3 Payoffs of "No-Excuses" Leadership

Too many leaders are quick to make excuses for why their companies aren’t performing to expectations by blaming others or circumstances outside themselves when things don’t go as planned.  However, if you are a true leader, you make no excuses and accept the responsibility for the results you get. By honing your own ability to lead, you will experience three payoffs that lead to success:

Payoff #1: You Know Yourself. As a leader, you have a life-sized laboratory or playground for exploring who you are, what you really want in life, and what you do to get what you want. As you become a more intentional leader, you shift to more deliberate, conscious choices and see more alignment between your intentions and impact. With this level of intentionality, you get the results you intended and don’t make excuses for the results you get.

Feedback is a primary way to get you to a place where you know yourself better, whether this feedback comes from assessments, other people, or the results you get from your actions. The trick is to be able to reflect on this feedback and to integrate it with your experiences. This allows you to know yourself better, which puts you well on your way to becoming a no-excuses leader.

Payoff #2: Align Your Business. Once you are more deliberate in the personal impact you intend, it follows that you would create that same alignment in your business. This alignment is about using your company’s intention (its mission, vision, goals, and values) to craft plans, procedures, processes, and systems that guide your employees to “walk the talk” regularly.

Creating and using a living, breathing strategic plan and current company goals, you and your leadership team ensure that daily work aligns with the company’s most important priorities. Every action taken, every promise made and acted upon reflects what you intended and wrote in the mission statement, your vision statement, and the strategic plan. You cultivate this same alignment with individual employees and teams throughout the company. With the business aligned, you decrease the need to make excuses for the outcomes you get.

Payoff #3: Express Yourself Clearly and Powerfully. The final payoff as a no-excuses leader is clear and powerful communication.  To achieve this, you see communication as a powerful, unifying process throughout your company. You check your own actions and words as well as your company’s systems to ensure the important communications employees need to hear are sent without mixed messages.

As a no-excuses leader you use a mix of stories, facts, and images to engage employees’ hearts and minds. You also learn to use influence more often than coercion to get stakeholders to join with you to accomplish you most important goals.

Socrates is attributed with saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Are you ready to examine your leadership to become a no-excuses leader?

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Beth Strathman works with leaders who are willing and courageous enough to shake up business as usual by understanding themselves, aligning their businesses, and expressing ideas clearly. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: firebrandconsultingllc.com.

5 Steps to Masterful Confrontation

Handled appropriately, confrontation done well allows you and your team to consider differing opinions, ideas, and assumptions with passive aggressive or victim-y behavior less likely to come into play. This, in turn, leads to greater buy-in and accountability.

Still, you are so trained to avoid confrontation that you probably haven’t taken many chances to practice it.  If you’re rusty on your confrontation skills, here’s how to confront issues and assert yourself without completely alienating everyone:

1. Be humble enough to know that you only have part of the story. When you decide to confront an issue, realize you may not have all the information and that you will learn more as you talk to the other person(s).  While the information you have may be troubling or disappointing, remember that you have interpreted the information you gathered and created a narrative in your head that is consistent with the way only you see the world.  There may be missing pieces that add a completely different spin on the issue.

If the information you have initially makes your blood boil, take at least a day to cool off and focus on the actual facts you have with the idea that the purpose for confronting this issue is to make sure you are seeing the issue from angles other than your perspective to round out the story.

2. Open with the facts.  As you start the confrontation, and after the usual “thanks for meeting with me today”, open with the facts.  These facts may come from your own observations, collected data, or from others’ reports or complaints.

Facts are different from your interpretation and include who, what, when, where, and how.  Starting with facts will help you set forth the context the issue surrounding the issue, the words and deeds of those involved, and the resulting impact those words and deeds had on the company, the team, customers, or others.

When you open with the facts, you need only recite what has transpired. This simple starting point helps you get over the awkward speed bump of what to say first and is grounded in concrete information that isn’t merely your opinion or hyperbole. Also, the facts focus the other party’s attention on exactly the issue at hand, which tends to cut off his/her options for deflecting blame.

3. Test the facts. After putting forth the facts you have, turn over the conversation to the other person with a question, like “Do I have this right?” or “What was going on?” or “Did this situation go as planned?”  This allows the other person to agree with the facts you have, add more, or tell you they experienced the situation differently.

4. Listen for others’ reactions.  As the other person talks, instead of listening for how you can argue back, listen for what’s at stake for him or her or any commitment that comes through. You may find that what you thought was a big issue, isn’t. Or if there is indeed an issue to address, you can then use the information provided to help paint a bigger picture for the other person, so you can both get on the same page. From here you can renew or establish commitments to each other.

5. Agree on a plan of action and follow up. Before you leave the confrontation, schedule a future meeting to follow up on the issue and any commitments you made to each other.

Confrontation does not need to be an angry exchange.  Healthy confrontation helps clear up misunderstandings or misinterpretations and get those involved back on track.  When you master confrontation, you increase understanding among co-workers, which increases the ability to work together productively.

Beyond the “Big Speech”: Daily Communication Habits Boost Leadership Presence and Impact

The fact of the matter is that most leaders spend a tiny fraction of their time giving huge public speeches. Instead, leadership happens moment by moment, person by person, both through words and deeds. There are hundreds of moments like these every day. Each moment sends messages that can ripple throughout your organization, with impact that the leader may or may not intend.

If a leader wants to better match intent and impact, earn the right to lead, and demonstrate true leadership presence, it makes sense to work on how the manager shows up in each of these moments throughout the day.

Specifically, managers can ask themselves the following questions:

• What messages do I send based on how I spend my time?
• What messages do I send based on the people with whom I spend my time?
• What messages do I send based on how I allocate resources?
• Am I authentic when I speak, or do I come across as manipulative and even dishonest?
• Do my deeds match my words?
• How well do I model the desired culture and values of the district and my school?
• How much integrity would my colleagues say I have?
• How do I respond to failures when people take risks?
• When do I provide praise and other rewards, and what messages does this send? 
• When do I provide criticism or punishment, and what messages does this send?
• What behaviors or results am I tolerating that I shouldn’t be tolerating, and what messages am I sending as a result?
• How well do I communicate expectations, how employees can be better, and what I appreciate about their work and contributions?
• How do I carry myself when I walk, speak one-on-one, and participate in meetings?
• How well do I listen and understand?
• How many different styles do I have for communicating in different, challenging situations?
• How well do I influence others one-on-one, in groups, and throughout the building or the entire district?

This is only a partial list of questions to explore. How well you present at the “big speech” is something to consider, but not even close to what really makes a difference -- when you communicate every hour of every day as a leader.

For more information, click here to download my free communication assessment then contact me any time at 801-946-0675 or at info@bethstrathman.com.



WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman is coach and advisor for senior leaders who want to get clear and focused and see better results in productivity and profitability in their organizations. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting LLC at: bethstrathman.com.

How to Be Successfully "Bossy"

According to a recent survey by the Adecco Staffing Group, about 30% of employees want the boss’s job.  After all, it looks so easy.  Bosses have more freedom with their schedules.  They are able to take longer lunches, come in late or leave early without having to punch a time clock.  Bosses get to spend most of their time in meetings rather than having to do actual work, and they get paid more and can tell others what to do.  Who wouldn’t want to move up the ladder and be the boss?

Ask those who were are in a supervisory position. 

It turns out most supervisors had no idea how difficult being the boss could be when they were on the other side of the management fence as a worker bee. After becoming the boss, they often find there is almost always someone who is unhappy with them, they generally work long hours, they must have tough conversations with employees even when they don’t want to, and in spite of what they thought before they were promoted, their direct reports don’t necessarily listen to them and sometimes even resent them just because they are in charge.  Some fun.

So, if you were recently promoted to a supervisory position or are still having difficulty accepting your role as boss, here are a few tips for being bossy – in a good way:

1.       Find your center to maintain your integrity. At its core, this includes making sure your personal values are mostly in alignment with those of your organization.  If personal and business values are off kilter, you will know it. In fact any misalignment will be magnified in a supervisory position because now you must directly represent the company’s interest.  If you can’t do that with a clear conscience, you might want to start planning a move.

2.       Communicate clearly by checking your assumptions. One of the most important aspects of communication is what happens before something comes out of your mouth or body – check your assumptions.  Some common assumptions that might catch you off guard are assuming employees have automatic respect for you because you’re up the food chain (they don’t – you have to earn it), assuming you can be the same kind of familiarly friendly with former co-workers you now supervise (you can’t, but they want you to), assuming they can avoid confronting problems because they’ll take care of themselves (some don’t, you need to address them), and assuming that your employees know what you mean all the time with little or no explanation.

To be successfully bossy on the communication front, you must set and reset expectations continually. New bosses especially are wise to meet individually with each direct report to get to know them, especially their career goals and current challenges.  From your end, make your expectations clear for employee behavior and performance, including specific performance standards you’re looking for.  Another thing to divulge are your “hot buttons” – those things that drive you crazy that you expect employees NOT to do.  The previous boss probably had different ones, so unless you say something to the contrary, your employees are going on the status quo.

3.       Remember it’s not personal; it’s the limbic system.  As a boss, your employees’ neurological systems perceive you as threat just by virtue of having an ever-so-slightly-raised status above your direct reports.  This means, even a slightly raised eyebrow from you will set some employees twirling off into a tizzy. Whenever you simply have a conversation about someone’s performance or conduct that needs improving, you’ll be accused of “yelling” at them even if you whispered during the entire conversation.  The same goes for positive interactions you have with employees; telling someone “good job on the Johnson project” can put someone on Cloud 9 for days. Yes, you’re that powerful.

Learn as much about emotions and neuroscience as you can to work effectively with your team.  More important, monitor your own emotional repertoire to avoid exacerbating the emotional response in others.

4.       Go slow. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” “Don’t eat the elephant all at once.” Et cetera.  You may see a thousand issues that need to be addressed, and you might be right.  To be successfully bossy, refrain from jumping in to tackle them quickly on your own (unless something illegal or unsafe is happening).  Instead, start asking questions about why things are done/not done a certain way.  Educate yourself and listen.  Then include your employees in creating or re-designing something different.  It will take longer and may not end up the way you originally envisioned; however, all will have ownership in what is created together.

5.       Be graciously fallible.  As the boss, you may feel pressure to continually prove you earned the spot – to be seen as competent.  Well, there may be an employee or two who could also do the job, but you’re the one who got it.  So, accept that you’re in charge and be successfully bossy by offloading the pressure to be right or smarter than everyone else.  It’s amazing how powerful you will be if you take a lesson from Louise Penny’s fictional character Chief Inspector Gamache, who mentors junior inspectors to set aside their egos by using 4 key phrases:  “I don’t know”  “I was wrong.” “I’m sorry.” “I need help.”

WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR NEWSLETTER, BLOG OR WEBSITE? You can, as long as you include this information with it: Beth Strathman is the Executive Coach for senior leaders who want to get focused and get results. Learn more about her company Firebrand Consulting at: http://www.firebrandconsulting.blogspot.com.