Tough or Nice?

Here is a very interesting and short article from the Harvard Business Review Blog, "The Best Leaders Are Both Tough and Nice," by Kevin Evers.  The answer is in the title, but read the article for some interesting data to support it.

I struggle with the tough versus nice challenge.  I want people to like me, which pushes me toward nice.  But I worry if I am not tough enough, I'll be a pushover, and I won't get the best from people.  It turns out that, like most things, balance is the key.  You need some of both to be a success as a leader.

When I think about bosses I have had, I find that I agree with the article, too.  Bosses that are too nice risk people not respecting them or not pulling their full load.  Bosses that are too tough don't motivate me to do my best.  Again, balance is key.

Different strategies work with different people and in different circumstances.  Sometimes you want to start off tough and then lighten up, and sometimes you start nice and toughen up.  With some people you can be nice most of the time, and with others you have to stay tough more of the time.  Learning what works with which people is one of the challenges of leadership.

If you are a leader, be sure you keep both niceness and toughness in your tool kit.

Don't Let Your Time Get Away From You

Do you ever come to the end of your day and wonder what you have accomplished?  If so, it's likely you spent a lot of time responding to email.  Now I love email, so don't expect one of those rants about how we would get so much more done if we didn't have to respond to email.  When I was starting my career, the bulk of communications within an office was still done with paper memos.  What do you think is faster, firing off an email message, or rolling a piece of paper into a typewriter, typing out the text, taking the paper to a copier, placing the copies into individual mailboxes, and then waiting for people to actually get back to you?  Give me email any day.

Like all good things, email has good and bad qualities.  We had much less spam back in the paper memo days.  People had fewer expectations about getting an immediate response to a memo.  ASAP meant hours or days, not seconds or minutes. 

In this time of fast communications and even faster responses, it's important to build in time to think and to focus on what's important.  The problem with email is that the important stuff comes interspersed with the unimportant.  It is much easier to get distracted.

Peter Bregman wrote, "An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day," in the Harvard Business Review Blog.  Read his article to see how his plan works.  Like most plans, though, it involves planning your day ahead of time, using defensive calendaring to set aside time for high-intensity work, and reviewing what you have done.

Don't let your tasks control you.  Take control of your time and practice.  You can get better at this.

Speaking in Public

I enjoyed reading this article, "Captivate Your Listeners with these Speaking Tips."  The author is Rita J. King from Science House.

Many people are afraid, some deathly afraid, of speaking in public.  But like many human skills, you can learn to do it and get better at it over time.  If you want to be a leader, it's essential to be able to speak (and write) about your ideas. 

During our leadership training from MOR Associates, we learned about "elevator speeches."  An elevator speech is short, just taking the amount of time that an elevator ride requires.  This is a great way to start.  Develop an elevator speech about an issue you feel passionate about.  Practice it in front of a mirror first, then with someone you trust.  The more times you give it, the smoother you'll get.  See if you can influence others to make a positive change with your elevator speech.

One of our staff members recently joined Toastmasters, because he saw it as a good way to develop his speaking skills.  What a terrific idea.  Others I have known have attended training in the Art of Hosting.  There are many ways to develop your speaking skills, and good speaking is just one of the important tools of a leader.  Give something new a try today.

Resilience

Every Tuesday, Jim Bruce from MOR Associates sends out a synopsis of an article he thinks is interesting for leaders.  This week's article is "Surprises Are the New Normal;  Resilience Is the New Skill," by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at the Harvard Business School.  The article appears in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.

This article really made my day and my week.  I've been feeling buffeted by change and challenges lately and wondering what to do about it.  Moreover, I've been having a hard time forgiving myself for my mistakes.  According to Professor Kanter,

"... the real skill is the resilience to climb out of the hole and bounce back."

According to Kantor, resilience is built on the cornerstones of confidence, which are:

• accountability (taking responsibility and showing remorse)
• collaboration (supporting others in reaching a common goal)
• initiative (focusing on positive steps and improvements)

Kanter also refers to her book, "Confidence:  How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End."  I intend to buy this soon.  It's also important to note that resilience comes from values and character, not from arrogance and narcissism.  If you are feeling short on resilience, be sure to read this article.

Critical Thinking, Criticism, and Problem Solving

In higher education, we talk often about the value of critical thinking.  We want our students to learn to be critical thinkers.  Wikipedia gives a whole list of definitions of critical thinking, but here is one I particularly like:

Critical thinking is a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned process.

Criticism is a related activity, but there are some differences.  Here is Wikipedia's definition:

Criticism is the practice of judging the merits and faults of something or someone in an intelligible (or articulate) way.

 Finally, we have problem solving.  It seems to me that the first step in problem solving is recognizing that there is a problem and defining it.  This requires critical thinking, or maybe criticism.  After all, you can't solve a problem if you don't know what it is.

So what's not to like about all of this?  Like almost any good human attribute, there is a flip side.  If you let your critical thinking flip into negativity, then you will have a hard time getting support from others in solving the problem.  If your criticism is too harsh, then the recipient will have a hard time accepting it, since he or she will become mired in feeling bad and won't hear the message.

I value my skill as a critical thinker and a problem solver, but I sometimes struggle in giving criticism.  What helps me in this realm is to keep balance in mind.  I must balance my critical thinking with compassion and diplomacy.  And like a lot of people, I can be my own worst critic, so I have to remind myself to keep that important balance when I am working on self improvement.

Leaders must be critical thinkers, they must solve problems, and they must offer criticism.  The trick is to employ balance to do it well.

Planning and Measuring Pays Off

Information Technology Systems and Services (ITSS), the department I lead, has been creating an annual Goals and Priorities plan for many years now, with the plans on the web back to 2000-01.  Moreover, we have been collecting process measures in each of our teams back to 1996.  This year, we saw a major payoff to all this work.  The UMD campus has launched a Program Prioritization Initiative, whereby every campus unit will submit information, including measures data.  This information will be scored by a committee and reviewed by our Chancellor's Cabinet.  Here is the goal of this initiative:

The goal of the Program Prioritization initiative is to manage and allocate our financial resources in ways that will best meet the needs of our students and our community.

 As our department has been working on our responses, we discovered how valuable our plan and measures are.  We were able to respond to the questions by showing our plans and supporting our points with measures data.

Now certainly we believed that these plans and measures were worthwhile during all of the years we have been doing them.  Planning documents set the goals for the department to meet each year.  Measures allowed us to see how our processes were working and to seek improvements where needed.  If we hadn't believed in their value, we would not have done all that work.

This year, however, it feels really great to see that work pay off as we work on our program prioritization response.  We sure hope we get some great scores.

Engaging the Other Side

This week I read, "Need Buy-In?  Invite the Lions In," by John Kotter in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.  There is an accompanying video as well.  In these materials, Kotter talks about the value of bringing the "naysayers and obfuscators" to your presentation.

This reminded me of some of the issues we are experiencing in our newly-established Technology Coordination Meeting in our department.  We have had a few experiences when a technical group brings forward a new technology or upgrade, only to have many objections raised by the support staff, who worry about the impact on customers.  The technical group comes in, thinking they are ready to go, only to find out that there are many objections to their roll-out plans as well as requests for further testing and documentation.  The support staff are happy to have a say in the process, which they might not have had before, but the technical staff feel criticized and delayed.  As one technical person said to me, "It isn't a good idea to replace one unhappy group of people with another."

As a result, we have made several changes to our process.  The first change is to ask the technical staff to come forward earlier in the process, so that the concerns can be addressed during the development phase, rather than at the end.  The second change was suggested by one of our support staff, and it seems to be working great.  We have invited customers to join our Beta Bulldogs group.  We give them access to the new service early, ask them to help us test, and fold their advice and experiences into the further development of the solution.  This new process seems to be working just great so far.

Despite the growing pains with our Technology Coordination Meetings, I think we are already seeing the value of this new process.  Hearing concerns before we roll out new services, and involving the support staff in solving the problems, simply strengthens the final product.  And that is good for all of us.  Keep those lions coming.