Category: Leadership

Want to Be a Good Example?

John Maxwell has said, “It’s easier to teach what’s right than to do what’s right.” So if we want to be a good example for those around us, we need to be as good as we think we are. Intentions alone do not set the example.

Setting an example also requires being visible, and interacting with people. If you are the best you can be, but working alone, then who are you an example for?

Those two thoughts deserve some reflection time. We would all like to be good, and set a good example. Review your activity in the last week. Have you had opportunities to be visible, and be engaged, and yet you choose actions that isolated you? Have you chosen actions that were easier, and maybe not shown how good you can be?

Colin Powell said, “You can issue all the memos and give all the motivational speeches you want, but if the rest of the people in your organization don’t see you putting forth your very best effort every single day, they won’t either.”  People around you will only give their best if they see you giving your best.

What are you going to do the next week that reflects your best? What are you going to do to make those actions more visible to those around you?

You Can Be a World Class Mentor

Almost 25 years ago, I was assigned an employee to mentor for the very first time. I had no idea how to mentor someone, but proud and excited to be asked. I was also scared. Mentoring is not a skill that was taught in any class I took. I never received training. I was just expected to know how.

I scheduled the first meeting with my new mentee with no agenda. We were just going to meet each other and talk. My plan as a mentor was to share experiences and give advice. That is what a mentor does, right?

After the first meeting I became discouraged. I felt inadequate and worthless. I had no sense of the direction to lead my mentee. I was not sure how I could help this person.

We continued to meet, but the meetings were not productive. I struggled adding future meetings to my calendar because I had more important things to do. Activities in which I provided more value to the company than mentoring. After a few months we just stopped meeting. I had failed with my first mentee.

I am glad that over the next 25 years, I was able to develop world class mentoring skills. It would never have happened if I had not failed first. People that avoid failure, risk never experiencing the event that will positively change their life forever.

For some time, I avoided mentoring, but soon I was assigned another mentee. The second experience was better, but ultimately a failure. In fact, I continued to fail several more times. I learned from my mistakes. I sought out training. I learned more by doing than from books. I had to be willing to face my mistakes, and do the work required to improve.

Being a great mentor is not easy. There is not one single skill that automatically makes a good mentor. Good mentors have a long list of skills including listening, teaching, training, guiding, storytelling, coaching, and most importantly human personalities and motivations.

You can be a world class mentor. It requires life skills that grow through experience, failure, improvement, and practice. What lessons have you learned making you a better mentor? Have you learned more from a book, or by practice? What are you learning now, that will make you a better mentor?

 

Rules and Responsibility

Rules and procedures are a funny thing. They are used to define decisions, responses, and actions for a defined situation. The intent is to drive consistent, and planned processes. If you could create procedures and processes that cover all possible situations, then your results would be 100% consistent. Also, if correctly designed, your results would achieve 100% of your goal.

But can your procedures cover 100% of the possibilities? I think it depends on the scope of the operation you want to control. Two things I have been pondering about rules and procedures.

First, a person that is instructed to follow procedures without questioning or thinking loses all responsibility for the outcome of the situation. The outcome becomes the responsibility of the person or group that created the rules.

Second, if you want your employees, organization, or team to just follow the procedures, couldn’t they all be replaced by robots and computers? What value does a human provide in a situation?

These questions apply to current events every day. United’s procedures for handling planes with more passengers than seats revealed major flaws in the last few weeks. Employees followed the procedures, but the outcome was not what United would have desired. Could this disaster have been avoided if people were given the ability to override the procedure? Maybe.

We can also look at the rising use of automation, such as Tesla’s self-driving cars. Should a human play any part in driving or control? Or would we prefer to put 100% of the responsibility on the developers of the software and hardware that control the driving?

I think these two examples represent many issues we will face over the next fifty years. It is important that we think about how we want humans to add value, and how much control we are willing to put into procedures, rules, robots, and automation. Are there limits?

Poor Leadership?

As you have probably seen, this week a man was forcefully removed from a United Airlines flight that was overbooked. The video went viral, and people were outraged. They should have been.

According to the Department of Transportation 46,000 passengers were involuntarily bumped from their scheduled flight in 2015. It is an every day occurrence in the industry.

So why the outrage? Normally an airlines offers an incentive for people to delay their departure to a future flight. In this case United claims to have offered an $800 voucher, but had no volunteers. They decided to randomly select four people to remove from the flight. But they also revealed later that they needed the seats for their employees.

This is a prime example of poor leadership. Employees followed procedures blindly without regard to the consequences. This is not how empowered employees would have acted.

There are a multitude of ways that United could have resolved the issue without violence. It is the company culture that allowed this situation to escalate to this level.

Strong leadership would create a work environment that was built on values, that support the procedures in place. Strong leadership would encourage employees to solve problems and make tactical decisions based on the current situation. Procedures can rarely cover all situations that would arise in a work place. Strong leadership would want employees that know how to successfully resolve issues.

When we ask employees to blindly follow procedures, we remove all personal responsibility from those employees.

United’s actions reflect their lack of respect for their customers. This is poor leadership from the top that has permeated their organization. We can only wonder what company values really drive their actions and their procedures. If we knew, we would probably stop using their services.