by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
This summary note, based on recent conversations with coaching clients, is useful for any business owner who has grown beyond finding and fixing and is ready for the next stage of development.
Strategic Leadership
Developing people is your primary work product.
- Empowering others by holding a space that calls forth excellent performance
- Being open to & on the lookout for ways the strategic leader is limiting other people’s development, e.g. rescuing and intervening.
- Remember to share credit and responsibility.
Expecting relevant, actionable reports rather than chasing answers
- Training and then trusting your people to report also supports their development, i.e., learning which events, changes, and data matter to leadership
- Makes visible who is up for responsibility–or not
Standing in the future
- Vision.
- Strategy
- Opportunities.
- Structures.
- Positioning.
The key is, more and more, stepping out of operations, perhaps by putting someone else in charge of day-to-day, even month-to-month operations.
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms, Sales Techniques, Team Manager Skills
Everyone’s favorite radio station is WII-FM
What’s
In
It –
For
Me
Broadcast on their frequency and they’ll tune in.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
I have just read this and I want to share it with all of you as it describes the promise of who we are as human beings trying to discover identities for ourselves.
A few years ago in the Seattle Special Olympics nine people assembled at the start line for the 100m dash. This was an unusual bunch as they were all suffering from mental or physical handicaps. At the sound of the starters gun they all surged forward except one boy who fell on the asphalt, rolled over a few times and started crying.
The other eight up ahead heard the crying and all looked back to see what is happening. Everyone of them turned and ran back to the young boy. A girl with Downs Syndrome bent down and (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
When you judge people’s worth only by the results they produce you elevate people whose ends justify the means.
We no longer elevate people of character but people of ruthless results. We are abdicating our right to evaluate character or methods.
The exclusionary rule is a vestige of the character school of public morality. Dirty Harry is the blossom of the anything goes replacement.
Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. (p. 228).
We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in a line of thought that forces one to admit that all means, provided that they are efficient, are permissible and justified to pursue something defined as an end…
…for to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means and paradoxes always indicate perplexities, they do not solve them and hence are never convincing. As long as we believe that we deal with ends and means in the political realm, we shall not be able to prevent anybody’s using all means to pursue recognized ends. (p. 229).
—Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975, in
The Human Condition
German-born American political scientist and philosopher
See also Gandhi on ends vs. means.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
There’s this tendency to say to people: “I want you to get good results. But I also want to review you along the way, I want you to tell me how you’re getting those results and I want you to review all these processes and everything else.”
And what that does is, it turns experts into novices. The reason is that most expert knowledge is tacit knowledge. In order for me to permit you to use that passive knowledge, I can’t force you to make extremely explicit exactly what you’re doing.
So I need to be clear about what we’re trying to achieve and I need to share that with you; and then I need to let you go do it, and not impose all this monitoring on you along the way.
–Jeffrey Pfeffer
Stanford University
Strategy & Business 3Q1998
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
A transformational leadership style, one that conveys a sense of trust, meaningfulness, and individually challenges employees, contributes to greater employee well-being*
- Leading by example,
- Contributing to a common goal,
- Intellectual stimulation,
- Positive feedback for good performance,
- Recognizing the needs of others, &
- Resolving conflict
–Christine Jacobs, University of Cologne
in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
via Transformational Leadership
Has Positive Effects on Employee Well-Being.
*Psychological well-being includes:
-
self-acceptance
-
the establishment of quality ties to other
-
a sense of autonomy in thought and action
-
the ability to manage complex environments to suit personal needs and values
-
the pursuit of meaningful goals and a sense of purpose in life
-
continued growth and development as a person
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
I have great respect for Dan Gallwey; he is a pioneer of coaching and really gets it. Heard him just yesterday on a video from the 70s or 80s, paraphrasing.
When an employee or competitor fails to deliver what you require, start by inquiring into what he sees as the requirement, what he saw in the performance. Growth comes from seeing the world differently, not from being criticized or corrected.
—Tim Gallwey in a conversation with
John Wooden, Red Auerbach,
George Allen, & Werner Erhard
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills
The fraud triangle is a model for explaining the factors that cause someone to commit occupational fraud. It consists of three components which, together, lead to fraudulent behavior:
1. Perceived unshareable financial need
2. Perceived opportunity
3. Rationalization
The fraud triangle originated from Donald Cressey’s hypothesis:
Trusted persons become trust violators when they conceive of themselves as having a financial problem which is non-shareable, are aware this problem can be secretly resolved by violation of the position of financial trust, and are able to apply to their own conduct in that situation verbalizations which enable them to adjust their conceptions of themselves as trusted persons with their conceptions of themselves as users of the entrusted funds or property.1
1Donald R. Cressey, Other People’s Money (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1973) p. 30.
—The Fraud Triangle.
See also my post on the MCI Worldcom scandal, Integrity Ebbs by Inches.
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
Bad presentation–or resistant audience?
Executives often find themselves assigning blame. Many believe that ranking and sorting their colleagues is a key management skill–and I agree. A much rarer and more powerful skill is the ability to see our own contribution to the unwelcome behavior we see around us. Why is self-awareness more powerful than judging others? Because altering my own behavior is the best access I have to altering the future.
I know this. I teach this. I also forget to practice it.
In November of 2007, for example, I was in San Diego attending a weekend training for coaches. A breakout session was led by the author of one of the best-known books on coaching. It is a good book and I was very eager to attend. His ninety minute workshop was scheduled six times over two days–I was in a morning session on day two.
The author immediately struck me as irritated, aggressive, and arrogant. (Here I am, always ranking and sorting.) His opening seemed vague and rambling and his responses to questions were not pertinent. (Here I go, proceeding to collect evidence for my case.) People were shaking their heads and looking at each other. Coaches are a fairly supportive audience but in the first fifteen minutes, five of the thirty people walked out, one while the author was responding (elliptically) to his question! (Perfect. I have other people agreeing with me, a seductive substitute for truth.) I decided to (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
The Motley Fool: As you well know, Costco has taken some heat on Wall Street for being overly generous to its employees. According to a recent New York Times story, Costco store workers earn an average of around $17 an hour, which is 42% more than employees at Sam’s Club, which is owned by Wal-Mart. You have said Costco’s pay structure makes for good business. Explain.
Costco co-founder & CEO Jim Sinegal: Well, first of all, we have a very low turnover in our company. Our turnover is something in the 20% range, and that is including a lot of seasonal hires that we have both in the summer and at Christmas. After employees have been with us for more than a year, that turnover rate goes below 6%, so we take great pride in the fact that people join us and they stay with us. Our attitude has always been that if you hire good people and provide good wages and good jobs and more than that — if you provide careers — that good things will happen to your company. I think we can say that that has been proved by the quality of people that we have and how they have built our organization.
Costco vs. Wal-Mart
Comparing some workplace statistics,
as reported by the companies.
- Employees covered by company health insurance
- Insurance-enrollment waiting periods (for part-time workers)
- Costco 6 months
- Wal-Mart 2 years
- Portion of health-care premium paid by company
- Annual worker turnover rate
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