This week I’m recording an interview with Kathy Tuberville, a University of Memphis Fogelman College of Business instructor who has elected to use our book, Rebooting Leadership in an upper level undergrad course on leadership. As a precursor to our discussion, she posed two questions for me to address in our interview. I did my best to answer them in a fashion that I thought would be most useful to her students, and have shared my thoughts below. To the degree that you have new or young leaders in your organization, or perhaps you are one yourself, you/they may find this of interest:

What are today’s biggest leadership challenges for emerging and newly appointed leaders? The greatest challenge perhaps is that the on-ramp to today’s leadership highway is short, steep, and unforgiving. Less than a decade ago it was still conventional for newly appointed leaders to experience the benefit of some pretty intensive leadership training in their first few months on the job (if not prior), and be on a relatively short leash with their reporting senior during that period. Within reason, mistakes were expected, and were considered part of the learning curve. Today, not so much. Most of the prep work is a DIY proposition, and mistakes are things that your boss may be less able or inclined to provide air cover on, so it’s probably best that they happen to other people.

Not unlike the world of professional football (the U.S. variety), where yesterday’s rookie players (quarterbacks in particular) could expect to ride the bench for a year or more before being inserted into the starting lineup, today’s players are paid (and expected) to be fully productive from day one. And sadly, once on the field, we tend to forget that they are still rookie players, and not fully developed.

I will submit that had a lot to do with the recent re-injury of Washington Redskins’ rookie phenom quarterback, Robert Griffin III during the team’s first (and only) game of the 2012-13 NFL playoffs. As a 22 year old man who, to my knowledge has not spent any time in med school, Mr. Griffin was allowed to be the sole decider as to whether or not his previously injured leg was ready for action. He guessed wrong. It wasn’t, and hopefully he will recover.

Perhaps the most challenging part of this for the rest of us has to do with the fact that today’s newly appointed leaders can’t always count on having a good example set for them. By virtue of having a sour economy for the past five years, it is entirely likely that their boss hasn’t had the benefit of any leadership training either, ergo it’s not unusual to have the blind leading the blind.

The good news (and it is good news) is that, due to the fact that most of today’s workers are more likely to engage with (and on behalf of) their leader rather than the broader organization, the efforts of each individual leader tend to matter quite a bit more. It’s truly motivating when you realize that what you pour yourself into every day is indeed mission critical.

What are your recommendations for students to achieve success as leaders? For better or worse, here’s what I said.

1.    For openers, be bone honest with yourself about whether or not you are up for this particular ride.

• Do you have the courage to make tough, unpopular decisions, and to deliver bad news without blaming them on someone else? How about telling a friend that they either need to change or leave?
• Do you have the resilience to take shots and beatings that are intended for other people (your team) without whining? You better be, because that’s part of the job.
• Are you willing to subordinate personal interest for the good of the team?
• Are you willing to liberally share credit with others, perhaps even more than what they deserve at times? If so, proceed. We need a lot more like you.

2.    Early on, it’s important that you become a real master of your time and priorities. On day one, and every day thereafter, you’re going to have a hundred fresh emails and other incoming items of varying importance before you even get to work, and a line out the door (oops, doors are a thing of the past) when you do. How you handle that stuff and keep it in proper context will materially impact your success as a leader, not to mention your sanity.
3.    Though you must be ever mindful of the fact that accepting the mantle of leadership means that you are held to a higher standard, you must at the same time, be authentic – be real. People who are not comfortable in their own skin have a habit of becoming petty tyrants.
4.    Be grateful, and show it, every day. Really. Leadership is not about you. It’s about the mission, and it’s about them.
5.    Become a good listener. It’s one of the quickest ways of gaining the respect and trust of others, not to mention being a great path to the answers you need.
6.    Lastly, unless you find that you’ve been blessed with having a really good boss who is both competent and willing to invest a lot of time in your development, get a coach or mentor that you can rely on – somebody who has been around the block a few times, who cares about you, and won’t blow smoke up your nose.

These are my thoughts. You are invited to join the discussion.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Take a trip, make a major purchase, dine out, open a bank account, or just go to work, and the odds are good that you will soon be asked to complete some form of satisfaction survey. It seems that we’re practically being surveyed to death these days. Okay, maybe not “to death”, but you know what I’m referring to. You’ve doubtless experienced a significant ramping up of user, customer, and employee surveys in recent years.

In the interest of full disclosure, our firm provides satisfaction survey services (customer and employee) for clients. But this isn’t about us, or what we might be able to do for you. Rather, it’s about what YOU can do for you.

I’ve been on a road trip promoting our new book, and four times during the last week have been overtly asked (begged might be a better term) by customer contact employees to complete a customer satisfaction survey, AND to be sure and record my response as a “10”, or 7, or whatever the maximum score is on the firm’s survey. These four episodes involved two major hotel chains and two prominent food service brands. There was nothing subtle about it. The clear implication in each case was that, we want you to complete a survey and give us a 10, and if you can’t give the 10, well, then… maybe you can rethink completing the survey. On top of that, I’ve received two emails from the credit card company we use to pay for this travel, the first one asking me to complete a survey, and the second bugging me to get the survey done.

If you’re going to seek and fully utilize satisfaction surveys, there are a host of critical success factors you should bake into your data gathering process. Here are just a few of them:

The beatings will stop when everything is rated a 10 – Whether it is of the employee or customer satisfaction variety, many survey users would suggest that attaining high scores is the main objective of doing the survey. Au contraire! We would submit that it is of far greater benefit to get valid feedback about what the employee, customer, or user sees as the best and worst aspects of doing business with your organization, AND to see scores go up over time. Indeed, low scores and some bone honest feedback about things that you need to improve are one of the best gifts someone can give you. But you’re probably not going to get that if all you’re pushing for is maxed out scores.

Be careful, very careful what you incent people to do – We’re not opposed at all to linking surveys to performance-based incentives, but as with any incentive, you’ve got to be very careful how you draw up the program. People, all of us, are going to do what we’re incentivized to do, regardless of whether it meshes with the spirit and intent of the program or not. If incentivized (positively or otherwise) simply on the basis of attaining high scores, people will find myriad ways to game the system in order to achieve that objective, witness my conversations with the four hotel and food service personnel.

Strive for high participation, but don’t, repeat do NOT badger people – Clearly, getting a significant percentage of respondents from the targeted survey population is a good thing in that it helps assure a valid sample. But, you want it to be an un-coerced sample. Doing otherwise annoys the would-be respondent, and it very likely “poisons the well.”

At the end of the day, it is important to realize that nothing short of our credibility and reputation are at stake when we invite people to tell us what they think about our business. The least we can do is to honor their time by asking a few (not a great long list of) relevant questions, inviting criticism as much as praise, taking their feedback to heart, and sharing the results with all stakeholders.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

A core part of every leader’s duty, regardless of rank, is having the wisdom and courage to sever the relationship with someone whose performance or behavior either persistently or grossly fails to meet expectations. It’s what we get paid to do. Failure on our part to either notice the condition or take decisive action represents a fraud against the person, their teammates, and the organization as a whole.

Such a fraud was committed yesterday when National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern opted to suspend rather than terminate the services of a player for a vicious, deliberate hit against an opponent. The player in this case is Ron Artest (aka Metta World Peace), who leveled Oklahoma City Thunder player James Harden in Sunday’s nationally televised game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Thunder. No stranger to unacceptable, violent behavior (on court and off), Artest has reportedly been suspended twelve (yes, 12) previous times in his thirteen-year career as an NBA professional.

Two things are evident from this record: 1) Mr. Artest is an individual who no longer deserves to be called a professional, by virtue of his unwillingness to control his behavior, 2) Sending him to “time out” doesn’t do any good. Where are Donald Trump and his elevator when we need them?

The question, for us at least, isn’t what to do about the NBA’s latest thuggish behavior, but rather, what happens to the Ron Artests on your team? No, you probably don’t have anyone on the payroll who has committed multiple batteries, but what about those who can’t seem to control their bigotry or bully tendencies? How about those who are clearly incapable of playing nice with others, or perhaps those who Professor  Robert Sutton referred to so aptly in his book, The No Asshole Rule?.

If you’ve been in a leadership role for any reasonable length of time, you’ve likely faced at least one of these characters. But have you dealt, really dealt with them? Our experience suggests that in too many cases, managers duck the issue because it’s hard, because it can damage your popularity for a while, you don’t want the hassle of extra scrutiny and lengthy termination procedures imposed by the folks in HR, and besides, as short as job tenures are these days, you might get a hall pass and title of the problem will transfer to a new owner. When that happens, not unlike the current day NBA, both you and the organization will pay a high price in lost respect, credibility, and business outcomes.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Deal with these situations sooner, not later. The passage of time with no intervention almost always makes the matter worse. The minute you decide that an employee needs to be on someone else’s payroll (preferably a competitor’s), start that process.
2. Not unlike any other surgical procedure, get a 2^nd and 3^rd opinion. Ask a fellow manager whose opinion and discretion you trust to dispassionately review the matter. Invite an HR professional to do the same. Trust us on this one. Most of them provide valuable advice, and they really do have your (and the organization’s) best interests at heart.
3. Be mindful of your own culpability. If you have in some way failed to be clear with the person about your expectations, or giving them a fair chance to succeed, own it and rectify it. Otherwise, step up to your duty.

“Avoiding the solution of a tough, miserable, volatile problem is not discretion. It is cowardice. And it is robbery. … Any coach who doesn’t kick the complacent ass on his team will end up kicking his own before long.”–Pat Riley, The Winner Within

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, the next edition of which will be released in July 2012 by John Wiley & Sons. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Twice in the last month when approaching the hostess stand at specialty restaurants inside high end hotels, I’ve been greeted immediately not by the words, good morning, hello, or anything like that, but by a request for my name and room number. In each case, at the end of the meal, I was asked for a room key before being allowed to charge the meal to my guest room. Then, upon signing the meal tab, I again had to enter my name and room number. Funny thing… in neither case was I even once called by my name.

We collect bushels of information these days, to feed the ravenous appetites of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), and other databases. I often wonder, though, how well that data is used, and just how much of it is operationalized in the form of applied knowledge.

It was clear in the case of the restaurants that the hostess staffs were collecting my information not because they intended to use it with me, but because someone in management was requiring it for another purpose. What they (and each of us on a too regular basis) lose sight of is that when you take the step of asking for someone’s name, personal information, or opinion, even once, let alone a second or third time, we expect you to use it in a form that is at least visible, if not beneficial to us. Otherwise, it reeks of arrogance.

I saw this again yesterday in a visit to the emergency department of an otherwise well run hospital. Despite having proffered my medical information via both a url to a secure website AND in writing, I was asked a third time for the same basic information.

This week our firm is in the midst of working with two clients on their employee opinion surveys. In each case, these organizations have figured out on their own, with no prodding from us, that if they are to truly get some ROI on their survey investment, it behooves them to feed the results back to their employees, and, at the end of the day, to act on the information received. Otherwise, management’s reputation, not to mention investment will have been squandered.

What about you? Are you in the data gathering or data using business? Do you at least acknowledge the information that people have given you? (Note to recruiters: This includes you.) Do you use it well? Do you bend the data gathering process to accommodate the preference of the information giver? If not, why not?

As we march on with the vital journey of creating electronic medical records and ever more powerful informational databases, let’s not lose sight of some of the low hanging fruit that is immediately at hand:

• If we know a person’s name, let’s use it. That will never offend them.
• Let’s show a little more consideration in the data gathering process. One thing our survey clients both insisted on was explaining to their workers on the front end, how their opinions would be used (and not used), and when they would get to see the results.
• Let’s resolve to being a bit more “subject-friendly” when gathering data, making sure, for example that any redundancy owes to real necessity, and not laziness.  Let’s resolve to put more focus on both the primacy and privacy of data, collecting only that which is needed, and truly safeguarding that which has been entrusted to us.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the newly released book,Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit theirwebsite, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

In a webinar presentation this week entitled, “Building a Go-Fast Organization” sponsored by HCI and Globoforce, I recounted a story in which former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger had asked a staff member to do a report on something. When Dr. Kissinger got the report, he sent it back to the fellow with a note asking, “Is this the best you can do?” The staff member re-worked the report and returned it to Kissinger. The same thing happened again. The guy reworked the report another time and returned it to Kissinger, who again asked if this was his best work. The fellow replied that, yes, indeed, this was his very best work, at which point Kissinger reportedly said, “Good… now I’ll read it.” The clear implication was that Dr. Kissinger felt that he was entitled to nothing less than the best effort of those on his team.

This week, Steve Jobs took a step back from his role as CEO of Apple. Not unlike Dr. Kissinger, Mr. Jobs is known for a lot of things, but accepting mediocrity is not among them. The introduction of uber-successful products like the iPod, iPhone, IPad, and Macbook Air would never have come about without Jobs’ relentless focus on producing “insanely great” gear, to use his words.

(One can only wonder how the U.S. Congress would be behaving right now if Dr. Kissinger was the Speaker of the House and Mr. Jobs the Senate Majority Leader.)

Most of us understand deep down that high standards are a necessary requirement of winning. Sure, we whine about it at times, but nobody gets up in the morning and says, “I want to go lose today. I want to go to my job, hang out with some really mediocre people, and do crummy work for a supervisor who is a self-centered weasel.” We get it that high standards and winning performance go hand in hand.

Too often, as leaders, we handicap the performance of our team by setting the bar too low, by holding ourselves and others to a standard that is less, far less than our best effort. We do so for lots of reasons… because we’re tired, or we know our team is tired, they haven’t gotten raises in a while, they haven’t been fully trained or equipped, the list goes on. And all that is probably true.

Yet, when we do that, we step onto a very slippery slope by enunciating that there is a new operative standard called, “good enough.” In so doing, we absolutely incense those who really are giving it their very best. In effect, we are telling them that their expenditure of discretionary effort is foolish. No one likes to feel foolish, to wit a decline in their effort is almost certain, and mediocrity becomes the new norm.

Very frankly, I think sometimes we’re too quick to apologize for having high standards. There’s nothing wrong with asking people to do their very best work. And when we fail to ask for or expect it (starting with ourselves), our chances of getting it are greatly diminished.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be on a team where I’m surrounded by mediocrity, or striving to do mediocre things. I’d much rather create a big smoking hole in the ground as the result of a failed effort at something fantastic.

As leaders, it is imperative for us to push through the rough patch that we find ourselves in right now. It is entirely possible to expect (and require) best effort while still being sensitive to the needs, feelings, fears, and aspirations of our teammates. Indeed, that is the only way to secure a better future for them and ourselves. Let’s get on with it.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the newly released book,Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit theirwebsite, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows