I read a couple of articles yesterday that provided clear explanations of some complex topics – the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud charge against Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration’s efforts on nuclear non-proliferation. Before you click away from this post, hang in there with me because there’s a quick leadership point the long term perspective that I want to make.

But first, here’s the set-up.

If you’re a leader who employs a prima donna (one who produces great results but alienates everyone), what should you do? It’s simple. Bite the bullet and fire that person. Here are three reasons why you should:

Among the many things I like about our group coaching program, Next Level Leadership™,  one of my favorites is when the high potential leader participants share with each other what they learned in their senior executive shadow days. Here’s how the shadow day works. To broaden their perspective on the organizational presence aspect of leadership, the participants spend the day shadowing a senior leader in their business. The agenda is simple - be the senior executive’s shadow for the day. Attend her staff meetings, go to her briefings, sit in on meetings she has with the C suite or board members, meet with the customers. The high potential leader is there to observe and learn from whatever the senior exec is doing that day. If the senior executive is responsible for a different part of the organization than the high potential leader comes from, so much the better. It helps broaden the perspective of the high potential that much more.

It’s almost always an eye opening experience for the high potential leaders in the program. The fun part for me is listening to everyone come back together and tell their stories about what they did and saw on their shadow day. We had one of those sessions yesterday in a Next Level  Leadership™ program. As we’ve been having these shadow day debriefing sessions in different companies over the past few years, I’ve been keeping some notes about the traits of the senior executives that the group coaching participants admire the most. Here are five traits of the most admired leaders that show up on the list again and again:

In this week’s VBC, I address two compelling questions. What is a giant hairball and why should you consider orbiting one? The answers are contained in the gently subversive classic, Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie. As the self-appointed Creative Paradox at Hallmark Cards, MacKenzie figured out how to work successfully in a big organization and still keep your personality and sense of humor intact. 

Where do you go when you really need to think and get some serious work done? If the result of that work is some first rate food for thought, you might think of the place that enables you to create it as your mental kitchen. It’s that place where you can get out of the continuous stream of incoming distractions that redirect your attention every 10 or 15 minutes. It’s the place that enables you to focus your thinking and go deep. It’s almost certainly not your office because your office is full of cues that remind you of all the urgent work that keeps you from going deep on the important stuff that you need to cook up. So where is your mental kitchen? What kind of features do you need for your mental kitchen to be a place of maximum productivity for you?

OK, I’ll admit it. Sometimes when I’m sitting in my office cranking through e-mail responses, I listen to sports talk radio. Dan Patrick’s show is my favorite. Of course, one of the challenges with hosting a three hour radio show is you have to come up with enough stuff to talk about to fill the time. Some of the topics are more consequential than others.

One of yesterday’s topics was less so. It seems that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was in a bar with a bunch of guys lately, got a little loose with his tongue and, using some colorful language, started dissing on NFL prospect Tim Tebow and his own former head coach, Bill Parcells. We know all of this because one of the guys that Jones was talking to recorded the conversation with the video camera in his smartphone. That guy sent it to a sports blog called Deadspin which “made it OK” for ESPN and all the other sports media channels to pick up the story. Since this is a PG-13 rated blog, I won’t link to Deadspin or any other sites that are running the Jones video. If you’re curious, you can find it on YouTube. The last time I looked, it had about 130,000 hits.

So, what’s my point?  It’s this. As a leader, you are always being watched. That’s what I mean when I write in The Next Level that you need to pick up a big footprint of your role. In an age when most everyone is carrying some sort of digital video camera around in their pocket, you’re not just being watched, there’s a pretty excellent chance that you’re being recorded and may not even know it until you show up on someone’s blog or Facebook page. 

Right about now, you may be thinking, “Heck, I’m not Jerry Jones. No one’s ever going to record and put me on line.”  Really? Think again. Here’s a quick story from a less famous leader about going viral along with a few thoughts about how to deal with the “always on” environment that leaders live in today:

This is one of those posts where I have to get some things off my chest. As someone who grew up in West Virginia, the coal mine explosion in Montcoal that killed 29 miners last week has been on my mind and heart.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran brief obituaries on most of the miners.  Looking over those two pages, I said to my wife, “I feel like I knew these people.”  I grew up in Huntington, a town on the Ohio River that got its start as a rail and river town moving coal out of southern West Virginia.  When I was in high school, I travelled all over the state in a leadership role with the West Virginia District of Key Club. As a young adult, I travelled all over the state again when I worked for the governor of West Virginia and then in six years working for one of the largest banks in the state. In my mid-thirties, as VP of HR for Columbia Gas Transmission, I regularly travelled up and down the pipeline to small towns in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and throughout Appalachia. 

So, in a way, I knew the guys who worked in that mine. I grew up with people like them. They’re good people, who work hard, care about their families and are trying to make a good life for themselves and their kids. It goes without saying that coal mining is hard and inherently dangerous work. Still, the guys who died in that mine last week deserved a hell of a lot more than what they got.

One of the things I try to do is be mindful and present in the moment. I’m not saying I’m great at it. I just try to do it. I read somewhere once that your mind is kind of like a puppy. You can tell it to stay and pay attention,  but pretty soon it’s going to go skipping off somewhere else. Like a lot of people, I’ve found that meditation is a good practice for training the puppy that is my brain to stay. That, however, is a long term project.

My post from last week on Why Staff Leaders and Line Leaders Have Disconnects generated a lot of thoughtful and provocative comments from readers both on the Next Level blog and on the Executive Coach column at Government Executive magazine’s web site.

In case you missed it, the gist of the original post was that there is often a big disconnect between line and staff leaders because the initiatives that staff leaders drive are often seen as doing little to deliver what is actually required to achieve results. As management guru Dave Ulrich says, deliverables are greater than do-ables. That point certainly seemed to resonate with many of you and your comments offer some great ideas on how to close the line leader – staff leader gap.

In this post, I’m building on some of your ideas and adding some of my own to come up with five ways to close the gap.

My amazing wife Diane and I were talking last night about a post she wrote yesterday on her gluten-free, dairy free cooking blog. She’s really into British chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution show on ABC because Oliver has gone to my childhood hometown, Huntington, WV, to help the community learn to eat healthier.  In her post, Diane was talking about an episode in which Jamie got a bunch of high school kids together to cook a fancy and healthy dinner for 80 of the movers and shakers in Huntington. Everything went great with the meal and the kids took a lot of pride in learning to cook and serving it to the big shots. The point of Diane’s post was the value of getting your kids in the kitchen to teach them an important life skill like cooking a healthy meal.

We were talking about the importance of taking the time to call out what you want the next generation to learn. That’s a key role for both parents and leaders. That’s one of the points I was trying to make in my post earlier this week about world-renowned chef Thomas Keller training the next generation of chefs in the kitchen of his Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry. Our conversation reminded me of a real life situation that happened to me years ago that taught me the value of calling out what needs to be said. I mentioned it to Diane and she said I had never told her the story. I couldn’t believe that because it’s one of my favorite stories. I told her the story and she loved it. So, I’ll share it with you too. Maybe you’ll love it.

In my work as an executive coach, I regularly work with the executive leaders of “staff” functions such as IT, finance, human resources, legal and the like.  When I interview the colleagues of these clients to learn what others think about what makes them effective and what they could do to be even more effective, I often hear comments about the distinction between staff and line leaders. That distinction is almost always made by the “line” executives. These are the folks responsible for manufacturing, sales and delivery of the product or service to the customer. As most of them would tell you themselves, they’re the people who make the money. 

Here’s the challenge I see for staff leaders. Rightly or wrongly, most line leaders feel like what they do is way more important than what the staff leaders do. As a result, they often don’t have a lot of patience with the different initiatives or requirements promoted by staff leaders. One result is a disconnect between the line and the staff. Lots of time and effort is spent on initiatives that don’t get a lot of traction because the line leaders don’t value them and spend as little time as possible on them. So the result of that for staff leaders is that their roles and internal brand become diminished and they don’t make the contributions they could or should.

One of my mentors, Dave Ulrich, summed up the solution to this dilemma in a simple mathematical statement years ago:

D > d

You may not think that an entire book about checklists could possibly be interesting, but surgeon Atul Gawande pulls it off in The Checklist Manifesto. A skilled and engaging story teller, Gawande uses examples from medicine, aviation, finance, cooking, construction and other industries to explain how checklists raise performance in complex situations. Since so much of what we do today involves a series of complex steps, knowing how to construct and use a checklist is a good skill to have.

Food is a big deal in my house. My wife, Diane, is an accomplished cook and food blogger and, lucky for me, I get to eat her great meals. So, we were both interested in an article that ran in the Financial Times  over the weekend about how one of the best chefs in the world, Thomas Keller, is training the next generation of great chefs at his acclaimed Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry. It takes at least six months to get a dinner reservation there. Some good friends of ours had dinner there last week and Diane is getting together with one of them today to hear all the details. Dining at The French Laundry is definitely on our bucket list.

The FT article focused on a couple of young chefs who are in the midst of three month stints in the kitchen of The French Laundry. Both of these guys are accomplished in their own rights and one of them comes from a family of French chefs that owns a Michelin three star restaurant of its own. They’re no slouches themselves and, yet, they take three months off to apprentice alongside Keller and the rest of his team.

The Wine Spectator ran a special issue on Keller last month and part of the package was a two page spread on the dozens of great chefs around the world who have trained with him. Along with creating great food, Keller is clearly passionate about building a legacy of talent that will carry on long after he’s hung up his apron. How is he teaching this next generation? Here are a few things I learned from the FT article on his apprenticeship program that could apply to just about any leader who wants to build a legacy for the future:

Earlier this week, I received a study on Developing the Global Executive from Jeff Del Rossa a new friend of mine at Development Dimensions International (DDI). The study was authored by some colleagues of Jeff’s at DDI along with two other good friends, Scott Saslow and Nancy Thomas of the Institute of Executive Development (IED).I looked through the study with interest last night as one of the focal points for the second edition of The Next Level is to broaden the global executive perspective of the book through new interviews with leaders who have significant international experience. As I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, Listen and They Will Talk, one of the big themes that has come through in those interviews is the importance of listening skills to leadership success in a global environment.

There are some results in the DDI/IED study that seem to line up with the conclusion I’m drawing from my interviews. The study authors surveyed a wide range of global executives and development professionals who support them. One of the questions in the survey was, “What unique skills make for an exceptional global executive?” Here are the five skills that the global executives themselves think are most important:

This week, I present the last of ten videos from my overnight visit earlier this year to the USS Harry S Truman. This final installment is an overview clip which includes some parting words from the Truman’s commander, Captain Joe Clarkson, a ship to ship refueling at sea, flight deck activity, a look at how the mess staff feeds 3,000 to 5,000 sailors a day and how the crew stays healthy and fit while under way.

If your house is like ours, there are certain movies that you watch again and again. The test of a movie like that is if you’re flipping through the channels on TV and you see a favorite movie and you start watching it all the way through from that point forward. I have to confess that Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is one of those for me. I like really stupid humor. However, one that my wife and I can both agree on is The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. It’s a fun movie on a lot of levels not the least of which is Streep’s performance in which she sends up the real life editor of Vogue magazine, Anna Winotur. If people in real life are as scared of Wintour as people were of Streep in the movie, then she must have a lot of power.  From what I’ve read, Wintour’s power comes from her control over Vogue which, historically, has set the agenda for the multi-billion dollar fashion industry.

So, it was with the Prada movie in mind that I read an article in the New Yorker last night on a web site called Polyvore. The simplest way to describe Polyvore is that it’s an online destination for over 6 million visitors a month to cut and paste clothes they see elsewhere online into sets of items that they think look good together. As someone in the article said, it’s like the cyber version of playing with paper dolls. 

For me, the article was interesting because of the larger implications it held for leaders in the digital age.  Not to oversimplify, but it seems like the command and control leadership style exhibited by Streep/Wintour in the Prada movie is a relic of the analog age. The people behind Polyvore seem to have figured out what it takes to engage and lead people in the digital age. Here are a few of the ways I think they’re doing it:

If you’re a leader, you have to deal with change on a regular basis. If you’re a leader, you need to get your own copy of William Bridges’ book, Managing Transitions. It’s a classic and an invaluable resource in helping you think through and develop a plan for productively getting your organization through change. It’s full of tips, frameworks and checklists that will help you organize your thinking, communication and action plans.

In this week’s Video Book Club, I share a couple of my favorite lessons from my dog eared, marked up copy of Managing Transitions.

This was a bit of a rough weekend for my brother, Steve. His beloved, number one seeded Kentucky Wildcats lost their bid for the Final Four. Since Steve was a student manager for the UK basketball team during one of their Final Four runs in the 1980’s, he maybe took this weekend’s loss a little harder than most. As the Cats game against WVU wound down on Saturday night, I sent Steve a text message saying I was sorry they were losing. He wrote this back in response, “Hate it. Maybe some of the freshmen will decide to stay now.”

That got me thinking about how the tournament has gone this year and a broader lesson about talent management. For the most part, the teams that have made it to the Final Four or who exceeded expectations earlier in the tournament have top scorers who are more experienced players. Take a look at the Final Four. The top three scorers for both Duke and Michigan State are two juniors and a senior. For WVU, it’s a senior and two sophomores. For Butler, it’s a junior and two sophomores. When you look at the stats for the two big Cinderellas of the tournament, Cornell and Northern Iowa, there are five seniors and one junior making up the top trios of those teams. In contrast, Kentucky’s top three was made up of two freshmen and a junior. 

The point I’m trying to make is that great teams need time and experience to gel. So, with that in mind, here’s a quick list of talent management lessons that can help keep your team from being “one and done.”

Earlier this week, I was with a group of business owners in the training and performance industry. As you might imagine, it was a pretty energetic and creative group of people. Someone at the meeting shared with us a list of rules that comes from a book called Rules of Thumb. The author is Alan Webber who is the co-founder of one of my favorite magazines, Fast Company. Knew the magazine. Didn’t know the book. Happy to have found out about it.

Webber offers 52 Rules of Thumb for life in his book. I’ve reviewed the list several times now and thought I’d share my five favorite (or 9.62%) of Webber’s 52 rules. Here they are:

It’s been almost two months since my overnight visit to the USS Harry S Truman. Since then, I’ve posted video clips on Thursdays that feature some of the leaders of the ship and offer a look at life on board an aircraft carrier. Based on the stats from You Tube, the three most popular posts in the series so far have been:

• What I Learned on an Aircraft Carrier
• Executive Officer John Meier on What He Looks for in a Leader
• Commanding Officer Joe Clarkson on Leadership

There are other great clips that you can find on the Next Level Blog  by entering "Harry S Truman" in the search box.

What connects Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson and NBA championship coach Phil Jackson? Fair question. Both became experts in their chosen fields and benefited from the teachings of others. They both, in turn, dedicated significant portions of their careers to refining what they learned and then passing those lessons on to others.

Whether you’re for or against the health care bill, it’s pretty clear that the passage of the bill by the House will be one of the bigger stories of 2010. In all of the coverage of the debate, one clip I saw made a broader impression on me. It was President Obama’s speech to the congressional Democratic caucus on the day before the vote. I’ve been on West Coast time this week and when I got back to my hotel room on Saturday night, I watched the speech on C-SPAN.  (That probably says a lot about what a wild and crazy time I have on business trips.)  Anyway, the speech struck me as an interesting example of how to give a pep talk.

Sooner or later, every leader is faced with the challenge of rousing the troops to go out and do something hard. One of my favorite examples is the “Band of Brothers” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V.  For a highlight of that speech, check out this clip of Kenneth Branagh as Henry V psyching up the troops at Agincourt.

OK, I’m doing something different with VBC this week. I’m recommending a book I haven’t read yet. It’s called Leaders Make the Future. I feel pretty confident pitching it because I just spent the better part of two days listening to its author, Bob Johansen, talking about what’s in it.

Bob is a futurist and his forecast for ten years out is essentially more of what we have today. Bob calls it VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Sound familiar? It should since that pretty much sums up the world we’re living in. In his book, Bob offers ten skills that leaders will need to master to make the future.

I’m in Phoenix this week for a meeting of companies that provide leadership and organizational development consulting and coaching. It’s a nice opportunity to learn from colleagues and I want to share with you a useful analogy I picked up today.

Our opening speaker was Dennis Bonilla, a managing director with General Physics Corporation. In talking with us about overcoming organizational fatigue in a tough operating environment, Dennis drew a comparison with metal fatigue. He asked us to think of what happens when you take a coat hanger and bend it back and forth until it breaks. The process is known as metal fatigue and it happens in three predictable phases that are analogous to what happens in organizations that are under pressure:

At this risk of reading like the opening line of a really bad novel, this post begins with the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.”  The thing is, it actually was.  On my January trip to the USS Harry S Truman, we had the opportunity to observe nighttime flight operations from the flag bridge.  The weather that night was terrible.  There was a complete cloud cover with no moonlight, rain blowing sideways and choppy seas that had the deck rolling from side to side.  In the midst of those conditions, Truman pilots and crew were launching and landing F-18 fighter jets about every 45 seconds.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to work with some Navy admirals and talked over lunch with a couple of them who were carrier based pilots earlier in their careers.  We were talking about night ops and one of the admirals made the point that it’s not something that anyone really enjoys.  Because it’s dark, you lose your normal visual references and only have a few lights in the middle of the ocean to line up on when you land.  When you’re flying night operations in bad weather, it gets even more tense and complicated.