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Ed Oakley & the Enlightened Leadership team

I hope you’re thriving, or at least holding your own during these challenging economic times.

A week ago, we gathered 5 expert panelists to address management challenges sent in by our subscribers. The result was a webinar 90 minutes long of excellent ideas that likely address issues YOU are facing right now.

This journal post will give you access to the webinar recording, thanks to the suggestion of our Making Managers into Leaders Institute members. We’ve also made it easier for you to review the material without necessarily going through all 90 minutes. So before telling you where to go for the recording, here is what we have done to help:

- We have broken the webinar into segments by question. You can select the TAB with the question NUMBER of interest to you, or go through the whole webinar.

Here are some examples of questions:

1. My concern will be how to convince your non-qualified, conservative, rigid but senior (bosses) on many things that need reform or change? In Pakistan, there is a paucity of informed and qualified leaders in almost all the business and public sector arenas. We as junior managers find it very difficult to convince our pessimistic and non-professional bosses and have to take lot of heartburn in dealing with the organizational development, which is much needed in our scenario.

Shahzad

4. How does a leader who faces layoffs speak with his people without deceiving them, not give false hope but also not crush their hope? 

  What is the most important step(s) to take as we stumble or slide into this next difficult period?

Brian

8. How to minimize the RIF paranoia that seems to build as the economy continues to worsen?

Daniel    (RIF is Reduction in Force)

11. What have you found effective in helping others overcome fear of the unknown?

What works in overcoming the paralysis of analysis?

How do you help others (and yourself) stay focused on the high-payoff actions and avoid wasting time?

Tom

There are nine other sets of questions like these addressed on the replay! Go check it out!

OK, HOW DO I FIND THE REPLAY?

I’m glad you asked.

We put the replay on a new Management/Leadership community that we are experimenting with. It’s a great platform for creating some dialog around the questions and solutions – which can help everyone. Hope you’ll participate!

Go to www.managerstoleaders.com. You’ll need to do a very simple registration – (unless you happen to belong to any other Ning community).

When you’re in the community, you’ll see “Optimizing Your Teams’ Effectiveness in Difficult Times” in the middle of the page at the top. Just click on the title to see the entire article and video.

You’ll see the questions on the post, so you can selectively listen to responses if you choose. The question numbers can also help you remember how far you got in listening – and more importantly – pick up later where you left off.

Enjoy the excellent answers to tough questions, and share your thoughts or additional questions.

Best regards,

 The Enlightened Leadership Team

We would love to hear your comments after taking the tour.

Enjoy the tour! Come back and click on Making Managers into Leaders Institute for more information.

Please comment below!

The Enlightened Leadership Team  & Making Managers into Leaders Institute

Robin is also one of those people that managed to squeeze four years of college into five years. Upon completion of that phase of her life, she moved to Steamboat Springs to be a ski bum – which basically means you have three part-time jobs just to survive – but you get to ski a lot. I was definitely a bit jealous.

Two years into that experience, out of the blue, Robin called me and said, “Dad, this has been fun, but I think it is time for me to get a real job.” Wow, I was so proud. Part of me wondered if this day would ever come, so I was delighted. Then, she continued, “Dad, while I’m looking for a real job, do you think I could work for you?”

Robin moved to

My expectations were really pretty low for how much Robin would really help us. You see, she didn’t have any background in marketing or business education that really fit our work, so I figured we were going to be paying her a glorified allowance while she found her “real” job. I figured we would just have her do odds and ends – simple things that most anybody could do.

It was in our first “all-hands” company review and planning meeting that I started learning about leadership from Robin. Everything was pretty normal during the meeting – except I was a bit surprised with all the excellent ideas Robin had. I remember thinking, “I wonder how she is coming up with all these ideas?”

But it was when we asked, “Who will take responsibility to take action on that?” that I was shocked. Robin quickly positioned herself in a leadership role, volunteering to do much of the book promotion work that was so important to us. “I would never have thought she had the capability to do that,” I remember thinking. The lesson she taught me that day, and many others as she did excellent work for us, was how easy it is to limit people by how we see their capabilities. I had put a glass ceiling over her, and thank goodness she was strong enough to blast right through it and teach me a big lesson about how poor leadership can limit people.

Leadership is about bringing out the best in people, not limiting them with our judgments and decisions about them. Assume the best from people, and they’ll give you a lot more.

What limiting decisions have you made about certain people around you that might be holding them back? What new, Forward Focused™ decision could you make about them that might just release them to perform at a whole new level?

While it is really hard to admit that YOU might actually be contributing to someone’s poor performance, what might be the value of shifting how you see them? What have you got to lose by trying it?

To the ever-learning “enlightened leader” in you!

Ed Oakley  

Making Managers into Leaders® is what we do – guaranteed!

Being a staunch believer in the essence of Enlightened Leadership and Leadership Made Simple, she knew the solution to the problem lied within the creativity of the people involved. She also knew that creativity would never surface if they stayed in their frustrated state.

To get past that frustration, she encouraged them to shift their focus to what was working – not only in that specific area, but in other areas that might trigger insights for how to do this one differently.

Using that Forward Focus(TM) approach, the team came up with several ideas they could immediately implement to improve the situation. As they got positive results from those early actions, they were energized to find more creative ideas – which, of course, they had no problem generating!

They periodically got back together to build on their successes to continually improve that particular metric. It was an easy process – celebrating and analyzing successes and taking the resulting creative energy to come up with more improvement ideas.

By the time the August numbers came out, they had improved the metric from 18% to 90% effectiveness in just 4 months. What an amazing performance improvement. This is what leading for results – the easy way – looks like!

Our acknowledgment and congratulations to the team!

In what ways have you experienced leading for results the easy way? We would love to hear – your solutions and your challenges.

If you have experience with using the Framework for Leadership(TM), you won’t be surprised by a statement made on the video by John Van Sky, Bioterrorism Preparedness Training Manager, Orange County(CA) Health Agency:

“I’m a clinical psychologist by training, and I’ve never seen anything take down the barriers for folks quicker than the Framework.”

Isn’t breaking down a variety of barriers one of the ongoing challenges we face in our team leader, supervisor, manager, executive, or even parent roles? Key to breaking down barriers is honoring people and teams for where they already are – BEFORE asking them to do even better. The Framework does that in spades if your intention is right!

How have you have used the essence of Leadership Made Simple to make a difference in your situation. Send us your comments.

To your continued success!

As soon as we began to warm up, I realized the 20-something,
strong, tall man I was playing had a much stronger game than
mine. Nick hit the ball very hard, both groundstrokes and serves.
He had a very aggressive style. I realized I could not possibly
compete with him by trying to match his style, yet if I did not
consciously decide otherwise, that’s exactly what I would
probably try to do. My ego would naturally want to “outperform”
him at his own game. If I tried that, I realized I would have no
chance of winning.

In leadership, we must adjust what we do based on the
situations and people with whom we are working. If we always
manage the same way – regardless of the circumstances
or people – we are likely to make significant mistakes and
create problems rather than resolve them. We must do our
best to understand the situation, create our best strategy for
dealing with it, test our strategy and move forward with it
or change the strategy if it doesn’t work.

We must stay conscious! – aware of the situation.

In that tennis match, I recognized I couldn’t hit the ball nearly
as hard as he did, but I am pretty good at placing the ball on
the court close to where I want it – both with groundstrokes
and serves. So, as we warmed up, I planned my strategy
for playing Nick. I noticed that he had a tendency to hit some
of his backhands wide, deep or into the net. He missed very
few shots on his forehand side.

So I adjusted my game. I worked very hard to hit to his
backhand side – again nothing fancy, just get it back to that
side of the court. I also realized that I had the ability to be
more patient than Nick, and I could use that to my advantage.
He would try to end the point quickly with a great shot. But
he missed a lot of those kinds of shots. When he did, he
became frustrated. The more frustrated he got, the more patient
I got, because the strategy was working. The whole strategy
evolved to getting everything across the net to his backhand
side and let him make the mistakes. It worked more often than
not.

The only problem I have with this analogy is the competitive
perspective. We are NOT competing with our people, but
continually working to learn how to best collaborate with
them in our leadership roles so we can compete effectively
as an organization in the marketplace. We must learn to adjust
our approach to match the needs of the situation and the people with whom we are working.

As leaders, we need to understand the situation, adjust our
approach, test it to verify whether it is effective, change if it
is not effective, and continue if it is. If we stay locked into
preconceived notions about how it should work, we greatly
limit ourselves.

If I had tried to play my “normal” game, I would have
inadvertently played into his strengths more often.

As it was, I adjusted to fit the situation and I won the
match 6-1, 6-3. May you be conscious enough to adjust
your leadership approach to better fit the need!

How do you relate to this message?

Ed Oakley
Change Management Made Simple

Do you want your future to be a repeat of your past? NO! You want it to be better and different. The question is, “How do I create a future distinct from the past?” The answer requires… a shift in thinking, NOT a shift in action. Thought leader Peter Block (www.peterblock.com and www.designedlearning.com), named the co-founder of the field of Organization Development, shares this core message on the “Nature of Transformation.”

Peter Block speaks about changing culture by changing the conversations you’re having. That’s why the future depends on relatedness or connections. For example, high performing teams are all about CONNECTIVENESS.

As Block says, “All transformation is linguistic. To change the world, you need to change the conversation. The medium for change is QUESTIONS, the right kind of questions that are personal, ambiguous, and create anxiety.”

SMALL GROUPS are the element of transformation. The key is to create connections by increasing the listening. Here is the formula for helping organizations change:

• Bring people together in a room. Use the room as your metaphor for the world you want to create.
• Create a context. Why are we here? These are the questions we will explore together. The questions can revolve around: invitation, possibility, ownership, dissent, commitment, and gifts.
• Break into small groups of 3 to 6 people, maximum. Have the people who know each other the least gather together so their knees are less than 9? away from their neighbor’s. Strangers allow freedom and possibility. There is safety with strangers.
• Ask good questions in the small group and let each member take a turn responding. Set a short time, such as 6 to 8 minutes, for the group to connect. The other members should LISTEN. They should NOT be helpful. They should NOT provide advice. They CAN be curious and ask the responder, “Why does it matter?” People only care about what they have created.
• Come back to the larger group and hear from a FEW of the groups, “What went on? What did you learn?”

High listening creates an alternative future. When there is high listening, there is high learning. High learning leads to high relatedness. High relatedness leads to high performance.

BUSINESS EXAMPLE

Suppose your company is implementing a new system of some kind. Here’s how you can apply this approach to your company’s change process. Use the steps listed above: gather people into a room, break them into small groups, and pose questions such as:

• What is the commitment you have that has brought you here?
• What doubts and resistance do you have about this new system?
• What is the “yes” that you no longer mean with regard to this system?
• What is the invitation regarding this project that you have been waiting for?
• What do you think you contributed to this system?
• What is the promise you are willing to make?

As the people connect and discuss, the important work to implement the system is taking place.

PERSONAL EXAMPLE

After attending the workshop with Peter Block yesterday, I came home to dinner with my family. Over dinner, we used this method and posed the question, “What is the gift you have that you do not completely acknowledge?”

Since we knew each other very well, we also answered this question for each other. It was one of the richest dinner conversations we’ve had, and it allowed us to connect at a deep level.

NEXT STEPS

Look at your professional and personal life. What transformations are you seeking? What questions should you pose to the small groups in your organization? Begin now.

Theresa M. Szczurek, Ph.D.
CEO, Consultant, Business Coach, and Speaker
Technology and Management Solutions, LLC

Thank you, Theresa! Good advice.

Ed Oakley – Leading Change without Authority