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Lessons from Cisco: Why there's a 'D' in Leader

I like Cisco's acronym for their leadership competencies: CLEAD (Collaborate, Learn, Execute, Accelerate, Disrupt).

Like any good acronym, CLEAD is intuitive and provides a working approximation to an underlying truth. Also like any good acronym, it is situational and not exclusive - CLEAD is what leadership means to Cisco, not to every organization.

But what I like most about CLEAD is that out of all the leadership competencies Cisco could have included, during all the kill-me-now, do-we-have-to-discuss-this-again meetings that I'm sure they had, somebody worked hard to get 'disrupt' in there.

Fact is, most business leaders don't disrupt. Quite the opposite - out of fear, comfort, ego, money or a combination of all four, mostly they do all they can to maintain the status quo. (Note, I'm talking here about formally recognized 'leaders' - not the real, informal, guerilla leaders in the organization.)

Every time a leader pulls the ladder up from behind them by quashing initiative in others, squeezing out the challenge factor, driving out risk-taking or strangling creativity they push their organization a little further over the edge from Treadmill (which is recoverable) into The Big Rut (which isn't).

Now, you don't do that (or you wouldn't be reading this in the first place) - but are you actively disrupting? Are you finding ways to improve what you, your team and your organization does by challenging the status quo and seeking new ways to address old problems?

Three questions for you:

1. When was the last time you saw an opportunity to disrupt?
2. Did you take it?
3. If not, why not?

Will you help me choose the cover design for my new book?

As you may already know, my new book, "Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization Back On the Growth Track - and Keeping It There" is being published next year by Greenleaf Book Group, and I'd really appreciate your help in one of the most important aspects of book marketing - choosing the cover.

Below this text you will see four alternate covers for "Predictable Success". If you were thinking of buying a book on growing your business (or your organization, division, department, project, group or team), which of these would most inspire you to pick it up?

To vote, simply type the number of the cover you prefer into the 'Leave a Comment' box (below,) together with any comments you might have on colors, images used, fonts - anything at all you think might help us make the cover even better.

Click on any cover to see a larger version.
Cover 1	Cover 2
Cover 3	Cover 4

Beyond $1bn: Growing the large privately held organization

A few weeks ago, I was asked to share with a small group of CEO's my observations on why some large privately-held organizations make it through the $1bn revenue range and go on to become $2 - $5bn businesses, while some seem to get 'stuck' at $1bn.

Here's a recording of the presentation (it runs about 25 minutes). Click the play button to listen to streaming audio:

Or click here to download the mp3 file to your desktop for listening later.
You can also click here to download the associated one-page summary.

5 simple steps to being a great manager

Being a truly great leader calls for transcendence. Being a truly great manager is mostly about getting the mechanics right. Here are 5 relatively simple mechanical skills that will transform any good manager into a truly great one:

1. Stop using Powerpoint. Learn the art of facilitation instead.

2. Let other people finish their thoughts.

3. Find a ubiquitous capture tool that you're comfortable with.

4. Ask two people you respect to review anything of importance that you produce, before it is finalized.

5. Understand that while your relationships with your direct reports hold the key to your short term success, it's the relationship with your peer managers that holds the key to your success in the long run.

The importance of shared vocabulary in high performing teams

High performing organizations and teams display an interesting characteristic - they use an optimum amount of shared vocabulary.

'Shared vocabulary', is an innate, shared understanding about what certain words or phrases mean. Of course, the words and phrases change from organization to organization and from team to team - it might be 'leadership' or 'customer service' or 'this month's sales budget' or even 'optimum inventory level' - but whatever the word or phrase is, everyone involved understands clearly, unambiguously and without exception exactly what is meant by it.

Low-performing organizations on the other hand, wrestle in a mire of conflicting opinions and ambiguous interpretation of even the most fundamental concepts. It's hard to hit your revenue goals when no-one agrees precisely what they are. It's hard to display consistent leadership when there's no joint agreement as to what 'leadership' means. It's hard to deliver consistent customer service when there's no unified agreement as to what precisely that means.

'Shared vocabulary' is not the same as 'agreed policy'. Many organizations have plentiful 'agreed policies', but little or no shared vocabulary. Agreed policies are decided by committees and promulgated in manuals and memos. On their own, they're just words on a page. An 'agreed policy' only becomes shared vocabulary when the people involved in implementing the policy develop and share an innate understanding, and agreement to, what the agreed policy means in reality, in practice.

Highly adaptive organizations and teams have more shared vocabulary than agreed policies. They prefer shared vocabulary to agreed policies because their shared vocabulary is a living, changing, adaptive tool, while agreed policies are brittle, written in stone (or on paper) and are out of date the day after they're written.

Too much shared vocabulary can be a bad thing - indicative of a cult-like, unthinking, unquestioning culture that quashes independent thinking, but too little shared vocabulary is worse.

If there are fewer than three material, important things about which you can put your hand on your heart and say 'everyone on my team absolutely knows what we mean by this', then you should be worried. If there are more than ten or so, you might want to loosen the knot a little.

Here's the key question - what are the seven, eight or nine things about which your team should have a shared vocabulary?

5 Seconds to Authenticity

As you go about your business today, take a step back and watch as you interact with others.

Maybe you'll find yourself in a conference room, talking with one or two colleagues about last night's reality show before the meeting begins. Perhaps you'll wander (or be summoned) in to a manager's office, where you'll swap condolences about the big game at the weekend before discussing the details of a project. Later, you might be on the 'phone with a supplier or a customer, asking how the weather is in Poughkeepsie before getting into the details of a job or contract.

One way or the other, you'll spend some part of today, if not chit-chatting or gossiping, at least talking informally with other people.

So far so good, so far so...normal.

It's what happens next that's of interest. When the time comes to move from informal, 'normal' chit-chat to the business at hand - say the meeting comes to order, your boss reaches for the project file, or the supplier on the 'phone says 'Anyhoo...' - at this point, for 98% of the working population, two things will happen:

1. The pitch of your voice will change slightly but perceptibly. You'll move up an octave (a small percentage of people's voices will go down an octave).

2. If you're face to face with an individual or group of people, your use of eye contact will change. You will use less direct, eye-to-eye contact, and more eye-to-bridge-of-the-nose contact.

These may seem like small changes - and superficially, they are. They're useful to some extent, too, in providing a demarcation between formal and informal discussion. But mostly, it's a destructive and inauthentic process. By subtly shifting to our 'business voice' and changing the way we make eye contact with others, we're signaling - to ourselves mostly, but to others, too - that this is not truly 'us'. That this business persona is 'other' than the real me.

The distinction between 'business me' and 'real me' varies from person to person. Some of us have very different 'business' and 'real' personas, and for others they are almost indistinguishable - but for most all of us, there is a difference.

The key difference is that we give 'business me' permission to do things 'real me' wouldn't. 'Business me' might exaggerate, avoid, evade, opine, shade, interpret, bond, reject, embrace or promote in ways 'real me' never would. 'Business me' will talk about things in an artificial manner we would never use at home or around friends - and not just in adopting workplace norms, but by responding to situations and others in ways 'real me' wouldn't.

In essence, what we're doing is reducing the stress caused by cognitive dissonance - having to do and say things we're not personally comfortable with - by shifting the responsibility of saying and doing those things to someone else - our fabricated 'business me'.

Of course the downside of this is that everyone else notices. Everyone. All the time. Don't kid yourself: just as you know when Jane or Juan are just being themselves and when they have turned on their 'business me', so everyone else knows, albeit at a subliminal level, when you're doing it too. (In fact, because of our desire to subjugate dissonance, we can begin to ignore it in ourselves, while noticing it in everyone else.)

This is the heart and root (if something can be both a heart and a root...) of inauthenticity. As soon as we switch into 'business me' there is a character void formed, where inauthenticity lurks. We say things, do things, agree to things, condone things we otherwise would not.

For most of us these are small things, maybe even insignificant - agreeing with our boss when she's made a silly suggestion, lightly shading data to prove a point, condoning a handling charge that we know is unnecessarily padded. At the other extreme, 'business me' can become a ruthless tyrant, a toadying panderer or a manipulative deceiver.

The problem is, being even a little inauthentic all the time is like being a little angry all the time - it colors and pollutes everything.

So today, try a simple experiment. In whatever environment you find yourself interacting with others, when the time comes to segue from the informal to the formal, pause for 5 seconds. Check for a tightening in your tonsils, and release it. Relax your throat and consciously return to your normal voice, make full eye contact, then talk.

Let 'real me' out. I guarantee you'll be surprised - and pleased - by what happens.

The $2 Trillion Leadership Widget

I like widgets. I use them all the time. I've got maybe 40 or so on my iPhone, and 10 to 12 on my desktop. Between my web sites and information aggregators like my Google home page, I use tens more - maybe 100 to 150 in total - over the course of a week.

Widgets are built for a purpose, and it's a good one: to allow (and promote) short, light-touch use of a larger service or application. Distinguishing between the use of each (the widget and the main application or service) is significant.

I regularly use my iPhone apps to browse the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but at weekends or other times when I want to read in depth, I buy the actual newspaper. The email widget on my phone is great for shooting off a quick response, but when I need to clear a serious amount of email, I fire up the email app on my computer. The weather widget is great for a quick look at what's coming later, but planning a two-week trip calls for a full-blown visit to Weather.com. I can record today's expenses using the little widget I found at the iTunes store, but my annual accounts requires the power of QuickBooks (sadly). Your mileage may vary, but you get the idea.

For the last 20 years or so, corporate training and development departments have been teaching leadership as a widget, rather than as an app.

Driven by a benevolent desire to see leadership practiced in places other than just the executive suite, training and development programs have proliferated with the primary purpose of helping middle managers, team leaders, supervisors and front line employees exhibit leadership skills in appropriate circumstances. These 'leadership lite' programs are in themselves, great (full disclosure: over the years, I've taught many of them) - their intention is good, and the results have often been positive for the organizations that implemented them. But it's important to see that what they teach is, in effect, the use of a leadership widget - not the 'leadership app' as a whole.

Here's the problem: Twenty years later, many proficient users of the leadership widget are now in positions of significant, sustained, full-time leadership (running Fortune 100 companies for example), without ever having learned to use the full app. The last two years has brought this into sharp focus as we've seen so-called leader after so-called leader caught staring into the headlights as they reached the boundaries of what they could achieve with their leadership widget. The global cost to date? About $2 trillion.

There's a substantial degree of shared responsibility in this failure - yes, many executives have demonstrated an arrogance and hubris that led them to believe they could manage substantial businesses by being jerks most of the time and reaching for their leadership widget only as needed, but the organizations that provisioned their rising stars with only a leadership widget are also to blame.

Look at your leadership training and development: are you handing your people just the widget?