This is part 3 of my series on leadership. In this post and the previous I have been sharing what I’ve learned from several books including Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, Dan Pink’s Drive, and Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers. Click to read part 1 or part 2.

My journey in leadership has been a meandering path that started in high school.  As I continue to try to discover my why, my greater purpose in life, and how I will lead in that space, I thought I was look back on where I’ve been.  My first real leadership experience started at Shiloh Community Church.  I was part of the youth group at Shiloh.  Every summer the senior high youth would go on a 2 week bike trip through different destinations.

My first trip toured South Dakota and Ioawa.  On that trip I was just a passenger.  During my sophomore year we toured the lower peninsula of Michigan.  Again I was just a passenger, observing from the student leaders around me and my youth pastor Kendall Harger.  But while I was just a passenger, I was an actively engaged passenger.  Liz Wiseman talks a lot in her book Multipliers about the importance of engagement in developing your people.  Kendall was a multiplier and he knew how to engage even those who were not yet leaders.  He engaged us by pushing us to complete arduous feats like ride 100 miles on a bike in a single day.  He pushed us by encouraging us to serve the church and the community that was hosting us each night by sharing our testimonies and leading worship, even though we were dead tired.

On my third year we were gearing up for a tough trip through the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and Kentucky.  This was the year that I was no longer a passenger.  This year I was to be a group leader. Group leaders were student leaders who were assigned to shepherd a group of 5-6 other students on each day’s journey.  This student was resonsible for everyone’s safety and for keeping morale high in the group so that the group finishes together.  The morale part can be especially hard because each rider is at a different fitness level.  Some riders could ride all day going 14-16 miles per hour while others would struggle to maintain 10 miles per hour.  The group was only as fast or strong as it’s slowest rider.  It was a balancing act of encouraging the stronger riders to use their strength to encourage the weaker riders.  As a group leader I couldn’t let the strong riders go off ahead on their own, leaving the weaker riders alone fighting the wind.  If I did, I would have caused a lot of students to give up and not experiencing the accomplishment of overcomming.

I really appreciate Kendall giving me this opportunity.  It sparked my servant leadership attitude that I lead with everyday in my life.  I am always searching how I can get everyone’s best to work together to achieve the best out of the team.  Dan Pink wrote in his book Drive something especially profound about how my generation will seek validation.  He wrote,

“We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice— doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.”

I think I’m still in search of my cause that is larger than myself.  But I know my life has been and will continue to be filled with experiences where I was given the opportunity to serve a cause that had profound impacts.

We’re designed to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice— doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.

• Dan Pink
• Drive

I hope that even just one student under my leadership experienced the feeling of finishing a tough physical challenge and was empowered to hunger for even more challenging feats.

This is part two of series on leadership that coincides with a course I am taking at Kendall College of Art and Design. Click here to read part one.

Autonomy and trust.

These are the two major themes that stuck out to me this week in my readings.  I believe both of these ideas are tightly interlinked.  Autonomy requires trust and trust requires autonomy.  Liz Wiseman writes in Multipliers, 

“Multipliers liberate people from the oppressive forces within corporate hierarchy. They liberate people to think, to speak, and to act with reason. They create an environment where the best ideas surface and where people do their best work. They give people permission to think.”

I am blessed to have the opportunity to work at an organization and especially with a team that trusts each other to let the ideas and attributes of individuals multiply throughout the team, and even beyond the team.  As a team we encourage each other to live our culture in a way that is infectious.  But we trust each other not to push our culture on other teams, or bring other teams down because they are different.  We all have permission to think and speak freely because there is trust.

“Multipliers liberate people from the oppressive forces within corporate hierarchy. They liberate people to think, to speak, and to act with reason. They create an environment where the best ideas surface and where people do their best work. They give people permission to think.”

• Liz Wiseman
• Multipliers

Simon Sinek writes about trust in his book Start with Why.

“The only way people will know what you believe is by the things you say and do, and if you’re not consistent in the things you say and do, no one will know what you believe.”

Throughout his book he continually ingrains his concept of the golden circle on the reader.  If we start with why, and hold strongly to our why, our whats and our hows will consistently communicate our why.  It is this consistency that builds trust in a team or trust in a brand or trust in a company.  If our whats and our hows don’t match our whys consistently, people wont’ know who we are.  They won’t know how they can identify with us.  They won’t trust us.

With trust, we are free to act autonomously in our organizations and our families.  There is no need for management.  Daniel Pink in his book Drive suggests that perhaps it’s time to just toss out the whole idea of management.  Trust allows for autonomy, and with autonomy people don’t need to be managed.  One of my first experiences with autonomous work was when my team at work decided to put up a bounty board.  This was a board that contained a bunch of ideas for small projects we wanted to do as a team but never had the time to do.  If someone had some down time, they were free to pick a task off this board and solve the problem however they wanted.  I decided to tackle a few problems from that board.  We were looking for a way to make our local development process more consistent with each other on the team.  Before we all used our own tools and setups to develop code.  This led to a lot of unforeseen bugs in our software.  The all to familiar saying in the software industry “It works on my machine,” was said all to often.  So I decided to develop a solution using a new technology called Vagrant.  This technology allowed us to install a consistent tech stack on our individual computers that was exactly the same for everyone.  So if someone’s code worked on their machine, it should theoretically work on my machine.  I developed that solution over two years ago now, and we’re still using it today.

“Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”

• Peter Gibbons
• Office Space

Trust and autonomy are absolutely essential for groups of people to prosper, to grow and to innovate.  Without it we are just algorithmic task masters doing meaningless work.  As Peter Gibbons would say, “Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.”

Simon Sinek says in his book Start with Why that, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” In my own personal development, as a person in general, and especially as a leader, I’ve been searching for my why. Having a why is so important. Daniel Pink wrote in his book Drive that “adding certain kinds of extrinsic rewards on top of inherently interesting tasks can often dampen motivation and diminish performance.” The old motivation model of carrots and sticks no longer work. So the question remains, how do I find a why that will motivate me towards enriching and fullfilling life experiences?

There are a few things that I have found that have worked pretty well so far. The first is to push myself into uncomfortable situations and observe how well I perform when there is a strong sense of unknowns to the task. In seeking out opportunites like informal leadership, public speaking, and learning new technologies I continually find intrinsic rewards in accomplishing something I never thought I would be any good at. I have found within myself a why that says I must be unique and I must not fit a mold that anyone else may have put on me. I want to be a person that is novel and a surprise even to those who think they know me well. I find this challenge even more rewarding than a job that offers a huge paycheck.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

• Simon Sinek
• Start With Why

Perhaps one example of this in my life happened when I was transitioning from life in the Navy back to the civillian world. Many of my colleagues impressioned on me how I could take my security clearance and the knowledge I had in information security and land a pretty cushy job working for a defense contractor in the Washington, D.C. area. But that didn’t feel right. Having a cushy job that paid well was not a compelling why for me. So I took my family back home to Michigan with no job in mind and just started searching. I applied for a job at Our Daily Bread Ministries as a web developer. I had very little experience programming for the web. But the job not only promised the opportunity to serve a mission in line with my faith, but also the opportunity to learn something new.

I applied for the job, was offered a position at a salary much less than I probably would have gotten had I stayed in D.C., but I quickly experienced fullfillment beyond what any money would have given me. I’m constantly faced with new challenges, embarking in heuristic work that requires taking chances and trying things out. I am given the freedom to fail and learn from my mistakes. I am given the opportunity to work with a team that is also continuously learning and experimenting and sharing ideas. It’s a team full of multipliers; leaders and colleagues that enrich each other.

Liz Wiseman in her book Multipliers said that, “Multipliers establish a unique and highly motivating work environment where everyone has permission to think and the space to do their best work.” This describes perfectly the team that I work on. This was not the example that I found while doing government work. Government work is much more algorithmic.

Multipliers establish a unique and highly motivating work environment where everyone has permission to think and the space to do their best work

• Liz Wiseman
• Multipliers

It doesn’t like freethinkers that chance failure. It rewards safety and efficiency rather than risk taking and innovation. I’m happy I found a place that helps me embrace and further develop my why.

This is part of a 6 week series I will be writing as I continue to develop my leadership qualities as part of a course I am taking at Kendall College of Art and Design. Read part two!

I had the opportunity to attend the first day of the Global Leadership Summit this year, and it was quite incredible.  It was my first year attending the event at the Kentwood Community Church host site. I came expecting to learn a few things and left with a lot of inspiration.  I would like to share some of the key takeaways from each of the four speakers I gleaned during this day.  This will be a four part series over the next few days.  I will start with Pastor Bill Hybels.

Bill Hybels

Bill is the founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area.  The Willow Creek Association that grew out of the church is responsible for organizing the summit every year.  I have read one of Hybels’s books, Too Busy Not to Pray, so my expectation of his content was one of spiritual formation.  I was not sure what to expect from him in terms of leadership wisdom.  He definitely delivered though.  His general theme for leadership was how to get someone from here, their current state, to there, a preferred state.  He emphasized that this leader must be a guide.  The leader should help his followers find their own way.  It is not the leader’s responsibility to tell them the right way, but to facilitate an enviornment where they can discern the version of the right way that best fits their life.

Hybels spoke about four different lenses of leadership.  The lenses were titled the passion lens, the shattered lens, the self-adjusting lens, and the rear-view lens.

Passion Lens

Hybels said that passion is like protein for a leader.  It is a source of energy that sustains and grows her vision  over time.  People crave a passionate leader to motivate them towards their goal.  Hybels pointed out that a motivated team will outperform an unmotivated team by 40%.

Passion comes either from an individual’s dreams about a greater future or from their frustration about a current state.  Hybels challenged us all as leaders by asking how full our passion bucket was.  It is the leader’s job to keep their passion bucket full to ensure that she is leading well.  It is not the job of the church, a board, family, or co-workers to fill the leader’s passion bucket.

Hybels gave two tips on how a leader can keep their passion bucket full.  The first was to reflect and read passionate authors.  I could say that listening to Hybels was a source of passion that filled my bucket as I was listening to him.

His second suggestion was to go to places that fill your soul.  For Hybels, a place that he needed to go to fill his soul on one occasion happened to be in the middle east.  Hybels was on a speaking tour and was beginning to feel drained.  So he went to an area that was currently being devastated by war and conflict.  He met a young boy and his family that was forced to flee their country because of the conflict.  They were refugees.  The boy’s family was able to find safety in a new home.  The boy was even able to be enrolled in school.  But the boy had a physical deformity that caused him to be teased and bullied in school.  So the boy never went back to the school.  This story broke Hybels’s heart and inspired him to do something about it.  He used his resources to get the boy’s deformity fixed.  After the boy healed from the surgery he was able to return to school without fear of being teased or bullied.  Hybels acknowledged that this one act of kindness wasn’t going to change the world, but it did change this boys life, and more importantly it inspired Hybels to continue his work to build up spiritual leaders around the world.

Shattered Lens

The next lens was the shattered lens.  This lens affects many people who have grown up around examples of poor leadership.  Hybels shared how his leadership lens started out shattered because his father did not exemplify how to properly lead people.  He talked about how his father would often take a worker who was being dishonest to the banana room (a temperature controlled, sound proof room where bananas were stored) to let the worker know how dissatisfied he was.  When the worker left the banana room they walked out of the building with their head hung in shame and never returned to work.  His father would walk out and give the rest of the factory floor a stern look as if saying, “Let this be an example.”  Hybels father led by instilling a culture of fear.  This culture obviously did not jive for Hybels as he was leading a growing church.  After recognizing this he realized he needed to bring in outside help to repair his shattered lens.

The takeaway from the shattered lens is to know where my blindspots are and to seek guidance from someone else to fix those blindspots.  I grew up with some shattered lenses.  My parents divorced when I was young and suffered from alcoholism and addiction.  My dad dealt with people by being agressive and my mom was somewhat passive.  Because of this I have always been a little timid when it comes to dealing with people.  The shattered lens from my dad always scared me so I clung to the shattered lens of my mom.  Over the years though I have been trying to surround myself with mentors that have healthy lenses.  I have come to be more assertive while still being kind and humble.  I try to empathize with people and their concerns, but not at the cost of always sacfrificing my own concerns when they are valid.  Healthy counsel can help repair a shattered pair of lenses.

Self-adjusting Lens

The third pair of lenses is all about how to view performance matters when dealing with the people you lead.  The first thing to remember is that people will model their behavior based on the actions of their leader.  Hybels phrased this as, “Speed of the leader, speed of the team.”  A leader can’t expect his team to move faster than he moves.  A leader must set the example he expects from his team.

The next takeway I got from this lens is the importance of telling people how they are doing.  Hybels said, “Everyone desperately wants to know how they’re doing.”  This is so true.  If there is anything that I feel is commonly missing from my professional development, it is having a good idea of how I am doing.  But just like with the passion lens, I think this has to start with me.  I can’t expect my leaders to always initiate an intentional feedback loop into our relationships.  In the end, my performance always boils down to the efforts of one person. Me.

Everyone desperately wants to know how they’re doing

• Pastor Bill Hybels
• Willow Creek Church

It is my job to get with my leaders and make sure that clear goals and expectations are regularly communicated.  It is also my job to ensure that accountability with my leaders is practiced.  It is the leader’s job to facilitate professional growth by being involved with this conversation and ensuring the relationship is intentionally carried out according to the mutual expectations discussed.

Rear View Lens

The last lens is the rear view lens.  This is the lens that we all must put on from time to time to reflect back on where we’ve been.  If we never look back, we won’t know how we’re doing.  We won’t be able to properly use the self-adjusting lens without the rear view lens.  Hybels discusses the importance of asking, “What am I leaving behind?”  This applies not only to worklife, but also homelife.  There must be balance.

For those who feel hopeless; like they have already wasted their life by being a workaholic, Hybels stressed that while there are no do overs, there are makeovers.  It is never too late to re-prioritize our lives.  Hybels said that we need to flourish holistically.  I need to be pouring just as much energy into developming my role as a husband and a father as I am into my role as a professional.  Excelling in one area will not make up for floundering in the other.

Hybels ended his talk with two important statements for us all to remember.
LEADERSHIP MATTERS

GET BETTER!

High performance teams in the corporate world are rare.  Even more so when working for a public sector or non-profit organization.  In my work experience a team’s ability to collaborate had a huge impact on the team’s level of performance.  Where there was a culture of individual, and even competitive performance within a team, production and innovation faltered.  Where team collaboration and mutual success was encouraged and rewarded, production and innovation was through the roof.

Struggling Teamwork in the U.S. Navy

When I was serving in the navy I was ordered to a naval command where many sailors go to finish up their career.  It was a 9-5 office environment with a relatively easy and mundane, though very important, mission.  We had work to get done, with well established practices to follow.  There was not a culture of innovation in this command.  When I came on, the command was experiencing increased demand for higher performance, but the higher ups could not justify giving the command more senior sailors.  Instead the command got stuck with people like me; sailors who were fresh out of training and had no significant real world experience.  Gratton and Erickson (2007)¹ of the Harvard Business Review talk about how Nokia inspired a culture of collaboration within their company by assigning all new employees a list of key relationships they needed to create.  These relationships were designed to create a social network within the organization so that despite its size, everyone was connected through someone else.  In the article they write,

“Our research shows that new teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who were strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationships.”

The article went on to say that when 20-40% of the people on teams were already connected their ability to collaborate increased.  When I arrived at my new command I didn’t know anyone.  I was left mostly on my own to get to know people.  I was not really guided in which relationships were important to have other than the required relationship I had with my direct superiors.

Our research shows that new teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who were strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationships.

• Gratton, & Erickson.
• Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

 

What actually happened was small groups of junior sailors formed cliques based on their backgrounds.  I had a small group of friends that I hung out with and would sometimes rely on for help with work problems.  We never worked together as a larger team.  Gratton and Erickson warned against this saying that the formation of strong subgroups based on common interests and backgrounds rather than creating intentional key relationships based on collaboration and knowledge sharing can lead to conflict both within and between these subgroups.  In contrast to this, Kelley (2007)² of leading design firm IDEO quoted the character Marry Poppins who said, “. . . in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.”  This describes perfectly the high performance team I am now a part of.

High performance at Our Daily Bread

After I separated from the Navy I began reaching out to my network of friends from college to find a job.  My friend Brett told me about a job on the team he worked for at Our Daily Bread Ministries.  He told me about how exciting the team was, that it was growing and evolving all the time.  It was just what I was looking for.  I wanted to work in a place where I would constantly be learning and building meaningful relationships.  Lafley and Charan (2008)³ of Proctor and Gamble talk about how they cultivated a culture of innovation and collaboration within their organization.  They were intentional to ease out people in their organization who were controlling and not willing to learn and collaborate.  They didn’t want anyone on the team who wasn’t curious.  They found that cultivating curious individuals led to natural collaboration.

This is exactly what I discovered on my new team.  From the get go I was mentored by Brett in learning not only the skills required for the job, but the ins and outs of the organization.  Brett also worked hard to foster a family-like atmosphere within the team.  We always ate lunch together as a team, and this was a great way for me to get to know everyone.  Since my early days there we have moved on to opening up our family-like culture to other teams by inviting them to the lunch table, playing games, sharing jokes, and talking about how we can improve each other’s work.

We believe the strongest teams take root when individuals are given the chance of picking what groups they work with and even occasionally what projects they work on.

• Tom Kelley
• The Art of Innovation

 

There is still room for improvement within my team for sure.  Kelley says, “We believe the strongest teams take root when individuals are given the chance of picking what groups they work with and even occasionally what projects they work on.”  Our team still struggles to break out of our technical expertise silos.  We don’t take a lot of opportunities to give ourselves time to work on our own projects.

Kelley also talks about how planned breaks can be great opportunities for team building.  My team does a great job of this, but sometimes we abuse it.  We let our team breaks go long, especially on a cold rainy day when we’re struggling to stay motivated to get our work done.

Lastly we would really benefit from seeing this culture infect the organization as a whole and be demonstrated and encouraged from HR and the executive leadership team.  Gratton and Erickson talk about how important it is for executive leaders to demonstrate collaboration amongst each other in order for collaboration to spread throughout the organization.  The executive leadership needs to plant and nurture the seeds.  They also talked about how HR departments can help by providing intentional collaboration training and organization wide outings, giving more people from different teams the opportunity to interact with each other in a casual way.

1. Gratton, L., & Erickson, T. J. (2007). Eight ways to build collaborative teams. Harvard business review, 85(11), 100.
2. Kelley, T. (2007). The art of innovation: lessons in creativity from IDEO, America’s leading design firm. Crown Business.
3. Lafley, A. G., & Charan, R. (2008). P&G’s innovation culture. Strategy+ Business Magazine, 1-10.