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2016 Global Leadership Summit – My Summary

August 19, 2016 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

This is my personal summary of the 2016 Global Leadership Summit in Chicago. A dozen business and outreach leaders spoke on the topic of Leadership.

I have organized my summary into three sections: Top Three Quotes from each speaker, One Minute Summary of each speaker, and a Three Minute Summary of each speaker. Enjoy!

GLS-SMALL

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TOP THREE QUOTES

  • Bill Hybels – Four Lenses of Leadership
    • You need to fill your own passion bucket so you can fill tthe passion buckets of people you influence
    • Maximizing performance requires constantly readjusting to stay in dynamic balance – not over adjusting or under adjusting
    • Legacies can and do change in an instant – in a good way or a bad. Eg: the thief on the cross. His legacy is getting his last decision right.
  • Alan Mulally – CEO Ford, Boeing
    • EVERYONE included – employees, suppliers, bankers, etc
    • EVERYONE knows the ONE plan, the status and areas that need special attention
    • Trust the process – Keep emotional resilience
  • Jossy Chacko – Empart USA
    • Faithfulness is not about maintaining what you have, it’s about multiplying what you have been given
    • Focus on Building the Character BEFORE your empower.
    • See risk as your friend to love, not your enemy to be feared – See Comfort and Safety as your Enemies
  • Dr. Travis Bradberry – Emotional Intelligence 2.0
    • Personality traits are fixed by age 15-20 but EQ can be developed your entire life
    • Self Awareness of your tendencies and being prepared to deal with them – lean into the discomfort and learn what you can improve
    • You have to focus more on the other person than yourself – You have to look at what the world looks like from the other person’s perspective and find common ground.

 

  • Patrick Lencioni – The Ideal Teammate
    • People who are hungry and smart but not humble are the most dangerous, hardest to spot and most devious because they can hide the fact that they only care about themselves.
    • It’s much better to allow people to self-assess than to tell them what’s wrong
    • Have the Courage to Constantly and Consistency to remind people of where they need to improve
  • Chris McChesney – Four discipline of execution
    • Execution does NOT LIKE complexity – the two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency
    • The number one driver of morale and engagement is when you think you are winning
    • Do your people feel like they are playing a high stakes winnable game??
  • Erin Meyer – The Cultural Map
    • www.ErinMeyer.com talks about Cultural map Dimensions
    • High context – it’s not what I said, it’s what i meant when i said it – the subtle messages between the lines – “Reading the air/atmosphere” “listening with all of my senses”
    • How do we receive critical feedback? Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback
  • John Maxwell – Intentional Living
    • Intentionally, every day, add value to people – this is the CORE of leadership – Do you exist to add value to people or to have people add value to you?
    • Everything worthwhile in life is uphill all the way. People have UPHILL HOPES and DOWNHILL HABITS – The only way you can change downhill habits is to be intentional. You have to turn on the switch of “intentional”
    • Significance is uphill and it’s not about us it’s about others – selfishness and significance are INCOMPATIBLE
  • T.D. Jakes – Second Wind
    • We think tribally instead of globally
    • You are going to miss something every day. Just try not to miss something in the same area multiple times in a row
    • We are so good at seeing what other people’s gifts are but we are not that good at acknowledging what God has given us – how he has gifted us.

 

  • Bill Hybels, Shauna Niequist, Henry Cloud – Blindspots for Leaders
    • Speed – Bill Hybels – We need self-reflection. We need to push the time-out button – stop the activity, sit before God, get a journal out and lower the RPMs
    • Connection – Henry cloud – Relationships operate according to a formula: I need to make my needs known, and find someone who can help me with those needs
    • Myth of Achievement – Shauna Niequist – Being FULLY PRESENT with everyone God has placed in your life, every moment of every day
  • Danielle Strickland – Leader Interrupted
    • True peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.
    • The world is crying out for all of the wrong things to be made right.
    • We need to create spaces in our lives where only God can show up.
  • Horst Schulze – Creating an Organization of Excellence and Efficiency
    • Any/All Customers Want: Perfect product – NO defects, You serve them timely, You care (this is the most important)
    • Process and Products are MANAGED – People need LEADERSHIP – Hiring people to perform a FUNCTION is NOT moral – You hire people to be part of a purpose, part of a dream
    • Is our dream/vision GOOD for all concerned: employees, customers, shareholders and society as a whole – measured by the VALUES that God gives us?

ONE MINUTE SUMMARIES

  • Bill Hybels – Four Lenses of Leadership
    • Passionate Lens
      • Passion comes from the top of the mountain (beautiful dream) or the bottom of the valley in the desert (outrage, holy discontent).
      • You need to fill your own passion bucket so you can fill the passion buckets of people you influence
    • Shattered Lens
      • Organizational health trumps everything. It takes hard work and effort and must be driven by a healthy leader at the very top
      • Transactional Noise (water-cooler talk that is negative) takes a toll on everyone. You need to observe and confront it head-on
    • Performance Lens
      • Maximizing performance requires constantly readjusting to stay in dynamic balance – not over adjusting or under adjusting
      • Willow assesses each department every six months thriving (gaining ground), healthy (maintaining ground), and under-performing (losing ground)
    • Legacy Lens
      • “I would give anything for a do-over” – There aren’t do-overs just make-overs.
      • Legacies can and do change in an instant – in a good way or a bad. Eg: the thief on the cross. His legacy is getting his last decision right.
  • Alan Mulally – CEO Ford, Boeing
    • Working Together Principles and Practices
      • People first
      • EVERYONE included – employees, suppliers, bankers, etc
      • Compelling vision
      • Comprehensive Strategy and Relentless Implementation
      • Weekly core team meeting with EVERYONE
      • Simple – Green, Yellow, Red dashboard
      • Clear performance goals
      • One plan
      • Facts and Data
      • EVERYONE knows the plan, the status and areas that need special attention
        • Everyone is expected to help out with the Red and Yellow statuses
      • Positive “find-a -way” attitude
      • Respect , listen, help and appreciate
      • Trust the process – Keep emotional resilience
      • Have fun – enjoy the journey and each other
  • Jossy Chacko – Empart USA
    • Faithfulness is not about maintaining what you have, it’s about multiplying what you have been given – The Three E’s
    • Enlarge your Vision – You need to enlarge that vision for multiplication
    • Empower your People –  Create opportunities despite your past bad experiences.
      • Leaders are like scaffolds to raise up leaders and empower them.
      • Character
        • Focus on Building the Character BEFORE your empower.
      • Relationship
        • You have to be in close proximity to know someone’s character. It’s about leading from alongside – rather than from the front
        • All future Empart leaders have to live with a small group and a leader for 12 months before leaving
      • Right Controls and Measurement – Right Outcomes
        • Control the outcomes not the people
    • Embrace Risk
      • Our Western society is all about eliminating risk – which is good generally speaking but in leadership it moves us from pioneering to preserving. From multiplying to maintaining
      • See risk as your friend to love, not your enemy to be feared.
      • See Comfort and Safety as your Enemies
      • You can’t have everything figured out before you get started.
    • Increase your Pain Threshold
      • Your leadership capacity is directly proportional to your pain threshold.
  • Dr. Travis Bradberry – Emotional Intelligence 2.0
    1. Personality traits are fixed by age 15-20 but EQ can be developed your entire life
    2. Four EQ Skills
        1. Self Awareness
          • Awareness of your tendencies and being prepared to deal with them – lean into the discomfort and learn what you can improve
        2. Self-management
          • It’s not about stuffing your feelings – both positive and negative emotions need to be managed.
        3. Social Awareness
          • You have to focus more on the other person than yourself.
        4. Relationship Management
          • You have to look at what the world looks like from the other person’s perspective if you’re to find common ground.
          • Don’t win the battle to prove you are right to lose the war which is the overall quality of the relationship.
    3. Increasing Your EQ
        1. Get your Stress Under Control
          • Low stress and high stress are unhealthy – “Optimal Stress” is necessary for good health.
          • The little things matter most when it comes to stress reduction
        2. Clean-up your sleep hygiene
          • Getting 7-9 hours helps, but high quality sleep is even more important.
          • Toxic proteins are a natural byproduct of normal brain activity that can only be cleaned up during sleep.
        3. Get your caffeine intake under control (BOO!)
          • Makes you less emotionally intelligent in the moment and affects your sleep long-term.
          • If you have to drink caffeine, don’t do it after 12 noon.
  • Patrick Lencioni – The Ideal Teammate
    • The Three Virtues
      1. Humility
        • True humility is just the recognition of what is true
        • Humility is not thinking less of  yourself, but thinking of yourself less
      2. Hungry
        • Passionate and tenacious in getting something down
      3. Smart
        • Common sense around people – people good at practicing the four behaviors of emotional intelligence.
    • When two virtues are lacking
      • The PAWN
        • People who lack hunger and smart. They are just humble
      • The BULLDOZER
        • People who lack humble and smart. They are just hungry
        • Leave a trail of dead bodies behind.
      • The CHARMER
        • People lack hunger and humble. They are just smart
    • When only one virtue is lacking
      • The ACCIDENTAL-MESS-MAKER
        • People who are humble and hungry but are not smart.
        • These are the people you are always making excuses for.
      • The LOVABLE-SLACKER
        • The people who are humble and smart but not hungry
        • They never go above and beyond. They are very frustrating.
      • The SKILLFUL-POLITICIAN
        • People who are hungry and smart but not humble
        • The most dangerous and the hardest to spot:.
        • They are devious because they can hide the fact that they only care about themselves.
    • Use the Three Virtues to develop yourself and your people
      1. Identify the areas that need improvement
        • You need to be vulnerable enough to identify the areas you need to improve in.
        • The leader has to go first and make it safe.
        • It’s much better to allow people to self-assess than to tell them what’s wrong
      2. Have the Courage to Constantly and Consistency to remind people of where they need to improve
        • People are most likely either going to improve or opt-out on their own – but occasionally you will need to terminate them
      3. Hiring people
        • Generally we over-emphasize technical skills
        • We don’t get people out of the interview room.
          • Ask them the same questions more than once
          • Stop doing SILO interviews. Do TEAM interviews.
        • Scare people with sincerity
          • Example: “We are fanatical about humble, hungry and smart. You will hate it here if that’s not you and we will hate you.”
  • Chris McChesney – Four discipline of execution
    • Execution is a game of changing human behavior.
      1. Focus
        • There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute
        • Focus on the Wildly Important Goal (WIG)
          • One WIG per team at the same time.
          • Everything else you need to sustain STILL GOES ON
        • Move goal from X to Y by WHEN
        • When accountability increases, morale and engagement increases because it throws the “game on switch”
        • Execution does NOT LIKE complexity
        • The two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency
      2. Act on LEAD Measures
        • Example: losing weight is the lag, diet and exercise are the lead measures
          • Everyone knows diet and exercise conceptualize, no one knows how many calories they eat and how many they burned
          • It’s easy to know the concept but not the data behind the concept
      3. Keep a Compelling Scorecard
        • People play differently when THEY are keeping score
        • We need a players scoreboard not s coach’s scoreboard
        • The number one driver of morale and engagement is when you think you are winning
      4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
        • Twenty minute meeting weekly where you make one or two commitments
        • Did I do what I was supposed to do
        • Review and update scoreboard
        • Make commitments for next week
        • As a leader, do not specify the commitments, let the staff make their own commitments
        • It’s a PULL strategy
    • Do your people feel like they are playing a high stakes winnable game??
  • Erin Meyer – The Cultural Map
    • ErinMeyer.com talks about every dimensions
    • Three Dimensions Relative to Communication
      1. Low versus high context
        • Identifying the subtle messages between the lines.
        • “Reading the air/atmosphere” “listening with all of my senses”
      2. How do we receive critical feedback
        • Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback
        • “Upgrader” words versus “Downgrader” words
      3. What silence means
        • High comfort with silence versus low comfort with silence
  • John Maxwell – Intentional Living
    • Intentionally, every day, add value to people – This is the CORE of leadership
    • Do you exist to add value to people or to have people add value to you?
      • There is a fine line better motivation and manipulation?
    • Three questions followers ask leaders:
      1. Do you like me? Compassion
      2. Can you help me? Competence
      3. Can I trust you? Character
      • In other words: Will you intentionally add value to my life?
    • EVERYTHING WORTHWHILE IS UPHILL – UPHILL ALL THE WAY
      • Good marriage, physical health, good business, etc.
    • People have UPHILL HOPES and DOWNHILL HABITS
    • The only way you can change downhill habits is to be intentional. You have to turn on the switch of “intentional”
      • Intentional living is deliberate, consistent and willful.
    • Significance is uphill and it’s not about us it’s about others
      • Selfishness and significance are INCOMPATIBLE
    • Significance is uphill and it’s not about us it’s about others
    • Most people don’t lead their lives, they accept their lives…which is not intentional
    • Five things I (John Maxwell) do every day to add value to people
      1. Value People
        • God values me and he values you, he values people I don’t know and people I don’t like
        • Are we going to spend our lives connecting with people or correcting people?
      2. Everyday think of new ways to add value to people
        • You need to think ahead to be intentional – Thinking ahead is preparing, reacting is repairing
      3. I look for ways to value people
        • I prepare in advance, then when I am with them, i look for new opportunities
      4. I actually do things to value people
        • You need to do it and measure it, not just talk about it
      5. I encourage others to add value to people
    • John’s one word for people is TRANSFORM
  • T.D. Jakes – Second Wind
    • We think tribally instead of globally
    • If we want to be salt and light, we need to GO more often than we ask people to come to church
    • How do you juggle multiple responsibilities?
      • You are going to miss something every day. Just try not to miss something in the same area multiple times in a row
    • Why start a Daily TV Show?
      • There are a lot of people who don’t go to church who are starving for what we have in abundance all the time – opportunity to help people with life skills
    • What about Racial Reconciliation?
      • The operative question is: Have you included people in the overall strategies of success?
      • “Tough on crime” was really tough on people who couldn’t afford a rich lawyer
        • Blacks are seven time more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime
      • We have left people behind who are no longer willing to be ignored.
      • We have not created a system that allows the under-privileged to be served.
    • Is the worldwide problem fixable without faith?
      • You need to be intentional about tearing down the natural propensity in all humans to remain comfortable.
    • On your book “Second Wind”
      • Re-imagining yourself – owning your own future – not waiting on anyone
      • What made America great? Being creative and not just consuming
        • God is entrepreneurial – We are more like God when we were creative.
      • We are so good at seeing what other people’s gifts are but we are not that good at acknowledging what God has given us – how he has gifted us.
  • Bill Hybels, Shauna Niequist, Henry Cloud – Blindspots for Leaders
    1. Speed – Bill Hybels
      • We ask God to keep up with us. To bless our speed and give us more speed. We go too fast for the people in our lives
      • We need self-reflection. We need to push the time-out button – stop the activity, sit before God, get a journal out and lower the RPMs.
    2. Connection – Henry cloud – Book: The Power of the Other
      • Part of what it takes to keep your head on straight is the power of the other.
        • Avoid NO CONNECTION, BAD CONNECTION and UNHEALTHY CONNECTION
        • Strive for REAL CONNECTION
          • Relationships operate according to a formula: I need to make my needs known, and find someone who can help me with those needs
    3. Myth of Achievement – Shauna Niequist – Book: Present Over Perfect
      • The Lies of Perfect
        • You are word you do. You are what you build. You are what other people think of you.
        • Everything becomes an opportunity to succeed or fail – Leads to exhaustion and isolation. Love is not found in the “hustle”
        • What are you sacrificing on the altar of achievement?
      • Love is found in exactly who you are – right now
        • Being FULLY PRESENT with everyone God has placed in your life, every moment of every day
  • Danielle Strickland – Leader Interrupted
    • True peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.
    • Shalom is about everything wrong being made right.
      • The fullness of how things were designed to be.
      • The world is crying out for all of the wrong things to be made right.
    • True Humility – First posture shift.
      • True humility is agreeing with God about who you are.
      • It is a dynamic tension between insecurity <——-> arrogance.
      • God wants you to stop “playing the tape” in your head
      • We need to come into agreement with God about who we are
    • True Dependency – Second Posture Shift
      • Agreeing with God about who he is – vertical dependency
      • You are NOT God.
      • Dynamic tension between self-sufficiency and codependency
      • We need to create spaces in our lives where only God can show up.
    • Take the Shalom into the world – Third Posture Shift
      1. God wants us to bring that Shalom – that wholeness of justice and rightness – true Peace – to the world around us
  • Horst Schulze – Creating an Organization of Excellence and Efficiency
    • What you need to do to be successful in business? You need to build the MOST sufficient and MOST efficient business
    • Sufficiency means you create excellence in what the customer wants.
      • Any/All Customers Want:
        • Perfect product – NO defects
        • You serve them timely
        • You care (this is the most important)
    • Efficiency means it costs you less to produce a better product
      • Do NOT exceed the customer’s expectations – that is wasteful and inefficient
      • The greatest efficiency you can have in your business is the elimination of defects
        • 5.6% of a business transaction as an average have mistakes. That rework causes inefficiencies.
        • Elimination of defects creates huge ROI.
        • The root cause of defects is almost always five steps away.
    • Every business is in the hospitality business
    • Process and Products are MANAGED – People need LEADERSHIP
    • Hiring people to perform a FUNCTION is NOT moral
      • You hire people to be part of a purpose, part of a dream
    • Is our dream/vision GOOD for all concerned: employees, customers, shareholders and society as a whole – measured by the VALUES that God gives us?
      • Employees need to know and be reminded often of what the dream is
    • Empowering employees is simply respecting them. Loving them well.

THREE MINUTE SUMMARIES

Bill Hybels – Four Lenses of Leadership

  • Organizational Leadership is moving people from here to there.
  • You can’t stay here, we must start the journey to a preferred future
  1. Passionate Lens
    • Followers need to be energized and sustained by the passion of the leader
    • Bill researched and found difference in productivity between motivated and unmotivated worker is 40%
    • Healthy culture, compensation, etc less important than following a passionate leader
    • Passion comes from the top of the mountain (beautiful dream) or the bottom of the valley in the desert (outrage, holy discontent).
    • Whose job is it to fill their passion bucket? Yours. It’s your job to fire yourself up. How do you do it?
  2. Shattered Lens
    • High trust, high functioning, caring culture versus low…
    • Willow named top workplace in mid sized businesses in Chicago in 2015
    • An organization will only ever be as healthy as the top leader wants it to be
    • Bill’s advice, hire an off-site firm to do an organizational health assessment and fix what’s broken
    • We need more pastors of business where congregation is the staff, or community, etc
    • Transactional noise (water cooler) chatter about decisions and promotions and relationships. Takes a toll on everyone.
    • Willow now uses Lominger Card Sorting … All 67 cards have a competence. Identify the top 22 they have are good at green. Not very good at is orange, neutral uncolored are the rest
    • This Lominger card Sort Exercise causes a self awareness explosion.and then you share them so you got others awareness
    • Senior executives need to do more “talent observation” to view people’s potential outside of the c suite for coaching and identifying rising stars
  3. Performance Lens
    • Speed of the leader speed of the team
    • Setting goals and measuring progress
    • Maximizing performance requires constantly readjusting but not over adjusting or under adjusting…losing your dynamic balance
    • Willow assesses each department every six months thriving (gaining ground), healthy (maintaining ground), and underperforming (losing ground)
  4. Legacy Lens
    • What people remember of you when you are gone? What are you leaving behind?
    • “I would give anything for a do-over”
    • There aren’t do-overs just make-overs
    • Redistribute the spending of energy
    • Legacies can change in an instant – good or bad – like the thief on the cross. His legacy is getting his last decision so right…..

Alan Mulally – CEO Ford,Boeing

  • Started his career as an aeronautical engineer with Boeing with experience on every single model of Boeing
  • CEO who turned around Ford, Google board member, adviser to Obama on exports.
  • From Career at Boeing: Working Together Principles and Practices
    • People first
    • EVERYONE included – employees, suppliers, bankers, etc
    • Compelling vision
      • Comprehensive Strategy and Relentless Implementation
    • Weekly core team meeting with EVERYONE
      • Green, Yellow, Red dashboard
    • Clear performance goals
    • One plan
    • Facts and Data
    • EVERYONE knows the plan, the status and areas that need special attention
    • Positive “find-a -way” attitude
    • Respect , listen, help and appreciate
    • Keep emotional resilience – trust the process
    • Have fun – enjoy the journey and each other
  • Moves over to Ford
    • When he first came in, Ford was losing billions of dollars
    • Gets picked up in a LandRover, and none of the cars in the executive parking garage are Fords
    • Journalist asked him during initial press conference, “Is it OK that the automobile industry is complicated, in trouble and you(Alan) know nothing about it?”
      • Alan replied, “Well, I know cars are complicated with 10,000 parts, but a 777 has 4 million parts and stays in the air”
    • “Is it going to be OK for the executives at the Ford World Headquarters to be wearing sport jackets and slacks instead of suits?”
    • “Henry Ford’s initial vision in 1925 –
      • “To open the highways to all mankind – not just the wealthy”
      • Henry Ford looked forward to the opportunity to serve all mankind.
  • Alan’s first strategic decisions at Ford:
    • to get rid of all other brands but Ford and Lincoln
    • every vehicle was ongoing to be best in class
    • serve all of the markets around the world
    • aggressively restructure the business to operate profitably even though demand is way down
    • accelerate all of these new vehicles despite the economic slowdown
    • we need a loan
      • Alan gave the pitch to investment banks for money himself
      • Secured $23 billion in loans to make the above happen
    • Started to implement the initial business plan review
  • Illustration of cultural issues at Ford
    • One of the worst old culture problems
      • “never bring a problem to your manager without a solution”
    • All the charts his teams made were green, even though they were going to lose $17 billion
    • Someone had the courage to mark something red –
      • “We need to work together to turn the red to yellow to green” – Alan started clapping when someone was brave enough to present something red.
    • it still took several weeks for the rest of the executive team to have the courage to start marking things red and yellow
    • Once that happened, once everyone had the courage to deal with reality, he knew they were going to be OK.
    • Just follow the plan. Trust the process
    • He also wanted to make sure that all of the dealers felt “love”
      • Made his executive look the Ford dealerships and tell them that they loved them
      • That made everyone realize that things were going to be different.
  • The turn-around: Where things eventually went:
    • Customers rank Ford to have the best product line across all sizes
    • #1 brand in the Unites States. #1 or #2 in Europe. Fastest growing in Russia and China, etc.
    • Suppliers – #2 ranked supplier against all other automobile manufacturers
    • Over 1000% stock growth, reinstated the dividend and increased it 5 times
    • Ford has the highest large company “employee positive impression of the company. compared to the world-wide average across all companies which is 42%
    • Ford did not go bankrupt and did not require a bailout

Jossy Chacko – Empart USA

  • Empart Mission – Transform 100,000 communities by 2030
  • Early Life
    • He moved from India to Australia, pursued his dream to be successful and rich in business.
    • He married an Australian lady named Jenny
    • They went to India to visit the Taj on their honeymoon.
    • They met an 8 year old beggar boy from the slums and they invited him along on their honeymoon.
    • That encounter changed both their lives for ever
  • The parable of the talents spoke to him greatly after that experience.
  • All of us have been entrusted with something.
    • How are we proving ourselves to be trusted with more?
  • If today the master demands an account of your talents, what would your response be and would would the master say back to you?
  • Faithfulness is not about maintaining what you have, it’s about multiplying what you have been given.
  • The “Three E’s”
    1. Enlarge your Vision
      • The unfaithful servant has a vision – a vision to play it safe and maintain.
      • You need to enlarge that vision for multiplication
      • Foundational vision of Transforming Communities can be enlarged to build bigger visions that include things like bring toilets to those communities.
    2. Empower your People
      • It’s easy to lose your motivation for this when people fail you, or leave, or betray you.
      • Leadership is all about taking wise chances to create opportunities despite your past experiences.
      • He took a crazy homeless man living under a bridge as a beggar and he is leading the transformation of several communities.
      • A good test of your empowerment of your organization is to take a long vacation and see what happens.
      • Leaders are like scaffolds to raise up leaders and empower them.
        • Character
          • Focus on Building the Character before your empower. People don’t fail because of lack of information they fail because of lack of character.
        • Relationship
          • You have to be in close proximity to know someone’s character. It’s about leading from alongside – rather than from the front
          • All future Empart leaders have to live with a small group and a leader for 12 months before leaving
        • Right Controls and Measurement – Right Outcomes
          • KPIs = key performance indicators – control the outcomes not the people
    3. Embrace Risk
      • To Jossy, risk and faith is the same thing. Without taking risks (faith) it is impossible to please God.
      • Our Western society is all about eliminating risk – which is good generally speaking but in leadership it moves us from pioneering to preserving. From multiplying to maintaining
        • See risk as your friend to love, not your enemy to be feared.
          • Embrace the courageous spirit from Jesus. Fear comes from the devil. Don’t allow the fear of losing what you have keep you from what God has for you.
          • Be permanently hinged to the door of risk so that doors of opportunity open for you.
        • See Comfort and Safety as your Enemies
          • Don’t allow comfort and safety into your leadership.
          • Who is missing out because you are refusing to take the next step of faith?
          • You can’t have everything figured out before you get started.
            • If Moses had board members and advisors like we had he would still be in Egypt.
            • Don’t allow the earthly practicalities keep you from the heavenly possibilities – Eph 3:20
        • Increase your Pain Threshold
          • Your leadership capacity is directly proportional to your pain threshold
          • Today is not only a learning day, but a decision day.
          • Make a list of all of the dreams, ideas and visions God has put inside of you that you have not acted on yet.
            • Put a timeframe column next to that on when you are going to take action on each, and in a third column who is going to hold you accountable.

 

Dr. Travis Bradberry – Emotional Intelligence 2.0

  • Founder of TalentSmart
  • IQ vs EQ
    • People with high EQ make $29K more annually than those without
    • IQ explains about 20% of your success in life. EQ outperforms IQ 70% of the time
    • All senses are processed from the back of your brain to the front, and they pass through the limbic system FIRST, so you FEEL your senses before you think about them rationally.
    • Personality traits are fixed by age 15-20 but EQ can be developed your entire life
  • Four EQ Skills
  1. Self Awareness
    • Awareness of your tendencies and being prepared to deal with them.
    • Leaning into the discomfort and learning what you can improve.
    • Self-awareness can and should be developed throughout your life.
  2. Self-management
    • What do you do with the increased self-awareness?
    • It’s not about stuffing your feelings.
    • It’s about embracing your feelings and channelling them to accomplish what you want to do.
    • Both positive and negative emotions need to be managed.
  3. Social Awareness
    • It’s not just knowing what the other person is feeling, but what they are trying to communicate to you.
    • You have to focus more on the other person than yourself.
  4. Relationship Management
    • Requires that you use those first three skills on concert to create a greater good.
    • It’s much more difficult in relationships that are strained.
    • You have to look at what the world looks like from the other person’s perspective if you’re to find common ground.
    • Don’t win the battle to prove you are right to lose the war which is the overall quality of the relationship.
    • Seeing how your behavior impacts other people and adjusting it so you can improve the relationship instead of always feeling that you are being wronged.
  • Business Case for EQ
    • Emotions are the primary driver of your behavior so EQ impacts every area of your life
    • Some stats:
      • 60% of job performance comes from EQ
      • 90% of top performers have high EQ and 20% of low performers have high EQ
  • EQ Scores by Job Title Research
    • From individual contributor to supervisor to Manager the avg EQ goes up
    • Then from director to executive to senior executive to CEO it drops off more rapidly than it climbed up from individual contributors.
    • CEOs have half the EQ of individual contributors on average
  • Increasing Your EQ
    • This is personalized because everyone has different sets of habits that need to be overcome
    • You have to make positive EQ behavior habitual and extinguish negative EQ habits
    • The three things – three silver bullets everyone needs to work on:
    1. Get your Stress Under Control
      • Stress and health graphed looks like a Bell Curve.
      • Low stress and high stress are unhealthy.
      • “Optimal Stress” is necessary for good health.
      • How to bring your stress down? Taking a walk, breathing, turning your phone off before bed, etc.
      • Attitude of Gratitude. – reduces stress hormone cortisol by 23%
      • The little things matter most when it comes to stress reduction
    2. Clean-up your sleep hygiene
      • Getting 7-9 hours helps, but high quality sleep is even more important.
      • Toxic proteins are a natural byproduct of normal brain activity that can only be cleaned up during sleep
      • Clean up the quality of your sleep. Don’t take anything to help you fall asleep. Benadryl, etc.
      • No blue light in the evening.
    3. Get your caffeine intake under control (BOO!)
      • Makes you less emotionally intelligent in the moment and affects your sleep long-term.
      • If you have to drink caffeine, don’t do it after 12 noon.

 

Patrick Lencioni – The Ideal Teammate

  • The Ideal Team Player is the “prequel” to the Five Dysfunctions of a Team
  • Patrick has used the same three values from being an executive at a software company to the founding of the Table Group. Many of the companies he consulted with decided to adopt those same three values.
  • He called them virtues and said an individual with those virtues could overcome the five dysfunctions of a team.
  • The Three Virtues
    1. Humility
      • more interested in others than yourself
      • about the greater good
      • not arrogant
      • There is a difference between lacking self-confidence
      • True humility is just the recognition of what is true
      • A person who denies their own skills and downplays their abilities is not representing humility
      • Humility is not thinking less of  yourself, but thinking of yourself less
    2. Hungry
      • Passionate and tenacious in getting something down
    3. Smart
      • Common sense around people – people good at practicing the four behaviors of emotional intelligence.
      • We like when people ask us “What do you mean by smart?” We mean EQ
  • When two virtues are lacking
    • The PAWN
      • People who lack hunger and smart. They are just humble
    • The BULLDOZER
      • People who lack humble and smart. They are just hungry
      • Leave a trail of dead bodies behind. Usually they are in charge or working for a wimpy leader.
      • They are easy to identify but can last longer in an organization than PAWNS
    • The CHARMER
      • People lack hunger and humble. They are just smart
    • People who have one are easy to identify and keep off your team.
  • When only one virtue is lacking
    • The people who have two and are egregiously lacking in the third one. These people are much harder to identify and keep off your team.
    • The ACCIDENTAL-MESS-MAKER
      • People who are humble and hungry but are not smart.
      • These are the people you are always making excuses for.
      • Patrick has a lot of patience for these people because he knows their intentions are good
    • The LOVABLE-SLACKER
      • The people who are humble and smart but not hungry
      • They are great people but do just enough work not to get fired.
      • They never go above and beyond. They are very frustrating.
      • Patrick also has a lot of patience for these guys because they are humble, but they can sap the life out of peak performers.
    • The SKILLFUL-POLITICIAN
      • People who are hungry and smart but not humble
      • The most dangerous and the hardest to spot:
      • They know how to convince people that they are humble even though they are not.
      • They are devious because they can hide the fact that they only care about themselves.
  • What do you do with this? – Use it to develop yourself and your people
    1. Identify the areas that need improvement
      • You need to be vulnerable enough to identify the areas you need to improve in.
      • He did a simple coaching example – rank the three 1,2,3. Gather all of the people according to the weakest one of the three virtues and have them brainstorm on what they can do to improve
      • The leader has to go first and make it safe. It’s much better to allow people to self-assess than to tell them what’s wrong
    2. Have the Courage to Constantly and Consistency to remind people of where they need to improve
      • People are either going to improve or opt-out on their own.
      • Both of those are better and more dignified that the passive aggressive approach.
      • If they do not want to improve or leave over time you have to fire them. But that is likely a very low runner if you are consistent
    3. Hiring people
      • We don’t get people out of the interview room.
      • Generally we over-emphasize technical skills
        • We do not have enough vigor in going after team players
        • Johnny Manziel is a great example of over-focus on technical skills
      • What’s more important than being a team player? But, we cannot really identify them well. There is a disconnect between desire to hire and who actually gets hired.
      • Do something with them in a real world example and see how they deal with human beings.
        • Ask them questions more than once and see if the answers change
        • Ask what other people would say about you? Example: “What would your wife say about you? Do you hold grudges?”
        • Stop doing SILO interviews. Do TEAM interviews.
    4. Scare people with sincerity
      • Example: “We are fanatical about humble, hungry and smart. You will hate it here if that’s not you and we will hate you.”
  • Concluding thoughts
    • How much the world has changed in 13 years since he first spoke at Willow:
    • Persecution in the West is becoming more real – not to the extent of Iraq or other places, but the it is becoming more real even in the US.
    • This is the golden age of leadership if you are following Jesus. Let’s not turn our back on God or wilt under persecution – even here in the West.
    • We cannot be bitter – we have to rejoice, because Jesus said to rejoice when you are persecuted because of him.
    • May all of us leaders be willing to suffer for Jesus

Chris McChesney – Four discipline of execution

  • Execution is a game of changing human behavior.
    1. Focus
      • Additional goals in addition to the background whirlwind of activity
      • Law of diminishing returns
        • If you have 2-3 additional goals you’ll accomplish 2-3
        • If you have 4-10 additional goals you will only get one done
        • If you have, 11-20 additional goals, then zero get done
      • Poison pill
        • You have to say no to good ideas.
        • There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute
      • Discern the line between energy to sustain the organization and your goals
        • Focus on the Wildly important goal (WIG)
        • Lives at the intersection of really important and not going to happen.
        • The WIG is a LAG measure
      • What are the FEWEST battles necessary to win the war
        • Don’t go big go narrow.
        • One WIG per team at the same time.
        • Everything else you need to sustain STILL GOES ON
        • You can veto but not dictate to the groups as a leader.
      • Move goal from X to Y by WHEN
        • X is the starting line
        • Y is the finish line
        • WHEN is the deadline
      • When accountability increases, morale and engagement increases because it throws the “game on switch”
      • Execution does NOT LIKE complexity
      • The two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency
    2. Act on LEAD Measures
      • Two Attributes of LEAD Measures
        • Predictive of success
        • Influenced by teams
      • Lag measure is the WIG
        1. Example: losing weight is the lag, diet and exercise are the lead measures
        2. Everyone knows diet and exercise conceptualize, no one knows how many calories they eat and how many they burned
        3. It’s easy to know the concept but not the data behind the concept
        4. Data is hard to get but empowered teams can get it
    3. Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
      • People play differently when THEY are keeping score
      • We need a players scoreboard not s coach’s scoreboard
      • Keep it simple. Lag measure and two lead measures.
      • The number one driver of morale and engagement is when you think you are winning
      • Do your players (teammates) believe they are playing a winnable game?
    4. Create a Cadence of Accountability
      • In the moment urgency always trumps important
      • Twenty minute meeting weekly where you make one or two commitments
        • did I do what I was supposed to do
        • Review and update scoreboard
        • Make commitments for next week
      • As a leader, do not specify the commitments, let the staff make their own commitments
      • It’s a PULL strategy
  • Conclusion
    • The natural laws of execution are the same laws as the laws of engagement
    • Do your people feel like they are playing a high stakes winnable game??

Erin Meyer – The Cultural Map

  • How cultural differences impact our effectiveness – especially in business
  • Erin created Cultural Maps to help us decode cultural differences
  • There are many dimensions.
    • In this talk we will focus on three dimensions that would make you a good communicator in other cultures
  • Every culture has a great deal of variance around their “norm” similar to a bell curve.
  • This variance is also generational and regional
  • Where you land in a dimension, the others can lie on the left and right.
  • The three dimensions we choose to focus on for this presentation:
  1. Low versus high context
    • Context is shared reference points
    • In low context you repeat and summarize often
      • it’s about simplification and making it clear
    • High context – it’s not what I said, it’s what i meant when i said it. –
      • Identifying the subtle messages between the lines.
      • “Reading the air/atmosphere” “listening with all of my senses”
    • U.S. Is the lowest context, Latin in the middle, and Asian are very high context
    • Ex: In India the same word means both yesterday and tomorrow
    • Written confirmation is key in low context cultures
    • High context perceives low context as being condescending
    • Low context perceives high context as lack of transparency and secretive
    • US is a melting pot so we simplify everything to the lowest common denominator
    • But multi-cultural projects require a common denominator of low context processes
    • When Working work low context people, be explicit
    • In high context cultures ask lots of clarifying questions, repeat yourself less, and learn how to “read the air”
    • Story from Japan about reading in a person’s eyes to see whether they have a question and asking them directly
  2. How do we receive critical feedback
    • Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback
    • “Upgrader” words versus “Downgrader” words
    • Germany is direct, U.S. in the middle, Asian indirect
    • Upgrader language confuses indirect, and downgrader language confuses direct
  3. What silence means
    • high comfort with silence versus low comfort with silence
    • Asian is high comfort, US is low,
    • Americans become uncomfortable at 2.5 seconds, Chinese at 8 seconds
    • There is also overlap cadence in conversation
      • like Latin countries. People talk at the same time
      • There is ping pong like in the US with no overlap but no silence
      • There is ping pong with silence gaps like Asian cultures
  • ErinMeyer.com talks about the other dimensions

John Maxwell – Intentional Living

Right after the iron curtain fell, John spoke in the Ukraine. His interpreter said You’re about to speak to 12,000 people who have never had leaders invest in them to make them better. How do I find common ground? He asked to questions. Have you ever been suspicious of a leader? Have you ever been hurt by a leader? Everyone raised their hands to both. Leaders either bless or curse, and these guys had only experienced leaders who cursed them.

John didn’t have the time to take them from here to there, he only had to get them to want to get from here to there themselves.

John boiled down the big idea of his talk to “Intentionally, every day, add value to people.”

  • Intentionally, every day, add value to people – This is the CORE of leadership
  • So you exist to add value to people or to have people add value to you?
    • What side of this thin leadership line are you on on any given day, at any given time?
    • There is a fine line better motivation and manipulation?
  • Three questions followers ask leaders:
  1. Do you like me? Compassion
  2. Can you help me? Competence
  3. Can I trust you? Character
    • In other words: Will you intentionally add value to my life?
  • EVERYTHING WORTHWHILE IS UPHILL – UPHILL ALL THE WAY
    • Good marriage, physical health, good business, etc.
    • It’s all uphill. It’s uphill all the way
  • People have UPHILL HOPES and DOWNHILL HABITS
  • The only way you can change downhill habits is to be intentional. You have to turn on the switch of “intentional”
    • Intentional living is deliberate, consistent and willful.
  • Significance is uphill and it’s not about us it’s about others
    • Selfishness and significance are INCOMPATIBLE
    • True test of selfishness: when you take a group picture, who do you look at first?
      • If you look good “send me that picture it’s awesome” and if you look bad, you say ” that’s a bad picture let’s take another one”
  • Most people don’t lead their lives, they accept their lives…which is not intentional
  • Five things I (John Maxwell) do every day to add value to people
    1. Value People
      • The one thing Jesus did was value people.
      • Everyone who encountered Jesus would say “Jesus valued me”
      • God values me and he values you
      • God values people I don’t know
      • God values people I don’t like – that’s a little uncomfortable
      • Are we going to spend our lives connecting with people or correcting people?
        • Christians today are much more about correcting than connecting
    2. Everyday think of new ways to add value to people
      • You need to think ahead to be intentional
      • Thinking ahead is preparing, reacting is repairing
      • John Maxwell asks himself, who am I going to be seeing today and how am I going to add value to those specific people?
    3.  look for ways to add value to people
      • I prepare in advance, then when I am with them, i look for new opportunities
      • We see things the way we are not they way they really are
    4. I actually do things to add value to people
      • You need to do it and measure it, not just talk about it
    5. I encourage others to add value to people
  • John’s one word for people is TRANSFORM

T.D. Jakes – Second Wind

(*sorry, I came late I had to take care of something so this is somewhat lacking)

  • We think tribally instead of globally
  • There are more people out on Friday night than in church on Sunday morning. If we want to be salt and light, we need to GO more than we ask people to come to church
  • How do you juggle multiple responsibilities?
    • You are going to miss something every day. Just try not to miss something in the same area multiple times in a row
    • Also, we need to be able to touch things but not hold them.
    • We need good teams around us that can hold things for us.
    • What do I need to let go of in order to take hold of what God has for me today?
  • Why start a Daily TV Show?
    • There are a lot of people who don’t go to church who are starving for what we have in abundance all the time.
    • Opportunity to help people with basic life skills in addition to sharing your faith. Race issues, economic issues, etc,
  • What about Racial Reconciliation?
    • The reason we physically get a fever or have pain is a gift that tells us something is wrong – there is a problem.
    • As horrendous and as atrocious as the issues are, they are in some ways a blessing like pain, like fever, bringing attention to issues that we don’t feel because we don;t know those people or live in those communities.
    • Eventually, a problem you do not know about shows up as a symptom so you can do something about it.
    • We have created pockets of infection that people are trapped in who cannot escape.
    • The operative question is: Have you included people in the overall strategies of success?
      • Poor whites and poor blacks are outside of the strategy.
      • It’s not just about race, it’s about not being able to eat, find a job, have opportunities.
      • It causes “swelling and pain” so we don’t ignore it.
    • TD Jakes wants to deal with criminal justice.
      • “Tough on crime” was really tough on people who couldn’t afford a rich lawyer,
      • Blacks are seven time more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime
      • it’s more about money and relationships than about pure racism.
      • Once you are an ex-con, you can’t vote, can’t get a job, can’t get an apartment.
    • We have left people behind who are no longer willing to be ignored.
    • We have not created a system that allows the under-privileged to be served.
  • When you travel, how do you deal with differences?
    • We see the types of war that we do not have a strategy to win. It’s no longer country against country
    • We need a worldwide comprehensive plan to attack hunger, disease, poverty, etc
    • Anarchy happens because someone in power forgot about someone who was not in power
    • Who is my neighbor is an opportunity to excuse yourself. Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan who helped someone who did not look like him. That he had nothing to gain from.
  • Is the worldwide problem fixable without faith?
    • Yes, but we have done a bad job. The church has the faith but not the works.
    • You have to be intentional about love. You need a strategy
    • You need to be intentional about tearing down the natural propensity in all humans to remain comfortable.
  • On you book “Second Wind”
    • Re-imagining yourself – owning your own future – not waiting on anyone
    • About what made America great in the first place – to be creative and not just consuming
    • Practical pragmatic skills for us to become entrepreneurial again.
      • God is entrepreneurial.
      • We were much more like God when we were creative.
      • We were not created to just consume.
      • We are now consuming from other people’s tables
      • This is a clarion call back to being fruitful
  • How would you inspire, challenge and encourage us
    • I want you to know that there is not one living thing on the earth that is not a seed within  a seed. There is potential for growth. You are gifted and gifted with multiple gifts
    • The real question is what are you going to do with what God gave you?
    • He wants us to take what he has given us and multiply it, to increase it.
    • We are so good at seeing what other people’s gifts are but we are not that good at acknowledging what God has given us – how he has given us.
    • At every age, at every stage you can be fruitful
    • Every morning God has given you a grace to discover yourself

Bill Hybels, Shauna Niequist, Henry Cloud – Blindspots for Leaders

  • Connection – Henry cloud – The Power of the Other
    • Part of what it takes to keep your head on straight is the power of the other.
    • Three Questions to Consider
      • Where are we in our state of connectedness?
      • What is the enemy of my connectedness?
      • Who is my buddy?
    • Map of Connectedness
      • Upper-left: corner of NO CONNECTION. You can be in proximity with someone and NOT be connected to them. A spouse, a boss, a coworker, a neighbor
      • Upper-right: corner of BAD CONNECTION – leaves us feeling bad. We aren’t good enough. You walk away from these relationships feeling like a loser
      • Lower-right: corner of UNHEALTHY CONNECTION – I want to feel good. We relieve the pain and connect with something that makes us feel good. Might be an addiction to drugs, or porn. Might be an addiction that looks positive – like building a better company, etc.
      • Lower-left: corner of REAL CONNECTION- the power of the other. Thriving.
    • Relationships operate according to a formula: I need to make my needs known, and find someone who can help me with those needs
  • Speed – Bill Hybels
    • We ask God to keep up with us. To bless our speed and give us more speed. We go too fast for the people in our lives
    • We need self-reflection.
    • We need to push the time-out button – stop the activity, sit before God, get a journal out and lower the RPMs.
  • Myth of Achievement – Shauna Niequist – Present Over Perfect
    • The Lies of Perfect
      • You are word you do. You are what you build. You are what other people think of you.
      • Everything becomes an opportunity to succeed or fail. The two emotions I felt were exhaustion and isolation. Love is not found in the “hustle”
      • It’s a long journey back to grace and love and connection.
      • I sacrificed my marriage, kids, my inner life on the altar of achievement.
    • Love is found in exactly who you are – right now
      • Being FULLY PRESENT with everyone God has placed in your life, every moment of every day

Danielle Strickland – Leader Interrupted

  • The Difference between Spiritual Leadership and Regular, Good Leadership
  • How do we make a transition from good gifted leaders to Spiritual Leaders with Authority?
  • True peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. Shalom is about everything wrong being made right. The fullness of how things were designed to be.
  • God wants all of us as leaders to come into “Shalom”
  • The world is crying out for all of the wrong things to be made right.
  • Judges the Story of Gideon – Judges 6:11-24
    • Gideon makes some essential shifts in his life:
    • When God confronts him, he is in a surviving posture.
  • True Humility – First posture shift.
    • True humility is agreeing with God about who you are.
    • It is a dynamic tension between insecurity <——-> arrogance.
    • Go in the strength you have.
      • God is calling out what already exists in him. It is already in him.
    • But Gideon plays the old-faithful story/movie tape in his head.
    • Any time you get interrupted by God, “Hey Mighty Warrior” you have the list of excuses playing from memory in your head.
    • God wants you to stop “playing the tape” in your head
    • We need to come into agreement with God about who we are
  • True Dependency – Second Posture Shift
    • Agreeing with God about who he is – vertical dependency
    • You are NOT God.
    • Dynamic tension between self-sufficiency and codependency
    • Gideon is making “pockets of dependency”
      • We need to create spaces in our lives where only God can show up.
      • We run things in such a way in America where we really don’t need God.
    • We need the experience of God in our real lives.
  • Take the Shalom into the world
    • The Ephesians 6 armor of God includes the Boots of Shalom
    • God wants us to bring that Shalom – that wholeness of justice and rightness – true Peace – to the world around us

Horst Schulze – Creating an Organization of Excellence and Efficiency

  • What do you think about when starting a new business or reimagining your current business?
  • Separate into industry – market segment(s)
  • You need to identify what that segment wants – who are the customers?
  • What you need to do to be successful?
    • Whatever you produce, you have to do it better than the competition.
    • You need to be more SUFFICENT to the end customer.
  • Sufficiency means you create excellence in what the customer wants.
  • But, you also have to be more EFFICIENT, so it costs you less than it costs the competition to produce a better product – you need to be more efficient
  • You need to build the MOST sufficient and MOST efficient business and that requires leadership.
  • Any customer wants
    • Perfect product – NO defects
    • You serve them timely
    • You care (this is the most important
  • If you care and show hospitality, you develop a longer term win because even if they do not buy anything short-term, they will be back long-term
  • Every business is in the hospitality business
  • From the Order of St Benedict – On the Reception of Guests

Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ,

for He is going to say,

“I came as a guest, and you received Me” (Matt. 25:35).

And to all let due honor be shown,

especially to the domestics of the faith and to pilgrims.

As soon as a guest is announced, therefore,

let the Superior or the brethren meet him

with all charitable service.

And first of all let them pray together,

and then exchange the kiss of peace.

For the kiss of peace should not be offered

until after the prayers have been said,

on account of the devil’s deceptions.

In the salutation of all guests, whether arriving or departing,

let all humility be shown.

Let the head be bowed

or the whole body prostrated on the ground

in adoration of Christ, who indeed is received in their persons.

After the guests have been received and taken to prayer,

let the Superior or someone appointed by him sit with them.

Let the divine law be read before the guest for his edification,

and then let all kindness be shown him.

The Superior shall break his fast for the sake of a guest,

unless it happens to be a principal fast day

which may not be violated.

The brethren, however, shall observe the customary fasts.

Let the Abbot give the guests water for their hands;

and let both Abbot and community wash the feet of all guests.

After the washing of the feet let them say this verse:

“We have received Your mercy, O God,

in the midst of Your temple” (Ps.47[48]:10).

In the reception of the poor and of pilgrims

the greatest care and solicitude should be shown,

because it is especially in them that Christ is received;

for as far as the rich are concerned,

the very fear which they inspire

wins respect for them.

  • Process and Products are MANAGED
  • People need LEADERSHIP
  • What do employees want?
    • We are going somewhere from here to there. Align people on the journey
    • Is the destination of the leader good for everyone?
    • Is it good for all concerned: employees, customers, shareholders and society as a whole – measured by the VALUES that God gives us
  • How can I lead if I do not have true, steadfast VALUES.
  • Show new employees on day one where is the destination, how the vision and mission benefits everyone. This creates alignment
  • Alignment means you are aligning the heart and soul with your heart and should, but there has to be benefit for them.
  • You have to manage the process of hiring but LEAD the people.
  • When a significant emotional event in your life occurs, you are open to change in behavior.
  • If you introduce them to on honorable objective that is for the benefit of everyone, people will align. You need to do this on day one, and then reinforce it every day. Total focus on people every day.
  • When we win, how will the employee benefit? Be honored?
  • You hire people NOT for function (wash dishes, check people in). That is NOT moral. Those are human beings
  • You hire people to be part of a purpose, part of a dream – to join us. They need to know what the dream is.
  • Capella Hotel Group Canon
    • http://www.ayanaresort.com/assets/file/AYANA_canon_card.pdf

Capella Hotel Group is in business

to create value and unparalleled

results for our owners by creating

products which fulfill individual

customer expectations.

We deliver reliable, genuinely caring

and timely service superior to our

competition, with respected and

empowered employees who work in

an environment of belonging and

purpose.

We are supportive and contributing

members of society, operating with

uncompromising values, honor and

Integrity.

  • Efficiency means you fulfill and MEET the customer’s requirements.
    • Do NOT exceed the customer’s expectations – that is wasteful and inefficient.
    • We exceed the competition, but we do not exceed customer expectations. We meet them.
    • Eliminate everything that does not add value.
  • The greatest efficiency you can have in your business is the elimination of defects
    • 5.6% of a business transaction as an average have mistakes. That rework causes inefficiencies.
    • Elimination of defects creates huge ROI.
    • The root cause of defects is almost always five steps away.
    • Example: Slow Room Service
      • Ask the team involved to find the cause of bad room service. Utilize cooks, waiters, etc
      • The team figured out that waiting for the elevator was the main cause of slow room service. It was several steps removed.
      • But more than that, the housekeeping people would prop the elevator door open because they were short on linen. More steps removed
      • Now, ask the laundry people, why are we short on linen. It ends up they were short on linen since the very opening of the hotel.
      • It was Horst himself who was the root cause of the problem when he decided to cut the linen on the opening of the hotel 🙂
    • So root cause is almost always several steps removed from where the defect is actually felt
  • Empowering employees is simply respecting them. Loving them well.

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Full Article, Main, Spiritual

Blackhawks “One Goal”

May 3, 2016 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

 

How to Change the World

Analyzing the Chicago Blackhawks One Goal Ad Campaign

 

It was very painful for me to watch the Blackhawks get eliminated in round one of the 2016 playoffs last week. They made it a close series in the end, but, the defending Stanley Cup champions came up short – in the first round. How could this happen?
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If you live in Chicago, you have likely seen one or more commercials from the Blackhawks “One Goal” advertising campaign. It’s been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in the history of hockey. The campaign talks about the primary professional goal of the Blackhawks organization and of the players is to win the Stanley Cup – the world championship trophy for hockey.

 

But, of course, that is not really the primary professional goal of the organization and players.

 

Please hang with me here – do not assume the point of this post is to bash sports, or money or any of that. If we can never discuss these things openly, we will never be able to get better. Don’t just tune out here – please consider the following perspective.

 

When the Blackhawks first won the Stanley Cup in 2010, I’ll admit I didn’t know a great deal about professional hockey. I watched games here and there and casually followed the team in the past. When the Hawks had the opportunity to win the cup, I jumped on the bandwagon like many other people. Not as a first-time hockey fan – I actually played rat hockey in my young adult years – but as a big time professional hockey fan.

 

The day after the Hawks took home their first Cup in 2010, I woke up early to get the localnewspapers. I did that for the Bulls every time they won a championship too – as a keepsake for my two sons who really love sports.

 

I remember thinking – man, we have the talent for a real dynasty-in-the-making here. Like the old SNL Superfans skit when the Bulls won their first championship – “We’re talking a minimum 8-peat.”

 

I read one of the articles after I bought the papers that morning, and one of the sportswriters said something to the effect of, “The Blackhawks will spend a few days celebrating, then, as we all know, they will gut the team and get ready for next season.”

 

G-g-g-g-g-ut the team? I didn’t know that. Why on earth would anyone want to do that? Let’s keep these guys together and go for the 8-peat! Well, it’s not that simple – you see – there are economic factors at play.

 

Let’s consider the two primary economic factors:

  • Other teams are willing to pay Cup-winning Blackhawks players much more money than they currently are making on the Blackhawks
  • All professional hockey teams has what is called a “Salary cap”. There is a limit to how much any team can spend on player salaries.

 

So, when a team, like the Blackhawks wins a world championship, the “value” of most of the players on the team immediately goes up. Since the team was already close to the salary cap at the beginning of the season, that leaves two options:

 

a) The players must refuse offers of more money from other teams and remain on the Blackhawks with the same salary so the team remains under the salary cap, or

b) Many of the players demand an increase in pay from the Blackhawks to match the offers from the other teams. The Blackhawks organization then decides who they consider too important to trade and raise their salaries. The Blackhawks organization then has to trade away enough other players to other teams and hire less expensive players to replace them – so the whole team is under the salary cap again. Those replacement players typically cost less because they have less playoff experience, so, the new team after the trades is usually less likely to win again next season – unless the organization gets lucky and hires “diamonds in the rough.”

As the sportswriter who wrote the article pointed out, most of the time, we end up with option (b). That means, the Blackhawks are less likely to repeat as champions the following year – ultimately as a result of the players demanding more money.

 

So the truth is, while winning another championship is A priority, the HIGHEST priority is usually how much money the individual players make.

 

The players could choose option (a), keep the team together, have a much better chance and winning the championship again the following year – and not have to move their spouses and kids to a new location if traded. They could develop some deep roots for their families and friends by staying in the same area for many years.

 

Even if you equally split the salary cap across the board, each player would be considered very wealthy – not including product endorsements and other bonuses associated with winning the championship and becoming a dynasty.

 

So, why doesn’t it happen more often, if ever? Maybe Dwayne Wade did it for a couple years in basketball, but you never see entire teams do it – ever. Why is that? Why always choose option (b)?

 

I think it is important to ponder that for a while. I do not think it’s an issue that only pro sports players have. I do the same thing – and it would probably only get worse the more money I had on the table. If you see this issue as us against them, you are completely reading this wrong. It’s us against us. This isn’t just professional sports players, it’s almost everyone – including you and me.

 

I believe it is very rare for anyone to volunteer to make less money than they could in their current positions. Some people wouldn’t change positions to make more money because they value their current jobs for some reason or another. But inside of a particular job, I know very few people who would voluntarily make less in their current job to accomplish some other positive outcomes in that same job.

 

You would likely be considered foolish if you did, and anyone asking you to do so would be considered selfish. Fear is a big driver. What if you get hurt and can’t play? What if yo play for 5 years and can’t find a good job after pro sports? Fear is one of the major motivations in many of the decisions we all make. 

 

Our culture values “more” – not necessarily more things – although things are important. But we value more time, more opportunities for leisure and “giving back,” etc. More money now gives us more time and freedom later. We can even spiritualize it. Let’s make enough money now so we can retire early and then “give back” of our time, money, resources or all three. It’s not that we really want more for us only, more for us will hopefully mean more for others too, somewhere down the road. At least that’s the plan. And, I believe many people honestly do this.

 

We can invite more poor people to live with us if we have a bigger house. We can take our kids friends to our vacation houses and invest in them. I mean – you know – it’s not really just for me, is it?

 

You can’t blame anyone for doing what has been programmed into them by the culture. Our culture values “more” – and it seems to value more of “more” every year. How do we turn that around? How do we change our ways as a society to place the highest value “enough”?


Those are important questions to ponder for me, you, our families, friends, our kids, spouses, etc.

 

Again, the sports analogy is simply an easier story to tell – like a parable – but it is really the story of us. We need to figure this out.

 

Anyway, back to our hockey parable. Let’s say the “One Goal” was really winning championships – getting to that elusive SNL “8-peat.” What might that look like?

 

The 2016 NHL salary cap is $71.4 million a year. The most players a team could carry is 23. For worst case, let’s assume the Hawks carried 23 players. That means, if each player made the exact same salary, that would mean that each would make about $3.1 million a year if they each made the same salary. Not too bad.

 

If the players really valued winning championships – they could have taken the championship team, and all signed 8 year contracts for $3.1 million a year, and guaranteed the same team dynamic for 8 years – and maybe accomplish the coveted  “8-peat.”

 

In addition, they wouldn’t have to risk being traded. That means, they would not have to move their families, their kids could attend the same schools, and they could have some stability with friends and neighborhoods. It would be a double win.

 

If it sounds too socialistic to just split it up between the best and the worst players,  they could each sign contracts for half the $3.1 million, call it $1.55 million each, and then have the rest ($35 million) in a pool for performance bonuses based on various factors. That way the top performers could make much more than the bottom performers.  All in all, everyone would be rich – that doesn’t even count endorsement deals of products, etc.

 

However, that is not how it pans out in reality. The superstars of the Blackhawks, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews each make $10.5 million a year, so the two of them combined eat up $21 million of the annual salary cap of $71.4 million. The second-tier superstars, Seabrook, Crawford and Keith eat up another $19 million between the three of them. This is a total of $40 million, or more than half the salary cap for 5 players. That means that the remaining 18 players need to split up what’s left of the salary cap – about $31 million.

 

So, you have to find players willing to play for a lot less than the superstars can make. Sometimes the general manager gets lucky and finds diamonds in the rough – but most of the time, you end up with mediocre players, and you don’t win the championship again the following year.

 

Oh well, so much for the “One Goal.”

We want to believe winning is the Blackhawks true “One Goal.” It makes life easier and more enjoyable. Just like we want to believe that the rich-poor divide isn’t our problem. We’ve earned our money – in fact, we probably should be making more doing whatever it is we do. It’s those richer than us that should cut-back and say enough is enough.

 

Maybe it makes life easier to believe the not-so-truthful ad slogans about our favorite professional sports teams. And maybe it makes sleeping at night a little easier for all of us to believe that we aren’t part of the problem – or part of the solution – ourselves.

 

I am reading a book called, “Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus”, by Douglas Rushkoff. It discusses how to address the issue of the income divide between the rich and the poor. It is a fascinating read so far – I am not even all the way through it yet. It talks about issues like the original purpose of corporations, how much is “enough” and other things.

rocks

 

When I accept the principle that I am part of the problem, I am also, simultaneously empowered to be part of the solution.

 

I would love to collaborate with others and dream up new solutions to the new problems we face in the new world of technology and globalization. Spending too much time looking backwards isn’t going to get it done – me thinks. Blaming other people won’t get it done either.

 

We need new, creative, attractive, agile solutions that maximize the dignity and value of every individual. I’d love to explore those things with you. Please consider this the first of many posts exploring these issues 🙂

 

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Full Article, Main, Social Enterprise

Marc Malnati Interview – In case you missed it

February 21, 2014 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

In case you missed the latest Willow Creek Association “BizBreakfast” – “Deep Dishing with Marc Malnati”, on Friday, February 21, 2014, at Willow, I put together the following summary of the interview. Marc Malnati is the current owner of the family-owned pizza business Lou Malnati’s. Lou Malnati’s has approximately 36 locations in the Chicagoland area. malnatiSmall

A short disclaimer. I was taking notes and it is entirely possible that some of what I write below from my notes and memory may not be entirely accurate. I accept your grace in advance, and please feel free to correct me!

History

  • In 1978, when he was 22 years old he graduated with a business degree, and the same year his dad died they had to close the Flossmoor store for lack of revenue. They lost about a half-million dollars that took several years to pay off.

  • Marc says, “The mistakes you make early on in your business can kill you.” It is much easier to lose money than make money. One bad business can lose enough money to close three healthy businesses.

  • In 1979 his mom suggested that he set up at “Chicagofest” to sell pizza. The sold more than 80,000 slices of pizza in ten days. That positive experience motivated him to pursue growing the business.

Marc’s Employees and Organizational Culture

  • His employees are willing to treat his business like it was their own. Over 25% of his full-time staff has been with the business for 10 years or more – significantly better than the average for the restaurant business.

  • Their staff, NOT the customer, is the highest priority of the Lou Malnatis business. Of course, the end result of that decision is much better customer experience across the board.

  • People – the staff – their development, care and support – are always the biggest challenge to contend with at Lou Malnatis.

  • One thing he and his staff take pride in is the organizational culture.

Marc’s Secret Sauce for Business Success – Leadership Coaching

  • About 25 years ago, Marc decided to bring in a counselor/executive coach for a two hour off-site meeting with him and his executive staff to help them work through issues. He figured that should be plenty of time. After about 25 minutes of pleasantries, things quickly devolved into yelling, screaming and verbal sparring.

  • Marc decided to schedule a “wrap-up” session for the next month to get the issues completely solved. This time, the pleasantries only lasted a few minutes.

  • Needless to say, those sessions have continued for the last 25 years. The executive leadership team eventually extended these coaching session to other groups of employees to spread the “secret sauce” throughout the organization.

  • He brings his leadership staff to the Willow Leadership Summit every year. The utilize things they learn during the summit. Their latest take away is Bill Hybel’s 6×6 idea he shared at the 2013 Summit.

  • This is almost a direct quote, “If you are going to be around in business a long time, whether you are a Christian-owned business or not, you have to adopt Christian principles.”

  • These principles include integrity, generosity, and “investing in and developing people so they rise to a level beyond which they ever dreamed they could” – **I love that one by the way!! Unleash the Masterpiece!!**

Lawndale Location

  • In 1996, Malnatis had 9 locations. At that time, Wayne Gordon – a Chicago pastor who decided to move his family into one of the poorest and most crime-ridden Chicago neighborhoods – asked Marc Malnati to consider “tithing” his tenth location by opening it in the Lawndale neighborhood. Wayne explained that the area needed a family-owned restaurant where community members could celebrate birthdays, hold business meetings, and just get out and enjoy some good pizza.

  • After a great deal of prayer and discussion, Marc agreed and opened the tenth location in an old, long-vacant and distressed local grocery store. Marc hoped that the location would become a bright spot in that community and be able to provide a health community hangout as well as local jobs for the areas under-resourced residents.

  • For the first 13 years, the area was too dangerous to do deliveries.

  • The Lawndale location recently celebrated their 20 year anniversary, with the last three years being profitable, after more than a million dollar investment.

  • When Marc opened the store, he committed to invest any and all profits back into the community. Since profitability occurred three years ago, Marc has kept that promise.

  • The spirit of the Lawndale location has energized his business over the years

Marc’s Style and Background

  • Marc is a self-proclaimed ready-fire-aim guy and has surrounded himself with people much better than him at planning

  • Marc came to follow Jesus in college in Indiana through Crusade, and the leader of Crusade at his campus named Tom Burnett.

  • When Marc was asked, “How would you describe your leadership?” he respectfully passed on the question.

  • One of his favorite leadership quotes is from General Colin Powell. He said, “I have never had to tell anyone ‘that’s an order’.” Marc loves that and says that you should be able to lead without having to remind people that you are the leader. They should already know and already respect you if you are doing it right.

  • When you go from one location to two, you will

    • Make less money – you will need to get to five stores before your margin improves again

    • Need to transition your leadership skills as an executive from a generalist to a specialist – an expert at developing and growing people.

  • Marc would rather tap investors than have to borrow money. If he has to borrow money, he likes to limit it to real estate purchases.

Future Plans

  • Marc plans on opening three new restaurants in 2014. The new stores, couples with the usual turnover, will mean Lou Malnatis needs to hire about 900 new people in 2014.

Jon Stewart and the Daily Show Situation

  • Marc Malnati has been in the news lately regarding an ongoing feud between Chicago-style pizza and New York style pizza

  • Back in November 2013, Jon Stewart went off on deep dish pizza during his show. He said some nasty things that included some inappropriate language

    • “Let me explain something, deep-dish pizza is not only not better than New York pizza. It’s not pizza,” Stewart explained. “It’s a **blanking** casserole!”

    • Stewart went on to liken Chicago-style pizza to “tomato soup in a bread bowl,” “an above-ground marinara swimming pool for rats” and, most damningly, “**blank** with a corpse made of sandpaper.”

  • Of course, Marc could not take these accusations lying down. He made a video response and posted it on youtube. The video went viral. You can see it here: Marc Malnati Response to Jon Stewart

  • After the video went viral, Marc was invited to have a discussion with Jon Stewart live during one of his shows. Marc accepted and they buried the hatchet as it were.

  • Marc had never seen the show, but was grateful for the free advertising he got his business given the more than two million viewers of The Daily Show!

My Parting Thoughts

  • Thanks for reading through my summary. I hope it has inspired you.

  • The closing of the meeting, since it was a Christian meeting, discussed a passage from the Bible – Matthew Chapter 5  – about being salt, light, letting your good deeds shine. We were encouraged to carry our salt and light with us and think through the good we can do wherever God has us in our daily lives, including our workplace. Sounds like he is saying we need to express our masterpiece in the “ordinary” living of our lives! Sounds good to me!

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Main, Social Enterprise

What Henry Ford Really Thinks of You – Full Article

October 25, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

 

The Man, The Legacy

Make no mistake about it, Henry Ford has been one of the greatest, if not the greatest influencers of our society for 100 years or more. His business savvy and creative genius have given the US, and the world many marvelous inventions, paradigms and nuggets of wisdom.

Most notably, Henry Ford perfected the factory and the assembly line inside of it, which together formed the primary means of production in the industrial economy. While the assembly line and factory did much to advance the nation as a whole, and significantly line the pockets of a few, it has also done a great deal of damage to “the masses.”

 FordAssemblylineSmall

Means of Production

Henry Ford’s factory/assembly line production model dictates which roles, responsibilities and skills are important, and which are not. Overall, I believe what this model implies about the value of “average” people, ultimately resulted in a much greater negative influence in our society than it has for good; and, perhaps has precipitated some of the deep rooted economic and societal issues we are struggling with today in this nation and around the world.

It was Seth Godin who articulated this phenomenon and enlightened me to the serious ramifications of the  the industrial revolution model, especially as we begin to move into a post-industrial economy. Seth explains that the Henry Ford factory production model, stresses compliance, uniformity, falling in line, and clear-cut, simplistic delineation of roles and responsibility.

There are assembly-line workers, assembly-line supervisors, factor managers and factory owners. Owners, and to a lesser extent managers, hold all of the cards and are responsible for all of the innovation and creative thinking. Innovative and creative thinking at the assembly-line level is not only discouraged, but in most cases forbidden. The assembly-line worker and even the direct supervisor are thought of as little more than trained monkeys.

 

Give me Monkeys, Please

Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” In Henry Ford’s system, people are only as valuable as the simple, repetitive task that they can perform. They are interchangeable, nameless and faceless. Henry Ford has no use for uniquely created masterpieces made in the image of God; what he needs are robots without brains, without personalities, feelings, dreams and desires.

 

I have worked for several large tech companies at various levels of management. One of the primary objectives of the executive management was to eliminate the high-paid coding experts through a combination of rigorous processes that eliminate the need for high competence, and outsourcing / offshoring which allows leverage of under-resourced individuals to lower salaries.

The message from the top at every company I worked was very similar, “I want to be able to put monkeys in the chairs and have them cranking out code that works!” That is a great illustration of the value system of the industrial economy. Creativity, leadership, excellence, high pay and leverage only belongs at the very top of the executive food chain. The goal for every level beneath the executive level is – monkeys. Inexpensive robots – mindless automatons that can and should be replaced with the lowest priced alternatives on an ongoing basis.

 

Societal Impact

That is the value system that the industrial economy is based on, and the foundation that our modern society is built on. Of the industrial economy, Seth says, “We invented public schools… jobs … suburbs—so many of the things that are part of our lives because we wanted and needed to support the industrial economy…. It was a very seductive bargain: if you gave up certain elements of self-determination and elements of your dreams—in return, the industrial economy would take good care of you.”

That’s right. Everything for the last 120+ years has been designed around the industrial economy – factory/assembly-line production model. Daycares, grade schools, secondary schools, colleges, job training programs, management and HR practices, churches – most everything. The system sees most of us, our kids, friends, relatives and neighbors as tools/cogs the elite use to make more money.

 

Are we Ready for the Future?

Certainly devaluing most of society and relegating them to a mindless, innovation and creativity free existence is a bad thing, but we have another, more pressing issue with running our organizations and societies on industrial economy principles – we are quickly moving into a post-industrial society, where uniqueness, individuality, entrepreneurship and specialty will rule the day.

The skills, abilities and motivations that prepare someone for a life-long journey in the industrial economy are completely inadequate for preparing someone to be successful in the post-industrial, connection-based economy that we have been moving into for the last several years. The good news is that it is not too late to opt out of the old system and jump into a new system. It will require a complete paradigm shift, and the onboarding of new systems and processes that value the individual over the task.

 

A Better Way

Seeing every individual as a unique, creative, critical, contributing component to any endeavor from business to education to outreach and ministry is the key to thriving in the new post-industrial, connection-based economy. We need to adopt new systems that formulate the tactics that align with this new overall strategy. What may these new strategies and tactics be? I’m glad you asked!

The research, development and effective onboarding of the most effective systems and processes that implement the strategies and tactics around post-industrial excellence have been the center of many of the efforts my partners and I have investing in over the last several years. We will be unpacking what we have learned through new initiatives over the next several weeks and months. Stay tuned!

 

Read this short story excerpt taken from Set Godin’s eBook titled, Stop Stealing Dreams Read Story

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Full Article

What Henry Ford Really Thinks of You – Quick Summary

October 25, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

Means of Production –

Henry Ford perfected the factory and the assembly line inside of it, which together formed the primary means of production in the industrial economy. While the assembly line and factory did much to advance the nation as a whole, and significantly line the pockets of a few, it has done a great deal of damage to “the masses.”

Henry Ford’s factory/assembly line production model dictates which roles, responsibilities and skills are important, and which are not. Overall, I believe what this model implies about the value of “average” people,

ultimately resulted in a much greater negative influence in our society than it has for good; and, perhaps has precipitated some of the deep rooted economic and societal issues we are struggling with today in this nation and around the world.

 

Hands not Brains

Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” In Henry Ford’s system, people are only as valuable as the simple, repetitive task that they can perform. They are interchangeable, nameless and faceless. The industrial economy has no use for uniquely created masterpieces made in the image of God; what he needs are robots without brains, without personalities, feelings, dreams and desires.

Certainly devaluing most of society and relegating them to a mindless, innovation- and creativity-free existence is a bad thing, but we have another, more pressing issue with running our organizations and societies on industrial economy principles – we are quickly moving into a post-industrial society, where uniqueness, individuality, entrepreneurship and specialty will rule the day.

 

Post-industrial Fallout

The skills, abilities and motivations that prepare someone for a life-long journey in the industrial economy are completely inadequate for preparing someone to be successful in the post-industrial, connection-based economy that we have been moving into for the last several years. The good news is that it is not too late to opt out of the old system and jump into a new system. It will require a complete paradigm shift, and the onboarding of new systems and processes that value the individual over the task.

 

Would you like to learn more? – Read this short story excerpt taken from Set Godin’s eBook titled, Stop Stealing Dreams Read Story
Read the full article about the importance of honestly assessing your leadership effectiveness. Full Article

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Main, Quick Summary

What Henry Ford Really Thinks of You – Story

October 25, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

From Seth Godin’s –  Stop Stealing Dreams – http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf

Schools for the Masses

The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing.

Some quick background:

The common school (now called a public school) was a brand new concept, created shortly after the Civil War. “Common” because it was for everyone, for the kids of the farmer, the kids of the potter, and the kids of the local shopkeeper.  Horace Mann is generally regarded as the father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine—because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The common school solved both problems.

The normal school (now called a teacher’s college) was developed to indoctrinate teachers into the system of the common school, ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the processing of students. If this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk, of interchangeable parts, of the notion of measurement and quality, it’s not an accident.

FordAssemblylineSmall

For the Lower Orders

In 1914, a professor in Kansas, named Frederick J. Kelly  invented the multiple-choice test. Yes, it’s less than a hundred years old.

There was an emergency on. World War I was ramping up, hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated, and factories were hungry for workers. The government had just made two years of high school mandatory, and we needed a temporary, high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots. In the words of Professor Kelly, “This is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders.”

A few years later, as President of the University of Idaho, Kelly disowned the idea, pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned. The industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired.

The SAT, the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on each individual, is based (almost without change) on Kelly’s lower order thinking test. Still. The reason is simple. Not because it works. No, we do it because it’s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward.

 

More Fear, Less Passion

School’s industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There’s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination.

And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed.  There’s no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple-choice test.

Do we need more fear?

Less passion?

 

Read the full article about the importance of honestly assessing your leadership effectiveness. Full Article
Read the quick summary of the full article. Quick Summary

From Seth Godin’s –  Stop Stealing Dreams – http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf

 

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Story

How am I Doing as a Leader? Full Article

October 21, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

Return to Summary

 

Ask yourself, “How am I doing as a leader?” I don’t mean how well are you performing the functional factors of your role – related to business results, revenue, sales, market share, impact, influence, throughput, defects, the direction of the organization, handling of deals, etc.

emperorSmall

I am asking about your effectiveness at your primary leadership responsibilities around the skills of motivating, inspiring, engaging, handling interpersonal relationships, leading by example, managing other’s strengths and weaknesses, listening, clarifying, being approachable and having empathy. Factors that are related to your emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ.

After you come up with an initial answer to that question, the next question to ask yourself is, “How do I know my perception of my effectiveness as a leader is accurate?” Or at a minimum, “Do I know roughly how accurate my perception is, and how?”

Putting the two questions together you get, “How closely does my opinion of my leadership performance match the opinion of my direct reports, my peers, my organization at-large and my customers/bosses?”

Why is this important to ask? No matter how good you feel your leadership performance is or how great the organization seems to be doing, the question remains: “How much better might the organization be doing if I added the development of my own leadership ability to the business plan?” The other side of the coin is, “What are the opportunity costs of blind spots in my leadership performance?”

Every leader has blind spots. A study by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence illustrates the extent of these blind spots. According to their research, first, mid and senior level leaders had a significant pattern of rating themselves higher on their leadership performance than those around them rated them. In other words, these leaders thought they were doing better with emotional intelligence related skills than did the people they led, served, worked with, and reported to. What’s more, the higher a person’s rank, the greater this gap became.

The underlying issue beneath these results stems from the fact that self-awareness does NOT come from self, it comes from a relentless, rigorous, ongoing pursuit of open, honest and meaningful feedback from those you lead, serve, work with and report to.

The higher the leadership position you hold, the more likely you are to suffer from what is called CEO disease, or CEO syndrome. Daniel Goleman in his book Primal Leadership defines this disease as “an acute lack of feedback…Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they’re doing as leaders…the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”

Geoff Colvin has a very simple, yet powerful illustration of this phenomenon in his book, Talent is Overrated” . Imagine a professional bowler, trying to improve his game by practicing more. During his practices, he decides to put a curtain in front of the foul line from the ceiling to about knee-height. He puts in ear plugs that block out all sounds, including the sound of the ball hitting the pins, and going into the gutter. He then proceeds to practice bowling. Colvin goes on to say that two things are going to happen as a result of eliminating feedback from his practice sessions, the first of which is obvious, the second of which, not so much.  First, the bowler is not going to get better at bowling, he is going to get worse. The second came as a surprise to me. The bowler, will stop caring about getting better.

Is it possible that this systemic, lack of feedback at the leadership level is degrading our skills as leaders? Is this lack of feedback causing us to become numb, and even blind to the importance and desire to obtain open, candid and regular feedback from those we influence? I have found in my own leadership, and in my experience with other leaders, this gap between self-perception of one’s leadership performance and the perception of other’s, is the single largest influencer of the extent of anyone’s success as a leader.

A study of 39,000 leaders by PDI Ninth House confirms this conclusion. They demonstrated a significant correlation between this perception gap, and their performance as leaders. Those who were identified as out of touch with this gap, were 629% more likely to perform below the level of expected achievement. To say it again, that is, six hundred and twenty-nine percent. I would say that is a pretty strong correlation.

It is not difficult to conclude, that closing this perception gap, is one of the most important, if not the most important activity that a leader can engage in. I have spent the better part of the last decade investigating the possibility of rigorous, well-defined systems and frameworks that could be strategically, and tactically engaged to close the gap between self-perception of leadership performance and other’s perception. In my research, I discovered a program that is centered around the development of what is called Personal Leadership Effectiveness on an individual basis, and a Personal Leadership Effectiveness Culture at an organizational level.

Executing this program on an ongoing basis will not only assist you in closing the gap, but will also result in the overall improvement of several other significant factors to achieving high leadership performance. I am excited to share more about this program in upcoming articles and posts around this topic!

 

Read a short, real-life story about a leadership team who decided to bravely go after the blindspots in their leadership effectiveness. Read Story

 

 

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Full Article

How am I Doing as a Leader? Quick Summary

October 21, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

“How am I doing as a leader?” and “How would I know?” can be combined into one similar question – “How closely does my opinion of my leadership performance match the opinion of my direct reports, my peers, my organization at-large and my customers/bosses?”

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Why is this important to ask? No matter how good you feel your leadership performance is or how great the organization seems to be doing, the question remains: “How much better might the organization be doing if I added the development of my own leadership ability to the business plan?” The other side of the coin is, “What are the opportunity costs of blind spots in my leadership performance?”

Every leader has blind spots. A study by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence illustrates the extent of these blind spots. According to their research, first, mid and senior level leaders had a significant pattern of rating themselves higher on their leadership performance than those around them rated them. In other words, these leaders thought they were doing better with emotional intelligence related skills than did the people they led, served, worked with, and reported to. What’s more, the higher a person’s rank, the greater this gap became.

The higher the leadership position you hold, the more likely you are to suffer from what is called CEO disease, or CEO syndrome. Daniel Goleman in his book Primal Leadership defines this disease as “an acute lack of feedback…Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they’re doing as leaders…the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”

Would you like to learn more? – Read this short, real-life story about a leadership team who decided to bravely go after the blind-spots in their leadership effectiveness. Read Story
Read the full article about the importance of honestly assessing your leadership effectiveness. Full Article

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Character, Main, Quick Summary

Fitness for Life

February 1, 2013 by Bob Clinkert Leave a Comment

I just got back from an early morning men’s meeting. I heard an ex-NFL football player talk about the importance of physical fitness. The theme was based on Deut 34:7 – “Moses was 120 years old when he died, yet his eyesight was clear, and he was as strong as ever.” Quality and quantity of life. I learned a few things I didn’t know. According to a Harvard study, it is better for your health to smoke a pack a day then to go without 90 minutes of physical activity a week. The average American spends about 10 years in a severely degraded and diseased condition before dying. Along with several other fun facts.

He went on to talk about how 3 times 30 minutes a week will reduce that 10 years of morbidity at the end of life to 5 years on average. Physical activity for 5 hours a week, cuts it down substantially from 5 years. The average age of this group was probably 50+ so he wanted to end on an encouraging note. He talked about a recent study where men, 70+ years of age in a nursing home, started a fairly intense (for their age) weight lifting routine. No cardio. Just weights. In three months the tripled their strength, and a great many of them threw out their walkers, canes, etc.

The speaker went over time and before he took questions the MC gave those who had to leave permission to leave. I had to get to work so I took that opportunity to get out of dodge. In my head I was pleased with the opportunity to run out without having to strike up conversations with any of the guys sitting around me. I have only gone to this group a few times and I really didn’t know many people. The old social stuttering phobia is hard to break.

As I was driving back into the office, I started to reflect on times, in my life, of reduced social stress and phobia. Those times occur when I am “socially fit.” When I am spending 90 minutes, or, maybe even 5 hours a week in situations where I have to introduce myself, make small talk, etc. The more “out of shape” I get in the social realm, the more my social morbidity increases.

I got to thinking about other areas of “fitness” that we can neglect. Other areas that may benefit greatly from either a small amount of “activity” per week. Spiritual fitness, are we spending 90 minutes a week? 5 hours a week, talking to God, learning about him, etc? How about parenting fitness? How much quality time are we spending with our kids? Spouse fitness? Mental fitness. Are we reading, writing blogs, etc.? Generosity fitness. How much time and resources are we freely giving each week to those who need it in our lives? On the negative end of the spectrum. If we have anger management issues, what is our anger management fitness level? Gossiping fitness? Integrity fitness? Can we dedicate 90 minutes a week to gossip free times?

The American culture is obsessed with physical fitness. A certain amount of investment in physical fitness not only makes sense from a human perspective, but also spiritually. God expects us to be good stewards of our physical bodies for many reason. However, is it possible that many of us may be out of balance in other areas of our lives? Are we neglecting fitness in the other areas of our lives? For some the neglect in the other areas of fitness may be because of an over emphasis on physical fitness, or some other forms of fitness may be out of balance.

In any case, this ex-NFL player went on to say that time, motivation and discipline were the biggest roadblocks to physical fitness. In my experience, discipline is really the biggest barrier to any type of fitness. Couple that with one of my favorite phrase, “Accountability beats discipline every time,” and you may say that accountability is the biggest barrier to any and all kinds of fitness. When I have a physical workout partner, I am very consistent. When I have no partner, I rarely exercise. I believe the same is true with any other areas of fitness – spiritual, relational, etc. I need accountability in those areas to get it done. That is much harder find in those areas than it is for physical fitness, and it’s pretty hard to find a dedicated workout partner even for physical fitness.

If I want to “be the change” I need to be there to offer accountability to others. Maybe that’s where it all starts.

Filed Under: Book/Speaker/Conference, Main, Spiritual

The 411 on Me

Ridiculously, happily married 31 years to Vicky, seven kids, three grandkids (so far). Comfortable in the gray. Stumbling after Jesus. Trying to make small investments to Unleash the Masterpiece in myself and others.

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