a leadership report card

On a Harvard Business Review blog, I found a leadership report for the nation’s most important leader, President Obama. Norm Smallwood lays out five rules that any leader can be measured on to assess a leader’s effectiveness. The five rules are a part of his co-authored book called The Leadership Code, here they are:

1. Rule 1: Be a Strategist and Shape the Future.
2. Rule 2: Be an Executor and Make Things Happen.
3. Rule 3: Be a Talent Manager: Engage Today’s Talent.
4. Rule 4: Be a Human Capital Developer: Build the Next Generation.
5. Rule 5: Be Personally Proficient: Invest in Yourself.

Action Steps:

• Ask people who know you and your work style well to assess in you these five areas. I like numbers ie. 1 to 5.
• Average the scores of others to determine your scores.
• Ask a mentor or coach to go over your scores with you and help determine how you can improve and what is going really well. Ask them to be specific.

In case you wanted to see Smallwood’s Obama report card.

excellence and leadership

On a previous post I wrote about how being an expert doesn’t necessarily make you the best leader. But what if you’re the leader of the team AND the go-to-person on your team? Sportswriter Bill Simmons wrote a great article today on how one athlete is handling it and doing it well. Check out the article here

Managing being the leader on your team as well as being the best can come with a number of caveats. As the leader, you can be seen as selfish, boastful, controlling, distrusting, and over zealous if you try to take over and do everything.

The key to being both is learning adaptability. Being the most adaptable member of your team can allow you to exhibit excellence as a team leader but also know how to defer to your other team members. Adaptability gives you the ability to adjust to different situations and lead different types of people and personalities. The best leaders adapt, while good leaders just manage well.

Points of Reflection
Are you the go-to-person on your team? If so, in what situations can you defer to your team and still achieve maximum success?
List all the responsibilities of your team. If you can do them all fairly well, you can take some giant steps toward adaptability.

value oriented actions

Values are a tricky thing. You can tell yourself and others that you value something, but if your actions don’t reflect it, it really doesn’t matter to you. For example, if you say that you value saving money, but your savings account has the amount in it as it did five years ago, you probably don’t.

So as the new year rolls along and you make your resolutions and set your goals, create them by orienting them closely with your values.

Action Steps
For the young leader
A lot of young leaders have a hard time figuring out what they really value. Here are three action steps to help you determine your values:

1. Look back at 2009 and create a list of your accomplishments or areas of strength.
2. What did you spend the most time doing during the past year? Work, reading, sports, hobbies? Create a list of your top five.
3. You should notice some trends, you should be able to identify what you value and what you don’t.

In the next year, the things you spend the most time on, should be the things you value most.

For the learning leader
The learning leader needs his values to better align with his actions. It’s in my experience that I sometimes get bogged down by having TOO many “values” and not enough action. Here are three action steps to help align your actions to your values:

1. Choose 3-5 (max) values to focus on this year. I think three is best. Whether it’s work related or life related, it will help you focus your actions if you don’t have too many values.
2. Determine the amount of time you’d like to spend a week on each value. For example, if you value your professional relationships at work, set the amount of time you’d like to spend investing in your colleagues.
3. After a week, evaluate how successfully your week reflected your values. If you value your family, did you spend lots of time with your family this week? To take it even further, show your list of values and time to someone close to you and check up on you, this can be your own personal values coach.

Though working hard is important, if your actions are in line with your values, your work will have more impact and more success as you grow as a leader. It’s simple, if it doesn’t fit in your values, why do it?

blog rebrand

After a long hiatus on the blogosphere, I’m finally ready to unveil my new rebranded blog. The new hour9 blog will be more specifically focused on providing reading material for leaders, like myself, who are either starting their careers in leadership or desiring to obtain some concrete tools or skills to take them to the next level. I will also be focusing some attention on young (in age) leaders and how they can develop into effective, successful professionals. These types of leaders are what I’d like to call, the learning leader. However, since leadership is leadership is leadership, all of my posts will still be relevant to ANY leader who is desiring to learn more or have a refresher course on some aspect of leadership.

I’ve created a FAQ for my rebrand so that you can get an idea of what to expect from my blog in the future.

How will it be different than before?
In the past, I wrote about anything and everything under the leadership umbrella. I will be focusing on topics that concern both young and inexperienced leaders and the issues they might face. My belief is that these leaders need to reflect on and develop different leadership skills than do their more experienced and seasoned colleagues.

What will make it different from other leadership blogs?
Every time I post I will include actions steps or points of reflection that are essential to the development of the learning leader. Though there are many other leadership blogs that focus on this, again, I will be focusing on the specific developmental areas of the learning leader.

Why should I read it?
That part you’ll have to decide for yourself. I will say this, it’s one of the few learning leadership blog on the web!

make your life “more than”

Recently, I caught the new documentary More than a Game showcasing LeBron James and his high school teammates journey through school and life. Though the movie is advertised as spotlighting LeBron, it’s actually much more about his teammates and his coach.

LeBron is one of the best players in the NBA and one of the top grossing athletes of our time. But his success wasn’t garnered on his own. His success grew in two ways: 1) he was supported and sharpened from great friends and 2) he was led by a disciplined and caring coach.

For LeBron and his teammates, basketball was much more than just a game. Through their well told story, it was apparent that basketball had taught each of the players how to work hard and how to become the best version of themselves.

It made me think that the goal is really about making our lives and our work more than… fill in the blank. Here are the tangible ways you can make your life and your work “more than” :

The ultimate connector

Life and leadership is about connecting. To make the greatest impact and influence on people you have to be able to connect with them and connect them to others. Though connecting may seem like an easy thing, most people mistake conversing or a fun, positive conversation as connecting with someone.

That’s not how connecting works. In order to really connect with someone, it has to go beyond

What is flat leadership?

A lot of people who study management or leadership have been talking about this idea of “flat” leadership: a leadership structure within an organization that carries no hierarchies or fancy titles.

Initially, this idea drove me crazy; a structure with no hierarchies?! How can this be?! My mind couldn’t get wrapped around the idea of people not having to answer to someone else. A system where one single person didn’t have all the ideas,  power or expertise couldn’t work, could it?

In our current stressful economy, companies who’ve adopted the opposite, top-down system are crumbling day after day. Their hierarchical structure has failed them as more and more of the top executives, in all their power and “expertise,” have taken advantage of the old way.

Flat leadership has to work. We can no longer wait for the next best thing to be the end all, answer to our prayers. Look where that got us…

Here are some learnings from my limited knowledge of flat leadership:

What’s integrity to you?

We’ve all heard it before, integrity. It’s actually an extremely nebulous word if you really sit down and think about what integrity means to you and how you see it portayed on a daily basis. 

Two bloggers that I follow, Bret Simmons and Mary Jo Ausmus, recently posted on the topic of integrity, how to stay in it and what it actually is. I was challenged by their thoughts and definitions as well as the numerous comments posted. 

Check out those posts, add to the discussion.