The morning after election day 2009 was probably not a particularly fun one in the White House. As noted in a first rate summary by John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico, the outcomes of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and even the New York City’s mayor race didn’t really go the President’s way. As an historical analysis by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post points out, it’s important to not over interpret the results,  but one thing about the 2009 election results does seem clear. Voters who identify themselves as independents are looking for  leaders who seem to address the issues that are most important to them. 

As an example, since I live in Virginia, I had a pretty direct line of sight into the governor’s race here.  The winner, Bob McDonnell, ran a very effective straight down the middle campaign centered on jobs, transportation, taxes and government spending. His opponent, Creigh Deeds, seemed to never get any traction on explaining exactly what his priorities would be if he was governor. (See Dan Balz's post election analysis in the Washington Post for more on this.)

In connecting the dots on the different races, I find myself looking for some common denominator lessons we can learn about effective leadership communications.  After all, that’s what a campaign is ultimately about.  In reviewing this week’s results, I’ve come up with four questions that I think leaders need to address either implicitly or explicitly if they hope to win over their followers. These strike me as important questions for any leader – not just political candidates – to address when they’re attempting to mobilize people in a challenging situation. Here are the questions:

In its almost always interesting series, Sunday’s New York Times ran a Corner Office interview with the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust. I’ve often thought that because of the range of different stakeholder groups involved that running an academic institution is one of the toughest leadership jobs there is. It was interesting to read what Faust had to say about what she’s learned about leading in this type of environment. Most of the points she made apply to leaders in all arenas  whether it’s academia, the private sector or government.

Here are some of the takeaways (in bold face quotes) I had from the Faust interview along with some of my thoughts about how they apply to the world beyond the Charles River.

Regular readers may recall that I ran a post last week on the leadership lessons that can be learned from not doing what Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder is doing with his organization. In the category of “doesn’t happen every day,” I got a call from a producer at DC’s Fox TV affiliate to ask if I’d do an interview on what I was hearing from fans about the situation. Fox 5 ran the piece on a few of their broadcasts following the Redskins’ Monday night loss to the Eagles this week. Roll the tape:

The next time you’re feeling challenged about how to reach a goal, think of the sailors from the USS Carl Vinson. As reported in the Washington Post,  30 sailors from the Vinson set a goal to make last Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon their first 26.2 mile race.  More and more people are running marathons these days, but not very many have their training space limited to the confines of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. The sailors from the Vinson were inspired by the example set by their former commanding officer, Walter Carter, a recently promoted rear admiral who shared his enthusiasm for running with his crew.  Carter has left the Vinson for his next assignment but came back to DC to run the race with his men. Through his own commitment to fitness and his and camaraderie with his team, Rear Admiral Carter is the embodiment of what a positive leadership footprint looks like.

I’m honored to report that I got a first hand account of how the race turned out for the sailors from the Carl Vinson when I was one of the opening speakers last Sunday for the Navy’s annual Flag Officer and Executive Training Symposium at a federal training center in the suburbs of DC.  (This is a week long annual event for the newly promoted admirals and their civilian colleagues in the federal Senior Executive Service. )

The speaker that followed me on Sunday was the head of the Navy’s Fitness program. She was there to brief the participants and their spouses on the range of support available to help these leaders stay fit in their very demanding roles. As she wrapped up her remarks, she read from the Post story and asked if Rear Admiral Carter was in the room. He was indeed and reported that all 30 of his sailors had successfully completed the race and that he had finished it in 3 hours and 36 minutes himself.  Bear in mind that this briefing came about six hours following the marathon.  Let it be noted that the admiral did not have the bearing or tone of someone who had just run 26.2 miles in under four hours.  He pretty much looked fresh as a daisy!

There were a number of  things I took away from the Sunday session that I think are worth offering as food for thought for leaders. Let me share three of them here.

When faced with an intractable or complex problems, it’s easy for leaders to get bogged down in the minutiae when trying to come up with a solution.  Another trap is to go binary – it’s either this or it’s that – too soon in the decision making process.  Rather than opening up options and possibilities, we sometimes try to solve complex problems by settling for the least painful of the most obvious options.

It’s at times like this, that’s it’s helpful to have someone in the room who can step back, get up on the balcony and ask some questions that seem obvious in retrospect but maybe weren’t asked because everyone else was too close to the situation at hand.

There’s an old, old phrase that, “A fish rots from the head down.”  It dates in English from at least 1674 and has probably hung around all these years because it’s true.  The Washington Redskins are one of the latest example of the truth of this aphorism.

Since the NFL season began, I’ve thought of writing a post on what can be learned about how not to lead an organization from analyzing the Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder.  After Sunday’s 14 – 6 loss to the previously winless Kansas City Chiefs that included a safety in the closing minutes, the time finally seems right.  After all, the Redskins have lost to the 1 and 22 Detroit Lions and haven’t beaten a team this year with a winning record.  As the Washington Post has reported, the team sues its fans who have fallen on hard times and can’t honor their ticket contracts.  They have one of the most bloated payrolls in the NFL and week by week, publicly humiliate their head coach Jim Zorn (a classic example of what I refer to as an NGB – “nice guy, but…”) by removing one more aspect of his duties.  (This week it was play calling.)

Seriously, if we can’t learn something about how not to lead an organization from watching Dan Snyder then it’s probably time to move onto another topic.  What are his secrets for leading a rotten organization?  Here are a few that catch my attention:

I’ve been in London this week for a presentation I gave to a group of new executives yesterday. It’s been a great trip with a lot of friendly people and fascinating things to see. One of the things I really enjoy when travelling abroad is immersing myself in the local media to learn what the big stories are and how people think about them.

Well, the story that’s dominating the UK’s headlines and airwaves this week is a controversy over how members of Parliament used their expense accounts for items like housekeeping, gardening and, in one infamous case, the digging of a moat. Sounds sort of outrageous doesn’t it?  The back story, as my cab driver explained it to me the other day, is that when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister she wanted to give a pay raise to the MP’s but knew that wouldn’t fly with the public. So, instead, she adjusted the expense reimbursement schedule for MP’s so it was much more liberal and ended up significantly supplementing their incomes.  That was all going along swimmingly for the past 20 years or so until earlier this year when the husband of the Home Secretary watched a couple of porn movies on the family telly and the cable bill was submitted for reimbursement under the MP expense plan. You can probably figure out what happened next.

The range of reactions to President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been really interesting to observe.  Depending on which person or group you’ve been watching or listening to, you’ve had the opportunity to witness a full spectrum of emotional reactions from happiness to anger, from satisfaction to surprise.  One that I think is out there but perhaps hasn’t been commented on so much is resentment.  There are those who resent the award because they say Obama hasn’t proven himself yet or that others are more deserving. (Obama himself essentially said as much in his remarks just a few hours after the Peace Prize announcement.)

I think there’s another reason that a lot of people resent the Prize going to Obama and it’s one that has a lot of parallels in countless organizations around the world.  You’ve probably seen it yourself or have perhaps even been the subject of it.  I’m talking about what I call the “smartest kid in the class” syndrome.  Whatever you think about Obama, there’s not much point in debating that he is one highly intelligent guy and has had a lot of success at a very early age. He’s probably the most extreme example I could come up with of the “smartest kid in the class.” 

While we may not be around Nobel Prize winners on a regular basis, most of us have had some experience on one side or the other (or both) of this phenomenon.

With this in mind, I came up with some rules of the road for how “the smartest kids” should handle themselves when working with others who might feel intimidated and threatened by their success:

In the category of “Man, I wish I’d written that,”  my blogging friend Mike Figliuolo had a great post last week called “Ten Reasons Your Team Hates You.”   It was a brilliant piece with so true they might hurt items such as you don’t fight for them,  you micromanage, you’re a suck up and you’re above getting your hands dirty.   It’s gotten a lot of well deserved attention, is definitely worth a read and is a post you’ll likely want to share with others.

So, it was with Mike’s post in the back of my mind that I watched Brett Favre lead the Vikings this week to a 30 - 23 win over his old team, the Packers, on Monday Night Football.  If you follow football at all, you understand why I’m making the connection between Mike’s “Why Your Team Hates You” post and Favre. Even non-sports fans are likely aware and completely sick of Favre’s multi-year act of will he retire or not retire, who will he play for, when will he play, etc., etc., etc. He’s done about as much as he possibly can to make his colleagues skeptical of his motives and intent. And yet, the Vikings at 4 and 0 so far this season seem to be gelling around him. 

If you take the publicity, the uniforms and the bone crunching hits out of the equation, Favre appears to be successfully doing what you’ll likely have to do at least once in your career – stepping in to lead a team that for whatever reason is skeptical of your motives and has their doubts about whether or not you’re the right leader. In spite of all the drama baggage he carries with him, Favre is winning the Vikings over. How is he doing it? Here are a few things he’s doing that I think apply to leaders in fields other than football:

The end of last week brought a couple of mirror image stories about leaders in the world of finance.  The first was the sudden announcement from Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis that he intends to retire at the end of the year.  As reported in The Economist, the B of A board is going to have to scramble to come up with a successor. In contrast is the news coming out of JP Morgan Chase that CEO Jamie Dimon has named a new head of investment banking in what he acknowledges is a key building block of a leadership succession plan.  As quoted in the New York Times, Dimon said, “It’s my duty to the board to focus on succession.  It’s important that we have people trained and tested with experience to succeed me.”

As Joe Nocera pointed out in his weekly Talking Business column, one of the most important duties of a leader is to prepare his or her successor. This is true not just for CEO’s, but for leaders at any level. How do you do it?  Here are five simple yet actionable ideas for preparing your successor:

Any week you can check something off your bucket list is a good week.  This was one of those weeks for me as I checked off a long held goal of seeing U2 in concert. Bono and his band mates are on a six week tour and they stopped at FedEx field here in the DC area to rock the house. Thanks to some really nice long term planning on my wife’s part (she bought tickets for my birthday back in April), the two of us  were there.  I’ve been to countless concerts in my life and (I don’t think it’s just the recency effect speaking here) this one was the best.  (In case you’re wondering what they’re playing on this tour, here’s a very cool web site with the set list and links to performances of each song.)  The show that U2 put on was a combination of rock concert, multimedia extravaganza,  political rally, massive party and religious revival.  And, oh yeah,  anytime somebody is keeping 90,000 people standing up for two and a half hours singing, dancing and completely engaged there’s probably something to be learned about leadership.

While it’s unlikely that most of us are going to be global rock stars anytime soon, I saw some great leadership lessons from Bono and the band that I want to pass on for your consideration.

This is the last of three posts that I’m writing based on some great presentations I heard at the Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC last week. The primary keynoter for the conference was leadership guru Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and the new book, How The Mighty Fall. I had never heard Collins speak before and when I found out he was going to be speaking in my hometown zone, I signed up for the conference.  It was the right decision. Jim Collins is a fantastic speaker. He offers incredibly rich and though provoking content delivered with the passion and energy of a world class evangelist.  If you get a chance to hear him speak, take it. You won’t be sorry.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you the top 10 to-do’s for leaders that he offered at the end of his two hour segment.  (These are paraphrased based on my notes.) It’s unlikely that all ten will resonate with you, but my guess is that you (like me) will find at least two or three that hit home.  Here they are:

This week I’ll be sharing some insights I picked up at the recent Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC.  Today’s come from Jet Blue’s founding CEO, David Neeleman who was one of several terrific speakers at the conference.

Lots of people in the United States are familiar with Jet Blue and have experienced the energetic service, seat back TV’s and Terra Blue potato chips that the airline is known for. What may not be as familiar is the story of Jet Blue’s founder David Neeleman and that he is now involved in starting his fourth airline. The first was Morris Air which was a regional carrier that began as a travel agency. In his Inc. presentation, Neeleman told the story of being approached by Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines, and being asked if he wanted to sell his company to Southwest. Neeleman idolized Kelleher and told the audience that he would have sold Morris to Southwest for a lot less than he did to get the chance to work with Kelleher.  Neeleman hit the ground running at Southwest and started pushing big changes on a number of fronts.  Five months after getting there, Kelleher took Neeleman to lunch at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Dallas and told him he was fired because he was just too impetuous. Neeleman told us he cried after that conversation.

I’m taking some time to feed the mind this week by attending the Inc. 500 conference taking place in Washington, DC.  There have been some notable speakers on the agenda including Good to Great author Jim Collins and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. The most thought provoking speaker I’ve heard so far is the CEO of Zipcar Scott Griffith.

By now, you’ve probably heard of Zipcar, the car sharing service that is sprouting up in metro areas around the U.S. and the world. (Maybe you’re a Zipster yourself.) Backed up with some great technology, the Zipcar model is pretty simple. You join the program for a modest annual fee.  When you need a car you reserve one online or on the phone. You walk to your car’s reserved parking space and unlock it using your Zipcard.  You drive away for a low hourly fee which includes your gas and insurance coverage. When you’re done, you park the car in its spot, lock it up and walk away.

Before you conclude that this post is an ad for Zipcar, let me explain what really rocked me about Griffith’s presentation.

In the early morning on September 8, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I read a little bit of news and among the stories were a number on the presidential elections in Afghanistan and the early indications of widespread voting fraud. The other main story around Afghanistan that evening was the appointment of General McChrystal as the new U.S. Commander. He was named to come up with and implement a  new plan. I’ll blame it on the semi-conscious state of being up in the middle of the night, but after my reading, I logged onto Twitter and posted the following haiku:

Have you ever felt like you were being watched? I’m not trying to induce panicked paranoia here, but if you’re a leader you should be feeling that way. The more senior a leader you are, the more you’re being watched. You need to pick up what I call a big footprint view of your role because, as a leader, your actions have a much bigger impact than you may realize.

That’s a lesson that Linda Hudson learned when she became a business unit president at General Dynamics back in the 1990’s. Hudson, who is now the president of the land and armaments group at BAE Systems, described her first few days as a BU president at General Dynamics in a “Corner Office” Q&A in Sunday’s New York Times. Wanting to make a good impression in her new role, Hudson picked up some new suits at Nordstrom’s and, as part of her ensemble, learned some interesting ways to tie a scarf to complement her suits. She showed up as president on day one looking really sharp. The surprise came on day two when, as she described to the Times, she ran “into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.”

When you’re the leader, people take their cues from you. When you’re aware of it, this can work for everyone’s benefit. If you aren’t aware of your footprint or ignore its impact, you can quickly set yourself and the organization up for failure.

So, with your leadership success in mind, here are five tips for how to successfully live with a big leadership footprint:

There’s been a lot written in the past few weeks about the demise of humility in our culture.  Fortunately, we still have some great examples of successful leaders who demonstrate humility. One of those is the Super Bowl winning former coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy.

I’ve admired Tony Dungy for a long time because of his capacity to succeed in the high stakes competitive environment of the NFL while maintaining grace and humility whether he’s won or lost. Since I’m a huge football fan and Dungy is on the broadcast crew for NBC’s Football Night in America this year, he has been on my radar screen a little more than usual these past few weeks.

Earlier this week, I was talking with an executive who’s recently been promoted to run a business unit that earlier this decade was generating a few million dollars a year in revenue and this year will gross a few hundred million dollars. Through acquisitions and organic growth, the business could be twice its current size in a few more years. As we were talking about the changes she might have to make in her leadership style as the business grows, I remembered a conversation I had last year with another executive who was facing the same sort of situation.

One thing I’ve learned in my years as an executive coach is that you can’t convince a leader who is heavily focused on results to work on relationship building skills just because it’s the “right thing” or a “nice thing” to do.  To motivate the client to change, you have to make a direct connection as to how stronger relationship skills will support the client in getting the results they’re looking for. The results oriented leader usually needs evidence of how relationships can help him achieve what he wants to achieve.

So, it was with great interest that I read David Rock’s article, “Managing with the Brain in Mind,” in the latest issue of Booz and Company’s Strategy + Business magazine.  Rock is an executive coach specializing in the connections between neuroscience and leadership. He is the author of Quiet Leadership and the forthcoming book, Your Brain at Work. In his S+B article, Rock opens with the story of recent MRI based research that demonstrates that people who feel rejected or treated unfairly activate the same regions of their brain as people who are taking a literal blow to the head. The brain’s responses to relational and physical attacks are quite similar.

Rock quotes a neuroscientist who says the link between social discomfort and physical pain makes sense  “because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival.”  In an economic environment where people are naturally worried about the future, this strikes me as a very important thing for leaders to pay attention to. Rock offers a helpful acronym, SCARF (which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness), which can help leaders better understand and act on the relationship factors that people naturally need to have addressed.  He outlines a number of ideas in his article about how to act on these needs. Building on Rock’s model, I’ll offer a few of my own here:

No, I’m not talking about some schlocky movie that didn’t make it into theatres this summer.  I’m talking about Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo Senior Vice President who was hired this week to be a key part of the leadership team charged with spinning AOL out of Time Warner over the next year. For fans of memorable business communication, Garlinghouse is best known as the author, in 2006, of a memo to the top executives at Yahoo that came to be known as “the peanut butter manifesto.” 

Among other points in the manifesto, Garlinghouse wrote:

“I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should”

His memo, which was eventually featured in a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, was a clarion call for Yahoo to get its act together and recapture its leadership position in the Internet space. That hasn’t happened yet (and may never happen), but the memo set off a chain of events which led to a change in top leadership and the implementation of many of the strategies that Garlinghouse wrote about.

So, as Garlinghouse joins AOL to help lead what is a combination of a turnaround and a start-up, I thought it was worth taking a look at the peanut butter manifesto to see what we can learn about how leaders can influence their bosses through highly effective communications. Here are a few takeaways:

Now that the Cash for Clunkers program is over, the results are coming in and it looks like the big winners from the program are Hyundai and Ford with year over year monthly sales increases of 47% and 17% respectively. The number three selling new car during the Clunkers program was the Ford Focus with the Ford Escape showing up in the top 10 as well. The other two American car companies actually showed declines in sales during August with GM down almost 20% from last year and Chrysler sales down 15%.

What’s the difference between the three U.S. auto makers? Obviously, there are a lot of factors, but I’d argue the most important is leadership.  As I wrote in this blog back in August of 2007, my money was on Ford CEO Alan Mulally to lead a turnaround at Ford and it looks like that’s what he’s doing. I spent some time earlier today reading some recent articles about Mulally and watching some video interviews with him to try to determine what he’s done right since arriving at Ford from the Boeing Corporation in 2006.  (My sources include articles in Fortune magazine, Business Week, and the U.K. Guardian along with video interviews from Time magazine and the New Yorker

Based on that research, here are five Mulally success factors I’ve come up with that I think apply to any leader charged with leading a turnaround in their organization.

And for this latest edition of the Leadership Lessons Podcast, something completely different. I’m talking today with the Tony Award winning Broadway star Michael Cerveris. Since his Broadway debut in 1993 as the lead in The Who’s Tommy, Michael has been nominated for four Tony Awards including best actor for Sweeney Todd and winning best actor for his role as John Wilkes Booth in Stephen Sondheim’s The Assassins.  His credits are too numerous to mention here but you may also know him as The Observer in the Fox series, Fringe.  This Fall he’ll be appearing in the new film, The Vampire’s Assistant with Salma Hayek and John C. Reilly and, beginning in October, will open at Lincoln Center as one of the leads in In The Next Room.

An impressive career to be sure, but why is Michael doing a Leadership Lessons Podcast?

Most Americans alive today cannot remember a time when a Kennedy of the generation of John, Robert and Ted was not playing a major public role in the life of the nation. The passing of Ted Kennedy this week literally marks the end of an era and is, I think, one reason why his death has moved so many people.  It is the clear end of an era in all of our lives.

There have been so many perceptive and thoughtful commentaries and remembrances written about Ted Kennedy in the past few days that it feels somewhat redundant on my part to add to the mix. Still, there are three quick things I want to address in this post.

First, I want to point you to some of the columns on Kennedy that I’ve found most thought provoking.  They include David Broder’s in the Washington Post, David Brooks’ in the New York Times and John F. Harris’s and Alexander Burns’ on Politico.com. 

Second, I want to share a couple of leadership lessons from Kennedy’s life that I think are important and that I have not seen clearly stated elsewhere (with complete acknowledgement that they may have been. I haven’t read everything.)

In my presentations and group coaching work, I’m fond of quoting Charles DeGaulle’s observation that,  “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”  The point I’m trying to make with that line is that while every leader has unique opportunities and responsibilities in their role that only they can do, no one is personally indispensible.  President Obama’s renomination of Ben Bernanke for another term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has me thinking that Bernanke may be the exception that proves DeGaulle’s rule. As Robert J. Samuelson writes in the Washington Post today, Bernanke, with his unique background as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Great Depression and his willingness to take decisive and innovative action to restore faith in the credit markets, could merit a Time magazine cover headline as “The Man Who Saved the World.”

A lot of the clients I work with in our group coaching program are middle managers. They’ve moved beyond the level of front line leaders and supervisors, but have not yet reached the ranks of the most senior executives. They’re the directors, senior directors and vice presidents in the private sector and the GS-15’s and SES – 1’s in federal government. And, based on my experience in working with them over the years, I would say that more and more they are the meat in the sandwich. By that, I mean they’re constantly squeezed from pressure above them and below them in the organization.

Over the weekend, one of my colleagues from the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, Marijo Puleo, shared a McKinsey survey report, Leaders in the Crisis, on the alumni list serve. In that same daily digest from the list serve there was an extended conversation sparked by another colleague who has a client in crisis. Like a lot of people these days, this client simply has too much work to get it all done and still have a semblance of a life. About ten coaches responded to that issue and said they’re seeing the same thing with their clients.

How much more evidence do we need that middle managers are the meat in the sandwich? The McKinsey survey had some interesting results that illustrate the point. Here are a few factoids for you.  Middle managers, compared to the top execs surveyed, are:

• Less committed to staying with their organizations
• Less enthusiastic about their work
• Less satisfied with their own performance and
• Far less satisfied than the seniors with how their bosses are doing. (Ouch!)

Does anyone else see a problem here? These are not just the people responsible for keeping things running during the current economic challenges, these are also the leaders that organizations are counting on for long term growth and success. The stakes around keeping this group engaged are pretty high. Here are a few ideas based on the McKinsey research about how to do a better job with that.