Bill Treasurer's Blog, page 32

Lessons from the Stars

Leaders Open Doors for MORE than Just the Top Performers

A Guest Post by Eileen McDargh

This summer, we spent nine days of backpacking in the Pioneer Basin region of the Southern CA High Sierras. The 12,000-foot Mono Pass assured us that we were well tucked behind granite peaks and away from the ambient light of the LA Basin.

I tried without luck to photograph the millions of stars, the twirling Milky Way Galaxy, and the split seconds of shooting stars the zapped across the night.

Then the moon rose, starting as a sliver and ending up just short of full.  With its emergence, the array of stars that so mesmerized me became indistinct and faded from view.  It is the moon and its brilliance that seemed to occupy the night. In fact, throughout history, the moon gets far more popular attention than any other object in the sky.

Isn’t that so true in life? The brighter-than-all sales superstar, the blockbuster drug, the number one athlete, the great rainmaker, and on it goes. The light from these individuals and products truly overshadow the rest. Attention and praise are heaped on them.

In doing so, a leader can miss the incredible artistry of a lesser “star.” In some cases, these now over-shadowed people paved the way for the individual’s singular achievement. The researcher toiling at the bench might not find a blockbuster drug but his discoveries could add much to collective wisdom and future achievements.

Don’t let the ultra-bright person or thing obscure the complexity, beauty, and potential of others.  You can’t create a resilient organization with only the moon.

 

 Eileen McDargh is an award-winning author and internationally recognized speaker. Her newest book was just released: Your Resiliency GPS- A Guide for Growing Through Life and Work. Love the book. Just bought ten copies. You should too!

 

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Join the Gratitude Campaign!

There’s been a lot of talk lately about breaking the Internet. Let’s see if we can do it by lifting people up, sharing inspiration and thanking those who opened doors for us.

I bet someone has opened a door for you in your life — a door that helped you succeed in ways you never thought possible.  Here’s your opportunity to thank that person and celebrate the difference they’ve made in your life.

Watch our video about what open door leadership is all about here, then post your story about a leader who opened a door for you in the comments section, on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.  I’ll choose the story I think best captures the spirit of open door leadership. Use hashtag #LeadersOpenDoors.

If your entry is selected, you will win a three-day registration to the ATD 2015 International Conference & Exposition in Orlando, Florida, where we’ll meet in person. You and your leader will each receive a leadership consultation and a copy of my new book, Leaders Open Doors, 2nd Edition.

Together we can say ‘thanks’ — and see if gratitude can #BreakTheInternet.

What are you waiting for?

It’s time to say ‘thank you’ to the people who opened the doors for your success!

 

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What Is A Chief Encouragement Officer?

It happens fairly regularly. I’ll hand my business card to someone, wait a beat, and watch them smile as they read my title — Chief Encouragement Officer.

I started my business, Giant Leap Consulting, in 2002. My personal and business mission is the same – to help people and organizations be more courageous. It was as clear to me then as it is now: fear is bad for business. As a consultant, I had seen the debilitating effect of fear on performance and morale. Too many leaders, unfortunately, use fear-stoking as the primary means of prodding results. I decided that I would dedicate my career to changing that.

Having worked with thousands of executives across the globe in the last decade, I’ve come to believe that everyone, regardless of where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, can be a chief encouragement officer. Here’s what it entails:

Promote Purposeful Discomfort: Growth and development are a function of discomfort. One of the best things you can do for your career is to purposely seek out situations that put you in over you heads. Not so far out into the deep waters that you drown, but enough that you have to stretch on your tippy toes to breath.
Focus on Opportunity, Not Risk: Too many leaders hyper-focus on risk mitigation and not enough on opportunity optimization. Focusing on mitigating risks puts an emphasis on reducing the likelihood of bad outcomes. Focusing on opportunity can increase the likelihood of the best possible outcomes. Focus on the good you want instead of the bad that you don’t.
Drive Out Fear: Edwards Deming, the famous quality pioneer, exhorted leaders to “drive out fear.” Good advice. Workers don’t care about what “keeps you awake at night.” They care about what gets you up in the morning. Give people permission to be courageous. Recognize and reward them when they do things that are difficult, challenging, and scary.

Being a chief encouragement officer doesn’t mean being soft, “nice,” or likeable. It doesn’t mean being a rah-rah cheerleader. Patting people on the backs, when done too much and without sincerity, is just another form of leadership manipulation – trying to get people to perform through trickery.

Being a chief encouragement officer means holding the interests of others and the interests of the goals of the organization as equally important. Goals provide momentum and direction for organizations and workers. But without motivated and committed employees, goals will not be accomplished. Goals are the end, people are the means, and chief encouragement officers are loyal to both.

Being a chief encouragement officer at the top of organizations also means activating the courage that lives inside your employees – quite literally encouraging them. It makes no difference if they hesitate and gulp when faced with big challenges or changes, as long as they keep moving forward, they are being courageous. Because courage isn’t fearlessness. Courage is fearfulness – to take action despite being afraid.

photo credit: thetaxhaven

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer of Giant Leap Consulting and author of Leaders Open Doors, which focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. 100% of the book’s royalties are being donated to programs that support children with special needs. Bill is also the author of Courage Goes to Work, Right Risk, and Courageous Leadership, and has led courage-building workshops across the world for NASA, Accenture, CNN, PNC Bank, SPANX, Hugo Boss, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and many others.

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Six Doors Effective Leaders Open for Their Employees

“Six Doors Effective Leaders Open for Their Employees” originally appeared in Training and Development Magazine in their September 2014 issue.

 

 

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5 Leadership Bounty Lessons From Spring Training With the Pittsburgh Pirates

Baseball spring training season is marked with a series of practices and exhibition games to prepare new and old players alike for the coming official season. This year’s Pittsburgh Pirates spring training at Pirate City in Bradenton, Florida also included leadership sessions with best-selling author Bill Treasurer. The invitation came after Clint Hurdle, the Pirate’s manager, read Treasurer’s latest book, Leaders Open Doors. What Treasurer didn’t realize was that he would learn as much about leadership from the Pirates in their two days together as he would offer the players and coaches. Below he shares his “Five Leadership Bounty Lessons From Spring Training with the Pittsburgh Pirates” as well as the leadership essential takeaways for leaders of businesses and organizations of all types.

Cultivate the Farm: The term “bench strength” comes from baseball. Over the long haul, the teams that consistently win are those that pay as much attention to the next generation of players as the big league stars. One overriding goal of the coaches at Pirate City is to turn boys into men. More than a few players are teenagers who are away from home for the first time. Character building is as much an emphasis as playing ball. Players are taught to wear their baseball caps straight!

Leadership Essential: Actively build leadership skills among your organization’s next generation of leaders to deepen the overall bench strength.

Emphasize Leadership: The simplest definition of leadership is “to stay out in front.” To be in the lead, you’ve got to be leading. A lot of coaching time is devoted to helping players learn to be leaders. They bring in outside leadership experts, journal their thoughts on leadership, and even have a “leadership counsel” of players who are voted on by their peers for their leadership potential.

Leadership Essential: Thinking about leadership isn’t enough. Leadership is something you do. Provide real opportunities for people to lead and take charge.

Own Your Own Accountability: Few things are as damaging to a team than lack of individual accountability. As said on a locker room poster, “You either did or didn’t, who cares why or why not?” Each morning team members who feel they’ve let the team down in some way voluntarily fess up and put a dollar into a penalty jug. When enough money accrues, it’s donated to a worthy cause. Self-accountability is the best way to promote team-accountability.

Leadership Essential: Create an environment that encourages people to “own” their performance and mistakes. Embody personal accountability as a core value.

Provide “Bursts” of Motivation: Energy management is critical to high performance. Players don’t need to be keyed-up for the entire game lest they fizzle out before the game is over. Rather, they need to flip the motivation button to “on” instantaneously as needed. Coaches provide motivational pep talks in short 5 to 10 min “bursts,” not drawn-out speeches or lectures.

Leadership Essential: Fire people up with one or two quick motivational messages, not every motivational quote you’ve ever heard.

Be Abnormal: At the end of the season, only one team wins. The winning team is an outlier. Winning isn’t normal and requires an abnormal level of preparation, practice, and hard work. Champions sacrifice the comforts normal people seek.

Leadership Essential: Get everyone striving for excellence by asking each person to improve performance by one tenth of one percent every day. It’s the best way to outperform average.

During his visit, Treasurer sensed a swelling level of confidence building in the Pirates franchise. After a twenty year losing streak, the longest in North American professional sports history, the team headed in 2013 to postseason play for the first time in twenty-one years. The season had built on the momentum that was created in 2012, when they won early in the season but later collapsed.

After reflecting on the experience, Treasurer shared:

“I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some of the best organizations in the world, ranging from NASA to Saks Fifth Avenue. For over two decades I’ve designed, developed, and delivered leadership and succession programs for corporate and nonprofit clients. But I’m here to tell you, I learned as much about leadership by spending two days at Pirate City than I have just about anywhere else.”

To inquire about having Bill work with your organization, contact info@giantleapconsulting.com.

 

 

 

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Advice for OD Professionals

I’m a practitioner of organizational development. “OD,” as it’s called, is the field of practice that primarily focuses on changing people, processes, and structures to help bring about performance improvement.

Because OD folks are always striving to help organizations reach a better future, a lot of OD folks lean toward idealism. Sometimes militantly so. “Shared leadership,” for example, is held up by many OD professionals as the highest leadership ideal. When everyone owns the outcomes, and everyone shares the leadership burden, performance and morale is boosted.

Another new ideal being spread by OD professionals is leadership “vulnerability.” When leaders open up about their weaknesses and secret fears, followers, we are told, build a kinship with them. Acknowledging your leadership weaknesses is the best way to build follower loyalty.

Call me a jaded OD professional, but I just think us OD professionals spend too much time advancing ideals that work better in aboriginal tribes than in actual organizations. Most business organizations are not social democracies. They are, mostly, benevolent dictatorships. The few people at the tippy-top make decisions for the masses below. Sure, as an OD professional I wish it weren’t so. I wish everyone had a voice, all people were treated equally and equitably, and that carrots replaced sticks as workplace motivators. I also wish for world peace.

Uncompromisingly holding on to high ideals is a good thing. Until it becomes a bad thing. The problem with OD fundamentalism is that it is elitist. It assumes that OD ideals are the ideals to which every organization everywhere should aspire. When organizations and their leaders fall short of the OD ideals – and most do – the idealistic OD elitist can look down on the bourgeois workplace and indignantly proclaim, “They just don’t get it.”

I prefer practical ideals that work to lofty ideals that don’t. My job as an OD professional isn’t to change people or shame them into doing things the OD way. My job is to help people get clear about the ideals that will serve them, and then help support them as they do their best to live into their own ideals.

If you’re an OD professional, I encourage you to stop doing these things:

Stop talking about The Emperor with No Clothes. Good God, can we please come up with a new metaphor for describing leadership? Most leaders are doing the best they can, so cut them some slack.
Stop trying to get people to “open up” about their pain. Enough focusing on sharing weaknesses and vulnerability. A little is okay, but too much just makes people feel emotionally raw and exposed.
Stop fixating on a shared leadership ideal. Most organizations are hierarchical structures, not ashrams. Get over it. Empowering others is good, abdicating one’s leadership responsibilities under the guise of empowerment is bad.
Stop relying on obscure academic research. Lessons gotten from clinical studies done on lab rats or graduate students don’t translate to the real-world of work. Base your advice on what you’ve actually experienced or seen work, not by results research spectators saw in a lab.
Stop using smarty-pants words. Words like pedagogy, efficacy, and gestalt may make you sound smart in front of your OD colleagues, but they make you sound like an out-of-touch egghead to regular folks at work.

You want to make a difference in the world of work? Then quit trying to get it to live into your worldview. Work with what is. Hold on to your ideals but don’t lose sight of practicality. OD is about positive change. The best way to bring about change in others is to let change start with you.

 

Bill Treasurer is the founder of Giant Leap Consulting, a courage-building consultancy. Treasurer is the author of Leaders Open Doors, which focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. He is also the author of Courage Goes to Work, an international bestselling book that introduces the concept of courage-building. He busted his butt writing Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace, an off-the-shelf training toolkit that organizations can use to build workplace courage. Bill’s first book, Right Risk, draws on his experiences as a professional high diver. Bill has led courage-building workshops for, among others, NASA, Accenture, CNN, PNC Bank, SPANX, Hugo Boss, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. To learn more, contact info@giantleapconsulting.com.

photo credit: ScoRDS

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University of Michigan Management Conference 2014 (Recap)

Last week, Bill Treasurer gave a keynote address to 300 employees of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He spoke about the importance of leaders as “opportunity creators,” based on concepts from his bestselling book, Leaders Open Doors.

Some highlights from his address:

Leadership is not about the leader, it’s about the people being led.
Open-door leadership is about serving people and organizations, by creating opportunities for growth.
Courage isn’t the absence of fear. Courage is the full presence of fear — but acting despite being afraid.
Would you rather be liked then feared? Or would you rather be feared than liked?
Open-door leadership resides at the intersection between leadership, opportunity, and courage. Growth and comfort do not co-exist. You grow, progress, and evolve in a zone of discomfort, not comfort — so part of your job as a leader is to make people uncomfortable.

Bill’s keynotes are always highly interactive. It’s not any speaker that can get 300 Wolverines out of their seats for some interactive fun! Bill also enjoyed meeting members of the U-M dance team!

If you were able to attend the conference, what was your key takeaway?

To contact Bill about speaking to your school, conference, or event, send an email to: info@giantleapconsulting.com!

 

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The Power of Storytelling

I’m honored to share this blog post by Jim Blasingame. I’ve known Jim for almost a decade now. He produces and hosts a radio show called The Small Business Advocate. And advocate he is! Small business owners everywhere benefit from Jim’s wisdom and vast network of experts, whom he calls his “brain trust.” I became part of that brain trust when I was invited by Jim to talk about risk-taking with the publication of my first book, Right Risk. Since that time, Jim has become a true friend. My brain certainly trusts Jim! So will yours when you read this post about Jim’s new book, The Age of the Customer.

 

Cogito ergo sum. French philosopher Rene Descartes proposed this idea in 1637, which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Certainly the power of abstract thought is what separates humans from other animals.

Anthropologists now believe Homo sapiens succeeded, unlike other members of the genus Homo, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon for example, because our brains had a greater capacity for speech and language. Today Descartes might have modified his philosophy to “I think and speak, therefore I am.”

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith proposed the written word as one of the three great human inventions. But long before humans were writing we were telling stories. And these stories – told, memorized and retold over millennia – became the headwaters of human development. We humans love to tell stories almost as much as we love to listen to them. 

Another thing that’s older than writing is the marketplace. Long before Madison Avenue ad copy, merchants were verbalizing the value and benefits of their wares. Surely early business storytelling was the origin of modern selling skills.

In 1965, Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that became Moore’s Law: “Computer processing power doubles every two years.” But in his 1982 watershed book Megatrends, futurist John Naisbitt posed this paradoxical prophecy: “The more high tech we create, the more high touch we will want.”

So what does all of this mean? It means that in The Age of the Customer®–a time of rapidly compounding technology generations–the most successful businesses will consistently deliver high touch to customers with one of our oldest traits – the telling of a story.

Here is Blasingame’s Three C’s of Business Storytelling:

Connect – Use stories to connect with prospects and convert them into customers.
Convey – Use stories to convey your expertise, relevance, humanity and values.
Create – Use stories to create customer memories that compel them to come back.

Storytelling is humanity in words. And since small businesses are the face and voice of humanity in the marketplace, we have a great advantage in the Age of the Customer. No market sector can execute the Three C’s of Business Storytelling to evoke powerful human feelings more than small businesses.

And regardless of how they’re delivered, stories don’t have to be long. I just told you five different ones in the first half of this article.

Write this on a rock:

The Holy Grail of storytelling is when

someone else tells your business’s story to others.

 

For a short video from Jim on this topic, click here. For more about his new book, The Age of the Customer, click here.

 

Jim Blasingame is one of the world’s foremost experts on small business and entrepreneurship, and was ranked as the #1 small business expert in the world by Google. He is the creator and award-winning host of The Small Business Advocate® Show, the world’s only weekday radio talk show dedicated to small business, nationally syndicated since 1997. He is also a syndicated columnist and author of two books, Small Business is Like a Bunch of Bananas and Three Minutes to Success. His third book, The Age of the Customer®, will be released on January 27, 2014.

 

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Three Buckets of Courage

Courage involves behavior. Like all behaviors, courage can be developed, encouraged, and reinforced.

While a lot of writers have focused on the realms in which courage is applied (for example: moral courage, military courage, and political courage), I think it is more useful to understand the common ways that people behave when being courageous, regardless of which realm they’re operating in. While the realms themselves may have sharp differences, the ways people behave when being courageous within those realms are surprisingly similar.

In my work as a courage-building consultant, I have discovered that there are three ways of behaving when your courage is activated. When you become familiar with the three distinct types of courageous behavior, you gain a deeper understanding of how to tap into, and strengthen, your own courage and the courage of those around you.

I call these three different forms of courage the Three Buckets of Courage.

TRY Courage

When managers talk about wanting workers to “step up to the plate,” it is TRY Courage that they are referring to. TRY Courage is the courage of initiative and action. You often see TRY Courage when people make “first attempts”—for example, whenever you see someone attempt new, skill-stretching, or pioneering tasks. Someone who volunteers to lead a tough or risky project is demonstrating TRY Courage.

TRUST Courage

TRUST Courage is the courage that it takes to relinquish control and rely on others. When managers talk of wanting employees to embrace company changes more willingly or to follow directives more enthusiastically, it is more TRUST Courage that they want employees to have. When TRUST Courage is present, people give each other the benefit of the doubt, instead of questioning the motives and intentions of those around them. TRUST Courage isn’t about taking charge (as with TRY Courage), but about following the charge of others.

TELL Courage

TELL Courage is the courage of “voice,” and involves speaking with candor and conviction, especially when the opinions expressed run counter to the group’s. To preserve their safety, workers often agree too much and speak out too little. When TELL Courage is activated, it causes workers to assert themselves more willingly and confidently. You see TELL Courage at work when employees tactfully but truthfully provide tough feedback . . . even to you, their manager. You also see it when workers raise their hands and ask for help, or when they tell you about mistakes they’ve made before you ask.

The main benefit of using the Three Buckets of Courage as a framework for understanding and categorizing courageous behavior is that it helps make courage, as a concept, more graspable.

Parsing courage into three behavioral buckets allows us to discriminate the different ways we have been courageous in the past and are capable of being in the future.

Think, for example, of the scariest or most uncomfortable moments in your career thus far: Weren’t you trying something new, trusting someone else’s lead, and/or telling the truth about a conviction you were upholding?
Now think about the single biggest career goal you have in front of you right now: To achieve your goal, won’t it involve exercising more TRY, TRUST, or TELL Courage (or some combination of all three)?

Courage is a large and vague concept. Using the TRY, TRUST, TELL framework helps bring it down to size. tweet this!

 

photo credit: itspaulkelly

 

Bill Treasurer is the author of Courage Goes to Work, an international bestselling book that introduces the concept of courage-building. He is also the author of Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace, an off-the-shelf training toolkit that has been taught in eight countries on four continents. Bill is a former member of the U.S. High Diving Team and performed over 1500 dives from heights that scaled to over 100 feet. His newest book, Leaders Open Doors, focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. 100% of the book’s royalties are being donated to programs that support children with special needs. Learn more at www.leadersopendoors.com andwww.couragebuilding.com.

 

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Start 2014 by Finding Your Golden Silence

Henry David Thoreau, who after spending a year and a half in quiet solitude at Walden Pond certainly earned the right to expound on silence, talks about the necessity to “shake off the village” as a means of connecting to your inner wisdom. Thoreau also underscored the importance of having a sacred place, or what he referred to as a sanctum sanctorum.

The sanctity of silence is essential in helping the Right Risk-taker to stand apart from the world, in order to make sense of it.

Ultimately the choice of whether to take a risk resides solely with you and no one else. While the opinions of others should be taken into consideration, you are the one who has to be most comfortable with your risk decision. Having a “sacred place” will help you shut out the world long enough to compare, contrast, and perhaps integrate your own opinions about the risk with the opinions of others. Though the actual location of your sacred space should be picked by you, I find such places as an empty church, peaceful garden, and local library to be luxuriously silent.

In his wonderfully insightful book The Courage to Create, Rollo May writes about the “constructive use of solitude.” Like Thoreau, May advises that we periodically disengage from the world and let solitude work for us and in us.

Silence helps us relax so that insights and intuitions can break through. The constructive use of solitude is not passive silence but receptive silence. We see this receptivity in the artist waiting for inspiration, the writer staring out the window, and the athlete focusing before the contest. It is the attentive silence of listening, not just for words, but also for indications from our intuition about the actions we should take.

Silence takes discipline because it requires being alone, something that seems increasingly difficult for people to do. Yet the rewards for doing so are clear.

In silence, we strengthen the connection to our inner wisdom, heighten our awareness, and become more exacting in our decision-making. Silence helps us become more clearheaded about what we need to do and why we need to do it. When we sit with silence long enough, we begin to hear and decipher the whispers of our soul. Right Risk-takers use silence to access the wealth—the “gold”—that resides inside them.

photo credit: Rennett Stowe

Bill Treasurer is the author of Courage Goes to Work, an international bestselling book that introduces the concept of courage-building. He is also the author of Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace, an off-the-shelf training toolkit that has been taught in eight countries on four continents. Bill is a former member of the U.S. High Diving Team and performed over 1500 dives from heights that scaled to over 100 feet. His newest book, Leaders Open Doors, focuses on how leaders create growth through opportunity. 100% of the book’s royalties are being donated to programs that support children with special needs. Learn more at leadersopendoors.com and couragebuilding.com.

 

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