The Power of Confident Humility

Confident humility. While some might believe these words to be dichotomous, Professor Adam Grant and the amazing minds over at Wharton have something to share: this personality trait is the secret to great leadership. In their latest nano-tool for leaders, confident humility is defined as being secure enough in your expertise and strengths to admit your ignorance and weaknesses. When one reflects on the most admired leaders throughout history, the two are often seen together. When leaders have one without the other, however, they falter. Confidence without humility leads to egotism and lack of forethought, while humility without confidence leads to doubt and failure.

Luckily, there are steps that leaders can take to ensure they embody these traits. First off, create a culture of learning as opposed to a culture of performance. Evidence shows that acknowledging one’s shortcomings creates more innovation and fewer mistakes. Second, give yourself the benefit if the doubt. Questioning methods and existing assumptions can lead to seeking new insights, thus broadening knowledge. And lastly, find one assumption to dive into and question deeply. Look for conflicting opinions or information, and truly ask if these assumptions can be wrong.

Apply these action steps to your self, and give your team some insight into what confident humility can look like in a leader. Check out the full article here and share it with those who might benefit.

The Six Types of Genius

Pat Lencioni knows all about struggles in leadership. This prolific and bestselling author/speaker is most known for his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, likely because he has dealt with all five dysfunctions. Pat writes from his experiences, and his new book is no exception. Published earlier this fall, The Six Types of Working Genius: A Better Way to Understand Your Gifts, Your Frustrations, and Your Team, this book also came from his own frustrations with understanding not only his team, but also himself. With this book, he says, he wants to help leaders “be the CEO you were built to be.”

Not long ago, Lencioni found himself mired in frustrations with his consultancy, The Table Group. Feeling stuck and listless, he did some self-reflection on why. He realized that while much of the advice around these common feelings is to “work less”, that didn’t fix the problem. It wasn’t until he worked harder on the things that brought him joy and energy that he started to see a shift in his perspective. He started to reflect on his own talents and those of his team, and thus the “Six Geniuses” were born (Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity).

In an interview with Chief Executive Magazine, Lencioni dives into what each of these geniuses means, the potential of identifying them in yourself and your team, and how to take the first steps in doing so, even in uncertain economic times. Take a minute to read the interview and the synopsis of the Six Geniuses, identify which one applies to you, then see if you don’t rush out to get the book!

The Hero Complex

When disaster strikes or issues arise in a business, those in leadership may feel the need to step in and attempt to solve the problem. They want to be the hero, and as leaders they may be naturally inclined to do so. But is this tendency really helping anyone? Of course leaders have a responsibility to respond to situations, but the onus to take over situations to “fix” them, may be misguided.

Colonel Fred Maddox, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College and Chief of Staff of the Army senior fellow at the Kellogg School shares his experiences in a new article from Kellogg Insight blog. In it, he explains that leaders need to resist the urge to ignore their own workload to help resolve these situations. “When leaders act like they’re the only ones who can solve something, it can become an issue for the whole organization,” Maddox says, “because they’re not focused on strategy and they’re doing someone else’s job.” Let that one marinate for a while.

Maddox goes on to tell leaders that when the urge to step in arises, take a step back and reflect on the situation first. Ask why this intervention is necessary. Are there fears around teams or individuals failing? Are there no systems of accountability? Is there just plain fear that the entire ship will go down? Once there is a good understanding of why this urge is coming up, then it can be addressed. Is the team/individual really in danger of failing? Likely not. It’s likely that they are actually quite capable if left to figure things out.

In preparation for problems inevitably arising, some leaders may want to rehearse common issues so that this urge to intervene may be better controlled. The confidence built for teams, individuals, and leaders can go a long way to allow everyone to do their jobs, and keep leadership in the strategic roles where they belong. Check out the article and see if you can let go of some of these tendencies.

A Resilience Workout

Resilience is defined as the ability of a person to adjust to or recover readily from illness, adversity, major life changes, etc. This has been a hot topic over the last few years and goodness knows we have all been put to the test. Resiliency is not necessarily a trait that comes naturally, but luckily it can be taught and developed with proper exercises. We just need to flex our resiliency muscles.

Often called the ‘father of positive psychology’, Martin E.P. Seligman has developed his PERMA resilience training program over the past 30 years. His major research was focused on applying this method to military personnel who had experienced a traumatic event. In this groundbreaking research, he used the following tools:

• Positive emotion;

• Engagement;

• Relationships;

• Meaning; and

• Accomplishment.

While some of the ideas proposed in each of these subjects may be a bit intangible, through proper application soldiers were able to mentally recover from trauma much more quickly than others.

Resilience training in the workplace has proved to not only benefit employees’ well being and mindset, but can also increase profits. One study of a two-month-long resilience training program resulted in a $1,846 gain per person for the company due to reduced presenteeism. Take a few minutes to read this article, listen to the associated interview, and even watch a video. We can all benefit from resilience training in our own lives, but see if it can help boost your business too.

How to Get More Hours in a Day

Wouldn’t it be nice to feel like we had enough time to get everything done and still be able to relax? Everyone has wished for more hours in the day, at least at some point. And since we can’t slow the speed of the Earth’s rotation, we have to get creative. This is where Kelly and Marshall Goldsmith come in.

In an article featured in Chief Executive Magazine, the Goldsmiths are on a mission to help everyone achieve their goals by using time management skills more wisely. In this brief article they layout a 3-step process to narrow down what your biggest time drains are, and where your energy would be better spent, along with advice on how to expand this to your team. This technique applies to any level and on any team, and can really spark creative ideas. Give it a try and see how much better your time is spent!

How Experts Make Big Decisions

The strategy of decision making has long been studied among social scientists. Why do some people feel certain they’ve made the right choice, while others waffle back and forth, easily overwhelmed by their circumstances? Since answers to this question were bound to be complex, researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg have turned to a complex source: the game of chess.

Yuval Salant and Jorg Spenkuch set out to do a deep dive on the complex decisions that we all make. They wanted to go beyond the everyday choices like which book to read next or what to have for dinner on any given night. Exactly what does it take to make a good choice in the face of growing complexity? In order to gain some insight they examined a database of more than 200 million moves performed in an online chess platform. Unsurprisingly, they found that those with more experience in the game (the chess masters) benefitted more from extra time to evaluate all options. Shockingly, however, they found that everyone - expert or not - suffered when the amount of mediocre choices outweighed the amount of poor (losing) choices.

Anyone who plays chess will understand why this is a perfect medium to study decision-making. Unlike daily life, each choice can be objectively ranked. Chess moves either lead to a win, or lead to a loss. It is complex enough of a game, however, that it is difficult to understand the nature of each option in the middle of a game (especially when time is of the essence). Players typically consider only a small subset of all possible options, and pick the first one that they consider good enough, a strategy that economists call “satisficing.” As mentioned above, when more mediocre options were considered, the players were more likely to choose a losing strategy regardless of level. So “satisficing” can often lead to undesirable results.

We all face these complex decisions every day, especially those in leadership. Hopefully this research will help us come out on the better side of the next big choice we have to make. Check out the new article here that summarizes this research and see if it can shed some light on your own process. If so, perhaps it can help you to avoid the pitfalls of the mediocre choices.

The Art of the 25-Minute Meeting

Wharton’s collaboration of their Executive Education and their Center for Leadership and Change Management just keeps impressing us all with their amazing nano-tools for leaders, and this month’s might be one of the best. So often we get stuck in meetings that drone on and on, with not a lot of substance produced by the end. How much would office morale improve if meetings could wrap up in 25 minutes? This is no arbitrary number. Donna McGeorge, author of The 1-Day Refund, and now The 25-Minute Meeting, outlines specific steps on both the art and science of keeping meetings to 25 minutes.

This technique will require some examining of your process, streamlining preparations, agendas, and the like, but has the potential to pay off ten-fold. For instance, when planning the meeting, think about this sentence: “At the end of this meeting, it would be great if…” That one statement can re-frame planning and help clarify purpose better than most tools currently in the leadership arsenal. Additionally, using the Scan-Focus-Act technique developed by Channon, Burns, and Nelson in 1983 will keep the time limit within the 25 minute goal.

• Scan - broad strokes, purpose, why are we here, etc. gets 12 mins max;

• Focus - 2 or 3 items that require attention, decision making, problem solving, etc. gets 8 mins max;

• Act - next steps, action items, etc. gets 5 mins max.

Take a minute to read this brief and insightful article for a deeper dive, and see examples of how other leaders implemented these changes. Bonus - alliteration nerds will notice a precise pleasing pattern.

Addressing Office Culture in Returning to Work

With more and more companies (actually) returning to the office this fall, many in leadership are having to face up to a difficult reality: employees largely do not want to go back. The push to return to the office seems to be coming from those in leadership across all industries. So how do these competing wishes stay balanced? What does leadership do when employees are pushing back against change? Kellogg’s own David Schonthal and Loran Nordgren have identified four “frictions” that companies can come up against when attempting to implement change.

The first step in this process (as in many processes) is acknowledging that people do not generally like change or appreciate being told what to do. Seems simple enough, right? Often recognizing these feelings is enough to open minds to changes. Second, is to seed ideas early and often. Mentioning that changes are coming down the pipeline long before they are actually implemented can help soften the blow. Third, involve employees in the process of designing change - but to a point. Too many ideas will be detrimental and time consuming. Working collaboratively, however, allows everyone to have a stake in the company wide change. And lastly, they pose the idea of framing changes as an experiment. Flexibility to keep what is working and lose what is not goes a long way in making people feel comfortable with changes.

While Mr. Schonthal and Mr. Nordgren post these tactics as relating to an office environment, they are easily applied in any walk of life. If your employees are returning to office work this fall take a minute to give this an in-depth read. You’ll be glad you did.

Preventing Burnout

“Burnout”, although currently a hot topic, is by no means a new concept. Even in our pre-pandemic lives this was a very real danger, especially in the workforce (although it can also happen in our personal lives as well). Luckily, Wharton’s own Adam Grant has come up with one of their simple yet highly effective nano-tools for leaders. His new article highlights his approach to preventing burnout, using a model he dubs “Demand-Control-Support”.

In this model, he highlights the strategy in the following ways:

• Demand: Make structural changes that lighten the load on the person doing the job or redistribute tasks.

• Control: When you can’t eliminate demands, you can at least give people the autonomy and skills they need to handle them.

• Support: Create cultures that make it easy to request and receive help.

It is interesting to see how differently these changes are exemplified in different industries. In some, for instance, tasks forces were created to identify where time-consuming tasks were holding people up, and new systems were put in place to correct them. At a Cleveland hospital, it was discovered that doctors were spending an inordinate amount of time charting in an outdated electronic health record system. Once this “demand” was identified, new management software was put into place and doctors were able to spend more time with patients.

While some companies may be able to address these issues immediately, others are more reticent, especially in the face of a predicted economic downturn. Many companies are already facing lay-offs, which, if not handled properly, will only increase burnout, not decrease it. Should a company find itself here, it is important that leadership take into account the “Support” aspect of Mr. Grant’s model. This step is able to really highlight top-down changes, as leadership must sometimes make the shift to the idea that asking for help is a sign of strength, not one of weakness. When leadership opens up about personal struggles, this culture is normalized, and employees generally are less prone to burnout, even if their workloads increase.

With “quiet quitting” coming into the modern lexicon, burnout has been blamed for this drawback from work life. Ideally, using these nano tools will prevent burnout, and thus embolden employees to set these healthy boundaries without taking away from what they are able to offer in their jobs. Take a look at Mr. Grant’s newest piece and see how your company can integrate these measures. Economic fluctuations and workload shifts are inevitable, but burnout is not.

The Ill Effects of Job Insecurity

All companies have ups and downs, it’s part of running a business in a capitalist economy. No one expects things to be good all the time. As such, sometimes companies go through periods in which cutbacks are a reality, and employees must be let go. Sad, but true. In an effort to get more from their employees, some business owners or managers may use job insecurity as a motivating factor to get employees to work harder, work longer hours, or to try and outperform colleagues. But does this threat of the lay-off actually work? A few of the brains over at HBR (Mindy Shoss, Shiyang Su, Ann Schlotzhauer, and Nicole Carusone) have published the results of a 3-month long study of how job insecurity affected employees.

According to a recent Gallup poll 15% of workers do not feel that their jobs are secure, despite unemployment being at record low levels. This new study surveyed over 600 participants and how they felt over a months-long process. One very interesting aspect of the study is that in the short term, these threats or scare tactics seem to work well to motivate workers. People will try to work harder to make themselves an indispensable part of the team, to impeccably follow the rules, and to make higher-ups aware of their achievements even if those achievements added no real value to the company. Over the long-term, however, the burnout becomes very real. Many participants described the heightened anxiety around job security as negatively impacting their job performance. Eventually, most people felt so distracted, tired, or worried that they began failing at their core tasks. Yes, they may have been working longer hours, but productivity, reliability, and creativeness suffered overall.

While some companies freely admit to using this strategy, others may do it unknowingly. Discussions of scarcity, austerity, or potential cutbacks can be overheard or mentioned in passing, and still have a negative impact on employees. Check out the full article here and get access to the full range of studies on the subject. See if your company and your employees are caught in this cycle of negativity.