Monthly Archives: November 2015

Minnesota Public Radio: Kerri Miller Friday Roundtable

This week on the MPR Friday Roundtable, I had the privilege of speaking with other CEOs about diversity in the workplace, how to motivate workers and the role of vulnerability in leadership.

Listen to my conversation with former chairman and CEO of Medtronic; MayKao Hang, president and CEO of the Amherst Wilder Foundation; and Jay Lund, chairman president and CEO at Andersen Corporation.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/11/13/bcst-roundtable-ceos

This post was originally published on Minnesota Public Radio on 11/13/2015. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google: Bill George “Discover Your True North”

What are the characteristics of innovation leaders? Bill George argues that to remain innovative, leaders need to adopt an empowering rather than hierarchical approach. During this talk at Google, Bill talks about why leadership matters, why leaders fail, and the missing element in many organizations: innovation leaders. Bill George is senior fellow at Harvard Business School, where he has taught leadership since 2004. He is the author of four best-selling books: 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, True North, Finding Your True North, and Authentic Leadership, as well True North Groups. His newest book, “Discover Your True North”, was published in August of 2015.

Huffington Post: Mindfulness is Transforming Leaders

Last week my wife Penny and I had the opportunity to keynote the Mindful Leadership Summit. MINDFUL-HPAt the summit, 750 participants gathered to discuss how mindfulness practices could change
global leadership for the better. As Charles Lief, president of Naropa University, said, “The opening of all sectors to talk about mindfulness, contemplation and compassion is a very powerful thing.” The enthusiasm within the summit provided ample evidence that mindful leadership has indeed come of age.

How are leaders becoming mindful? One of the most popular ways to learn mindfulness is to attend a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. Popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn since the late 1970s, MBSR is built on ancient meditation practices. However, it wasn’t until the last decade that the marriage of mindfulness and leadership became reality. In 2007 Chade-Meng Tan – Google employee #107 — launched Google’s meditation program. The program currently teaches 2,000 Googlers per year to meditate in order to become better leaders.

In January, 2010 I had the privilege of presenting my ideas for developing compassionate, authentic leaders to the Dalai Lama at the Mind & Life Institute’s conference in Zurich. The following year Janice Marturano formed the Institute for Mindful Leadership, based on the highly successful courses she created for General Mills. Today, leading companies like Blackrock, Aetna, Ford Motor and Goldman Sachs conduct mindfulness classes for thousands of their leaders.

What is causing this shift to mindful leadership? In the stress-filled 24/7 world in which we live, leaders of all organizations need the opportunity for a “time out” period. It is their opportunity to relax, breathe deeply, de-stress and gain clarity about their work and the decisions they are facing. As I stressed at last week’s summit, mindfulness practices enable leaders to ensure the important issues are taking precedence over immediate pressures.

Business isn’t the only sector practicing mindfulness. These practices are gaining widespread use in health care, non-profits, education, athletics and even government. Recent clinical studies are demonstrating that mindfulness not only reduces stress, it improves productivity and reduces health care costs. As Aetna learned in its 2011 controlled study of meditation and yoga, health care costs for participating employees could be reduced by $2000 a year. As a result, Aetna is currently offering mindfulness classes as a covered benefit to its enrollees.

My own mindfulness practice began with a course in Transcendental Meditation (TM) that my wife and I attended in 1974. For the past forty years I have meditated daily. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I felt comfortable sharing my practice publicly, as I feared people would find it strange or even weird. This practice is the best thing I have done to calm my mind and my emotions, focus on what is most important while releasing trivial worries and think clearly about important decisions. Perhaps even more importantly, my most creative ideas have come from meditation.

Of course, meditation is not for everyone. What is essential for all of us — as I share in my classes and lectures — is having a daily practice of taking twenty minutes to quiet your mind, reflect and be introspective. For you, it may come through prayer, journaling, reflecting in a beautiful place or taking a long walk or jog. The goal? To create more self-aware leaders who understand themselves, their motivations, their values and the purpose of their leadership.

Becoming a mindful leaders requires daily practice. It is easy to say, as I did back in 1974, that you don’t have the time to fit this practice into your busy schedule. In fact, the opposite is true — you don’t have the time not to pursue it. A recent study by Aetna and Duke University proved that mindful practices can increase productivity by an hour a week. Just think what you could do with an extra hour: Play with your children? Take a walk with your spouse? Organize your life? However you use that extra time, mindfulness can help you accomplish it. More importantly, you will become more effective and satisfied in your work.

As I discuss in my new book, Discover Your True North, mindful leaders can help us begin to overcome the crisis in leadership we have experienced since 2001. Simply stated, mindfulness is a powerful practice that will help all of us become more authentic as leaders. If you haven’t experienced it, give it a try, and you will find that you have a greater sense of well-being and become a better leader.

 

This article was originally posted to Huffington Post on 11/11/15.

CNBC: Where University of Missouri President Wolfe Failed

Leaders must actively listen for crises to be avoided. Take, for instance, the recent crisis at the University of Missouri. Had leadership listened closely, especially after the events of Ferguson, perhaps things could have been different.

Harvard Business School: Authentic Leadership Rediscovered

“Authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership.”

—Harvard Business Review, January 2015

In the last 10 years, authenticity has become the gold standard of leadership. This is a sea change from 2003 when I wrote Authentic Leadership. Back then, many people asked what itBG-Headshot
meant to be authentic.

Authentic Leadership was intended as a clarion call to the new generation to learn from negative examples like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco. In it, I defined authentic leaders as genuine, moral and character-based leaders:

“People of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations … who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values who have the courage to build their companies to meet the needs of all their stakeholders, and who recognize the importance of their service to society.”

Authentic leaders demonstrate these five qualities:

  • Understanding their purpose
  • Practicing solid values
  • Leading with heart
  • Establishing connected relationships
  • Demonstrating self-discipline

The following year the Gallup Institute and Professor Bruce Avolio, a well-known leadership scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, organized a definitive conference on authentic leadership in which the importance of leaders’ life stories became paramount.

In spite of widespread acceptance of authentic leadership—or perhaps because of it—several authors have recently challenged the value of being authentic, claiming it is an excuse for being locked into a rigid view of one’s leadership, being rude and insensitive, refusing to change, or not adapting to one’s style to the situation. These arguments appear to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes an authentic leader. Recommendations that leaders should accept narcissism, embrace their inner jerk, or focus on themselves will not work in the long-run.

In light of this public discussion, it’s important to rediscover authentic leadership as well as examine some of the recent mischaracterizations of it.

Authentic leadership is built on your character, not your style. My mentor Warren Bennis said, “Leadership is character. It is not just a superficial question of style. It has to do with who we are as human beings and the forces that shaped us.

Style is the outward manifestation of one’s authentic leadership, not one’s inner self. To become authentic leaders, people must adopt flexible styles that fit the situation and capabilities of their teammates. At times, authentic leaders are coaches and mentors, inspiring others and empowering their teammates to lead through the most important tasks without a great deal of supervision. At other times, authentic leaders must make very difficult decisions, terminating people and going against the will of the majority, as required to meet the situational imperative. These difficult actions can be taken while still retaining their authenticity.

Authentic leaders are real and genuine. You cannot “fake it till you make it” by putting on a show as a leader or being a chameleon in your style. People sense very quickly who is authentic and who is not. Some leaders may pull it off for a while, but ultimately they will not gain the trust of their teammates, especially when dealing with difficult situations. The widespread adoption of LinkedIn, Google and increasingly networked communities means that every leader has the informal equivalent of a “Yelp” score that will come to light. If people see their leaders as trustworthy and willing to learn, followers will respond very positively to requests for help in getting through difficult times.

Authentic leaders are constantly growing. They do not have a rigid view of themselves and their leadership. Becoming authentic is a developmental state that enables leaders to progress through multiple roles, as they learn and grow from their experiences. Like superior performances in athletics or music, becoming an authentic leader requires years of practice in challenging situations.

Authentic leaders match their behavior to their context, an essential part of emotional intelligence (EQ). They do not burst out with whatever they may be thinking or feeling. Rather, they exhibit self-monitoring, understand how they are being perceived, and use emotional intelligence (EQ) to communicate effectively.

Authentic leaders are not perfect, nor do they try to be. They make mistakes, but they are willing to admit their errors and learn from them. They know how to ask others for help. Nor are authentic leaders always humble or modest. It takes a great deal of self-confidence to lead through very difficult situations.

Authentic leaders are sensitive to the needs of others. One author has postulated, and I paraphrase, “What if your real self is a jerk?” People are not born as jerks, nor does this behavior reflect their authentic selves. Rather, these individuals likely had very negative experiences early in their lives that cause them to have difficulty in managing their anger, in part because they feel like victims or feel inadequate.

Situations like these indicate the importance of processing one’s crucibles: people need not feel like victims or stuff their experiences deep inside themselves. Rather, by understanding themselves and reframing their experiences, they can find the pearl inside that represents their authentic selves. That’s why exploring who they are and getting honest feedback from their colleagues are essential elements of becoming authentic leaders. That’s what Starbucks’ Howard Schultz did in coping with the severe challenges of his youth. It is also what made the difference for Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple nine years after his 1986 termination.

For all these reasons, authentic leaders constitute the vast majority of people chosen today for the key roles in business and nonprofits. Their emergence as the predominant way of leading has resulted from all we have discovered about leadership in the past decade.

A Human-Centered Approach to Leadership Development

My 2007 book, True North, showed people how they could develop themselves as authentic leaders. Whereas Authentic Leadership was based on my personal experiences in leading, True North was built on field research drawn from in-person interviews with 125 leaders. With 3,000 pages of transcripts, it remains as the largest in-depth study of leaders ever conducted, based on first-person interviews.

Having examined the literature containing more than 1,000 studies of leaders, most of which employed third-person approaches of observations and questionnaires, our research team concluded that learning directly from these leaders about what was important to them and how they had developed would give us much richer insights than prior studies. Indeed, this proved to be the case, as we discovered the paramount importance of leaders’ life stories and the crucibles they had faced. We also learned from them how people develop into authentic leaders.In our research, we embraced the richness of understanding leadership as a fully human endeavor. This approach built upon the pioneering work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Douglas McGregor, Daniel Goleman and Warren Bennis. True North assembled this developmental process in an original approach that enabled people to develop themselves as authentic leaders.

In order to see how leadership has changed in the past decade, we initiated research in 2014 that focused on 47 new leaders who were more global and diverse than the original cohort. We also followed up on 90 leaders featured in True North to see how they have fared since their 2005-06 interviews. With only a couple of exceptions, we learned these leaders had remained true to their authentic selves, and had performed very well in myriad roles.

This research led to my new book, Discover Your True North, which profiles 101 leaders and describes how they developed. It also draws heavily upon classroom experiences in the Authentic Leadership Development courses at Harvard Business School, where 6,000 MBAs and executives have participated in this developmental process.Most significantly, we learned that authentic leaders are constantly growing and learning from their leadership experiences. By taking on new challenges, they become more effective as authentic leaders. When they find themselves in entirely new situations, authentic leaders draw upon their true selves, what they have learned in past life experiences, especially their crucibles, and they learn from their new colleagues. This enables them to become more effective as leaders. This approach is similar to Stanford’s Carol Dweck’s “growth mindset.”

If you want to be an authentic leader and have a meaningful life, you need to do the difficult inner work to develop yourself, have a strong moral compass based on your beliefs and values, and work on problems that matter to you. When you look back on your life it may not be perfect, but it will be authentically yours.

This article was originally published on Harvard Business School: Working Knowledge.

Catholic Business Journal: LEADERSHIP MATTERS: Recent Headlines and Finding Your True North

These recent headlines in the Wall Street Journal highlight the ongoing problem of leaders who have “gone south” and have taken their organizations with them:   “Walgreens is Waiting for Answers About Theranos” … “Attention Shareholders: Beware of the Board” ...  “Credit Suisse Settles ‘Dark Pool’ Case” …  “Stanford Business School Steps Down After Affair with Wife of Direct Report” … “Bribery Case Hits UN” … “Volkswagen Chief Martin Winterkorn Resigns Amid Emissions Scandal” … “VC Arrested for Insider Trading Now Accused of Defrauding His Firm”

Stanford business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer would use these headlines as examples of how “the leadership industry has failed.” Prescriptions for leaders to be more truthful are at odds with what goes on in the real word. “The ability to lie can be very useful for getting ahead,” says Pfeffer. “Manipulation is a foundation for social power…in fact; there is a reciprocal relationship between power and lying.”

And this brings us to Bill George’s latest book, Discover Your True North: Expanded and Updated.  In it, George brings his wisdom, observations, examples, and practices to bear on helping leaders be something more than what Pfeffer proposes.

Author George encourages us to build on our natural leadership gifts and to stay on our “True North” track to inspire and empower others to excellence. According to George, our “True North” is the internal compass which, based on deeply held beliefs, values and principles, “represents who we are at our deepest level.” Knowing our internal compass helps when pressures and seductions detour us from achieving our purpose in life. It is our lifesaver… alerting us to get back on track when the life being lived is not aligned with who we are at the deepest level.

George’s True North needs some reconciling to Pfeffer’s belief about the reality of leadership.

Pfeffer talks about power for the sake of power, while George talks about power that flows from character. This disconnect may be attributed to the lack of good role models for those seeking to be leaders. I have observed over the years that leadership training—if not reinforced by good role models—does not lead to “True North” leadership. It is hard work to develop the type of leader George talks about. It is “The Road Less Traveled” due to the required investment of time by both the student and the role model.

For this reason, I recommend Discovering Your True North with the caveat that it be reinforced by a role model. This may be satisfied with George’s concept of a “support team” that he details in the book. I have worked with Bill George and can vouch that he is the real thing. I am sure that he provides the modeling needed to those he touches in the classroom and for those with whom he works in his consultancy.

Brief Summary of this updated edition – George revisits his NYC Times best-seller, and now business classic book, that was released in 2007.  In this 2015 updated version, he integrates his personal insights gained as CEO of Medtronic and as a professor and Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School with new first-person interviews of 48 “authentic global leaders.” These leaders include many who have garnered the positive attention of the press and have inspired and empowered millions to excellence –Indra Nooyi, Jack Ma, Alan Mulally, John Mackey, Sheryl Sandberg, Michael Bloomberg, and many others. He also includes updates on the original 125 participants featured in his first book and includes a chapter on finding your “GQ” (your global quotient).

George also includes case studies of those who were seduced and took detours – Rajat Gupta (insider trading), Lance Armstrong (fraud and demonization of those who tried to reveal the truth), and Michael Baker (fraud).

It is early yet, but we all may have something to learn from what appears to be a scandal of major proportions brewing at Theranos. Did Elizabeth Holmes take time to find her “True North”? Did she take a detour? Will Theranos survive? For her, this book may be too late.

Those who read George’s first book will find this updated editon to be just as inspiring. For those  who missed the first book, they will find this new edition to be a treasure (and will regret having missed the 2007 edition).

This article was originally published on Catholic Business Journal.