This past
Monday night, my wife Diane and I had a once a lifetime
experience. We got to attend the red carpet premiere of the
last Harry Potter movie at Lincoln Center in New York. Diane
has to be in the top 1% of Harry Potter fans in the world and she won
the trip through a local radio station. It was a blast and a
surreal experience to be in the same room with the cast and people
behind the biggest movie franchise of all time. If you want the inside scoop on red carpet night,
Diane wrote it all up on her blog and included some really great
pictures of the cast speaking before the movie started.
No doubt, many of you
will be seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
this weekend and in the days to come. Enjoy it. It’s a wonderful film
and a fitting end to the movie. If you have any mental and emotional
bandwidth left over as you’re watching Harry save the world, you might
also put your leadership lens on for some examples of servant leadership
in action.
Servant leadership is based on the
principle that the leader is the servant of the people that he or she
leads. They have a desire to serve first and lead second. The concept
was first articulated by an AT&T executive named Robert
Greenleaf in the mid 20th century and he eventually wrote
a book on the subject
. Today, the Robert K.
Greenleaf Center shares and builds on his work.
The president of the Greenleaf Center, Larry
Spears, has identified ten characteristics of servant
leaders. Having been immersed in all things Potter
in my house for the last ten years, it seems to me that Harry embodies
all or most of them. Here they are:
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been
ignoring articles in the Financial Times about a
cell phone hacking scandal in England. This morning, the New York Times picked up the
story in a big way and I started paying attention.
Here’s the very quick
recap.
Earlier this year, I was with an
executive who was proudly showing me the Power Point presentation he had
prepared for an upcoming strategic offsite.
We got through three slides
and he turned to me and asked me what I thought so far. I
asked if he really wanted to know and he said yes. My response was that I
had seen the same exact presentation at a company conference in an
entirely different industry just the day before. He looked
crestfallen, but, to his credit, he asked for
details. As kindly as I could, I made a little
“Blah, blah, blah” motion with my right hand and said that his first
three slides were classic signs that the rest of the presentation was
going to stink.
They’re classic because they’re
so overused that when the audience sees them appear it immediately shuts
down with a “Seen it before,” barely suppressed yawn. Does
your presentation deck have them?
Here’s the checklist:
So, let me first assure
you that the picture that comes with this post has not been
Photoshopped. That is me in my business clothes standing on my
head alongside Melissa, one of my good buddies from yoga. The back
story is that yesterday I went straight from a meeting with clients to
the Down Dog
Yoga studio to sneak in the lunch time class. The folks there
are more used to seeing me in shorts and sandals than a jacket and
slacks. As soon as I walked in, Alison, the instructor, said "We've got
to take pictures of you doing poses in your suit. It will be the
business power hour!" I have a hard time saying no to Alison and the
next thing I knew, there we were going upside down.
If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you might remember a
post I wrote about six months ago called Leadership Lessons from Yoga.
When I wrote it, I had been going to yoga for a couple of months and was
about as flexible as your average 2x4. The fact that I was doing a
headstand in my work clothes for a joke photo yesterday kind of blows me
away when I think about it. The first time I ever did a
headstand in my life was in a yoga workshop a couple of weeks before
I turned 50 years old. Now, a couple of
months later, I'm cranking them out on request.
Never imagined that I'd be doing that which brings me
to a few new leadership lessons from yoga:
The big buzz in baseball
last week was the sudden resignation of Washington Nationals manager,
Jim Riggleman. As Dave Sheinin reported in the Washington
Post, the Nats had just beaten the Seattle
Mariners to go over .500 in June for the first time in six years. It was
then that the team’s general manager walked into the club house to tell
the players that their on-field skipper had just quit.
Apparently, Riggleman had been unhappy with both the
salary and short term nature of his contract with the Nationals and told
his GM before the game with the Mariners that he wanted a better deal
by the end of the game or he was walking. He didn’t get the deal and he
walked.
Everyone who has ever dreamed of telling
their employer where to put it probably admires Riggleman at some level.
You have to wonder, though, if Riggleman woke up the next day thinking,
“Man, what have I done?” The guy was perfectly within his
rights to want a better deal. There’s nothing wrong with what he wanted.
How he went about trying to get it is another story however. Is any
other organization going to hire a manager who walked out on his team in
the middle of the season?
Are you a leader who’s
considering making a big statement like quitting your job on short
notice? The case of Jim Riggleman offers at least three things
to consider before you do something you might regret in the
morning:
Yesterday, I had the good
fortune to follow Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for
Disease Control, as a speaker to the leadership fellows of his
agency. His remarks were so fascinating that I was honestly a
little disappointed when he wrapped up and it was time for me to speak.
On the other hand, as the person who had been asked to deliver a keynote
talk on leading at the next level, I couldn’t have had a better set-up
than Dr. Frieden.
In his talk, Dr. Frieden did a
great job of using stories to demonstrate to the fellows the impact of
their work in the field of public health. Most of his stories emphasized
the importance of gathering data to both define the problem you’re
trying to solve and to measure your progress in solving it. He
also talked a lot about the importance of establishing human to human
connection in leading people to make positive changes.
One story he told that really stuck with me was about the five
years in he spent India earlier in his career working to rid the country
of tuberculosis. Frieden seems like a pretty self aware guy and called
himself out over how proud he was of the hours he put in working the TB
problem. His typical day in the office, he said, was from 8:00 am to
10:00 pm with additional hours working from home. As his time
in India drew to a close, he was meeting with his counterpart from the
Indian government for a final review of their progress. In their
conversation, his colleague acknowledged all the hours Frieden put in
but said that really wasn’t his most important contribution. Frieden
said he took a little umbrage at that until his friend said, “Tom, the
most important thing you’ve done is to give us hope.”
Today's post is short and sweet
as I have about 10 minutes before they shut the door on my
plane. Which raises the question, "What can you do with a 10
minute break?"
That question is on my mind
because I spent a good part of yesterday talking with rising executives
in our group coaching program about how being so racked and stacked on
their calendars leaves them with very little time to think ahead,
reflect back or just recharge.
I've written here before about the running
flat out until you crash syndrome that so many leaders are caught up in
these days. It's a big problem, but the good news is it doesn't take as
much time as you might think to sneak in a break. If you think about
your typical day, you probably have 2 or 3 ten minute interludes between
meetings or conversations. What do you do with them? Answer more emails
or recharge your batteries?
Today is my 24th
wedding anniversary. You can accuse me of bias (and you might
be right), but my wife, Diane, is one of the best leaders I
know. She may not be famous (although she’s increasingly
becoming so to the people who follow her food blog and presence on
social media) and is not running any organizations larger
than our family, our business and the online communities she’s
started.
She is, however, one heck of a
leader. I’ve learned a lot about leadership from Diane in 24
years. Here are just some of the reasons why she’s one of the best
leaders I know:
The title of this post
reminds me of the “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC” TV commercials from a
couple of years ago. The question, “Are you an IBM or a Dell?”
was inspired by an article I read this week in The
Economist.
As it happens,
this year is the 100th anniversary of the founding of IBM.
Lasting a hundred years is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any
company. For one in the ever changing field of technology,
it’s especially impressive. How has IBM managed to survive
and, most of the time, thrive for that long? Here’s how
The Economist answers the question:
