One of the great advantages of giving service is gaining a wealth of experience. I served on the Board of a 400 member organization for 3 years. The last year, I served as the Board President. What I learned as a leader of that organization was priceless. It would take years of seminars and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of coaching to equal the leadership experience and knowledge acquired.

Manage Up, Mentor Down

As Board President, I, along with the rest of the Board, was the boss of the CEO of the organization. We were accountable to the members of the organization and had sole purview to hire and fire the CEO. In this position, one can be tempted to rule with an iron fist. However, that method doesn’t benefit anyone.

I found it beneficial to adopt the mantra, “manage up, mentor down.” When you are someone’s manager, team leader or boss, your job is to enable that person to be successful. When your employees are successful, they make you shine. As a manager, it is your responsibility to provide the tools, resources, and direction needed by your employees.

It is also your responsibility to manage your customer expectations. You customer may be actual customers, shareholders, members of an organization, or your boss. After conferring with your employees to determine what they need to be successful, it is your job to relay this information to your customers.

Let’s say you are a project manager for an IT project. You’ve met with your clients and received a project charter. Rather than lord over your team members to ensure that every “i” is dotted and every “t” crossed, you can let them know that precision is extremely important to this client and ask them what they need to achieve the highest level of precision. At the same time, you can set the expectation with the client that the level of precision expected will require more time, money, or staff. You might also work with the client to relax their standards to a level with which both parties are comfortable.

Most managers work the other way around. They cow tow to clients and promise the moon. Then they turn around like a drill sergeant with their team. In my experience, I’ve found that you burn relationships, deliver unsuccessful projects, and generate unwarranted stress when you do this.

Take the time to cultivate relationships with your employees and your stakeholders. Be a bridge between both parties, rather than a referee.

Share Ownership

When you’re the leader of a 400 member organization, everyone seems to look to you to fix everything. It was tempting to be the savior, but much more enriching to engage the members of the organization.

When employees, customers, and other stakeholders engage in solutions, ownership shifts from the few to all. When everyone owns the organization, everyone feels responsible. Ownership is not just about paying for a service. Oftentimes, members and shareholders say that they own an organization because they monetarily donated, or paid for a share. Ownership is about doing the work to make the organization succeed. In order to foster ownership of your organization, encourage and empower your stakeholders to:

• Participate in events sponsored by the organization;
• Engage in the planning process of the organization;
• Take the initiative to solve their problems;
• Provide a solid financial base.

Everyone wants an opportunity to share their expertise. A good leader encourages and empowers everyone to use all of their skills.

Pay Attention To What Is Shown AND What Is Said

After moving to a new location, some of our long-standing members started to complain about accessibility to the building. On the surface, this was a valid problem. You needed a key, then a pass code to get into the building. Before, anyone could breeze in and out. There was a sense of familiarity and ownership.

Naturally, we sought to remedy the problem by giving access to those members and providing a doorbell so that it would be easy for members to come in and out of the building. And naturally, this did not really solve the problem.

You see, the members were complaining about the loss of that sense of familiarity and ownership which showed up as not getting into the building. Once access was provided, the complaints moved to another manifestation of that loss.

Only 7% of verbal communication comes from our words. The rest of it comes from voice inflection and body language. When listening to your staff and stakeholders, it is important to listen behind the words so that you can understand what they truly intend to communicate. You don’t need to guess what they are trying to say. You can ask questions, as you notice their body language and vocal tone, to clarify what they are saying. At the end of the conversation, it’s helpful to provide a summary statement and wait for the reaction. If someone says, yes, you got it right, but they look resigned, continue to ask until there is a sense of simpatico.

Live in Limbo

As a leader, it’s not your responsibility to fix everything. In fact, the less you are personally responsible for fixing, the better off your organization. It would mean that your organization is rich with resources and its own leadership pool.

Limbo is a tough spot to live in. If you are a natural leader, you want to get the job done and conquer. It may be difficult to witness your organization struggle. As a leader you will need to correctly identify problems, correctly assess the skills and passions of your people, and effectively match the problem with the people. They will have fun and relish the opportunity to fix the problems for you and to the benefit of the entire organization.

While you are waiting to match the problem with the people, you will need to sit with the situation without fixing it.

Be An Example

Whatever you expect from your team, you must be willing to exemplify. You want a team that’s punctual, you have to show up before everyone. You say a lot by your actions. Your actions build the construct for your team. You can list the rules of engagement on a poster on a wall. You can put them in policy manuals and have reams of orientation material. In the end, your team will mirror their behavior after yours.

Teach, Don’t Talk

You know the saying, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” It’s the same with leadership.

When you tell your team what to do without giving them reason or context, they can follow the instructions and complete the task. However, when they need to do the same thing again, you will need to tell them again. On the other hand, if your provide for them the context for the directions, the next time the situation arises they can execute without your presence.

Another reason to teach your team and provide context, is that they may come up with solutions that you could not have conceived on your own. It may take a little more work on your part and a more time initially, but it will pay high dividends for you and expedite execution in the future. Best of all, you’ve empowered your team to execute without your direct influence.

Praise Publicly, Punish Privately

When you chastise your staff publicly, you are alienating yourself from them and making your job as a leader infinitely difficult. It’s bad enough if you chastise the group as a whole. If you single one person out, you are embarrassing that person and you cause irreparable harm to that relationship and your team.

Take team meetings, and other public events as opportunities to praise you team for their performance and highlight individuals who excelled. Take personal evaluations or one and one meetings to discuss weaknesses or short comings.

You shine as a leader when you empower and enable every individual on your team to shine.

In Spirit,
Nneka

I recently applied to a job at Lulu Publishing. They sent me a polite email saying that there were other more qualified candidates for the position. Have you ever gotten that letter? Did you think you were qualified for the job?

What makes a person qualified anyway? Companies usually base the answer to that question on an assessment of talent, training, and time - or experience, but they miss a key factor.

Talent

Talent is like the rock in the mines that have not undergone pressure or polish. It’s raw materials. You may have analytical talents like programming or figuring out complex math problems. You may have creative talents like singing, or painting. You may have athletic talent. Most of us have some quirky combination.

Talent alone won’t get you very far though. Untrained talent remains in its infancy stage. Compared to honed talent, it seems amateurish. You need to add some training to the mix.

Training

In a study of musicians in their 20’s, K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology, found that talented musicians identified as great practiced an average 10,000 hours in their lifetime, those identified as good practiced an average of 8,000, and those identified as mediocre practiced an average of 5,000 hours.

Continued training creates ruts in our brain that allows us to do a task by rote. We no longer think about doing the task. It becomes effortless. Training can be gained formally through education and apprenticeship, or it can be gained informally through trial and error.

Time (Experience)

Time, or experience, differs from training in that this is the period where you show off what you have. Experience is measured by the time put in to produce value from the combination of your talent and training. It may happen at the same time as gaining training or it may happen linearly. Experience sets you apart as a professional in your field. It gives you the springboard to become an expert.

Heart, the Missing Factor

Talent, training, and experience will give you what you need to become an expert. Heart, however, gives you the passion and fuel to become an attractor in your field.

I’m not talking here about the drive to succeed. You know those people, you might be one. You’re good at everything you set your mind to because you must succeed. You are so good that you’ve forgotten what you really love. You’ve forgotten where your passion lies. You mistake success for heart.

Heart is the measure missing from most career matrices and evaluations. In fact, it is the oft ignored, key ingredient of assessing qualification.

Heart is a passion that comes from within. It’s what drives you to do something regardless of the outcome. You spend hours at the sewing machine ensuring that the hem of a dress is just so. Rather than step away exhausted and spent, you feel refreshed and energized. Heart fuels you. Drive drains you.

Heart, also known as le cœur in French, is the root of courage. When we are engaged with heart, we have the willingness and courage to press forward. We take risks that the talented, trained, and experienced are not willing to take.

Heart also provides an ease and enduring harmony to our undertakings. It is like a silk cloth that both contains and covers our talent, training, and time to give our work a polished feel.

In the movie Center Stage, Maureen, one of the lead characters is the top dancer of her class. She’s assured a space in the prestigious, fictitious American Ballet Company. She has the feet or the talent and has spent here life in training and gaining experience for this position. Near the end of the movie, Maureen gives up the lead role in the audition ballet to a friend. Upon seeing the lead ballerina, her mother is perplexed and rushes out of the theater. In the lobby, Maureen and her mother meet. Her mother is going on about her missing the opportunity of a lifetime. Maureen begs her mother to listen, explaining to her that this is not her dream. Her mother argues that she just wants her to be happy. She doesn’t want Maureen to live a life of regret. Finally Maureen says, “That’s what this will be. You didn’t have the feet Mom. I don’t have the heart.”

In Spirit,
Nneka