Power & Love

September 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ying and Yang, Eros & Agape, Inside & Outside, Profit & Contribution…

Power & Love?

Are you still listening?

It’s funny how a word can awaken so many of our preprogramming. Adam Kahane wrote an interesting book on Power and Love that is extremely relevant to Leadership. He has found a generative and degenerative side of both of these dimensions and does a nice job of explaining how whole, mature leadership is a combination and/or cooperation between the two drives. Both and again it seems.

Here’s a video of a speech he gave at the RSA a while back:

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The Truth Comes Out In the End, Doesn’t It?

September 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As everyone knows, Norway was struck to a homegrown terrorist this summer. The damage and death he managed to cause, seemingly alone, is beyond belief. The Norwegian summer idyll was shaken to its roots.

In the weeks since this tragedy the news papers have been in overdrive, sometimes investigating and other times sensationalizing the events of 22 July. I’ve been struck by the lack of openness coming from the government throughout this process – most specifically the police and secret police.

This would be possible to debate if the statements made by the leaders of these organizations held true over time. That’s not what’s happened. Initial claims that everything was done as it should have been done have been disproven over and over again.

Just days ago the newspapers reported that the police had never used their helicopters as sharpshooter platforms. Today the papers report multiple examples of them being used for exactly that.

I’m not writing this post to criticize the police or talk about helicopters. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for what many individuals must be going through as they process the things they did and saw on that horrible day in July.

What I’m writing about is Leadership and vulnerability and truth. In today’s day and age, the truth often comes out and the press & public jump on situations that smell fishy or not authentic. This is exactly what has happened here. Leaders who are unable to admit mistakes may have been made in the heat of the moment during the course of an event no one could have imagined are like divers throwing chum in the water around them. The sharks will come.

I hope that leaders in the police and elsewhere will learn from this experience and choose to be more authentic and maybe even more vulnerable in the future. That might make things easier on all of us.

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The Le.ad Project Trailer

June 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

We’ve been working hard on The Le.ad Project, a film project that focuses on finding an interviewing sustainable leaders. We have a trailer ready and it’s available on Vimeo.

As of today, we’ve done two interviews and we have three more scheduled for July in the US. We’re on track to launch a new website (at 2le.ad) that showcases these leaders; specifically where they found their inspiration, learned to lead and made a positive impact on the world.

Here’s the trailer – we hope you like it!

 

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New Project – Leadership Film Project

May 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In April we launched a working group consisting of individuals from various industries that share a desire to make a difference by focusing on leadership. Over the last two months we’ve been working on a film project based on an idea we hatched late last year. The concept has to do with the role models up and coming leaders model themselves after. We conducted a short research project where we interviewed leaders in the target group to better understand their challenges, worries, goals and development areas. We used this information to compile a list of common issues/questions that we could use in interviews with experienced leaders.

When we thought more about experienced leaders, we discovered that we were most interested in those that really practice Leadership, build great cultures where employees thrive, give back to the community (#CSR) and create results.

We conducted our first interview on May 9th with Ingar Skaug, the former CEO of Wilh. Wilhelmsen (a shipping company based in Norway that has a global reach and has a history of innovation on a variety of fronts). Ingar is a visionary leader when it comes to Corporate Culture and Strategy among other things. He also serves as the Chairman of Petroleum Geological Services (PGS) and the US based Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).

Ingar Skaug during our first interview

Our second interview will be shot on June 7th with Pår Larshans, Chief Sustainability Officer for the Stockholm based MAX Hamburgers. MAX has been recognized globally as an innovator in sustainability and employment practice. They have made great strides in reducing the environmental impact of their business and also focused on employing individuals with disabilities.

This summer we hope to conduct to interviews in the US and then increase our pace through the fall until we are able to launch a website where we showcase the insights offered by these Visionary Leaders. We intend to create a place where the world’s up and coming leaders can come for inspiration and input as they choose how they would like to develop during the course of their careers!

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Are we the leaders we need?

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

No doubt you’ve noticed that the world is a pretty chaotic place at the moment. There are unpredictable mechanisms in motion in most regions of the world. Some are catastrophes and some are evolutions that seem like they could just as easily go the other way. During my childhood we had the cold war – which as black and white. Then we had perestroika and it’s idealism – “the new openness” that later gave way to realism. All the while the west enjoyed great prosperity that fueled never before seen growth in China, India and in many other countries in Asia.

When Ronald Reagan demanded that the Gorbachev tear down the wall dividing Germany it was easier to have a grand vision. Freedom, democracy. progress.

The world has gotten more complicated since then. Democracy has been tried using different approaches with varying results in many places. Some have gotten unimaginably wealthy at the cost of the stability of the world’s economy. Only some of them have been punished for their irresponsibility and selfishness.

As a father of three young children, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of world they will live in. Richard Barrett, a leading values guru, wrote an interesting post on the state of leadership in 2011. It was pretty bleak and resulted in one comment (from me, after more than two months). Are we asleep at the wheel merely working to “get ours?”

Have we given up our capacity for healthy values and  vision, and instead settled into a sort of drugged apathy fueled by consumerism? Is this a gap between generation shifts?

For me, these are important questions and they need to be addressed. What will you do?

Will you be one of the leaders we need?

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Norway entering the age of customer experience

March 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Great customer service but mediocre overall customer experience won’t be enough over the long-haul

Over the seven years I’ve living in Norway (Oslo), I’ve seen “progress” on many fronts.

  • Selection has improved.
  • Customer service has improved.
  • Follow-up has not improved.

While watching a Fast Company video from the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in the US, I felt compelled to write this post. The video showed an interaction between a Groupon.com client and Groupon.com’s VP of Sales. The Summary goes like this (my paraphrasing):

Groupon has perfected their editorial voice, they are absolutely killing it in terms of marketing and brand. The problem is operations and to a degree the handoff from marketing, brand and sales to operations. The brilliance shown in the branding and marketing is by no means matched on the operations side. Promises are made by sales that are then broken by ops. The ops folks don’t always understand what was sold, etc.

I predict that one of the next revolutions in Norway will have to do with the quality of the whole experience a customer has with a vendor. Here are two examples of how it is today:

  1. I want to buy a pair of jeans so I visit a fancy shmancy jeans store on Bogstadveien in Oslo. The salesman is interested in his job, he does a great job helping me and finds jeans that match how I describe my taste. Great job! Here’s the rub – they didn’t have the right size in on of the colors. He writes my name, number and order in a weathered little notebook that is then stashed in a drawer under the register. I know then and there that I will never hear from them again (unless I ask). I shouldn’t have to ask. (I never hear from them.)
  2. I call one of Norway’s largest telecom’s to talk about my business service. The girl is nice on the phone but can’t answer my question and asks if she can call back. I say yes. She never calls back.

This is typical of today’s customer experience in Norway (if you ask me). If your need can be satisfied on the spot, you’ll be pleased with the service you receive. If you need anything that requires follow-up, more often than not it will fall through the cracks.

The next revolution will have to do with the total customer experience. Not long ago the major challenge here in Norway was availability. As selection of goods and services rapidly improves, consumers will be pleased with how they see they market developing and be more impressed with the selection than anything else. When this activity levels off, they will expect other things like better customer service (this is where we are now). After a period of time the total experience will be how a company is evaluated.

This is what the Fast Company video eluded to – it’s not enough to have world class branding, marketing and sales. You have to have a production apparatus that lives up to and delivers on the promises made by the first. And I’m not talking about a better notebook here…

Things have been developing quickly in my short time here, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next!

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Adecco Medical Norway show’s us how important values are

February 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The importance of values-based leadership demonstrated by Addecco.

Hindsight is always 20/20, right? It’s easy to be critical of others’ mistakes, however sometimes it’s important to learn from them.

I’m sure the former director of Adecco Medical never intended to end up in the situation he finds himself in now. It’s also impossible to say how and why he ended up there. What causes a respected company that provides a critical service to makes such horrible decisions? We’re talking about the kinds of decision that, once they become publicly known, cause great damage to the company’s business and reputation. Lying about it to the press only makes it worse, especially when the things be lied about are items of fact.

So what happened here and how can companies prevent this sort of thing happening in the future?

In August of 2010 I had a meeting with a CEO where we spoke about corporate values. His statement on the matter sums up how I think many leaders feel about the subject:

“Aren’t values something you just decide and then get back to work?”

That depends on who you and your organization want to be. I’m sure Adecco has corporate values, they may even be plastered all over their business cards, conference room walls, websites and annual reports. The thing we know for sure is that if they have them, they are not lived. They don’t walk the talk.

The fact that businesses are in business to earn a profit makes it extremely important that there is a counter-balance, a human element if you will. If we’re in business only to maximize profits we’ll make decisions to that end and potentially that end alone. In that setting it could be okay that employees work like the employees in Adecco did.

Is that good enough or do we expect something more from ourselves and companies we interact with on a day to day business?

Values help us decide what we should do when we think no one is looking.

Many companies invest a great deal of time on values processes that include the employees and then communication them far and wide.

In fact, the only thing that is critically important once a company establishes it’s values is that the CEO and leaders on all levels ensure that they behave according to them. Not doing so is not only extremely dangerous for the company (ala Adecco), it also creates a counter-productive culture that takes years to turn around.

Read more about the Adecco example:

Synopsis from newsinenglish.no:

Following a Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) investigation last week, which revealed that employees at Adecco Helse’s Ammerudlunden nursing home in Oslo had been working 84-hour weeks for years and slept in the basement, evidence of even more serious illegal activity has now been discovered at the Midtåsen nursing home (also in Oslo) and at Greverud in Akershus. At Greverud in particular, employees have apparently worked 100-hour weeks, with 20-hour days, for as long as 20-day stretches.

In English: newsinenglish.no

In Norwegian: NRK broke the story initially

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The Reluctant Leaders

February 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few months I’ve been interviewing leaders to find out how they experienced their transition into their first leadership role. One of the things that stood out was that many them are what I would call “reluctant leaders”.

Reluctant leaders often find themselves promoted to their first leadership position because they’ve proven their ability to do their job well. They describe being taken, at least partially, away from the profession they’ve spent years preparing for and being thrown into a new profession, leadership, one they feel unprepared for.

Then it seems that it truly becomes survival of the fittest – the same leaders describe different scenarios following their promotion with some similarities. Most feel that they don’t have access to direction and/or mentorship from their superiors. The standard reply seems to be “I trust you completely, I know you’ll figure out how to handle this” often followed by some form of “don’t “f” this up”. Their leaders are either too busy or far away to ensure their transition to leadership is smooth and supported. They are “thrown” into it and the stakes are sometimes high.

Leadership development programs don’t seem to help much either due to the fact they are either reserved for levels higher up in the organization or serve more as corporate policy education than leadership development.

The preceding paragraphs discuss the majority of responses from an unscientific research project. The potential conclusions are striking – do organizations take talented competent people and throw them into situations where they have little hope of being competent? Does this result in people that should be leaders not continuing? Many clever people don’t like feeling incompetent and avoid it – such an experience could lead many people that could be great leaders to give up on leadership altogether.

I don’t know why this dynamic exists in organizations and I should stress that these interviews are not scientific.

However, I think it’s safe to say that this dynamic exists and is important to better understand. Senior business leaders and the companies they lead have a responsibility for cultivating their next generation of leaders and my experience is that in most organizations this area is need of improvement.

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New Year’s Resolutions: the “meaning” organization

January 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Daniel Pink inspired us with his book Drive where he argues that people are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Purpose is another way of saying meaning – people can be more effective at work when they understand what is meaningful about what they do.

So you could say that I’m on the lookout for things that expand on this thinking. An HBR blog post titled The Shape of the Meaning Organization describes meaning in some more detail.

Food for thought for leaders looking to bring more Enterprise 3.o thinking into their organizations.

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How do healthy leaders maintain their balance?

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Leadership roles often attract narcissists according to Christian Enger Gimsø’s doctoral research at BI. The discussion around narcissism, power and position is ages old, examples of great leadership and poor leadership abound.

How do good leaders maintain their balance?

Every leader should understand that they are a “work in progress” and seek ways to secure and accelerate their personal and professional and professional. Professional development opportunities tend to be more straight forward and can include advanced education, on the job training, conferences, mentoring, etc. The personal development opportunities are less obvious. Life experience plays a role as do other activities outside of work like family life, travel, reflection, volunteering, etc.

In a coaching session recently, a client spoke about his leader group. He had a desire to bring the group’s performance to a new level but had reservations about two of the five team members.

“They just aren’t the type. They are purely action oriented – they aren’t interested in looking inside themselves. Don’t see any value in it”

This particular client is in a business where their individual results rule though that becomes a problem when they must create engagement, energy and action in the employees that work for them. Leaders that don’t look within themselves to see where their own development opportunities lie become handicapped when it comes to motivating employees.

So maybe this does boil down to things like narcissism and ego. A leader who looks upon him or herself some the knight in shining armor, the one who is carrying the operation will be limited by what he or she can get done herself. A leader who sees him or herself as part of something bigger, and something more important will be easier able to perform and create results through others.

Here’s the hitch – as objective as we’d all like to think we are – it’s not always easy to see which one of two we are..

Read the DN.no article here (in Norwegian)

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