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.

Have you ever noticed that the more stressed you get, the more likely you are to keep doing things that aren’t that productive (e.g. waste another 10 minutes surfing the web or eat that second piece of cake)?  Well, I don’t know if this will make you feel any better, but it turns out that lab rats do the same thing.

As reported in the New York Times this week, new research out of Portugal shows that chronically stressed rats keep doing the same thing over and over (like compulsively pressing a bar for food they’re not going to eat), because they’re too stressed to do anything more productive. Of course, you might be stressed too if, like the lab rats, you had to live with dominant bully rats or periodically got zapped by a mild electric current. (Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound a whole lot different than getting buzzed by your Blackberry 200 times a day.)

As I wrote last week, the health care reform debate is, unfortunately, full of important lessons for leaders on how not to drive change. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to observe what seems to be going wrong when you’re watching the process instead of being in the middle of it. Still, it seems like President Obama’s reform process is running off the rails. The White House spent last week playing defense on the health care reform town halls and the latest example is this morning’s confusion (as reported on Politico ) about whether or not a public insurance option is still on the table.  

How did we get here?  I think there are three lessons from how the President and his team have handled this that anyone who is responsible for leading dramatic change should pay attention to. 

You’ve no doubt seen the videos of members of Congress such as Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill conducting (or, more accurately, trying to conduct) town hall meetings on health care reform. This seems to be rapidly turning into the summer of the shouters. My friend and blogging colleague John Baldoni picked up on this trend and posted a solid piece this week on how speakers should deal with an unruly crowd. My concern is that with all of the cable TV coverage of the health care shouters, leaders in other domains may soon face more of this behavior in town hall meeting type settings. The health care town halls feel like the latest example of how the bar for what passes as civil discourse in our country keeps getting lowered.  

So, with the goal of prepping you for leading and communicating effectively the next time you face a contentious group, I want to recap John’s good advice, see what we can learn about what not to do from Senator Specter and share with you a lesson I learned when I had to defend a tax increase to a bunch of beer fueled construction contractors twenty years ago.

 My wife, the healthy food blogger (www.thewholegang.org), and I played hooky from work last Friday afternoon and went to the 1:10 pm showing of the new movie, Julie and Julia. (We were there with all of the retired folks and I concluded that that looks like a pretty sweet gig.)  Anyway, it’s a great movie – two thumbs way up from both of us. Anytime you have Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Stanley Tucci (as her husband Paul Child) acting together you’re well on your way to a great movie.

One of the questions that I get asked all the time in coaching sessions and speaking engagements is, “How do I work with or influence my new boss?”  That’s a great question because it outlines a situation that most executives are going to face multiple times throughout their careers.  I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a riff on how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rather seamlessly transitioned from working for George W. Bush to Barack Obama.  (You can see that post here.)

A  couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who was working on a story about how to influence your boss and found the Gates post online. He was pitching the story to a web site that’s focused on Gen X and Gen Y guys in the workforce.  When he told me the intended audience, my first thought about how to influence your boss was, “Ask for directions.” Of course, as any wife or girlfriend who has been lost with her guy in the car knows, asking for directions is one of the hardest things for guys to do. Getting into why that’s the case would provide enough material for a whole separate blog. So, let me focus in on why asking for direction is my first piece of advice for anyone (not just guys) who wants to influence their new boss.

Here are three quick tips:

Been to a Starbucks lately?  If so, what do you think?  If you’re a long time Starbucker, how does the experience in the stores lately compare with the way things were four or five years ago?

What do any of these questions have to do with leadership, you ask?  (After all, that’s what this blog is supposed to be about.)  Here’s where I’m coming from.

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how Starbucks is starting a company-wide program to implement the concepts of lean manufacturing to raise the efficiency and productivity of its stores. In a tight economy, it’s understandable why Starbucks or any organization would focus on controlling its costs.

Last week was a vacation week for me and this week sort of, kind of is. What’s the difference?  Well, one big difference is location – Laguna Beach, CA vs. Northern Virginia.  I learned last week that when the Pacific Ocean is a three block walk down the street from where you’re staying that it’s pretty easy to lose track of time. And then there’s the three hour time difference between the West Coast and the East Coast.  That always throws off my rhythm a bit.

It’s the end of July and I’m on vacation so let’s have a little fun today. Let me start out by saying that I love William Shatner. He was great as Captain James T. Kirk, hilarious as Denny Crane of Boston Legal and I never get tired of his Priceline Negotiator bits. The man completely knows how to walk the razor’s edge between maintaining his dignity and making a complete fool of himself. That takes a lot of self awareness.

For most Americans, cycling’s annual 15 minutes of fame has come and gone with Sunday’s conclusion of this year’s Tour de France. In case you missed it, this year’s winner was Spain’s Alberto Contador. Finishing third and making a comeback after a three and a half year retirement was the seven time winner Lance Armstrong. One thing that made the race more interesting than usual this year was that Contador and Armstrong were on the same team although you’d never have known that from the way they’re sniping at each other now.

In a post race press conference, Contador said, “My relationship with Lance is zero.  He is a great rider and has completed a great race, but it is another thing on a personal level, where I have never had great admiration for him and I never will.”

Armstrong fired back on his Twitter account. Quoting the tweet, "Seeing these comments from AC (Alberto Contador). If I were him I'd drop this drivel and start thanking his team. Without them, he doesn't win."

Snap and double snap.

Let me say from the outset, that this is one of those posts that I’ve debated writing. Let me also say what I’m not writing about. I’m not writing about racial profiling or who was right or wrong in the situation of  Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates being handcuffed and arrested by Cambridge, Mass. police officer Crowley in his home last week. You’ve probably heard the story by now that after returning to his home from a trip, Gates and his cab driver were jimmying a stuck door to get into the house. A neighbor who observed them working on the door called the police. After Gates was in his house, Officer Crowley arrived and asked Gates for his ID. This is the point at which their stories diverge in terms of who did or said what. One thing that is clear, however, is that the situation escalated to the point that Gates was led out of his house in handcuffs.

The key phrase for me is that last sentence is “the situation escalated.”  I’ve been doing a lot of reading on this case the past couple of days and have been surprised that I’ve seen nothing on the role that one or more amygdala hijacks likely played in the scene at Gates’ house. If you’re not familiar with this phrase, I believe it was first developed by Daniel Goleman the author of Emotional Intelligence and many other books on the topic. The amygdala is a small part of the brain located just above the spinal cord that stores emotional memories, particularly those associated with fear. It’s where the fight or flight response resides.   If you’re in a situation that feels threatening to your physical being or your ego, it’s the amygdala that stimulates your reaction to either fight or get out the heck out of there. The fight or flight response was probably really useful for our prehistoric ancestors who had to deal with the occasional sabre tooth tiger.  It’s usually not a particularly useful response in today’s world.  When the amygdala kicks in the adrenaline surge it releases can overpower or hijack the logical, critical thinking skills that come from the brain’s frontal cortex. 

Given the tense situation at Gates’ house and the outcome that resulted, it’s not hard to imagine that one or probably both of the men involved suffered from some form of amygdala hijack. We’re all going to find ourselves in situations where we’re going to feel threatened from time to time so what can we do to prevent a reaction that leads us to say or do something that ends badly? Here are a few tips:

Last week,  I sent out one of my periodic newsletters which featured my recent blog post on leadership lessons from the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. That article prompted a note from Rich Beach, a director at IT services provider CGI and an alumnus of our Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program. In addition to being a smart and interesting guy, it turns out that Rich is also a great writer and quite the rock and roll aficionado. In his note, he shared with me one more leadership story about Springsteen and a lesson from the Beatles about getting the right people on the bus.

So, with his permission, and in his own words, here’s Rich Beach with two really cool leadership lessons from the history of rock and roll.  Thanks Rich!

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. (I spent a lot of time watching TV, period.)  They used to have a segment on the show called “Peabody’s Improbable History,” in which the highly intelligent talking dog, Mr. Peabody, and his boy, Sherman would use their WABAC machine to travel back in time. The events of this past weekend took me way back to my childhood in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In thinking about them, I learned a little bit about more about how some of the things that happened back then shaped me as an adult and a leader. In particular, I’m talking about the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing, the death of TV anchorman Walter Cronkite and the completely improbable (Mr. Peabody would have loved it) performance of 59 year old Tom Watson at the British Open.

So, jump into the WABAC machine with me for a few minutes and let’s see what we can learn.

For the past several months, the New York Times has been running interviews on leadership with the CEO’s of well known organizations. They’re almost always interesting. Sometimes I agree with the points they make, sometimes I learn something new and, honestly, sometimes I find myself wondering, “How did this person become a CEO?” The latest Times interview subject is Dave Novak, CEO of Yum Brands. I think it’s the best one in the series so far.

To counteract the karma of my last post about how terrible leadership helped blow up AIG, I thought I’d share ten thoughts from Dave Novak on how to be a great leader along with a tip from me on how to follow through on that thought. The bold face points are direct quotes from Novak, my accompanying tip is in plain face type:

If you’re looking for a textbook example of how to be a dangerously ineffective leader, look no further than the great writer Michael Lewis’ article, “The Man Who Crashed the World,” in the current issue of Vanity Fair. It’s the story of  a guy named Joseph Cassano who ran AIG Financial Products from the end of 2001 to 2008 when his unit helped crash the global economy. Based on reporting he undertook after receiving a few phone calls from a former AIG FP trader, Lewis details what can happen when what he calls a “cartoon despot” ends up running something important. It’s an amazing article and worth your time.  If you want my Cliff Notes version of how to lead your team to a $182 billion loss, read on.

Any executive who has ever been charged with leading a turnaround has to empathize at some level with President Obama. How would you like to be accountable for two wars, a shaky economy, fixing the health care system and dealing with Iran and North Korea – all at once?  If you’ve led a turnaround, you know that the flood of issues can overwhelm you and make you more than a little frantic. The image I have in mind is the little Dutch boy trying to plug his fingers into all the holes leaking water from the dike.

Regular readers know that I’m an Obama supporter, but I’m beginning to worry (as is Colin Powell) that he’s trying to plug too many holes at once. As he travelled to Russia, Italy and Ghana last week, Obama needed to take time out to walk back comments from Vice President Biden on the economy and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on health care reform. You just get the sense of someone who is trying to keep too many plates spinning.

As a 48 year old, I am too young to have a first hand recollection of the role that former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara played in shaping the Vietnam War.  As a student of leadership and history, I’ve been fascinated to read the many different obituaries, articles and editorials that have been written about the man since he died earlier this week. They range from sympathetic (as an example, see this interview with George McGovern on Politico ) to reflective (for instance, David Ignatius’ column in the Washington Post to angry (Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times is one example).

Of all the articles I’ve read on McNamara, the most comprehensive is the front page piece by Thomas Lippman in the Washington Post. With respect and acknowledgment to those who experienced Vietnam as young adults, here are a few lessons that I’ve picked up from the life of Robert McNamara that I think leaders should keep in mind.

The latest Leadership Lessons podcast interview is guaranteed to go well with your grande Caramel Macchiato. My guest is Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks Coffee Company. His book, It's Not About the Coffee  is out in paperback with a new preface on leading in hard times and is available on Amazon.com.

Howard brings a unique perspective on leadership to our conversation. He joined Starbucks in 1989 as its VP of sales and operations when the company had 28 stores in the Pacific Northwest.  When he retired as president in 2003, Starbucks was a ubiquitous global brand. He continued to play a role in the company’s strategy as a member of the board of directors until 2008. 

I’m spending a lot of time this week talking with high potential leaders in our group coaching program about the next level strengths and opportunities that are showing up in their 360 degree feedback results. The goal is to get the focus down to improving one or two behaviors that will make the biggest difference in how effective they are as a leader over the next year. One thing I’ve learned in coaching busy leaders is that there’s a much greater chance of success if you focus your attention on one or two opportunities that could make a big difference than it is to spread your attention across 5 or 6 or even more things. My rule of thumb is if you can’t remember what you’re working on,  then you’re probably not going to get much better.

That’s where the T shirt comes in.