by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
The telephone and Internet were still not connected three days after moving our office. I had spent way too much time on hold and hearing excuses from Verizon. I needed to get free of their bureaucracy to focus on running my business. So I called in the Marines. Actually just one former Marine, a recently retired Colonel. For some jobs one Marine is plenty.
“Chet,” I said, “I know you are an executive here and you have plenty to do. So do I. We need telecomm restored ASAP. Do what you can. Okay?”
“Sure, boss.” Chet replied, “Whatever it takes.”
I was a little concerned by the martial fire in his eyes when he said, “Whatever it takes,” but I was determined
to get the business back online and myself focused on other tasks.
“Right,” I said, “Get it done.”
When I walked into the office the next morning (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Recommended Books
The Economist offers a fascinating summary of the new book by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. The key requirement is to get into the right department and specialty. As with starting a business, riding a rising tide by choosing a growing, lucrative sector makes everything else easier and success more likely. Once you are in the right place, three practices help you rise to power:
- Manage up. Ask for help and mentoring; flatter your seniors; and make a good impression.
- Be a bridge or node. Nurture relationships across departments and levels; be able to call on the right person to get key information or smooth a transaction.
- Practice loyalty. Persevere with difficult postings. Don’t change companies for short term advantage.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
New York Times columnist David Brooks, alumnus of my college and our off-campus newspaper, explains beautifully some of the reasons I advise my executive coaching clients to put away popular business books and get into great novels.
Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. … Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. … If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
—David Brooks
History for Dollars
NYTimes.com.
Also see my short post, Why I review novels on a blog for CEOs and executive coaches
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
I noticed something interesting about executive effectiveness while reading an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, What Makes a Great Teacher? The researchers identified specific traits of the most effective teachers, traits that I immediately recognized as characteristic of exceptional business leaders. Try reading the following excerpt from the article while substituting “manager” for “teacher” and “employees” for “students.”
First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly (more…)
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Leadership Development
Disputes are inevitable any time you are working with people to produce significant results. What is not inevitable is dreading or delaying the confrontation required to resolve the conflict. Here’s how to get it over within one conversation.
My 3 Rs of dispute resolution are:
- Relationship,
- Responsibility, and
- Request
RELATIONSHIP: Early in the conversation, state plainly the quality of the relationship you want to have with the person. Invite the other person to declare their intentions, too. A client once said to me, “I hope when we’re through negotiating this and we (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
At Accelerent, I was lucky to meet the commander of the USS Cole and hear his story of the day his destroyer was nearly sunk by al-Qaeda. Kirk Lippold made clear that his ship was saved mostly because of how he led and trained his crew in the years prior to the attack, rather than by any dramatic decisions or heroics on October 12, 2000.
His “Five Pillars of Leadership” are:
• Integrity
• Vision
• Personal Responsibility and Accountability
• Trust and Invest
• Professional Competence
He gave a thrilling and informative presentation. I particularly thanked him for illustrating the masterful use of chain of command, maximizing his impact as a leader by improving his officers rather than continually reaching down to personally resolve specific issues.
The Navy, unfortunately, tends to be rather unforgiving of officers whose ships are damaged so Kirk Lippold never made Captain. The military’s loss is our gain as he tours the country sharing his leadership lessons.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
I was very pleased to be invited to a meeting with former MCI Worldcom internal auditor, Cynthia Cooper, sponsored by Accelerent. She is the employee who discovered and “blew the whistle” on the $11 billion financial fraud that, along with Enron, changed corporate governance in America. Unfortunately, similar frauds continue to be perpetrated. Her story, also told in Extraordinary Circumstances, illustrates an important principle of business integrity.
Business crimes are seldom committed by evil people searching for opportunities to lie, cheat, or steal. Most misdeeds, from pilfering pens and misusing the copier to billion-dollar stock frauds, are carried out by regular people who have rationalized small steps over the line. At MCI Worldcom, accountants reclassified some reserves into revenue because the CFO said (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
A friend considering whether to propose marriage wrote to me in 1995 to request coaching. Here is my response.
In my first marriage, arguments with my wife followed a common format: I attacked and withdrew (what John Grey refers to as “the bear healing in his cave”). In my cave, I found myself stewing over imagined details of how we would divide the furniture, whether I would lose half of my library and the joys of returning to dating and seduction. Then we would cool off and gradually return to normal. But conflicts occur in close relationships, so I had lots of opportunity to (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills
Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions, and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal stress, communicating more often with employees, customers, and suppliers. All of that is useful and important.
I also find it useful to remind managers that change is not quick or easy for companies.
Leaders, especially the most dynamic, creative, and entrepreneurial, must keep in mind that stability is in the nature of organizations. That’s why we call them organizations, rather than alterizations or adaptizations. People, especially in groups, need (more…)
by Tony Mayo | Leadership Development, Recommended Books
Here is my take on a classic novel about personal transformation along with some intriguing exploration of paradigms, human perception, and frames of reference.
First, this blurb…
Thanks so much for putting this into words. It is the most concise and accurate analysis of this work that I have ever read. The Razor’s Edge has been my favorite book for many years. I re-read it often. And now I will be able to look at it with a fresh eye again.
Thank you. Terrific work.
–Jack Randall Earles, playwright
Top Executive Coach Tony Mayo’s essay on
The Razor’s Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
The Razor’s Edge is often described as the story of Larry, a war veteran who forsakes a comfortable life in Chicago “society” for a vague spiritual quest. It is better appreciated as a portrait of his acquaintances, whose conventional lifestyles are starkly contrasted to the path walked by the seeker. Some readers have wished to know more of Larry and criticize the space and attention Maugham lavished upon the “ancillary” characters. Instead, The Razor’s Edge illuminates the spiritual path by focusing on people more like the typical reader, people who do not give up materialistic Western striving. The best way to see Larry is to look at what he is not.
This narrative technique succeeds wonderfully in the masterful hands of author W. Somerset Maugham, best known for Of Human Bondage. Rather than simply lay out the details of Larry’s explorations and development, which, being spiritual and internal, would be rather dull to watch, Maugham reveals Larry by dissecting the contrasting behavior of his associates.
The Positive Aspects of Negative Space
This reminds me of the artist’s exercise of drawing “negative space” instead of the object itself. By carefully sketching only those parts of the background visible around the figure one creates a suggestive (more…)
Recent Comments