Eye contact is, of course, dependent upon a clear line of sight. That means you need to lose the props—or at least a sizable number of them. Eyeglasses, podiums, notes, flip charts, and PowerPoints can all get in the way. It’s impossible to make eye contact with anyone if you’re struggling with twenty pages of notes or fifty densely packed PowerPoint slides. The less there is between you and your audience, the better. How to polish your Leadership communication Skills
Ditch the verbal crutches. Fillers such as “um,” “like,” and “you know” get in the way of and undermine your message. Tape yourself. Allow yourself to pause when you’re giving thought to something mid-sentence. Moments of silence give greater import to the words that precede and follow them.
Broaden your small talk. Kalinda, a real-estate analyst at a financial-services company, affirms the usefulness of being able to contribute to casual conversations: “One of best things ever to happen to me was managing the NFL budget,” she says, referring to a former job. “I didn’t know a thing about American football when I got there, but I recognized I needed to, if I was ever going to be considered one of the guys. So I read Sports Business Daily every day. The teams, the games, the analysts—I could talk about all of it with anyone. Even now, if I hear football being discussed, I insert myself in that conversation, because I have something to add. For the same reason, I picked up golf a couple of years ago. I’m not good at it, but I can talk about it, and that opens a door with my managers.” Get control of your voice. Lord Bell, the advertising guru and PR maestro who masterminded the British Conservative Party’s 1978 campaign, helped tone down the Iron Lady’s speaking voice with a simple concoction: water tinctured with honey and lemon. “Because she did so much talking, her vocal cords got stressed and it made her sound shrill,” he says. “We found that if she drank some hot water with lemon and honey it lowered her pitch and took the strain out of her voice.” Sallie Krawcheck makes sure she breathes, consciously and deeply, before taking the stage, to eradicate any shakiness in her voice. Kerrie Peraino sips water to relax her throat muscles, as tight muscles can produce a squeaky, raspy, or breathy tone. Overprepare. Barbara Adachi finds that by dint of careful preparation, she can overcome her inclination not to speak unless spoken to. “I used to go to meetings and just not say a word,” she recalls. “People wondered why I was even there. Unless asked to comment, I wouldn’t volunteer. Speaking up was so hard for me. And I still need to push myself in new situations. But if I go in wellprepared and knowing I know more than I need to, I find it easier to speak up and not go back into my cocoon.” Less can be more. Jane Shaw, former chairman of Intel’s board, affirms that you can’t afford to be a wallflower at meetings. But she cautions against speaking up just for the sake of it. “Inject a comment when you have something fresh to add. If you’re asked for an update, stick to new items. Invite others to add their opinion rather than babble on. If someone has not weighed in, you might throw it to them when you finish,” she advises. Invoke your vertical. Anne Erni, who today heads up human resources at Bloomberg, describes an incident early in her career on Wall Street where her body language helped her pull off an unpopular decision with a hostile crowd. “The other executives were ganging up on me, literally yelling and cursing. Meanwhile, forty people were waiting for us to come forth with a decision. I had to focus on getting to that goal. I sat there and, with every ounce of energy, just kept pushing my feet into the floor, sitting tall, and making my spine and head straight. Then I leaned forward and spoke. It not only got me through that awful moment, but I won their confidence, and we moved forward.” Lose the props. It bears repeating: You will exude executive presence if you establish and maintain a direct connection with your audience, whether you’re addressing two or two hundred. Learn to present without props. Do not allow challenges to your authority to go unanswered. Hecklers are looking to rob you of your command of the room by getting under your skin. Don’t let them. Parrying with humor is your best defense, as it demonstrates that your confidence can’t be shaken and makes the heckler look petty for trying. You can also declaw a barb by acknowledging a germ of truth in it—and then annihilating that germ with counterevidence. Sometimes, however, it’s important to reassert your authority by going full frontal. Dwight Robinson, chief of diversity at Freddie Mac, describes how his first sponsor chose him as his deputy to run the state housing authority committee. Robinson knew he was utterly qualified to win the position, but as both he and his sponsor were African-American, he knew the decision would come under fire. Indeed it did. But Robinson’s sponsor did not flinch. To the builders, the developers, and the mayor who questioned his choice, he countered, “You’ve got twenty-seven other departments with two people of the same race in charge. They’ve solved their problems, so how does it signal something negative when two white people are running twenty-seven agencies and two black people are running one?” Robinson says it was a “life lesson” for him in exercising courage and asserting authority. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2alpGGb July 24, 2016 at 03:18PM
0 Comments
Developing leadership traits
In May 2010, as a torrent of crude oil spewed from the ocean floor into Gulf of Mexico waters, ABC News anchor Jake Tapper drilled into Bob Dudley, then BP’s managing director who was know for his exceptional leadership qualities, for an explanation. “So ‘topkill’ failed,” Tapper opened, referring to BP’s attempt to plug the well by pumping heavyweight drilling mud into it. “Should the American people prepare themselves for an uncomfortable fact that this leadership hole will not be plugged until August, at the earliest?” http://ift.tt/2ap8oaCDudley features composed, collar unbuttoned affirmed that, while August was a possibility, BP was working around the clock and would contain the spill as soon as was humanly possible. Tapper turned up the heat. “As you know there are serious questions as to whether or not there have been corners cut safety corners that resulted in this accident,” he said. Why, for instance, did BP use “the risky option” of a metal casing known to buckle under high pressure? The leadership in the form of Dudley calmly countered that no corners had been cut, no risky options pursued. “But why were operations not shut down immediately until well control could be restored?” Tapper persisted, his tone ever more accusatory. “That is another issue the investigation is going to look at very, very carefully,” Dudley responded evenly, never breaking eye contact with the camera lens. He then went on to say that getting to the bottom of this tragedy was BP’s top priority. The company owed that to the people of the Gulf. Two months later, Dudley again sat in the hot seat this time, on PBS NewsHour, where he answered questions put to him by hard-hitting host Ray Suarez about the catastrophic consequences of the spill. Dudley, his voice steady but charged with empathy, stepped in with his first response. “I’ve seen the devastation,” he began. “I went down to Grand Isle two weeks ago and I saw the oil on the beaches. . . . I traveled out to Grand Pass and saw the oil in the marshes and talked to the local people.” He then leaned forward and looked Suarez in the eye. “You know,” he said, “we’re going to make good on the claims from individuals and businesses down there.” And he methodically laid out the steps BP was taking to do just that. Suarez then made a reference to the Exxon Valdez incident a very badly handled oil spill. Dudley didn’t shy away from the implied comparison; instead he explained that BP wouldn’t “hide” behind a declaration of bankruptcy or some legal processes, as Exxon had done. Suarez continued to press, but during the entire grilling there wasn’t a single question Dudley avoided or refused to answer and he came over as a compassionate, considered, and competent leader, and that indeed is his image. Bob Dudley, these days CEO of BP, has the leadership traits who doesn't get hot under the collar, but it’s not because he’s stayed out of the kitchen. On the contrary, as he detailed in an interview with me, his career in Big Oil, which began at Amoco at the height of the OPEC crisis, has put him at the epicenter of the industry’s worst nightmares. As CEO of TNK-BP, he battled a group of Russian oligarchs intent on squeezing him out. He dealt with various kinds of harassment, including, some say, threats to his life, and, when his visa was denied, proceeded to run the company from an undisclosed remote location. Fresh from that challenging set of experiences, he was put in charge of BP’s operations in Asia and the Americas, reporting to CEO Tony Hayward. Then the Deepwater Horizon exploded, Hayward imploded (more on that later), and BP stock tumbled to half its value. In July, the firm tapped Dudley, who was heading up the Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, to take over from Hayward. Such was Dudley’s credibility that before the well was even capped, BP’s share price took an upturn. When I attempted during our interview to credit him with BP’s recovery, Dudley demurred with characteristic humility. “There were a lot of people who performed unbelievably well,” he said. But nothing, he agreed, is more important in troubled times than a leader who projects calm and confidence. “I want people around me who can be clear-thinking and calm in a crisis,” he emphasized. “I don’t believe I’ve ever been able to judge or trust a person unless I can see what they’re like under fire.” Early in her career as an academic, Katherine Phillips emerged as the voice at the table courageous enough to point out the elephant in the room. In only her second year on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Phillips told her colleagues at a succession-planning meeting that it was “a waste of energy” to discuss replacing Max Bazerman, a world-renowned faculty member who’d recently left, because none of them was willing to allocate the necessary resources to lure in an equally towering intellect. “You guys have already taken his office, his courses, and his grant monies and divvied them up among yourselves,” she pointed out, referring to the fact that Bazerman’s empire had already been picked over. “What’s left? What are you willing to give back? X, y, or z? No one top-notch will consider coming to Kellogg without an amazing package that needs to include x, y, and z.” She let that sink in, then added, “Let’s not waste time talking about it anymore, because what I’m seeing is, Max has already been replaced” she raised an index finger and jabbed it—“by you . . . and you . . . and you.” “Well, they were stunned,” Phillips told me, marveling at her own youthful bravado. “But after the meeting two leadership development programs faculty members thanked me for saying what I did. And it sparked a much more honest discussion in the department.” This incident established Phillips as someone others could count on to speak the truth when no one else dared. She is today the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School the first African-American woman to hold a chair at this prestigious school. “You could say that ‘speaking truth to power’ has become part of my personal brand,” she observes. “I’ve never been afraid to say what others won’t and people have come to count on me for that.” In 2012, a newly appointed CEO of a medical device manufacturer faced a difficult watershed moment. Recently enacted U.S. healthcare rules meant the firm would be hit with a 2.3 percent excise tax—an unforecasted loss equivalent to $75–$100 million in reduced profits. This new leader knew he needed to move quickly and cut expenses across the board including (most painfully) head count. By strategically reallocating resources from poorly performing units to more promising divisions, he could probably save hundreds of jobs. Still, there would be layoffs. More than two hundred, in fact. The CEO delivered the bad news himself. “I pulled the group together, stood in front of them, and walked them through why the company needed to make these cuts and answered their questions,” he told me in an interview. “Obviously I couldn’t get rid of their pain—and I didn’t try to. But I did want them to know that it wasn’t a personal thing (these were hardworking, loyal employees) but a structural thing (the company needed to downsize in order to survive and thrive going forward). I also wanted them to know that there would be a ‘package’ and we would do our utmost to help them find a way forward.” He paused. “Still, it was a pretty tough two hours. They were surprised and distressed, and felt blindsided even betrayed. They let me know it in no uncertain terms. But one thing was clear to me. I needed to be there. I wasn’t about to hide in my office and expect a junior colleague to deal with the tough stuff.” Lots of leaders do precisely that, I pointed out. Had he seen Up in the Air, where George Clooney plays the professional ax man, flying around the country doing the dirty work for leaders lacking the courage to fire employees themselves? He had. “You have to be there in bad times as well as good, to show you lead from the heart as well as from the head,” this CEO observed. “This emotional intelligence thing is important. If you don’t reach out personally, if you don’t show empathy, if you don’t speak from your heart, you lose the trust and respect of not only your employees but also your investors. And then you’re truly powerless.” Leadership Traits: The Right Stuff
We all know a real leader when we see one. Like Bob Dudley, he or she projects an aura of calm and competence that instills faith even in—especially in—the white-hot center of a crisis. Like Kathy Phillips, he or she reveals integrity and demonstrates courage by uttering truths when they are inconvenient or most unwelcome. And like our medical-device firm CEO, he or she demonstrates courage and emotional intelligence that secures followership even in the wake of news that would seemingly destroy it.
These qualities connote gravitas, that weightiness or heft that marks you as worth following into the fire. Gravitas is the very essence of EP. Without it, you simply won’t be perceived as a leader, no matter what your title or level of authority, no matter how well you dress or speak. Gravitas, according to 62 percent of the leaders we surveyed, is what signals to the world you’re made of the right stuff and can be entrusted with serious responsibility. But what is it, really? What makes up gravitas—this elusive but all-important piece of executive presence? How do you come by it, and how might you telegraph it?
CTI research reveals gravitas to consist of six key behaviors and traits.
What strikes me about this list is how entirely contemporary it is. It makes perfect sense, in our troubled times, that senior leaders in our survey and virtually all of the CEOs I interviewed—prize “grace under fire” (79 percent concur it’s critical for women’s EP, and 76 percent concur it’s critical for men’s EP). Just consider what we’ve been through in the past ten or fifteen years in terms of unprecedented events. The century opened with a bang: not Y2K, but the bursting of the dot-com bubble, wiping out billions. In 2001, the unthinkable occurred with the September 11 terrorist attacks, driving us to war in both Afghanistan and, by 2003, Iraq.5 Before the year 2001 was out, the economy took another major blow when it was revealed that accounting fraud and corporate complicity had bankrupted Enron, the $100 billion energy and commodities firm. Six months later, telecommunications titan WorldCom revealed a similar scandal on an even more spectacular scale, stiffing creditors to the tune of $5.7 billion. This was only a taste of the defrauding to come: The subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 robbed Americans of their jobs and savings, triggering a recession in the United States and touching off a global financial meltdown from which much of Europe has yet to recover. Every day, it seems, we’re rocked by news of ever more scandalous behaviors by those entrusted with our financial security, whether it’s the $891 million in customer accounts that MF Global misappropriated to cover trading losses in 2011 or the 2012 revelations that British banks had colluded to fix LIBOR. Is it any wonder, given this spate of scandals, that we’re drawn to leaders who keep their promises, keep their cool, and show compassion as well as courage in making the truly hard choices? Gravitas alone won’t secure you the corner office, of course: You’ve got to have the skill sets, the experience, and the innate talent to qualify for the job. As Linda Huber, chief financial officer at Moody’s, observes, “Substance must be the bedrock in order for someone to be taken seriously.” But if you have that depth of experience and those vital skills, gravitas is all that’s between you and that top job. It can’t be faked, but it can be cultivated. Leadership Traits: Grace Under Fire
How do you come by composure in a crisis?
You’ve got to reach inside yourself to that place where you believe, you absolutely know, you’re eminently qualified to do the job at hand. “Self-confidence is your iron core,” says Anne Erni, head of human resources at Bloomberg LP. “To lean into the wind when your heart is pounding, you have to believe in yourself, deep down. It’s not something you can fake.” Steeliness is forged, history shows us, in the crucible of crisis and it may take a crisis for you to discover your core of confidence. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor since 2005, may not solve the euro crisis, but no one contests her competency or credibility as a leader, in large part because she never loses her composure. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund and prior to taking over that institution, France’s finance minister, likewise enjoys universal respect for her poise and levelheadedness in steering her country through the straits of the 2008 liquidity crunch. Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former prime minister, will forever be known as the Iron Lady for having weathered, with nary a hair out of place, protracted crises at home (double-digit unemployment, a national coal miners’ strike), a lingering cold war with the Soviets, and a Falkland Islands showdown with Argentina. Most of us are like teabags, to borrow from Eleanor Roosevelt’s shrewd words: We don’t know how strong we are until we’re in hot water. That you may have boiled the water in which you steep doesn’t necessarily undermine your opportunity to acquire gravitas. Look at recent headline makers who’ve proven their mettle not by averting mistakes, but by owning up to them. For example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, failed to forestall some $5.8 billion in trading losses in 2011 which is not much of a testament to his leadership traits prowess! Dragged before Congress to explain why, he might well have joined the infamous ranks of dissemblers like WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers. But instead, Dimon accepted responsibility and equably answered questions, maintaining his composure and exuding confidence without coming off as arrogant. Far from gutting his gravitas, the public flogging actually seemed to bolster it. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, observed in Fortune that Dimon would be remembered as a man who “dusted himself off, got back on his horse and rode on—stronger and a whole lot wiser.” Investors in JPMorgan actually cheered his performance, according to Money.com. History may yet judge Dimon a scalawag, but even his detractors came away impressed by his grace under fire. So while avoiding catastrophe may demonstrate competence, it is handling catastrophe that confers gravitas. Recall Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who landed in the Hudson River after striking a flock of Canada geese. Avoiding the geese was not an option; what was an option for this leader was not succumbing to the “worst sickening, pit-of-your-stomach falling-through-the-floor” feeling he suffered moments before the crash.7 As a result of Sully’s extraordinary poise and control, every passenger and crew member survived that forced landing unharmed. You will make mistakes. You will suffer the mistakes of others. Accidents completely out of your control will befall you. Each of these represents, however, a monumental opportunity to acquire and exude gravitas: to reach within yourself, at the height of the storm, for that eye of calm, and to speak and act from that place of clarity. Because when you demonstrate that your confidence cannot be shaken, you inspire confidence in others. At worst, you’ll win their forgiveness and forbearance. Very possibly, you’ll win their trust and loyalty. Tim Melville-Ross tells of just such a watershed moment in his career, when a mistake he made might have cost him his job, his career, and his reputation but instead provided him occasion to man up and show the public what he was really made of. Back when he was CEO of Nationwide, the United Kingdom’s biggest building society (equivalent to a savings and loan in the United States), Melville-Ross acceded to pressure from one of his top directors to adopt a questionable business practice, one that would help the firm hold its margins in a shrinking economy. “To my undying shame, we tried to screw the customer,” he admits. “A good building society simply doesn’t do that. I made the wrong decision.” But then he made the right one: He sacked that director and made a very public apology. He wrote a letter to the London Times, one that he closed by inviting readers to write to him personally. Many did write, Melville-Ross told me, and took him to task for his blunder. The larger result of his falling on his sword, however, was restored faith in Nationwide—and, interestingly, in him personally. “It established me as a leader of integrity,” he says, “a reputation which has carried me through many a storm since.” Melville-Ross is today chair of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and president of the Institute of Business Ethics. You have this same choice. In a crisis, you can lean into the wind, acknowledge your shortcomings, and rise above them; or you can take cover. You can acquire gravitas, the cornerstone of a real leader. Or you can demonstrate that, no matter what your actual title, you really don’t deserve to be in charge. Just look at Tony Hayward. When the BP oil spill first made the news, Hayward seemed to have the public’s trust because he’d shown himself to be “frightfully” candid about BP’s previous stumbles and “dreadful” performance. But the minute he attempted to distance himself and the company from blame—the infamous “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” comment to BP executives, and then, two weeks later, observing to the Guardian that “the amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into [the Gulf] is tiny in relation to the total water volume”—the public turned on him.8 His comments were seen as conveying arrogance rather than confidence. Any chance he may have had to restore public opinion—by apologizing, for instance—he squandered with ever more stunning displays of insensitivity, the most memorable being his infamous remark “I’d like my life back.” These petulant words provoked a savage reaction. News commentators couldn’t believe that he was complaining about his schedule—missing a few summer weekends seemed a paltry sacrifice in the context of this catastrophic spill that had wreaked havoc in the Gulf. So many residents had lost their livelihoods—and eleven oil rig workers lost their lives. So instead of calming the waters, Tony set fire to them. It was a blunder that cost him his job. Leadership traits: Showing Teeth
Lynn Utter, who is today chief operating officer of Knoll Inc., a global leader in furniture and textile manufacturing, recalls the moment in her career when she first showed teeth. She’d just been named head of the container unit at Coors Brewing Company, replacing a thirty-year company veteran to become the company’s first female senior leader. Just a few months into the role, Utter sat in a meeting with half a dozen male board members who were debating whether to invest millions of dollars to fund a start-up as part of a joint venture. Having done her homework, she was utterly clear on how and why Coors should do the deal. Still, she listened to others, hoping for insights outside her own, until finally, fed up with the equivocation, she stood and addressed the room. “If we do not invest,” she said with calm, sturdy authority, “we are not living up to the fundamental philosophy of our partnership. If we do nothing, in fact, the entity is doomed. Either we step up, or we call it off.”
Under her leadership traits, the investment went forward. “I do not think they expected me to have that kind of backbone,” Utter says. “But I’d done my homework and knew the numbers cold. I knew what we needed to do and felt it was up to me to show strength and point the way forward.” Making difficult decisions is what we look to leaders to do. It is not so much about rendering the right decision, but about rendering a decision at a time when no one else dares, that confers gravitas, because it telegraphs that you have the courage, as well as the confidence, to impose a direction and take responsibility for it. Yahoo's leader, CEO Marissa Mayer showed leadership traits when she had the chops when she announced that all employees, starting in June 2013, would need to be working out of Yahoo’s offices. For the survival of the company, whose share price was tanking, she was revoking telecommuting privileges. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo that employees received from HR head Jackie Reses. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” The move sparked a firestorm: Some leaders (Jack Welch among them) applauded the move as an appropriate piece of discipline for the ailing firm; others (Richard Branson was one) condemned it as “a backwards step.” But Mayer had the courage to recognize that business as usual was not going to bootstrap Yahoo out of its death spiral. She made a bold, if unpopular, decision. She showed teeth. That display of confidence and courage boosted her gravitas and, consequently, her shareholders’ faith in her ability to turn the tide. CTI research finds that 70 percent of leaders consider decisiveness to be a component of EP for both men and women, second only to confidence in a crisis, making it a core aspect of gravitas. Being able to make decisions isn’t so much the issue as needing to appear decisive in public the difference, again, between doing the job of a leader and looking like one as you’re doing it, between demonstrating competence and exuding presence. George W. Bush clearly recognized this imperative when he zeroed in on being “the Decider” and built this as a central part of his brand. Mitt Romney similarly trumpeted his assertiveness on the presidential campaign trail; in his view leadership traits and “showing teeth” were synonymous. Better to get a reputation, as president, for being a hard-ass than a wuss “soft” on terrorists, or illegal immigrants, or dictators. Given that showing teeth draws on so many stereotypically male attributes aggression, assertiveness, toughness, dominance—it’s ostensibly easier for males to appear decisive. Yet if the emergence of testosterone clinics is any indication, men aren’t necessarily naturals at showing teeth. The Financial Times reported that, in search of “the positive side of aggression,” men are dosing up on testosterone, convinced the hormone will confer the “alpha male personality” of a bona fide Wall Street mover and shaker. One clinic, located steps away from the New York Stock Exchange, offers twice-weekly treatments as part of a $1,000-and-up monthly regimen. The injections aren’t without risk: Side effects include sleep apnea, increased risk of heart disease, growth of latent tumors, and testicular shrinkage. But the results, to hear the clinic’s Wall Street clientele describe them, more than justify the risks. Testosterone makes them feel bolder, louder, and more assertive, they say; as a result, they’re more comfortable showing teeth and taking risks. “It’s important to project an aura of invincibility,” one trader confided to me. The way he sees it, he’s buying job security—no small thing in an industry that’s shed one hundred thousand jobs since 2008. Women, however, definitely have a harder row to hoe—not in being decisive, it bears repeating, but in appearing to be. Women like Marissa Mayer who render decisions that demand action risk being perceived as “unfeminine” aka unlikable in the eyes of their peers and subordinates, a phenomenon we’ll explore at much greater length in the blog. It’s the classic double bind: If you’re tough, you’re a bitch and no one wants to work for you, but if you’re not tough, you’re not perceived as leadership traits material and you won’t be given anyone to work for you. It’s a high-wire act that every capable woman has had to perform, and the higher she goes, the more perilous the act. A senior colleague and mentor of a female tax attorney whose meteoric rise to CFO at Lehman Brothers garnered her intense scrutiny recounted to me some of the advice he felt obliged to give the attorney as she navigated her way to the C-suite. “She had no problem finding her voice at the table with fourteen other men,” he told me. “But that was the problem: She was very demanding, very assertive. And that was no way to impress these guys, many of whom had spent fifteen, twenty years at the firm.” He counseled her to “damp it down,” to be more sensitive to the other voices. “You walked in and spoke like you are the next chairman of the firm,” he remembers telling her. “You may be, and it may be a good goal for you . . . but you can’t act like that today. You have to be a little more sensitive to the senior men sitting around the table with you, or they’ll eat you alive.” Male or female, the way to walk the line between decisive and difficult may be, as Lynn Utter demonstrates, to dish it out very discriminately—to hide your teeth more often than you bare them. Real leaders don’t issue edicts just to look and sound like they’re in charge. Real leaders listen, gather critical information, weigh the options carefully, look for a timely opening (typically when everyone else is writhing in indecision), and then demand action. “Oftentimes it is just as important to know when being decisive is not the thing to do—to let events play out in a certain way and bide your time,” cautions Bob Dudley. “I see a lot of people trying to be too decisive too quickly.” When the moment demands a decision that you’re prepared to render, step forth and render it. Just choose those moments with care. Leadership Traits: Speaking truth to power
In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey shocked his fellow Republicans by publicly heaping praise on Barack Obama just days before the 2012 presidential election. Speaking live on Fox News, with images of the ravaged state playing over the airwaves, Christie told viewers that he’d had three conversations in the last twenty-four hours with the president, asking that his state be declared a federal disaster to expedite funds, and that that morning Obama had signed the paperwork. “I have to give the president great credit,” Christie concluded. “He’s been very attentive and anything I’ve asked for, he’s gotten to me. He’s done, as far as I’m concerned, a great job for New Jersey.” When asked if he’d be touring the state later by helicopter with Governor Romney, Christie, a vocal supporter of the Republican candidate just days before, told the correspondents he didn’t know and wasn’t interested. “If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics,” he said heatedly, “then you don’t know me.”
Those who know Christie weren’t, in fact, shocked by his behavior. Mike DuHaime, an advisor to the governor, observed he was acting true to form. “He calls ’em as he sees ’em,” he told the New York Times .18 That’s what Christie does: When homeowners refused to evacuate from New Jersey’s barrier islands, Christie called them “both selfish and stupid.” 19 Prior to Sandy, he called President Obama “the most ill-prepared person to assume the presidency in my lifetime.” Christie doesn’t hesitate, that is, to speak his truth—however impolitic it may be, however mighty the audience he offends with it. And that candor marks him, paradoxically, as a presidential contender. Speaking truth to power, as more than 60 percent of our respondents affirm, is a potent affirmation of leaderlike courage. The higher you go in an organization, the more impressive you are when you demonstrate you have the spine to share your convictions. “I want people who will walk into my office and say, ‘Here’s where I differ, I want to talk to you about it,’ ” affirms Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact. “I love that! This is the kind of courage I’m looking for, in addition to the given of stellar performance.” Make sure, however, that when you challenge authority, you’re coming from a core of unshakable values. Anything less and your actions will be perceived as insubordination and/or arrogance—the opposites of gravitas. And then prepare to be truly tested. Financial powerhouse Sallie Krawcheck established early on in her career a penchant for telling it like it is. As a research analyst on Wall Street, she downgraded Travelers for its acquisition of brokerage firm Salomon Brothers, a move that earned her the fury of Citicorp’s Sandy Weill (Citicorp would acquire Travelers to form Citigroup). Impressed with her intellectual integrity as well as her analysis skills, however, Weill eventually hired her to head up Citigroup’s Smith Barney unit, promoting her within two years to be CFO of Citigroup. Krawcheck continued to tell it like it was, suggesting, at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, that the company partially refund its clients for investments positioned by Citi as low risk that had taken a nosedive during the downturn. CEO Vikram Pandit wasn’t appreciative of this piece of advice and fired her. The story doesn’t end there. In 2011, the integrity and courage Krawcheck exhibited at Citi won her the top job at Merrill Lynch, which had recently been taken over by Bank of America. Her brief: to make this much-revered wealth management house profitable again. Despite huge success on this front (revenues rose by 54 percent in her second quarter on the job), she found herself in the crosshairs of new CEO Brian Moynihan, whose leadership traits had resulted in losses of $8.8 billion across Bank of America during that same quarter.21 By September of that year, Krawcheck was out. “I’ve found that speaking truth has not always stood me in good stead in terms of my career progression,” Krawcheck told me when we discussed her extraordinary journey. “But it always, always, always stood me in good stead in terms of managing businesses.” She added, with heartfelt pride, “Had I to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it any differently. Not one thing.” Leadership Traits: Demonstrating Emotional Intelligence
Mitt Romney’s compulsion to show teeth to remind us at every turn that his tough leadership style had made him a phenomenally successful CEO might have garnered him more votes in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election had he not, at the same time, demonstrated at every turn his utter insensitivity toward half the electorate. Like Tony Hayward, Romney was tone-deaf when it came to tuning his remarks for constituencies outside his war room. Comments such as noting that his wife had “a couple of Cadillacs” didn’t persuade voters of his love for American cars, but rather that he lived in a rich man’s bubble and was insulated from working people’s reality.
In a similar vein, his comment that he had consulted “binders full of women” to fill his cabinet as governor served to underscore how out of touch he was with the sensibilities of working women. The final blow, delivered at a private fund-raiser and captured on video that quickly went viral on the Web, was his sweeping condemnation of 47 percent of the electorate as freeloaders who pay no income tax! (Freeloaders, it turned out, included not-yet-employed returning veterans and the disabled.) Romney’s 47 percent comment “did real damage” to his campaign, as he himself conceded, underscoring just how important emotional intelligence—or EQ, as psychologist Daniel Goleman calls it—has become what we look for in leaders. A hefty majority of our respondents see EQ as very important, with 61 percent noting its importance for women’s executive presence, and 58 percent noting its importance for men’s. And here’s why: While decisiveness and toughness in a leader signal conviction, courage, and resolve, when untempered by empathy or compassion these same characteristics come off as egotism, arrogance, and insensitivity. Look at Marissa Mayer’s decision to force Yahoo’s staff to return to their desks on campus. Issuing this edict showed teeth, as we’ve discussed, but regrettably, it also showed a leader out of touch with the realities other working parents contend with. Mayer drew fire not for being tough but for being hypocritical, having solved her own child-care issues by building a separate cubicle next to her office for her infant son and nanny. “I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set ’em up in the cube next door?” joked the husband of one Yahoo mom. His voice was tinged with bitterness. Making and enforcing unpopular decisions is indeed part of showing you’ve got the chops to be put in charge. It’s just that in today’s ever-flatter organizations, acting insensitively actually compromises your ability to create buy-in among employees and realize optimal outcomes for the firm. This was the conclusion two researchers from Harvard and Stanford reached after spending weeks on two offshore oil rigs studying the culture change that management had initiated to improve safety and performance. The research team expected that, in this most dangerous and macho of work environments, aggression, bravado, and toughness not only would be on display but would be embraced and rewarded. But as a result of management’s stated goals bringing down work-site injuries and bringing up capacity—they witnessed a remarkable shift in attitudes and behaviors among the crews on oil rigs. Workers confirmed that, previously, the culture discouraged asking for help, admitting mistakes, or building community. The crew, in prior years, had been “like a pack of lions,” with the guy in charge being the one who could “basically out-perform and out-shout and out-intimidate all the others.” Once the emphasis shifted to safety, however, the company stopped rewarding “the biggest baddest roughnecks” in favor of men who could admit to mistakes, seek help when they needed it, and look out for each other. Over a period of fifteen years, this shift in values and norms helped the oil company achieve its goals: The accident rate fell by 84 percent and production hit an all-time high. Even on an oil rig, that is, demonstrating emotional intelligence (EQ) is a key leader trait because it builds trust—essential in conditions where bravado could get you killed and a lack of concern for the team might cause others to wonder if you were cutting corners and compromising their safety. In less life-threatening conditions, however, EQ is just as important for building trust because demonstrating it shows you have not only self-awareness but also situational awareness. It’s absolutely vital in white-collar worlds such as finance, law, and medicine to show you’re capable of reading a situation, and the people in it, correctly. Standout leaders who can be trusted to pick up on all relevant cues win the trust of followers to steer them through an uncertain future. Our interviewees spoke of the importance of EQ in particular in “reading a room”—the room being a metaphor for your immediate audience, in person or virtual. What’s the vibe, or unarticulated emotion you need to address or temper? What do people need from you in order to move forward? Leaders who pick up on these cues know when to be decisive and when to hold back; when to show teeth, and when to retract their claws. “It may be more important to comfort a room than command it,” points out Kent A. Gardiner, chairman of international law firm Crowell & Moring LLP, “because at times it can further consensus-building and problem-solving.” Gardiner, whose career has encompassed RICO prosecutions and major civil and criminal antitrust litigation, describes how he cooled one particularly heated mediation session. “Everybody was unhappy, everybody was antagonistic, so getting up and pounding away was only going to increase the gulf,” he says. “I let a little venting occur, and then I got up and said, ‘Let’s think about it this way,’ very much respecting the other side’s position, but then trying to move us all beyond a litigation resolution toward a business resolution. And people listened. People felt like it was a discussion, not just a fight.” It’s not simply managing your own feelings, although restraint on that front, as Gardiner shows, makes an enormous difference. Rather, it’s recognizing and acting in accord with the feelings of others. “Not showing that you have an understanding for people’s feelings is absolutely a no-no,” says the CEO of the medical device firm. “It does not negate your ability to be tough and make tough decisions, or tell people when things are not going right or when they are not doing their jobs. You can do all of that with compassion.” Most important, you can acquire this sensitivity. EQ isn’t an inborn intelligence so much as a muscle you build through experience. Recall Michelle Obama’s misstep in 2010 when she whisked her daughter and some forty friends off to Spain for a glitzy summer vacation. It was something Jackie O might have been celebrated for, but then, Jackie’s husband hadn’t gotten voted into office to fix a global financial crisis. To be spending lavishly on a European holiday when her fellow Americans were grappling with unemployment, protracted recession, and gutted retirement plans was a Romneyesque blunder, one that got her dubbed “a modern-day Marie Antoinette.” That was the last time the first lady acted so heedlessly; indeed, over the last several years Michelle Obama has acquired perfect pitch. For example, when Hadiya Pendleton, a fifteen-year-old honor student who’d performed at the 2012 inauguration, was killed in a random shooting just a week later, Michelle attended her funeral and met with her family. In April she returned to Chicago to meet with other high schoolers terrorized by gang shootings and make an impassioned plea for tighter gun control laws nationwide. No one who saw her deliver that speech could doubt the first lady felt our pain. The gaffes of her first years in the White House have been forgotten Leadership Traits: RIGHT-SIZING YOUR REPUTATION
Make no mistake: Your reputation does precede you, either bestowing gravitas or bleeding you of it. Before you enter a room or open your mouth, your reputation speaks for you—never more so than today, when word of your latest blunder or scandal races at lightning speed around the globe in 140 characters or less. People will have formed an opinion of you before you’re in a position to help them form it, which is why 56 percent of leaders concur that reputation matters a great deal in establishing EP for women and 57 percent agree it matters for men. Managing your personal brand is almost a job unto itself, lest it be managed for you by people who don’t hold your best interests at heart. You’ve got to be proactive in asserting who you are, what you stand for, and how you’d like to be perceived.
Even in Hollywood, where celebrities are fixated on honing their image, Angelina Jolie’s brand is viewed as a towering accomplishment. She’s clearly a standout beauty and accomplished actress, but she’s also a universally admired public figure with depth, heft, and clout. How did this happen? First off, she’s distinguished herself among movie stars by her dedication to underprivileged children the world over, several of whom she’s adopted. Her efforts seem to come from a deep place, and far exceed the photo-op moments that characterize celebrity “involvement” in good causes. After filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia, she started traveling with UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, as a goodwill ambassador, a commitment that’s taken her on forty-some field missions since 2001 and won her, in 2012, a special envoy appointment. She started the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation to address conservation in Cambodia and the National Centre for Refugee and Immigrant Children to provide free legal aid to young asylum seekers, work that earned her membership on the Council on Foreign Relations. She does much of this work off the radar of the press, and yet the gravitas it has conferred is palpable. Many a sterling reputation is forged in the crucible of scandal. Recall Magic Johnson, the all-star basketball player who contracted HIV/AIDS. When news of his illness broke in 1991, AIDS was a scourge associated with homosexuality and intravenous drug use. Johnson made a courageous choice: He made himself very publicly an example of the consequences of unprotected sexual activity, transforming the behavior of homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, and curbing the spread of AIDS as a result. Johnson’s reputation as a basketball legend regained its luster, and today he’s known as a former megastar, but also as a successful businessman, author, and philanthropist extraordinaire. Bear in mind that your reputation is not a function simply of your deeds and actions: Social media and the ubiquity of smartphones—with their handy dandy cameras conspire to make your reputation a function of what people see, including your attire, office décor, automobile, vacation home, and collectibles. This visibility makes it imperative you style your environment as carefully as you style yourself—a point we’ll take up at length in chapter 4, on appearance. Even the photos on your desk or office wall say something about you, so make sure they communicate a message that’s in keeping with your mission. One chief financial officer at a tech giant in Silicon Valley learned this the hard way: She featured on her office wall a photograph taken of herself emerging from a limo clad in a very short black dress that revealed a stunning length of well-toned thigh. The image, which had appeared in a national glossy magazine, had accompanied an article trumpeting her rapid ascendance in an almost exclusively male culture—a triumph she felt warranted further exposure on her wall. But her colleagues felt otherwise. One of them insisted she take it down. “Is this what you want people to focus on? Is this your leading edge?” he asked her angrily. “It’s critical to the success of this firm that shareholders feel confident in your judgment. Anyone seeing this photo would have to question it.” Leadership Traits:VISION AND CHARISMA
If there’s one name today that’s synonymous with visionary leadership traits, it’s Steve Jobs.
Jobs is also synonymous with innovation, but that’s because every product to emerge from Apple during his tenure demonstrated his commitment to machines and environments so beautifully and flawlessly designed that they supported an intensely pleasurable user experience. And Jobs consistently deployed his design values, applying them to Apple hardware, Apple software, Apple stores, and online Apple platforms such as iTunes. Even in his attire—black turtleneck, perfectly fitting blue jeans—Jobs telegraphed the simplicity and elegance of his creations. Jobs’s means of achieving this vision secured him equal parts loathing and reverence, to hear his biographers tell it. A perfectionist incapable of compromise, he hounded his team to rework the first iPhone even as the launch deadline loomed. He deemed it too utilitarian, too masculine, too task-focused to seduce users into plunking down five hundred dollars for an untried product. The beauty of line and touch needed to be more obvious. He was as ruthless in paring down his teams as he was in paring away extraneous features on Apple products, arguing that “A” engineers were not only fifty times better to have than “C” engineers, but also that “A’s do not like playing with C’s.” 28 Jobs’s perfectionism and his impatience with people who didn’t share his veneration for design earned him a reputation as a control freak and an unfeeling boss. But because some of these very qualities aligned with Apple’s brand—flawless function, minimalist design, and a seamless marriage of the two—these traits served, paradoxically, to make Jobs revered by colleagues and customers the world over. In the decade leading up to his untimely death in 2011, Jobs secured an almost cultlike following. When he died he was deeply mourned. There were candlelight vigils in Shanghai, São Paulo, and San Francisco, and the glass walls of the Apple Store around the corner from my New York apartment were festooned with handwritten Post-its. I read two of the notes: A fourteen-year-old thanked Jobs for the fun she had with her iPhone, it was so easy to use and made her feel cool; a twenty-nine-year-old father wanted Jobs to know about his undying gratitude—his iPad was transforming the life prospects of his three-year-old autistic son. Exceedingly few of us will conjure up or drive a vision as powerfully as Jobs did. Yet to communicate gravitas, it’s critical you telegraph vision. Fifty-four percent of the leaders we surveyed think “the vision thing” is key for men; 50 percent believe it matters a lot for women, too. Joanna Coles, editor of Cosmopolitan, has long had a vision of spearheading a different kind of women’s magazine, one that has its fair share of fashion and fun but also encourages women to use their new clout to make a difference in this world. She has always believed that such a magazine could be enormously commercially successful. She finally got a chance to realize her vision when, in 2007, she was appointed editor of Marie Claire—a fashion magazine that focuses on thirtysomething year-old professional women. During her five-year tenure she shifted its editorial content so as to include important pieces of investigative journalism that targeted women’s issues. One of the first pieces she spearheaded was a story on women’s rape kits getting tossed to one side (shelved, filed, or just plain lost) instead of being tested and used in criminal prosecutions. This article proved riveting to readers—and drove circulation to a new high. It zeroed in on a young woman whose rapist was out there in the community raping other women because no one had bothered to log into a national database the DNA sample collected from her. But this piece, besides driving sales, also vaulted the magazine into a more serious realm, short-listing Marie Claire for a prestigious journalism award. With that success, Coles had license to embark on a socially conscious editorial agenda, one that helped shine a spotlight on women such as Angelina Jolie for their humanitarian achievements, and not just their fashion sense. Nowadays, she’s bringing the same sensibilities to Cosmopolitan, inspiring a whole new generation of women to take themselves seriously. It hasn’t always earned her praise or won her popularity trophies: Coles is hard-driving and famously demanding of her staff there is a whiff of The Devil Wears Prada about her. But this doesn’t concern her in the least. “I won’t be one of those people who lies on her deathbed thinking, ‘I wish I had spent less time in the office,’ ” she muses. “I will lie on my deathbed thinking, I wish I’d given everything one hundred and fifty percent instead of the occasional one hundred percent.” Indeed, as Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, points out, likability is what women loathe to sacrifice. Leadership cannot be a popularity contest, she affirms. “There are people who absolutely don’t like me,” Hobson told me. “I make them uncomfortable. But I also know they respect me. I’m someone with whom they’d want to be in a foxhole. That’s how we talk about leadership traits at this firm: Who do you take into the foxhole? You don’t take people you like, you take someone who is going to save your life in a really bad situation. You don’t want a whiner. You don’t want someone who panics. And you certainly don’t want fake optimism,” she elaborates. “You want brutal optimism. Great leaders are brutally optimistic.” Leadership Traits Blunders
In focus groups and interviews we asked senior executives (and white-collar employees across the board), What are the mistakes? What gets you in trouble on the gravitas front? And how serious is this trouble? These were the top picks: The blunders shown below trigger a wide range of consequences. While a star salesman can recover from such missteps as an offensive joke or a lack of depth on some technical issue, or a talented computer engineer can withstand accusations of bullying (as long as it’s in the past tense), there are two blunders that are career killers. Lack of integrity (think Jon Corzine) and sexual impropriety call into question people’s judgment and values on such a fundamental level that they completely lose their gravitas—and ability to lead.
Sexual impropriety takes some kind of prize as a career killer—at least for men. Recent headliners include former congressman Anthony Weiner, former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former four-star general and CIA director David Petraeus, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd. A quick Google search turns up a raft of other C-suite-ers who all recently became “formers” as a result of sexual shenanigans: CEO Brian Dunn of Best Buy, CEO Gary Friedman of Restoration Hardware, and CFO Christopher Kubasik of Lockheed Martin are among the recent crop.
Interestingly, while sexual impropriety can knock the powerful off the top perch, there’s usually a chance at recovery or some sort of consolation prize cushioning the fall—for men, at least. After being forced to resign when his extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell came to light in the course of an FBI investigation, David Petraeus was quickly snapped up by investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company to become chairman of the firm’s newly created KKR Global Institute. He also landed faculty positions at the City University of New York and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was given a named chair. Mark Hurd engineered a similar comeback. Six weeks after he was shot down from the top perch of HP as a result of a sexual peccadillo, Hurd became co-president of Oracle—thanks to his close friendship with Larry Ellison. Meanwhile, Brian Dunn and Christopher Kubasik have both received multimillion-dollar severance packages. Not bad! The women involved in these sexual peccadillos fare much less well. One reason is that many of these relationships involve a senior male leader and a female subordinate who has neither the power nor the prestige to help her recover. For example, in the wake of her affair with Petraeus, Paula Broadwell was disciplined by the military and lost both her commission in the reserves and part of her retirement benefits. The female contractor who allegedly carried on that affair with Mark Hurd has not been able to find work since the scandal broke and is currently living in a trailer park in New Jersey. Sad to relate, gravitas blunders are steeped in bias and inequity—but that doesn’t make them any less real. How to Deepen Your Leadership Gravitas
Gravitas is that je ne sais quoi quality that some people have that makes other people judge them born leaders.
But born leaders are made, oftentimes through their own systematic efforts. They live intentionally, guided by a set of values or a vision for their lives that compels them to seize every chance to put their convictions into practice. We gravitate to them because they telegraph that they know where they’re going—a rare and intoxicating certainty that most of us lack. That is the real font of their gravitas. So consider what larger vision you’re here to fulfill, and make sure it informs each of your everyday actions. If you can articulate it, you’re well on your way to achieving it. People with a clear goal who show they are determined to achieve it exude gravitas, which in turn bolsters their chances of securing the support they’ll need to achieve their goals. You can be one of them. Here are some quick wins and inspirational stories to get you started. Surround yourself with people who are better than you. “Best piece of advice I ever got,” says James Charrington, chairman of Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at BlackRock. “Recognize your own weaknesses, and hire people who will complement your strengths by addressing your weaknesses. Those I’ve seen struggle to move forward invariably are those who have trouble recognizing their shortcomings. When you talk about what you’re not good at, it helps others see what you really are good at—and your gravitas grows for admitting it.” Be generous with credit. As Deb Elam, head of diversity at GE, observes, nothing undermines followership faster than a boss who hogs all the credit for him or herself. Shining a light on those who helped you score a win underscores your integrity and sense of fairness, which in turn inspires others to give even more of themselves. Stick to what you know. Do not shoot from the hip; do not claim to know more than you do or possibly could know. Credit Suisse’s Michelle Gadsden-Williams learned this back when she worked for a pharmaceutical firm and asserted to the executive committee that the playing field for black employees wasn’t level. But she was careful to back up her assertion by offering concrete examples culled strictly from her own experience—and couched them as such. That way, she says, her insights were received as firsthand testimony and not a generalized indictment. Show humility. Nothing signals you’re emotionally attuned more than your own willingness to admit mistakes and own up to failings and shortcomings. BlackRock’s Charrington doesn’t hesitate to point out that he lacks a college degree, a very disarming revelation in this age of resume inflation and hyperbolic CVs. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg likewise disarms detractors by volunteering embarrassing details of her seemingly flawless life, owning up to her seventypound weight gain during her first pregnancy (“Project Whale was named after me”), her failed first marriage (“No matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the scarlet letter D stitched on my chest”), and even her fear of being number two in her children’s eyes (“Stay-at-home mothers can make me feel guilty and, at times, intimidate me”).29 Far from undermining her gravitas or tarnishing her reputation, her humility serves to bridge the gap between herself (the $1.6 billion woman) and her followers. It’s hard to paint a mother who discovers head lice on her kids on the corporate jet as an out-of-touch billionaire. Smile more. This was advice Mellody Hobson received some twenty years ago from one of Motorola’s most senior women. At the time, eager to demonstrate her toughness as a female on her way up, she was flabbergasted at the suggestion. Now she spreads the word. “Smiling a lot projects happiness and likability, and people want to work with those who they like and those who are happy,” Hobson says. “There are energy givers, and energy takers. Who do you want to spend time with? Who are the people you run to the phone when they call and who are the ones you let go to voice mail? I want people to want to take my call.” Empower others’ presence to build your own. Others will see you as a leader when you concentrate on making those around you act responsibly and win visibility for themselves, says Carolyn Buck Luce, a partner at accounting firm EY who recently retired. “Think about your impact, not in terms of deliverables, but in terms of realizing larger goals for the firm,” she says. “See the bigger picture: You’re a conductor of an orchestra. Executive presence is not what you do with your presence, it’s also what you do with other people’s presence.” Snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Steve Jobs did it when he reclaimed his role at Apple after an eleven-year hiatus during which his successor nearly ran the company into the ground. But perhaps the most notable exemplar of this is Al Gore, who was, for a few days in 2000, president-elect of the United States before the Supreme Court snatched away his victory. Ten years later Gore secured himself a Nobel Prize, and a place in history, that the presidency might not have conferred: as a prophet willing to speak an inconvenient truth, and as a visionary whom we entrust not only to show us the future but also to guide us safely through it. In so doing, he utterly transformed his image from a wooden lifelong public servant into a Saturday Night Live host with a devilish sense of humor as well as a disarming sense of humility. He is, as New York magazine put it, the ultimate Davos man, a leader whose credibility and gravitas are held in global esteem.
Drive change rather than be changed.
For the first thirteen years of her twenty-five-year run at Goldman Sachs, Gail Fierstein transformed the businesses she partnered with—first as a software developer, then as a project manager, then as a product line manager. It fell to Fierstein and her team to solve some of the firm’s thorniest challenges in terms of managing risk and introducing new product. “In tech, it’s not just about innovating; you need to be thinking about worst-case scenarios and making sure they don’t happen,” she points out. “You’ve got to get into the detail, ask questions; you’ve got to keep challenging the group and your own assumptions.” But when she moved into human capital management as the Technology HR business partner, Fierstein’s interrogative style didn’t go over very well: “I’d ask about implementation, about how we were communicating, and how the team would support it because I was thinking twenty steps down the road. But either my colleagues in HR weren’t used to getting questions or they didn’t think my concerns about process were relevant, because to their way of thinking, I wasn’t being supportive. I wasn’t being a team player. “That shocked me,” she continues. “It was the complete opposite of tech, where the more questions you ask, the more you’re considered part of the team, because it shows you’re collectively working toward a solution.” So Fierstein stepped into the role of change agent. “You have to worry when I don’t ask questions,” she told her colleagues in HR. “And we all have to worry if you’re not thinking twenty moves ahead.” Subsequently, at every opportunity, Fierstein put a spotlight on her style difference. But at the same time, she says, she became more sensitive to the style differences of others. “Change works two ways,” she observes. “In order to help others get to know me I provided them with context. I learned to say to junior people meeting me for the first time, ‘I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. The more questions I ask, the more support I have for your proposal. So don’t misinterpret my intent.’ ” Her approach worked: Fierstein was promoted to managing director and increased her span of responsibilities as HR business partner to eight divisions. Today she’s applying her toolkit to a whole new challenge, bringing women in the IT community together as a force for social good through her involvement with NPower, a nonprofit that harnesses the power of the tech community to bridge the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) career gap for nonprofits. Once again, she says, she’s bringing an execution/process mindset to the team. “Sometimes the very thing an organization wants you to change about yourself,” Fierstein concludes, “is the very thing you most need to change about them.” She adds, “When you acknowledge that, and start acting as a force for the greater good, others will follow your lead.” via Blogger http://ift.tt/2ap7M59 July 24, 2016 at 12:57PM
Leadership development programs during the core of turmoil
It has been an extended week, but you're eventually in the vehicle traveling back home. You turn on the radio to hear the news headlines, and among the typical reports concerning the economic situation and also the newest skirmishes throughout the world, you listen to the announcer state that a nationwide food brand is now being recalled since it might have germs that may cause severe intestinal infection. Plus it requires your best brand of chocolate chip treats! Now you are merely partly taking note of the remainder of the news because your head starts to ponder: Do We have those cookies in my kitchen at the moment? Did I consume a few yesterday? Did my child take a little to school in the lunch? I happened to be becoming a bit nauseated last Weekend. http://ift.tt/29GOEu1Ever wonder exactly how national recalls are determined? They can be several of the most decisions that are challenging organization encounters. On the line will be the security of consumers, the company’s hard-won reputation for quality, millions of dollars, and perhaps even some people’s jobs. A decision has to be produced really small amount of time, a day roughly at most of the. Whenever an organization has evidence that is clear of quality issue, your choice is straightforward. However, there are times when data are inconclusive plus the leaders are not aligned regarding the decision. Just what then? After some duration ago, Jim, a executive that is veteran of Fortune 500 company, explained about simply such a recall. He additionally told me the way the work he and his team was indeed doing with mindful leadership development programs played a significant part in a very challenging decision-making procedure. My day started similar to times. A lot of meetings, too many priorities, and too many opportunities that are potential. Then a call arrived in. It absolutely wasn’t just any call, it absolutely was the sort of call which had the power to turn the day on its mind. It erased every conference from my calendar and demanded that I fall every other concern. A potential severe contamination problem had arisen with an important brand. When an issue about the security of a food product emerges, I am certainly one of three leaders of a team responsible for suggesting to the CEO whether or not to recall this product. Sue, Mark, and I also had been seasoned professionals, and we had led the group through prospective recall circumstances before. Happily, these instances were uncommon within my company, and the united group set up to deal with them was together for many years. We knew each other well, and now we had respect that is great each other’s expertise and experience. Within an hour associated with call coming in, our recall group was built with data, research, and informed opinions and concerns. The step that is first to understand the magnitude associated with the problem. Fortuitously, in this instance, we soon discovered that an internationally distributed chocolate candy product might contain germs which could cause illness that is serious especially for older people and young kids. In these circumstances, there is certainly a huge number of pressure. We had been extremely worried about any potential danger towards the consumer’s wellness, and we were also worried about the prospective public relations dilemmas while the fact that a recall can price vast amounts and significantly harm the product’s brand. The recall team started initially to function with what we knew, and exactly what information that is additional could obtain through evaluation. We notified the appropriate government agencies and encouraged them regarding the status of this investigation into the prospective problem, so we gathered outside experts, microbiologists and meals scientists, to greatly help with technical questions. We knew it all must be done in the next twenty-four to hours that are forty-eight. If there clearly was a nagging problem with our item, we'd have to bring our suggestion to the CEO rapidly to protect our customers. Usually the test results and consumer problem information enable us to reach a consensus fairly quickly. We confirm a quality problem, or we disprove the allegation, plus the decision becomes clear. It's based on analysis and facts. But it wouldn’t be so simple this time. This time, despite working 24 / 7 aided by the team, in hours and hours of meetings examining reams of medical analyses and test results, we were left with only an unsubstantiated discovering that the product might be the reason for an outbreak of infection in a location for the country where food-borne infection had seen a spike and one associated with possible items involved was our candy. No conclusive data. No cigarette smoking gun. No evidence that is incontrovertible. This time around we knew which our decision would have to be predicated on something a lot more than the data and advice that is expert had heard. This time around Sue, Mark, and I also knew that we will have to rely on our experience and intuition to achieve that decision that is final. In the early night for the second day, time was running away. Sue, Mark, and I left our recall team and gathered in an conference that is empty to deliberate. Even as we settled into our chairs, Mark advised that we each start out with a brief monologue to share our overall analysis of the situation and our opinion on the recall. I recall experiencing a sense of relief so we were comfortable with using monologues and deep listening that we each had been trained in mindful communication. And, I privately hoped that there would be a consensus among us as we began the process. There ended up being. Now just what? One option could have been to start a discussion about our points. You know, the sort of typical debating that can absorb large numbers of time and rarely results in a choice that is great. More regularly it's a compromise, or an option that is only supported by some of those in attendance. A lot of is at stake here for that to be our next thing. Therefore, as opposed to carry on with a discussion, Sue suggested we let that which we had heard sink in and take some time for reflection. We consented to reconvene in an hour. Mark left the space and took a walk around the building. Sue discovered a quiet, empty room by which to sit. I discovered a cup of coffee and came back to my office, shut the door, and allowed myself the quiet I needed to take in all that We had heard and sensed throughout the span of the afternoon the peaceful that will allow me to listen carefully to my intuition. An hour later, we returned towards the meeting room and shared our viewpoints once again. This time we had reached an obvious and consensus that is strong. It might not be a decision that is welcome numerous in the organization, but it had been now clear towards the three of us that we would need to suggest a recall. Much like hardest decisions, coming to a choice that is clear critical in Jim’s story. Jim, Mark, and Sue felt well informed to be able to consult with the CEO (and others) through the strong foundation and shared support of a decision that is unanimous. This is a decision created perhaps not from the data, which stayed inconclusive, but from their collective experience and instinct. After they took their unanimous recommendation to the CEO, he asked only one question, “Did anyone have a new standpoint?” if the response was no, he rapidly agreed utilizing the recommendation. Their clarity helped the CEO too: he could feel confident within the option to authorize an expensive recall because every one of his advisers had arrived at the exact same summary. It had been the thing that is right do. Now everyone’s energies could seek out the most truly effective and efficient approaches to carry out of the recall. It wasn’t exactly what anybody desired to take place, but the choice ended up being easier to implement and live with more than the long run because they had taken enough time necessary to be clear concerning the choice that is best. This was maybe not a quick, reactive choice in the swirl of doubt. It had been perhaps not a decision that arose through the exhaustion of a long debate. This is an option the team leaders made using their power to understand whenever it was crucial allowing the mind to settle so they had a much better chance to discern the best option. As supervisors trained within leadership development programs, Jim, Sue, and Mark knew just how to combine their conventional business and leadership qualities and experience that is hard-won their training associated with brain. Mindful leadership techniques and workouts had taught them to notice the strong pull to react, the mind’s propensity to slim the main focus when under anxiety, the dynamics of difficult conversations that can often be settled by reaching the lowest typical denominator to gain contract as opposed to the most skillful choice, plus the adverse effects of data overload. The training also assisted them elect to keep the ambiguity of “not knowing the clear answer” for a time, providing the peaceful and spaciousness had a need to see clearly and to respond. Neither their traditional business training nor mind training alone would have sufficed to help them achieve an optimal choice. It’s the combination of this two that proved to be so powerful. Jim, Sue, and Mark had the courage to quit for some time, allowing the dirt to stay, and to use all of their abilities to help guide your decision. These leaders exhibited leadership development programs excellence in the midst of the chaos. All too often we have been unaware of the consequence that being in a situation that is pressure-filled on our ability to lead with excellence. We have the ability that is innate be fully present for all tough decisions for many of our decisions—but we need to notice as soon as we are moving into a reactive mode and learn methods which will help us make conscious choices. Everyone has the capacity to lead with excellence. You may be in a posture now that requires one to make decisions impacting those you consider yourself a leader and you are seen as a leader by others around you and wider circles beyond and so. Or you might not hold a leadership part by itself yet touch the lifestyles of other people every day with techniques that obviously have the potential to have a leadership impact. Regardless of the full case, we all experience the window of opportunity for leadership known by Secretary Albright into the epigraph at the head of this chapter. When Secretary Albright referred to the ability for leadership that is “deep within us,” she was speaking about the sort of leadership that is a potential outgrowth of mindful leadership training. Why do we need mindful leadership development programs?To respond to that relevant concern, let’s start out with a glance at just what it means to be mindful.When you are mindful with this minute, you are current for your life along with your experience in the same way it is … maybe not while you hoped it would be, not as you expected it to be, not seeing more or less than what's right here, perhaps not with judgments that can lead you to a conditioned response … but also for what is right here, because it unfolds, meeting each moment with equanimity. It’s relatively easy to see how much we need to cultivate mindful leadership as we consider the challenges leaders face today. The environment we live and work with is continually evolving. Time has become usually calculated in Internet microseconds. There are new and complex financial and resource constraints on our businesses. We have been attached 24/7 to an array of technological products that regularly create information that is anxiety-producing and a sense of disconnection that will overwhelm and separate us. The world is changing so quickly that folks training for a career may find the career path radically altered by the time they are ready to enter it today. One paradigm after another is moving. The volume of data at our disposal is, in reality, resulting in less instead of more certainty. The amount of voices and opinions we could hear on any provided problem is indeed dauntingly big that individuals usually don’t understand who or what to think or follow. Furthermore real, though, why these tumultuous times can provide great possibility and ample opportunities for innovation, once the globe becomes smaller sized so we start to see the possible to meet up with the complexities for the day with techniques which can be really imaginative, effective, and compassionate. It’s a right time to take leadership, and to redefine just what it indicates to lead with excellence. In my experiences, first as a Wall Street associate, a residential district volunteer, a member of staff in three big companies, and an officer of a Fortune 200 company for fifteen years, after which into the work I have done in providing mindful leadership training to leaders from around the globe, I’ve consistently discovered that the very best leaders’ qualities get far beyond “getting the work done.” top leaders are women and men who've first-class training, bright minds, hot hearts, a separate embrace of these mission, a connection that is strong their colleagues and communities, therefore the courage to be available to what's right here. They’re driven to excellence, innovation, and making a positive change. Yet time and again, they feel as though their abilities and their leadership training are inadequate. They tell me that even while they execute well and meet with the quarterly objectives, they merely do not feel they've been residing their finest lives at work or in the home. They feel something is missing. But what? Probably the most answer that is frequent: Space. We frequently simply would not have the area, the breathing space, essential to be clear and focused, also to listen deeply to ourselves and to others. It requires training and courage to intentionally create such space as we saw in Jim’s story. One of many means people place space to their lives is by attending a mindful leadership retreat. On a recent retreat which I led, Sarah, a midcareer marketing director, described her time as “running a gauntlet.” She, like numerous others, juggles a new household and a career that is successful. After one of the retreat’s early-morning meditation practice sessions, she shared with the other participants that her life had been filled to your brim: “I get halfway throughout the day and feel effective, because I think i have to be accomplishing a great deal. All things considered, I’ve been running from meeting to meeting. Something helpful must certanly be happening! In addition to that, I’m getting reviews that are good my manager.” Later that time, as Sarah started to use the unscheduled time during the retreat to avoid and take a better view that which was occurring in her day, she begun to realize that there may be a big difference between a filled schedule and a full life. “I’m just checking the boxes in the list that is to-do” she stated, “but I’m not really there. I never have sufficient time become as imaginative or innovative as I understand i really could be. And often i'm therefore rushed into the time if i had some more time. which I simply give a quick approval getting a project off my desk despite the fact that a part of me knows i may have contributed more to it” Sarah recognized the cost that living on a treadmill that is nonstop accept us. For starters, creativity as well as the innovation that outcomes from healthier collaboration often suffer: how can we expect you'll create the connections with your colleagues and communities we are so busy that all we can really do is check off boxes, squeeze in a perfunctory hello to our co-workers, and get through the day’s meetings and calls that we need when? Can we realistically expect leadership excellence when we invest entire days on autopilot looking at our watches and wondering where the went, looking at the calendar and wondering how it could be spring when just yesterday it was Thanksgiving day? Whether our leadership affects millions, hundreds, or a handful, we could no further afford to be on autopilot within our lifestyles, with our families, or in our organizations. We could no longer afford to skip the connections with those we work with, those we love, and the ones we provide. We could not any longer make choices with distracted minds, responding instead of responding or initiating. We could no further lose touch with what motivated us to lead into the place that is first. We are in need of mindful leadership to lead with excellence. Up to now we have been exploring the requirement to show up for leadership functions in the workplace. There clearly was an equally, or simply more, crucial have to be present for the leadership functions in your personal life. Quality involves making aware alternatives about not just how you work but the way you live your life and exactly how you relate with your loved ones, friends, and community. We need mindful leadership to live with quality. What excately is a mindful leader?A mindful leader embodies leadership development programs existence by cultivating focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion into the service of other people.Leadership existence is a quality that is tangible. It takes complete and complete nonjudgmental attention within the moment that is present. Those around a mindful frontrunner see and believe that existence. A friend of mine made a decision to attend a rally that is local see if he could get an essential healthcare question answered by presidential prospect Bill Clinton. Needless to say, when he arrived, he encountered a teeming, screaming audience, but he maneuvered his option to the authorities barricade and waited. Clinton soon arrived and started walking over the barricade hands that are shaking. As my buddy stretched out his hand and Clinton took it, he yelled away their concern. The candidate stopped, faced him, and responded to the question in that moment. Later my pal told me, “In those few moments whenever we spoke together, it seemed as if Clinton had nothing else on their head. It was just as if there clearly was no other individual there.” He felt respected and heard. That’s leadership existence: you give your attention that is full to you’re doing, among others understand it. Leadership existence is effective. In your own life, you often will recall instances when you experienced leadership presence, either in yourself or somebody else. It could have been around in a one-on-one conversation, or it may have been in an audience filled up with people. Presence can be sensed also from far away. You can truly remember the far more typical experiences whenever you feel only partially within the space, or perhaps you have the person speaking that is you’re is not really there. As with any of us, even when you have every intention to be focused, your mind becomes easily distracted—thinking about the past or the near future, and only partially in today's if at all. In those moments, you are not embodying the capacity that is innate possesses to be current. Exactly why is that? Exactly what do we understand about being present? As a new, you could remember a moment when you experienced awareness that is full a situation. When here seemed to be nothing else but what you may were noticing. This might have already been a moment that is momentous the delivery of one's kid. For the reason that brief moment, time seemed to stay nevertheless, and nothing else existed but the warmth of that miraculous being softly resting in your hands. You had been not distracted by the to-do list or the noises in the hall. Your attention mind that is full, and heart was completely consumed in that minute. Or it may have already been an ordinary minute, the kind often overlooked and not especially celebrated. You might have lingered to note a sunset. Perchance you recall it stopped you dead in your tracks and held you in its beauty, all of you, for just what seemed like forever but in clock time might have been one or two hours seconds. In those moments, you became conscious of the shades of red and orange, the play that is intricate of and shadow, your body’s consumption of this waning power of nature, while the sense of belonging to one thing bigger than your self. Perchance you had been at the cafe each day, the mind rushing through the main points of this future time, and you also seemed up from your own coffee and also noticed an item of art on the wall or the warm, comforting aroma regarding the shop. Whatever it absolutely was, it interrupted the busy brain, and you were living that moment of your life more completely. Such moments when we completely inhabit our anatomies and our sensory faculties have reached work with significantly more than an interior storyline, checklist, or rehearsed conversation are what give life meaning that is true. Beyond that, for all of us who hold jobs of impact, the capability to be present, to embody leadership existence, isn't just critical around us: our families and friends, the organization we work within, the community we live in, and potentially the world at large for us as individuals, but it also has a ripple effect on those. Just like a pebble thrown into a still pond can cause ripples spreading through the whole regarding the pond, therefore too can the cultivation of leadership presence get far beyond the effect it's on us alone. If the Institute works together with a company to create leadership development programs that is mindful to its employees, we witness an example of the ripple effect. We frequently start with retreats or courses for any more leaders that are senior and as working out starts to change how they lead, those around them notice the modification and quickly ask to enroll into the training as well. It is maybe not unusual to hear people tell tales associated with change they seen in their manager. As one individual described it, “I’m here on retreat since when we asked my manager exactly how she generally seems to constantly make me feel as if I’m important and what I have to say is valuable, even if I know she is swamped with work, she proposed I explore leadership that is mindful. So, right here I am.” As leaders we all know that individuals frequently underestimate the impact, for better or even worse, we have actually on those around us. We are distracted and on autopilot when we are present and engaged, the effect is very different from when. However it isn’t sufficient to want to be more present, to wish to have a ripple effect that is positive. We have to train the mind. The job of developing leadership existence through mindfulness begins by recognizing how much time we spend in a state of mind who has come to be called continuous attention that is partial. If you’re similar to of us, you most likely just take pride in your power to multitask, to be incredibly efficient by simultaneously listening to a conference call, writing a e-mails that are few and consuming your salad at your desk. Problem for you? Yet, once you were paying attention in in the call, did you really hear anything? Did you share your most useful thinking in the e-mails? Did you love your meal, or also realize that you ate it? Possibly certainly one of my many lessons that are memorable the expense of multitasking came early one morning when I sat within my desk, getting things prepared for on a daily basis full of meetings and reviewing the newest emails. Among the communications that morning originated from my hubby, who had been forwarding an e-mail from my daughter’s teacher. It absolutely was asking us to select one of the parent-teacher that is available slots on her calendar, and my hubby desired to know what type i needed before he replied. We had written to my husband, “Thursday at 10 would be great love that is forever, many thanks for last night.” Fine. Except that in my haste and attention that is partial we wrote those terms to my daughter’s teacher. Needless to say, once I finally discovered exactly what took place, it became a moment to remember. No harm there, a few relatively small embarrassment. Needless to say, those of us who've been into the workforce for just about any period of time can aim to daily e-mails containing mistakes and incomplete, hastily arranged ideas of questionable merit. A few minutes of people-watching in the hallways at the job or in the sidewalk in the front of one's building can additionally present a taste associated with the disconnection that outcomes from multitasking. You’ll notice people texting and checking e-mails while they walk, barely avoiding walking into walls and every other. This has also become acceptable to get this done when walking—and supposedly having a conversation with another person. As soon as upon a right time, this might have already been considered rude. Placing ways apart, though, continuous partial attention can be exhausting and inefficient. Neuroscience is now showing us that the mind’s capacity for multitasking is very limited. We’re really built for doing one thing at any given time. The hallways of offices had previously been places for casual greetings and impromptu conversations. Valuable connections could be manufactured in the hallways. Physiologically, a walk down the hallway used to permit a few moments of room when you could keep behind the ideas associated with the last meeting and reach the next with a bit of openness. Today, few if any connections are created, as everyone else rushes down the hall with thumbs blazing on smart phones. As a result, every person gets to the next conference nevertheless connected to the final one. We lead hurried, fractured, complex lifestyles, and we be seemingly more easily losing the richness and engagement which come from being within the moment that is present. With all the many ways our company is enticed to get sidetracked, to drown our intuition out, and also to fragment our attention, we are able to easily undergo our entire life without ever bringing our capabilities and awareness of any provided minute. Exactly what do we do about this? Is leadership presence a normal present possessed by a unique few, or could it be developed? Can we train our minds to support our intention to call home life with focus, quality, imagination, and compassion even though our everyday lives are hurried, fractured, and complex? Thankfully, we are able to. Leading with quality, being completely present for just what we do, and linking with others these are innate abilities most of us have. Those who are good leaders, and those who aspire to be good leaders, are eager to cultivate these abilities in my experience. Leadership development programs training can perform just that. By after simple practices that hone your attention along with your capability to be familiar with what’s going on in your body and mind at any given moment, you might use your capabilities clear minds and hot hearts and wise choices and begin to see the link between leading from an authentic place. via Blogger http://ift.tt/29GOG5i July 17, 2016 at 02:14PM |