It's pretty likely that if you're a leader you will, from time to time, have public disagreements or falling outs with other leaders. It's just the nature of things. Some of their goals conflict with yours even though you share common interests on other fronts. When you get cross ways with each other, one of you needs to take the initiative to "kiss and make up" in service of the bigger picture.

That's what happened at the White House this week when President Obama and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu had a very public reconciliation session after a few months of tense relations. As reported in the New York Times, there was a long photo op, an extended one on one between the two, a lunch and, when the visit was finished, Obama walked the prime minister to his limo. With that as an impetus, I thought it would be worthwhile to start a conversation on how to get things back on track when you and an ally have a derailment.

Here are three tips:

So, as you’ll see from the three day stubble, I took a few minutes at the end of the July 4th weekend to talk a bit about one of my favorite books, Leading Minds. It’s by Harvard education professor Howard Gardner and it’s captivating and thought provoking. Gardner shares a number of case studies of public and non-public leaders to identify the characteristics they all share.

The 4th of July has always been one of my favorite holidays. The root of that goes back to my childhood on Midvale Drive. Fireworks weren't legal in West Virginia but they were in South Carolina. When we went to Myrtle Beach on vacation my dad would buy what seemed like a ginormous amount of bottle rockets, roman candles, firecrackers, spinners, the incredibly loud M-80's and a bunch of other low grade explosives which would promptly go to the top shelf of the closet in my parents' bedroom. (I figure the statute of limitations has run out at this point and that I'm not putting my dad at any legal risk with this post.)

There’s an interesting video on the New York Times web site that offers a peek inside the daily staff meeting of the team responsible for cleaning up the Gulf oil spill. It’s about three minutes long and is worth a look if you want to see how an efficient staff meeting is run.

I’ve watched it a few times and have concluded that while it probably wasn’t intentional the meeting format could have been based on the old journalism school formula for writing a news story – Who, What, When, Where, Why, How.

Here are some examples of what I mean by that. See if you agree with me that it’s a pretty good way to run a staff meeting.

If you’re moving too fast to read this post, then you probably need to take a minute and a half to watch this week’s Video Book Club clip on John Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency. In the clip, I mention his distinction between real urgency and false urgency. I also share my big take away from the book not it’s not just about the facts, it’s about something else.

Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia died in the early morning hours of Monday. As reported by Adam Clymer in the New York Times, he was 92 and served 51 years in the U.S. Senate following six years in the House of Representatives. That made him the longest serving member of Congress ever.

I grew up in West Virginia, worked for one of its governors and am a student of politics so I watched Senator Byrd in action for most of my life. Some of us with ties to the state call it Byrdland because it seems like every other building or road is the Senator Robert C. Byrd something or other. Much to the chagrin of many but to the delight of most West Virginians, Byrd channeled over a billion dollars in federal projects to the state when he was chairman of the Senate Appropriations committee.

Like all of the rest of us human beings, Byrd wasn’t perfect. As a young man, he joined and then quit the Ku Klux Klan (and, as Clymer notes in his article, spent years apologizing for and regretting his membership). He became a consistent supporter of civil rights legislation only in the last half of his career.  He certainly had an ego as all of those buildings and roads with his name on them will attest. That said, in reading the Byrd obituaries this morning, there are three lessons from his life that I think leaders should consider:

If you haven’t read the full Rolling Stone article on General Stanley McChrystal, it’s worth 15 minutes of your time to do so. The RS reporter, Michael Hastings, had pretty much unfettered access to McChrystal and his top aides over the course of a month in Paris and Afghanistan. The result of that is an engrossing article that includes a number of intemperate remarks from the General and his aides which have endangered McChrystal’s career. I took some time to read the article online yesterday and was struck by something that I haven’t seen discussed in the secondary reporting.

One of the things that makes a strategy book really useful is when it introduces a model that you can use to organize your thinking for years to come. This week’s VBC feature did that for me. It’s The Discipline of Market Leaders. In this video clip, I share and show my big take away from the book and how it might help you think about executing strategy.

A long time ago in a land far away, I worked for a year as a first year associate in a now defunct Wall Street investment bank. It was a stressful, but educational experience. What did I learn? Lots of things. Things like the recruiting process is not necessarily the best indicator of what it will be like to actually work someplace.  

Or, that you shouldn’t believe everything you read. The firm I worked for had ten corporate values printed in the back of its annual report. Number ten was, “Have fun!”  Late one afternoon, about six months into the year, one of my first year colleagues had the temerity to ask Dan, the senior associate who was our drill sergeant, “Hey Dan, one of our corporate values is ‘Have fun!’  When do we get to have fun?” Face reddening, veins bulging, Dan’s reply was “Not until your third year!”

But the biggest thing I learned that year was how not to lead. The senior partners in our department led through fear and intimidation. A typo in a proposal was cause for being publicly called out and dressed down in an all hands staff meeting. Leaving the office before 7:30 or 8:00 pm was seen as a lack of commitment.  Yelling at subordinates was the norm. There were good cops and bad cops to keep you on your toes. The threat of firing was always in the air. I often said to myself, “If I ever lead a group of people, I’m going to do the exact opposite of everything they’re doing here.” That actually ended up being a pretty good running start on an approach to leadership in the jobs I had after that one. 

My Wall Street days came to mind recently when I was listening to an executive speak to a group of high potential leaders I’m coaching. 

Every so often, I’ll have a conversation with a client who is really frustrated with someone at work. It could be a really difficult boss or a peer who is only focused on his own agenda. What I frequently see with clients in these situations is a lot of pent up negative energy about the other person. You don’t have to scratch the surface very hard for the client to go off on a bit of a rant about how unreasonable the boss is or how selfish the peer is. 

Understandable but not very productive. What’s happening in these situations is illustrated by a little formula developed by leadership coach Tim Gallwey. It goes like this:


Your performance is equivalent to your potential minus the interference. A lot of people mistake the interference for an external factor like the bad boss or the sneaky peer. That’s not the interference; that’s the trigger for the interference. The interference is the story that builds and builds in your head that gets you so wound up, stressed out or ticked off that you can’t think clearly. The next thing you know, all of that internal interference has overwhelmed any potential you have to perform at your best.

So, what can you do about this? 

A s I often do, I spent yesterday with a  group of high potential executives in an orientation program. The point of the program was to give these newly promoted leaders an inside look at what’s expected of them and to give them some opportunities to learn and think about what’s going to be different now that they’re in executive level roles. It’s a great thing to do and these leaders are fortunate that their company creates some time for them to go off line and learn from senior executives, each other and a few outside speakers.

I was part of that last group – the outside speakers. My goal was to share some tools and frameworks that would be useful to them for leading at the next level. I had that coveted 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm slot when everyone’s energy level is at its highest (not). In spite of the time of day, we had some really lively conversations. One of them was around the value of visualizing the outcome you’re trying to create in different events and meetings and how you need to show up to make that outcome likely. I asked everyone to identify an important event on their calendar next week and then spend four minutes coaching each other in pairs around three basic questions:

Here’s a question that might make you uncomfortable or maybe even angry. If you had to run a campaign to keep your leadership job, could you get reelected?  In this era of anti-incumbent fever, my guess is that there are a lot of non-political leaders who would be voted out of office if their followers had the chance.

What prompted this line of thinking for me was an article in this morning’s Washington Post about how DC’s mayor Adrian Fenty is being booed lustily at just about every public appearance he’s making lately. This is the reception for a guy who was consistently cheered back in 2006 when he was running for mayor and who, since he was elected, most everyone agrees has improved city services, raised test scores in schools and opened new libraries and rec centers. 
He’s gotten some great results, so why the boos as he runs for reelection? He may have gotten great results but he’s blowing the relationships.

I'm in Florida on a business trip this morning and was watching the crew from Morning Joe broadcast live from Pensacola Beach as I was getting dressed and packing up in my hotel room. It's beyond sad watching the people there stay brave in the face of what they know is coming - millions of gallons of oil that's going to foul their beaches, destroy their environment and kill businesses that provide jobs and feed families.

With each new guest, essentially the same question was asked, "How did this happen?" I have a terrible feeling that we're going to be asking that question about the Gulf oil spill and a lot of other disasters for years and years to come. For every time we ask it, there will be all sorts of technical answers but at the simplest level, I think there is one answer to the question.

I’ll acknowledge that it’s just too easy to nominate BP CEO Tony Hayward as the worst leader of the year. Granted, he’s got some stiff competition, but he deserves every inch of the big target on his back. Like a lot of people, I’ve got a crick in my neck from shaking my head after all of the stupid things he’s said and feckless things he’s done.

If you Google  the phrase “Tony Hayward quotes”, the first result you’ll get back will be a link to a helpful compilation of them at a website called NowPublic.com. They’re all sourced. Here are some of my favorites:

If you’ve ever said something along the lines of “If I do good work, it will speak for itself,” then you need to watch this week’s Video Book Club segment to learn why that can be a dangerous way to go. Inspired by Peggy Klaus’ book, Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn without Blowing It, I share two important reasons why you need to speak for the work and not just let it speak for itself.

It's easy to conclude that they just don't make them like John Wooden anymore. Like my grandfather, who passed away at age 93 a couple of years ago, Wooden was literally a man from another century. As so many tributes over the weekend recalled, he was the winningest coach in college basketball history leading UCLA to 10 national championships in the 1960's and 1970's. He was so much more than that though. 

As evidenced by the many former players including Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabar who flew in from around the country and around the world to stand watch at his deathbed, Wooden shaped lives. He did it through his coaching, his teaching, his actions and his words. One article I read about him said that he never accepted a salary at UCLA that was higher than $32,500 because it wouldn't be modest. As my mother asked me in a phone call last night, how often do we even hear the word modest anymore?

For the past year or so, I've been using the following Wooden quote to close my presentations because I love the way he described the effect of continuous improvement:

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur... Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens and when it happens it lasts.

Wooden, for me, has been a Yoda like figure. Small stature, but huge in wisdom. I've been thinking the past couple of days about what he would say about the quality of leadership in the public arena these days.  What would his take be on oil spills in the Gulf, safety violations that led to the deaths of coal miners, short term interest decisions that led to the near collapse of the global economy? We'll never know what Wooden would have said about the failure of leadership in these and other arenas, but by reading through some of his quotes, I think we can make an educated guess:

Who would have thought that the feel good story of the week would be one of the biggest blown calls in the history of baseball? By now, you’ve probably heard the story of how Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had a perfect game plucked from his grasp when first base umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe when he was clearly out in what should have been the last play of the game. Galarraga himself was covering first and stepped on the bag with the ball in his glove a good step and a half before the runner got there.

Galarraga and the rest of the Tigers were getting ready to celebrate when he looked over to see Joyce signaling safe. That’s when a series of moments of truth began that have led to such a captivating story. In a time when oil company executives spend their time in front of Congress blaming each other for an environmental disaster and there are countless other examples of nominal leaders not taking accountability for their actions, we get a really simple and clear example of how we’d like our leaders to act and how we hope we’d respond in similar circumstances. 

Here are three simple lessons from the blown call and its aftermath:

I don’t mean to be rude with the title question of this post, but I’ve learned over the last four or five years of coaching that it’s a great question to ask yourself. Here’s why. 

How many times have you been in a conversation with a group of colleagues that goes something like this?

Wow, they totally don’t get it. They are so far removed from reality that they really just don’t know what’s going on. They should be doing something to change the situation but they don’t even know where to start. You know, what else? For the most part, they’re all like that.

Admit it. You’ve been in those conversations. Here’s how it usually plays out. A bunch of corporate directors are sitting around talking about the corporate vice presidents and how they don’t get it. Or a bunch of GS-15’s are hanging out talking about the SES leaders in their agency and how they don’t get it. I know those conversations go on because when I speak to leaders at any level, I usually ask them if they’ve been in conversations like that. As soon as I ask the question, there are a lot of embarrassed, sheepish expressions spreading throughout the room. Almost everybody’s done it. I used to do it myself on a semi-regular basis when I was a corporate executive.

If you’ve ever been a part of two organizations coming together as one, you know how challenging that can be. More mergers fail than succeed and a big reason why is a mismatch between the cultures. If you’re a leader responsible for shaping a culture that works (and what leader isn’t?), then you need to take a look at this week’s Video Book Club feature.

One of the highlights of the week for me came yesterday when I led a day long workshop on leadership coaching for a group of candidates for the Federal Senior Executive Service. We talked a lot about how important it is for leaders to know how to coach and worked on different skills and models for coaching. 

Of course, a core skill for any coach is listening. We worked on that skill by grouping up in threes with one person talking about something that mattered to them, another person listening and asking questions and the third person observing the listener. After three or four minutes of conversation between the first two people, the observer offered a minute or two of feedback to the listener. The feedback consisted of two or three things the observer appreciated about how the listener listened and one suggestion for how to be an even more effective listener. We did three rounds of this so everyone could be in each of the three roles.

As the second round ended, I asked the group to bring their attention back to me for a second so I could ask them if they were feeling what I was noticing watching them. What I was noticing was the love in the room.  Here's what I mean by that and what it might mean to you.

Late last week, the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, resigned from his job after a little more than a year in the job. As reporting in the Washington Post points out, Blair’s replacement will be the fourth person to hold the DNI job in just over five years. In legislation passed after 9/11, the DNI’s charge is to coordinate the collaborative work of 16 different intelligence agencies including the CIA. Just about every informed observer believes that it’s an extremely difficult job, maybe even impossible.  

In some ways (and obviously not in others), the DNI role is like a lot of other leadership roles in a matrixed organizational structure. More and more these days, leaders find themselves in jobs with a lot of responsibility but not a lot of direct authority. With a mixture of dotted lines, solid lines and no lines at all in the org chart, leaders in a matrixed environment have the unenviable task of herding the cats. 

What can you do to survive one of these jobs? It seems pretty clear that you can’t act as if you have a lot of authority to command things get done when, practically speaking, there are all kinds of ways for others to avoid or ignore doing what you want them to do. Especially in the first year or so, surviving in a matrixed leadership role depends a lot on effective change management. With that idea in mind, here are five strategies to increase the chance of survival in one of these roles:

In this week’s installment of the VBC, I’m featuring what I think is an indispensable part of a leadership coach’s (and most leaders for that matter) tool kit. It’s a book called FYI - For Your Improvement  by Mike Lombardo and Bob Eichinger.

Thirty years ago, John Naisbitt took the publishing world by storm with his book, Megatrends. It was best seller for two years and sold nine million copies. Naisbitt identified ten big trends for the future by doing a deep analysis of current news stories and looking for the patterns within them. It was a classic case of what Harvard leadership strategist Ron Heifetz calls getting off the dance floor and onto the balcony.

You may have heard about The MBA Oath. It was created by a couple of Harvard Business School students last year and has spread to business school campuses around the world and led to a book on the topic. As the Financial Times reports, it’s supported by the new dean of Harvard Business School but a significant percentage of the students there won’t be taking the oath on Class Day this year. Some say it’s not necessary, others say it’s cheesy. 

You can read the entire oath at mbaoath.org. For now, here are some selected excerpts:

About this time last year, I wrote a post called “Feedback Do’s and Don’ts from American Idol.” In the belief that everything you need to learn about leadership you can learn from American Idol, I thought I’d do another Idol post this year. (Before you fire off an angry comment, that was irony at work.) All kidding aside, if you put a leadership lens on, there are occasionally some interesting things to see in the show. Over the past couple of weeks, my takeaway has been about the importance of showing up with the right amount of confidence. It can make or break your effectiveness as a performer and a leader. Of course, a lot of the time there’s not a lot of difference between performance and leadership.