It's a Performance Family, Not a Blood Family

                  In many organizations around the world, the word “family” is used as a form of self-description by the leaders.  Organizations do have aspects that are similar to family.  People spend a lot of time together.  They share a lot of experiences together, some mundane and some quite intense and meaningful.  They develop strong affections for and loyalty to each other. 

                But there is a critical difference between a blood family and a work family, particularly a business family.  Most blood families allow for a wide spectrum of behaviors on the part of their members.   There is an implicit understanding that you’d have to do something way out of bounds for a blood family to eject you.   A business family’s bottom line is not blood but performance.  It is a performance family.  There is an explicit understanding that underperformance is grounds for dismissal.  In corporations, this applies to the CEO as well as the lowest paid front-line employees. 

                In conducting dozens of educational seminars and town hall meetings in businesses, I have always emphasized this point, especially in those smaller businesses where the owners are emotionally closer to their workforce.   I usually say something like this:  “No matter how much your owner loves you, you have to perform.  This is a performance family, not a blood family.  Now, it is management’s responsibility to make sure that you have a very clear picture of what constitutes a good job in your position so that you know if you’re doing well and can self-correct or ask for help when you know you’ve fallen short.  But we all have to perform.  As your company coach, that applies to me as well.  If I don’t deliver the value the boss is looking for, our relationship is likely to end.  So let’s be clear that the boss can love you as a person but not love you as a worker in your particular position.  If necessary, he may have to love you right out the door.  So let’s not mistake a performance family for a blood family.   But on the other hand, let’s celebrate that this is a place that cares about you and actively works to listen to you and nurture you so that you can perform well and experience the benefits of job stability, being part of a great team and hopefully traveling a path toward increasing competency, responsibility, income and joy in your work.”

Strength versus Toughness

   One of the most common misunderstandings on the part of people in management/leadership roles is the thought that "you have to be tough" in order to be effective.  "You can't get too close to your people.  After all, you might have to fire them."  Or, "Sometimes you have to give a real a--chewing to someone and it's hard to do that if you're close." 
   Let's be very clear about this.  Tough and Strong are not the same.  Aggressive and assertive are not the same. People who prefer tough generally are operating out of an insecure energy, rather than the energy of confidence and competency.  I"ve worked for such people.  It's not always that they can't do it differently but just don't know there is an alternative.  They don't realize that you don't have to give anyone an a--chewing.  There are better ways to talk to people, ways that are more likely to get you positive results.  These authoritarian approaches don't project a calm and strong sense of self, a sense that it's possible to havedirect but empathetic talks with underperformers.  But the truth is, the closer you get to people in a genuine way, the more affecton and respect they feel for you, the more likely they are to dig deep and give you their all.  You'll notice I used affection and respect in the same sentence.  You've got to have both.  You've got to be good enough at relationship that you can evoke both feelings roughly in equal measure.  It is a false assumption to believe that people won't respect you if you're too close to them.  People will not respect you if you're unable to tell them the truth with decency. So, if you either don't tell them the truth, sugarcoat it or are unnecessarily bombastic and hurtful, no, people won't respect you.
    Most of us want to be close to our leaders.  We want to know and be known by them.  We want to feel that we are on the same quest.  I have worked for "too tough" and "too nice".  They are equally limited.  I have also worked for and with a few people who are strong enough to be warm, fully engaged and straight to the point about shortfalls.
   This is not as hard to accomplish as most people think.  If you're in a leadership position, you undoubtedly have many positive qualities.  You are probably already a fair communicator.  Maybe no one has either given you permission or offered a model of what it looks like to be calm, straight, clean and empathetic in sensitive situations, but you can find your way there, as I and others have. You can mobilize the energy of confidence and competency rather than trying to play from a weak side.
    In my book, The Superman Syndrome (2000) I give a comprehensive treatment of how we deal with "prima donnas" in our organizations.  These are people who actually are very productive but reach their numbers in ways that tend to breathe toxicity into the culture and actually limit or depress the performance of others.  Leaders coming from the weak side fear confronting these people becaue "I need their production."  Arrogant leaders think, "I don't need them!"  Neither attitude is helpful.  The essence of my coaching with prima donnas is as follows:  We sit down and tell such folks in a calm, "You're a good producer.  We value your production.  You make a number of important contributions to the organization, but you are also doing things that undercut those contributions very seriously and they are not acceptable."  Now we give them a clear description of the offensive behavior and just one example, with the assurance that there are many more examples, unfortunately. We don't allow the person to respond until we're done.  We continue, "You might try to deny you do this, but that would be a waste of your energy.  You do it.  I know it. Your coworkers know it...and I'm pretty sure you know it.  So now the question is, 'Do you want to change and are you capable of changing to eliminate that behavior?'  So what I want you to do is take the next two days off to think about this.  I want you to come back to me then and tell me either you are all in for the personal growth we're calling for or you can't and won't do it...in which you are choosing to leave.  That would be unfortunate and sad, but the status quo is unfortunate and sad...and unacceptable.  So think it through.  We hope you'll decide to stay and commit yourself to some very positive changes.  We'll see you in a few days."  This is Management by Truth.   It is assertiveness without aggression and it works.
  This is just one example of how you can be direct and yet decent.  There are many others we could offer in less acute situations.  Bottom line?  A great leader does not fear getting too close to his people because he knows he strong enough to serve the greater good of the organization, even if that means having to terminate someone he cares about deeply.  See http://www.bobkamm.com/ for more...or purchase The Superman Syndrome on http://www.amazon.com/

One of the Unsung Greats of the 20th Century

   When Time Magazine put Einstein on its cover as the Man of the Century, I frankly cringed.  Don't get me wrong.  I find Einstein fascinating and there is no doubt he had a huge impact on the 20th Century...but in many ways, a negative impact.  Even though he warned about the dangers of nuclear weapons, he was their father.
   A better choice for that cover would have been W. Edwards Deming.  Deming was the father of The Quality Movement.  He was sent to Japan right after the war to begin to establish some basic metrics for what was a devastated society and economy. He had a Masters in Mathematics and a PhD in Physics. He was not only ferociously competent in those fields, having established an outstanding track record at Western Electric and doing work for our own government.  He was also a curious and compassionate man by nature.  He did not look down upon the defeated Japanese but rather befriended them.  In 1950, he was invited by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers to address their members.  At that point in time, even the brightest members of Japanese society were still deeply traumatized by the war.  They had no clarity about how to rebuild their society and economy.  They had practically no natural resources, they thought.  Deming taught them they could import resources and create high quality products the world would run to buy.  So began The Quality Movement.  People in the States laughed at a lot of the early Japanese efforts--such as transistor radios that worked for a short time and then ended up in the trash.  But the Japanese knew Deming was onto something and they stuck with it.  Toyota, Honda and many other Japanese companies would not be what they are today were it not for Deming.  The Deming Prize is the highest civilian honor you can receive in Japanese society today. 
  It wasn't until the early 1980's that our own country was ready to embrace Deming.  Corporate leaders had rejected his teachings after the war, mistakenly believing that quality costs more.  Right after the war, it was a seller's market, huge demand.  Corporations didn't want to take the time to learn a new way, even if it was in their own best interests.  But in the early 1980's, we were in a serious recession and minds were more open.
Over the next 13 years, Deming was in high demand all over the country.  America's major corporations either called him in for consulting or sent their managers to his 4 day seminar on Quality, Productivity and Competitive Advantage.  Minds were changed at AT&T, at Nashua Paper, at Ford...and on a much more humble level, in police departments and municipalities, in small entrepreneurships and NGO's.
  I attended this seminar in 1992 in San Jose, California.  There were 550 people in attendance.  Deming was 92 and he lectured for 6 hours a day.  The other 2 hours were directed by his assistants, all of which were PhDs in related fields.  Being in that room with Deming was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  The man had a deeper and broader vision of humanity than just about anyone who lived anywhere in the Century with the few exceptions of Gandhi, King and perhaps Winston Churchill. 
  The extraordinary leaps and bounds of the quality of our every day products is due directly to what Deming taught.  MIT Professor Peter Senge's work on The Learning Organization (his big book was The Fifth Discipline...Systems Thinking) was a direct outgrowth of Deming.  The ISO 9000 and its descendents, such as Six Sigma, all outgrowth of Deming's work.  When you hear the term "continuous improvement" you are in Deming's arena.
  I'll write more about Deming as I go on.  But for now, I encourage you to learn about his work yourself.  I recommend starting with Mary Walton's book, The Deming Management Method, and Rafael Aguayo's, Dr. Deming.  This was a truly extraordinary man whose child is quality, not weaponry.  For more, go to www.bobkamm.com

And What of Courage?

   Clearly, great leadership involves courage, a word from the French meaning
"an act of the heart."  Courage is a companion of Conviction, which not only means a powerful belief but by extension, the determination to act in accordance with that belief, to bend the world to that belief. The word, "conviction" comes from a Latin root that means "subdue"...so to believe and to subdue reality in alignment with that belief. 
   An obvious person who comes to mind here from my teens is Martin Luther King, Jr.  This man had an exquisitely fierce belief in the rightness of his cause.  While his first and immediate focus was securing the rights of blacks, he fought for the rights of all humans.  He went into the streets...was arrested, threatened but undeterred.  This was Courage and Conviction operating together for maximum potency, girded by King's Clarity and his Consciousness of the broader issue. In fact, we can readily see all of the C's operating in him, as we do in Gandhi, the man who so deeply influenced him.
   Some might ask, "What separates such a leader from, say, a monster like Hitler, et al?  Aren't all these men marked by most of the C's you're talking about?   The answer is actually quite simple:  they are lacking in Compassion.  And this returns to the point I've made earlier that the C's are not a menu but an ensemble and that all are necessary to achieve great leadership.  A great leader has Compassion, even respect,for those who oppose his efforts.  He knows that if we sacrifice our compassion to hatred in defeating another, we will be ultimately little or no better than he. A great leader lives in accordance with the deepest teachings of all the wisdom paths humanity has given rise to: to live thy neighbor as thyself, to turn the other cheek, to live thine enemies.  To the degree that we fall short of those teachings, we still have plenty of work to do.
   King was a man, so I would not be surprised if people close to him saw flashes of anger, sadness, even bitterness.  All leaders experience such things and those experiences are not a negation of their compassion but just a mark of their humanity.  If we demand absolute purity from our leaders, we are denying their humanity, and our own.  In fact, the longing for heroes may, to some unfortunate degree, be driven by such a denial of the complexity of our emotional nature. Beware of absolutes.  No one can measure up to them over time.  So the question is not, "Are you compassionate every second every day towards those who oppose you?"  The question is, "In the long run, what is your disposition towards all humans, including your enemies?"  King demonstrated a rare Constancy in his practice and portrayal of an all-encompassing compassion that ultimately is the only true path away from violence in our species.

The Central C?

   So, yes, our language lends itself to some wonderful alliterations and clusters around topics as I have pointed out with the letter C and how it stimulates language to describe great leadership.  In the last blog, I listed 14 C's.  The one to which I most frequently refer with my clients and colleagues is Clarity.  Great leaders have the capacity to reach clarity on complex topics and usually faster than most of the people around them.  They also have the accompanying skill of achieving clarity in their communication about their ideas.  Without clarity of understanding and communication there is no vision and, as the good book says, "Without vision, the people perish."  So does this make Clarity the "central C?"  Tempting, but remember, while we love our Powerpoint presentations and the idea of one C being central to all the others offers some tempting simplicity for some overhead slides, The C's are an organic whole.  No one is more important than another.  It can seem so, but the resounding truth is that only when they are all vibrantly present in someone are we likely to be able to say, "That is a great leader."
  So at this writing, we have fourteen C's of Great Leadership. Do we need another list of descriptors for great leadership?  Sure we do.  We need an ongoing discussion to continuously remind ourselves of the subtlty and breadth of specific energies that must be mobilized to master this particular art...and it is an art.  It's a good idea to err on the side of over-communicating on topics of substance. On my website, http://www.bobkamm.com/,  I have a discussion of the 4 E's (Entrepreneurship, Efficiency, Effectiveness and Empathy...available from the leadership consulting page) which takes a  little different look at this, as well as an article called "Trust Centered Leadership" on the home page. 
   Of course, there are many great books that have taken a look at this, not the least of which would be Covey's Principle-Centered Leadership, Executive EQ by Cooper and Sawaf, and Good to Great, by Collins, in which he reveals what he calls Level 5 Leadership, Primal Leadership by Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee, and Servant Leadership by Greenleaf.  This is an ongoing discussion humans have been having about the topic probably dating back to our early tribal ancestors.  Maybe we'll eventually distill it down to just a few C's or other words that contain or imply all the rest.  But for now, better to keep the conversation big, broad and voluble.  Let's have our own conversation. 
   To recap, here are the C's of Great Leadership, in random order...because they are all important and they each are necessary but not sufficient to achieve great leadership.  They constitute a living breathing organic whole.
   1.Curiosity
   2.Collaboration
   3.Compassion
   4.Commitment
   5.Connection
   6.Conviction
   7.Consistency
   8.Constancy
   9.Creativity
  10.Clarity
 11.Consciousness
 12.Competency
 13. Courage
 14.Core Values. 

  I'm going to write about each and all as time unfolds, but I will not do so sequentially.  My own mind functions better when I let it follow its own impulses, rather than having to put everything in neat order...life is not neat.  Leadership is not neat. My mind is associational in nature.  In the mean time, feel free to jump in and offer some thoughts and examples regarding any that are immediate for you.

The C's of Leadership

It's amazing how language works.  When I think about leadership, a lot of words beginning with the letter C come to mind:  Curiosity, Collaborative Spirit, Compassion, Connection, Commitment, Conviction, Constancy, Creativity, Consistency, Competency, Core Values, Courage, Clarity and Consciousness.  There may be more but those are the ones that quickly surface.  It's unlikely you could come up with such a long list with, for example, the letter E.  Each C is necessary but not sufficient unto itself to engender great leadership.  They are an ensemble of qualities that call forth specific behaviors that in turn engender congruent systems, processes, and policies.  I'll be exploring their meaning and application in the arena of great leadership as time goes by.  I've already mentioned Curiosity.  It impels us to ask lots of good questions, to seek out the best sources of information and to get people involved in crafting solutions.  Let me mention Collaboration here just briefly in one context.  There is a myth that leaders are "self-made" men or women.  I think Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers has put this to rest.  But let us put flowers on the coffin by affirming that no one ascended to great leadership without the participation of many other people, as mentors, colleagues, followers, students, even distant influencers.  Generally, when we put a bunch of smart people in a room, the IQ goes up...as long as there is Trust--a Core Value--that people can speak their minds freely.  So Collaborative Spirit is another mark of great leaders.  Humility is another Core Value that plays out through Collaboration.  Great leaders certainly have ego drive, but it is tempered by a realistic sense of their own limitations...which is just another reason to reach out and invite others to participate.

Welcome to My Blog on Leadership

   Welcome! Welcome, specifically, to an ongoing discussion about leadership. I've been working in various arenas of leadership since I was a kid.  It has always intrigued me. Why do some people naturally rise to positions of visibility and influence with relatively little effort?  Why do others so avidly want to follow them, for there is no leadership without followership.  What are the qualities and behaviors that separate the great from the rest of the field?  How do they get that way?  Is it genetics?  Upbringing?  Destiny?  Divine guidance?  All of the above?  Why is it that even the greatest seem to have fatal or near fatal flaws?  Can folly be avoided?  Is there some kind of formula that good leaders can apply to elevate to greatness?
We're going to dive and dive deeply into all of these possibilities and more.
   In the United States, we are particularly fond of sports and military metaphors.  We seem implicitly attuned to the possibilites of leadership in both those arenas.  I'm sure we're not the only culture with such a bent.
I was in Costa Rica recently and was struck by the avid followers of soccer teams and all the press on the key members of those teams as well as their coaches.  Certainly, leadership matters in sports and in the military.  But it also matters in any community of intention, from children trying to raise money for a class field trip to non-profit organizations try to raise money to help the misfortunate, from the mayoral offices of small towns to the palaces of the powerful in Washington, Paris, Mosco, Beijing, New Delhi, London, and so on.
Why do we so favor sports metaphors to define this area when there are so many other arenas in which leaders rise and "strut and fret their hour upon the stage"?  Is it because sports are easy to relate to or because these examples really do strike at the essence of what otherwise seems awfully complex? 
   Well, we're going to dive into that question, too.
   It might not surprise you to learn at this moment that I believe one of the many marks of great leaders is CURIOSITY, and the ongoing practice of asking cogent questions and getting their followers involved in finding the answers.  So I invite you into this inquiry with me.  Go ahead and take a shot at answering any of those I've posed here...or let me know what else you'd like to ask.  The world is clearly in need of great leadership. Maybe our discussion will help guide and grow someone whose name is currently unknown to us but who, through clarity, compassion, creativity and determination, will have a positive impact somewhere on the planet.
  For more on me, feel free to visit any of the following:  http://www.bobkamm.com/, http://www.slrii.com/, http://www.loveover60.com/