Today was a momentous day for the US and the world with the inauguration of Barack Obama.  In my opinion, the most meaningful line from his speech was when he invoked “a new era of responsibility”  and talked about the need to put childish things behind us and do some growing up.  This looks like a much-needed dose of reality and “tough love”  by an emerging leader who now has a very difficult and challenging job to do.

Leadership and change always begin with personal responsibility and truth-telling.  If you want to develop top talent, start by leveling with people.  Tell them the truth and enlist their help in being part of the solution.  Now is the time for responsibility and assertive (yet humble) leadership.

I had a colleage ask me today about talent management and my experience with how employees respond to talent management efforts at work.  Here’s some of what I shared with her.

From the employee side, there is a natural concern about fairness and favoritism; will Talent Management (TM) be administered fairly and give everyone an equal chance to succeed?  Will it be a cover for leaders who are championing/grooming/promoting their own favorites?

Also, most TM efforts or programs have some kind of measurement included with them.  Some of those include personal profiles or talent assessments.  Some people have a natural fear about how those will be viewed or used by management.  Other measurements are more tied to performance management or productivity or contribution to the company.  Some employees don’t like the additional scrutiny that comes with measurement–period.

Honestly, a lot of “talent management” efforts are really HR-sponsored drives that are modest in their goals/design and don’t have real staying power.  Employees have a legitimate right to question if TM is a “flavor of the year” hobby that will be eventually abandoned in 12-24 months.  That often seems to be what happens unless management is fully committed to it and is willing to make it a robust, long-lasting change in how the organization thinks about and practices talent management.

Of course, I encourage leaders who are committed to developing top talent to exercise some empathy and think first about how their efforts are going to be received by employees.  It can avoid a lot of pain and waste later on.

My wife encouraged me to write something about talent and the interface with the elections in the US.  I scratched my head (figuratively) until some of the following thoughts came together.

Look at the leaders of a democratic country–they are a reflection (or projection if you will) of the people they represent.  The aspirations, pride, patriotism, greed, humanity, biases, wisdom, folly, enlightenment and blindness of the people are embodied in the elected leaders.  The talent and judgment and choices of the people gets elected to office.  When people are unhappy with their leaders, on some level they are also unhappy with themselves.  That may sound philosophical to some, but it’s also the cold, hard truth.

Most people focus on the leaders–the candidates and their positions, policies, their merits and flaws.  I encourage you though to look at the electorate, the people who vote and put the leaders in office.  It’s the talent of the people who go to the polls that determines the direction of a country to a much greater degree than the individual they elect.  When we ignore that and elevate our leaders to to a cult-hero status, we literally give our power away. 

Today, on the eve of the US election I’m going to champion the talent of the people, the great mass who will collectively decide the direction and leadership of their country.  Whether you agree or not with the outcome, look a little deeper into the wisdom of the choice that is made.  That choice will arise from a deep collective talent finding expression.

I have taken part in two annual meetings for boards I belong to in the past week.  It has given me a sharper sense of what counts in terms of leadership in organizations. 

First, a lot of what goes into “leadership” arises from a person simply being willing to take action, to be used for a specific purpose.  Leaders are NOT born for greatness; most are simply willing to step forward when many others are not.  As I look at those who assume leadership roles in groups, a large part of leadership is simply being willing to lead and following that up with action.

Second, good leadership makes a lot of difference in setting a particular tone for a group that they lead.  Whether people are energized, depressed, confused, enthusiastic–a lot of it has to do with the quality of leadership that is being exercised in the group.  

Third, from what I’ve observed a board’s effectiveness is directly related to two things:  how much time they spend reacting to what has already happened or is imminent, and planning what they want to happen or anticipating changes that are yet to come.   The most effective boards focus their energies on proactively planning for the future.

One of those board meetings I was part of required preparatory work and we met three long hours, but we focused on strategic planning and everyone afterwards acknowledged this was one of our best meetings in recent memory.  The other meeting was fairly short, reactive in focus and unfocused.  What a difference leadership makes in helping people focus strategically!

If you want to create change, one of the better strategies you can adopt is to get an accurate instrument and place it (along with some training on how to use it) in a prominent location where you (and other people) can’t miss it.  Real-time feedback allows you to make small changes and fine-tune your results.

MPG Instrument

I recently bought a new car and it has a sensitive gauge that tells you how many miles-per-gallon you are getting at the present time.  I’m already paying more attention to this gauge and it has helped me in changing my driving habits for the better (to be more fuel-efficient).

Apply this to people in an organization–even a small one–and it becomes obvious that equipping people with a new tool is much more likely to yield change than talking about change, management lectures or internal communication initiatiaves.  These other activities are useful too, but I’ve seen too many leaders and companies rely on them and end up with very little meaningful change.

Like any new tool, you have to learn to use it properly.  When I took training to be a pilot, I initially spent too much time looking at the instruments-I assumed that’s how you fly the plane.  My instructor had to emphasize to get my head up and look outside the airplane.  The great majority of pilots of small planes fly visually by looking out the window 90% of the time.  Only instrument-rated pilots and airline captains fly solely by reference to the instruments, which is a much more mentally taxing activity that requires extra training, practice and licensing.  So here’s my caveat: when you get an instrument for measuring real-time performance, beware the tendency to stare at it and miss the other information and contextual clues about what is going on around you.  If you can learn to do that (and it is possible), you will be much better positioned to build a high-performing organization and drive results and accountability further down to the individuals that actually do the work.

You read the title right–I found a surprising and incongruous agreement between Friedrick Nietzche, the 19th century philosopher who rejected Christianity, and a lesser-known contemporary Christian author named Eugene Peterson.  Peterson is known today for his contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message, but back in 1980 he came out with a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. 

The title comes from a quotation by Nietzche which is quite remarkable:

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is…that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.

Friedrich Nietzche,  Beyond Good and Evil

Peterson uses Nietzche’s quote and the sentiment behind it as inspiration for his writings about discipleship in an instant society.  The consumer mindset militates against sacrifice, postponing gratification, and long dedication to a single practice without evidence of an immediate payoff.  I would echo this and say the same thing applies to the practice of self development and talent management in business.  There are precious few genuine shortcuts to developing top talent.

The third point of agreement in this triad is George Leonard, the American aikido teacher and an early leader in the human potential movement.  Notice what he has to say:

How do you best move toward mastery?  To put it simply, you practice diligently, but you practice primarily for the sake of the practice itself.  Rather than being frustrated while on the plateau, you learn to appreciate and enjoy it just as much as you do the upward surges.

George Leonard, Mastery, 1991

There you  have it–three different teachers from very different worldviews who find agreement and articulate a rare wisdom that few will champion today.  Real development and growth is found in a consistent, patient obedience, a rigorous dedication to mastery and excellence in a larger society that settles for shallow half-measures and ineffective quick fixes.

Here’s my model of Leadership Levels or what I call “Fields of Leadership.” I still need to show examples of these and work them out in more detail, but here they are in outline form. Leadership Fields are the primary domains where one exercises leadership. Leadership in one area can help one develop leadership in another domain, but it doesn’t guarantee that this will happen. Each field has its own set of skills, competencies and mindsets that go along with it. High levels of Thought Leadership don’t automatically make one gifted in Interpersonal Leadership. My thinking is still developing on this topic; I’ll post more here so stay tuned.

Leadership can be expressed on many different levels, and each field of leadership has its requisite skills and competencies.  The five fields of leadership are:

1. Personal Mastery:  Self-Awareness, Vision, Integrity and Self-Control

2. Interpersonal Skill:  Empathy, Influence, Communication, and Contribution

3. Thought Leadership: Observation, Analysis, Learning/Integration, and Sharing

4. Group Endeavor: Organization, Meeting Discipline, Execution, Collaboration and Teambuilding

5. Systemic Leadership: Vision for Future, Organizational Design, Culture and Values, Strategy and Transformation

The 2008 Summer Olympic games opened yesterday.  I was able to see a good part of the opening ceremony and the spirit of the Olympics came through to me: the youth and energy of the athletes, the meeting of nations and laying aside of differences, and the courage to strive and endeavor against the top athletic talent in the world.

Do you have Olympic-caliber talent in your organization?  What values or aspirational goals are found in your company?  The talent we see on display in the Olympics is a product of both individual aspiration and the broader culture of world athletics.  How could you build your culture to attract more top talent?  It is a possible goal to attain.

I’m often asked this question.  My answer often surprises the leader who asks it. 

If you want to develop people better, you will first have to look at your own leadership.  My friends Steve and Jill Morris make a distinction between lead management and boss management (the type of authoritarian/power-based leadership that is all too common).  Lead management is about leading people to lead themselves, to develop their own skills and abilities, to be self-evaluating.

This notion of lead management is based on Choice Theory and the work of William Glasser.  It is spelled out in a short but powerful book called “Leadership Simple” that was one of the most impactful books I read last year.  I encourage all leaders to take a look at this.  

A true leader makes choices deliberately after doing a careful self-evaluation.  They define what they want, they own their perceptions of what seems to be happening (without projecting that on others), and they lead others to do the same. 

It should be a relief to leaders that you don’t have to figure out how to develop each one of your people (they are all unique, afterall).  You do need to be deliberate and aware of what you want, what they want, and know how to lead people through a process of change that is of their own choosing.

I’m not going to talk about the humorous (or horrifying) ways that human error is displayed at work.  Instead, I’m interested in the tension between organizations (with their impersonal tendencies) and the  human spirit (with its assertions of personality, commonality and innovation).

I like fresh and innovative thinkers, especially in the field of management.  Steve Byrum is one of those guys, and his book From the Neck Up:  The Recovery and Sustaining of the Human Element in Organizations (2006) is a refreshing read.  In it he looks at the work of Frederick Taylor (the father of Scientific Management) and Robert Hartman (the father of Formal Axiology) and draws some very interesting comparisons and contrasts.

Taylor was concerned about finding the one right way to do things, and the focus was on efficiency.  Under Taylorism the human element too often has gotten reduced to just a “cog in the wheel” of the system.  Human beings were best replaced by automation and robots wherever possible.  That may be oversimplifying, but it captures the essence.

Hartman was a philosopher concerned with defining what exactly “goodness” is.  His discoveries led to the founding of a new field called value science.  Hartman placed great importance on the human element in organizations.  He affirmed this through promoting the practice of profit sharing and through his consulting with several large corporations in the 1950′s and 60′s.  Hartman was interested in organizing goodness; the modern term of “adding value” (in all dimensions) has many deep resonances with Hartman’s ideas.   He saw it as possible and desirable to align people, processes and materials in a way that was effective, efficient and ultimately affirming of the people involved in the enterprise.

There are many insights in this 150 page book that would reward a few hours of reading.  The only drawback is that the book is not readily available (either in bookstores or online).  You can reach Steve Byrum directly and order a copy from the Byrum Consulting Group at (423) 886-5587.