“That was dreadful. Not only was I bored, everyone else was bored too. Disengaged. I’m terrible at facilitating these kinds of meetings. But they’re so important. I’ve got to get better at it. I need to find a better way.”

I wrote that in a journal entry about seven years ago. I still remember the meeting that finally drove me to change how I run meetings. There were about 10 people involved — the CEO and his direct reports — and we met for two days offsite, in a hotel, so we wouldn’t be distracted. The goal was to discuss and agree on our plans for the next year. A strategy offsite.

I had prepared meticulously. I met one on one with each person on the team and collected their thoughts about the strategy of the company and what might get in the way of its successful execution. Using their input, I designed the flow of the two days and asked each person to prepare a PowerPoint presentation of the strategy for their area.

The result? When each person stood up to present his strategy, everyone else did one of two things: tune out or poke holes.

Most presentations elicit those reactions because most presentations are polished and thorough and designed tosatisfy their audience, as well as to build confidence that the speaker knows what he’s talking about. People tune out because nothing is required of them. Or they poke holes because, if they don’t tune out, it’s the most interesting thing to do when someone is trying to prove there are no holes.

So over the following seven years, I experimented with designing offsites. I did team-building activities, I stayed at the front of the room throughout the meeting, I took myself out of the meeting completely, I taught skills critical to the meeting like communication and team dynamics, I had the CEO run the meeting, I took the CEO out of the meeting completely, and dozens of other tweaks.

Over time, I identified a single factor that makes the biggest difference between a great meeting and a poor one: PowerPoint. The best meetings don’t go near it.

PowerPoint presentations inevitably end up as monologues. They focus on answers, and everyone faces the screen. But meetings should be conversations. They should focus on questions, not answers, and people should face each other. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve found that even the hum of the projector discourages dialogue.

Meetings are exorbitantly expensive when you add up the number of highly paid people in the room at the same time. They should be used as a time to engage deeply in issues, not to update each other on progress.

Try this. Instead of having executives prepare clear, well-thought-out (and boring) PowerPoint presentations about their own businesses, try having them lead informal discussions about theircolleagues’ businesses, using flip charts to collect important points, draw conclusions, and agree on action plans with owners and timelines.

Before the meeting, assign each executive an issue to explore that is outside his or her silo. A problem related to manufacturing might be assigned to the head of sales. A problem in marketing might be assigned to the head of operations. The executive’s task is to investigate the issue and prepare some ideas and solutions for discussion.

This breaks people out of their silos (a challenge I wrote about in Solving Your Organization’s Open-Faced Sandwich), conveys their collective ownership of the company, and keeps people from getting too prideful or too defensive about their particular business. In other words, it keeps the meeting real.

Save at least an hour or two at the end of the meeting to develop communication plans to disseminate the decisions. I’m always a little surprised at how many inconsistencies and disagreements are surfaced only when it comes time to commit to precisely what is going to be communicated.

There is, of course, a lot more that goes into a successful meeting. But following the “no PowerPoint rule” has the greatest impact because it keeps the energy where it should be: solving problems together.

I always get a little nervous when I run an offsite because, if it’s run well, it’s unpredictable. Ideas, insights, and solutions arise that never would have come up without the collaboration of the people in the room. Arguments can break out at any time. But what makes offsites unpredictable is also what makes them exciting and valuable.

Last week I spent two days running a strategy offsite with the CEO and leadership team of a large technology company that is experiencing the good-but-very-real problems that accompany rapid growth. Each executive led a conversation about an issue in a colleague’s business. Each conversation ended with an agreed-upon action plan with owners and timelines. All this was accomplished without the background hum of a projector.

At the end of the meeting, after a two-hour conversation about communicating our decisions to the rest of the organization, the CFO — a true cynic when it comes to spending (wasting?) time in meetings — turned to me and said “that was a really useful way to spend a couple of days.”

Coming from him? That’s journal-worthy.

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

(Via HBR)

I recently saw the movie The Last Samurai for the second time. Set in Japan in the 1870s, it tells the story of an American civil war veteran who was captured by samurai fighters and, over time, learned to honor their ways.

The first time I saw the movie, when it came out in 2003, I was enthralled by the beautifully choreographed fight scenes.

But this time, I was most moved by a scene I don’t even remember seeing the first time: a samurai drinking tea.

Sitting at a low table, he moved deliberately, singularly focused on his tea. He contemplated it. Then poured it. Then sipped it, tasted it, and, finally, swallowed it.

This, I realized, was the source of the samurai’s strength.

His acrobatics were impressive, but they were merely ademonstration of his strength. The source was this tea ritual and many other rituals like it. His power as a warrior came from his patience, precision, attention to subtlety, concentration, and his reverence for the moment.

The power of ritual is profound and under-appreciated. Mostly, I think, it’s because we live in a time-starved culture, and ritual is time-indulgent. Who can afford the luxury of doing one thing at a time? Who has the patience to pause and honor an activity before and after we do it?

We all should.

Religions understand and leverage the power of ritual. In Judaism, blessings are as plentiful as iPhone apps. Wake up? There’s a blessing for that. Wash your hands? There’s a blessing for that. Experience something new? Eat a meal? Go to the bathroom? There’s a blessing for each one. Every religion I know has similar practices to make our experience of the world sacred.

Which might be why we avoid ritual in the business world. Religion is so loaded, so personal. But ritual doesn’t have to be religious; it’s just a tool religions use. Rituals are about paying attention. They’re about stopping for a moment and noticing what you’re about to do, what you’ve just done, or both. They’re about making the most of a particular moment. And that’s something we could use a lot more of in the business world.

Imagine if we started each meeting with a recognition of the power of bringing a group of people together to collaborate and an intention to dedicate ourselves, without distraction, to achieving the goals of the meeting. Perhaps even an acknowledgement that each person’s views, goals, and priorities are important and need to be heard. Of course, that would require that every meeting have a clear goal, an agenda, and a purpose. But those are just nice side benefits.

What if every performance review began with a short thought about the importance of clear and open communication? If every time we worked on a spreadsheet someone else created for us, we paused to acknowledge the complexity of the work she did and the attention to detail she brought to it? If at the beginning of the day we paused to honor the work we are about to do and the people with whom we are about to do it?

Here’s what makes it easy to get started with this: no one needs to know.

Start with just yourself. Sit at your desk in the morning, pause before booting up your computer, and mark the moment. Do this by taking a deep breath. Or by arranging your pens. Whatever it is, do it with the intention of creating respect for what you’re about to begin. Do the same before you make a phone call. Or receive one. Or before you meet with a colleague or customer.

Each time we pause, notice, and offer respect for an activity, it reminds us to appreciate and focus on what we’re about to do. And by elevating each activity, we’ll take it more seriously. We’ll get more pleasure from it. The people with whom we work will feel more respected. And we’ll feel more self-respect.

Which means we’ll work better with each other. And produce better results.

That focus will help us accomplish our tasks more carefully, more proficiently, and more productively, with fewer distracting under-the-table BlackBerry texts. And all the research shows that that kind of singular focus will make us far more efficient.

In other words, that time-indulgent ritual thing? It might just be the perfect antidote to a time-starved world.

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

(Via HBR)

Consider this, from Science Daily, Dec. 1, 2010:

New research by University of Minnesota psychologists shows how social support benefits are maximized when provided “invisibly” — that is, without the support recipient being aware that they are receiving it. The study, “Getting in Under the Radar: A Dyadic View of Invisible Support,” is published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In the study, graduate student Maryhope Howland and Professor Jeffry A. Simpson suggest there may be something unique about the emotional support behaviors that result in recipients being less aware of receiving support. Receiving social support, such as advice or encouragement, is typically thought of as positive, a generous act by one person yielding benefits for another in a time of need. Effective support should make someone feel better and more competent, it is generally acknowledged. However, what is supposedly considered “support” may make someone feel vulnerable, anxious or ineffective in the face of a stressor, Howland and Simpson found.

It seems to me that this study is as relevant for managers as it is for romantic partners, who were the actual subjects in the study. It is a truism that employees need support, and that enlightened management does all it can to provide support. But this study suggests that if the support is provided too obviously, too visibly, it can actually make a person feel worse. Support that is too blatant risks making the recipient feel as if he needed support, which is not a feeling most people in the workplace feel comfortable acknowledging. Well-intended though it may be, visible support can backfire, and make the employee feel resentful, insecure, and worried.

So what is a manager to do? Withhold support? We know that causes problems. Give support? We see that that can cause problems, too. So what then? Send anonymous notes of support? Sneak up from behind the employee and whisper in her ear, “We value you!” then disappear before she can turn and see you? Kidding aside, how you offer support can turn the well-intended but clumsy offer into the kind of support that actually boosts performance.

The best support comes naturally, organically; not on cue, not on script. The best support feels as if it is simply a part of the ongoing conversation in the workplace. It enters seamlessly into the discussion. If the manager intended to be supportive, the employee never detected that intention. Spouses yearn to hear the words, “I love you,” but if they are asked for or sound the least bit rehearsed, they mean nothing, or can be counterproductive. Same deal at work. Employees yearn to feel valued, but if the manager doles out statements of valuation he can actually undercut the employee’s feeling of worth.

Making an employee feel valued is one of the most important things a manager can do (my book Shine goes into some of the ways, based on the latest psychological evidence, that managers can bring out the best in people). But as the study by Howland and Simpson shows, it is also one of the most difficult things for a manager to do.

The takeaway: Learn how to value people subtly. How? Subtle actions, like making eye contact; asking a person his or her opinion on something, anything; noticing the person, not complimenting, simply noticing; recalling something the person said yesterday, last week, or last month; giving a high five; or recalling a past success when times are tough. These are subtle expressions of support — and if you start to think about it, you can come up with scores more.

But the best are the ones you don’t even think of. You just do them naturally, invisibly, because you feel what you feel. You’re glad to be working on your team and you show it. That’s the best support.

What works for you? How do you show support? What kinds of support make you feel the most valued?

About the Author

Edward Hallowell, MD, is a psychiatrist, served as an instructor at Harvard Medical School for 20 years, and is the director of the Hallowell Centers in New York City and Sudbury, Massachusetts. He has authored eighteen books, including the national bestseller Driven to Distraction, that have sold millions of copies.

The art of self-awareness is absolutely key to being a successful leader. Why? Because we always judge ourselves on our intentions. And others judge us on our behaviour.

We might think we are being focused, empowering, direct, authoritative, in control and motivational but we might actually be being seen as too controlling, too direct, too over the top or even coming across as a bully. Leaders, you need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and then build a team around you to make sure that if you have a particular weakness that you employ someone with strengths in this area. As a leader you must work with your hand-picked dream team so that you’ve got the whole picture of your business covered – by the right people.

For you as a leader, self awareness is particularly key ingredient in the recipe for success. There is increasing talk now about personal branding – you have one whether you realise it or not and it is the collection of perceptions of what people think about you.  How do you want the people you work with to perceive you?  You should be bothered.

When you leave the office what do you think people say about you? It’s important to identify your Blind Spots (the areas through feedback that you should know about) and work on improving them. You must understand your core values because your staff will also know what is important to you and you make decisions based on your values every single day.

Leaders are judged on their behaviour. How congruent are your personal values with your work-based values?

Do you know what’s really important to you? Do you know what you stand for? Do you know how you come across to others?

Perhaps it’s time you took some time out to determine who you really are on the inside between your ears. People are making decisions about each other all of the time. In a leadership role it is vital that you are a congruent and authentic leader in order to be successful at attracting followers. I’m not talking here ‘followers’ like in social media. A leader cannot be a leader without followers and followers (your staff) want to be led, and led well. It is important that everyone who works for you feels proud to do so.

So who do you think you are?

[EBA]

This was the fourth day of our five days together, and we were swirling in chaos. There were almost thirty of us in a small room as part of Ann Bradney’s leadership workshop I wrote about last week.

Sara* was on the floor, cradling the arm and leg she had broken several months earlier, feeling broken herself, crying as she thought about her son who died five years ago. A few feet away from her, Angelo stood with his hands on his chest, also crying, immersed in his experience of alienation from his mother. Across the room, Zoe was huddled with her sister, Chloe, as they felt the pain of losing their own mother and confronted their fear of losing each other.

As I looked around the room, I saw two or three other people scattered about, each struggling with deep emotions of loss, fear, anger, and sadness. The noise was disorienting. People were crying, laughing, shouting, hugging, and comforting each other, all at the same time. It was completely out of control.

Just like life itself.

We were a microcosm of the world and of every organization I’ve ever known. Not just the pain, though that certainly exists wherever we’re brave enough to look, but the multiplicity of activity. The variety of individuals and groups, each occupied, engulfed even, by their own concerns, needs, and desires.

To top it off, we had only one established leader, Ann, to manage the mayhem. It was an impossible job. She couldn’t be in seven places at once. She couldn’t support each of the people who needed her. She had set herself up to fail.

Which, it eventually dawned on me, was her plan all along.

Ann didn’t just let the chaos happen by accident. She welcomed it. Because the perfect ingredient to draw out leadership is exactly the one most of us, including leaders, fight so hard to avoid: overwhelm.

Leaders like to be in control. I know that’s true for me. I want things to turn out right and I feel — often mistakenly — that if I have control over them, they will.

But here’s the thing: the more control I have over something, the less room there is for other people to step into their own leadership. If Ann didn’t need the help, many of us would have sat back watching, happy to let her lead.

When I took a bird’s eye view of the room, I saw that there were only six, maybe seven, people who needed help at that moment. The rest of us, close to twenty, were in a physical, psychological, and emotional place where we could offer help.

But it’s hard to offer help, to step into your own leadership. It requires tremendous courage. You have to risk being wrong, overstepping your bounds, and standing alone.

Which is why we needed a nudge.

So Ann created a situation that she couldn’t possibly handle by herself, and people stepped up. One participant, Janice, went over to Zoe and Chloe, the two sisters, and spoke softly to them. Another participant, Holly, sat next to Sara, who was mourning the loss of her son and held her. And I went over to Angelo, who looked up at me for a moment and then fell into my arms crying.

It’s not that Janice, Holly, and I were the leaders in the workshop. The day before, it was me who was crying, and Angelo who did the comforting. But on this day, in this moment, we were in a position to reach out.

Designing chaos into a process is the antithesis of what most leaders do. Usually, we try to focus on one thing at a time. One objective, one concept, one conversation, one task.

But in real life, in real organizations, nothing happens one thing at a time. And no one can be on top of it all. At one point, one of the participants accused Ann of allowing too much bedlam. Ann’s response was swift and emphatic:

“No. People want to make the leader the one who sees and knows everything. I am just a human being. I can’t see everything. I can’t know everything. I make mistakes. When you make me more than human, you can bring me down while refusing to take responsibility or any risk. Step into your leadership now.”

But wait a second. It sounds great but what if everyone in an organization stepped into their own leadership? What if everyone followed his own impulse? Wouldn’t that lead to anarchy?

Maybe. It depends on the strength of their organization’s container. How clear is the mission of the organization? The vision? The values? The culture? If we know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what’s important to us, and how we operate, then there will be trust, focused action, and abundant, unified leadership. If not, there will be anarchy.

But if the container isn’t strong, there will be anarchy anyway. Because, no matter how much leaders would like to, they just can’t control everything. And trying to control the uncontrollable just makes things worse. People check out. They feel no ownership. They work the minimum. And things fall through the cracks.

Here’s the hard part: leading without controlling. Stepping into your own leadership while leaving space for others to step into theirs as well.

If you find yourself still wanting to control it all, try saying “yes” to everything until you’re overwhelmed and can’t possibly deliver. So overwhelmed that, like Ann, you will fail to be on top of it all.

If that happens, then, like Ann, you will grow leaders around you. Your failure will prevent others from making you more than human. It will encourage them to take responsibility and risks. To step into their own leadership.

And if, on a particular day, you feel good, grounded, and strong, with a little extra energy, then look around for someone else who is overwhelmed and reach out to help. Take the risk to lead.
*Names have been changed

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

(Via HBR)

I was on a plane, flying back to New York from California where I’d spent the week in an intense workshop, The Radically Alive Leader, led by Ann Bradney.

In the aisle across from me, a mother was sitting with her two daughters, one about five years old, the other about seven. I happened to look over as the mom was working with the younger daughter on a math problem. I listened for a moment and soon found it hard to breathe.

She was furious at the girl for not knowing the answers to her math problems: “Why don’t you know that? What are you learning in school? All you do is watch TV!”

The little girl began to cry. When she did, her mom’s fury escalated. She hammered on, through the girl’s tears, with a word problem: “If you buy candy for $1.00 and a drink for $1.25, how much do you have to pay? Well? How much do you have to pay?” Her little girl turned her head away, sobbing.

At that point, I started to tear up too.

Mostly, I cried for the girl, but also for her mother. I don’t know what pain this woman has felt in her life or what drives her anger. But I know it’s not her child’s inability to solve a math problem. And I would not be at all surprised if she’d endured similar treatment when she was her daughter’s age.

I realized that I was also crying for my own mother, for myself, and for my children. When I was a child, I felt what that girl was feeling. And, as an adult, I have grown angry with my children for not knowing things.

Most leadership trainings are about ideas, techniques, theories, and methodologies. But the workshop I took this week was designed for the heart, not the head. It was about feeling deeply the emotions we spend our lives avoiding, like the pain of failure and loss.

This act of diving deeply into the feelings we avoid, the feelings we don’t necessarily even know we have, is, I have come to believe, our only hope of breaking our link in the chain of hurt, suffering, and ineffectiveness.

That’s a leadership issue. Because every leader is a human being. And when we avoid feeling the suffering we naturally experience as human beings, we perpetuate it and act against our best interests in our relationships with our colleagues and the people we manage, as well as with our families.

One CEO in our group talked about how, even though she knows her team is capable, she avoids delegating. And now she is exhausted from carrying the weight of her company, saving everyone from making mistakes, and doing their work for them.

Here’s where it got interesting: she didn’t just talk about her exhaustion; she felt it. She lay on a mattress, was physically held by others in the group, and cried. Soon, she began to speak about her brother who killed himself years earlier. Through tears, she told us of her regret at not being able to save him.

It soon became evident that, unable to save her brother, she is trying to save everyone else, a habit that is draining her and could prevent her company from succeeding.

This is not a leadership skills issue. She already knows everything there is to learn about delegation. But until she faces — not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally — that she couldn’t save her brother, all the delegation skills in the world will not help her.

At this point, you may be rolling your eyes at the California-ness of all of this. A leadership workshop with crying? Touching? Extreme self-disclosure?

Truth is, if I were reading this without having experienced it, I might be rolling my own eyes. But that’s the point, really. Talking about emotions doesn’t get us very far. That’s the shortcoming of teaching emotional intelligence as a skill. It doesn’t go far enough. To really become emotionally intelligent, emotionally mature, we have to experience the emotions.

Over the five days there were countless examples of ways in which each of us are stuck in self-defeating patterns. And each time, the cause of the habit had deep origins, born from suffering that was too heavy for us to carry with the maturity we had at the time we experienced it. These feelings are deeply embedded in our bodies as well as our minds. Years of traditional therapy do not unlock them. But we need to release them.

The solution? Feel our feelings deeply. Especially the painful ones.

We need to surround ourselves by others who are supportive, loving, and courageous, and then dive back into the one pool in which we really don’t want to swim — the painful feelings of both the past and the present — and realize that we won’t drown. Sometimes it feels like drowning. But every one of us emerged Ann’s workshop feeling more alive than when we entered it.

I have spent my life trying to prove that I’m good enough to live it. My mother narrowly escaped the holocaust, and her baby sister Ariel did not survive. I grew up thinking daily of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, thinking that because of them, my life had better amount to something.

And now I watch myself drop names of important people I know and talk too much about things I’ve accomplished. I brag, too often striving more for my own success than the success of others, or of endeavors I believe in.

This is a destructive game. The more I try to impress others, the less I believe in myself. And no amount of communication training will help unless I can feel the pain of never feeling good enough and acknowledge that my life can never make up for any of the six million. The only way we can move forward, live fully, and lead courageously, is by feeling enough to become deeply mature human beings.

The challenge is formidable: are we willing to stop being the people we are expected to be, the people we expect ourselves to be, and simply be who we are? If so, then we will make room not only for ourselves, but for others to be themselves. And that is powerful leadership.

We cannot lead without feeling the pain of living because the things we do to avoid feeling pain result in poor leadership. We don’t acknowledge others. We try to control everything. We lose our temper and criticize others disproportionately. If we don’t feel our emotions, we are controlled by them.

Towards the end of the flight, the mother had fallen asleep, and the girl was snuggled against her peacefully. How much better would it be if her mother could offer that comfort awake?

How much more powerful would the CEO be if she could convey her trust for her very capable people, delegating with the confidence that they will accomplish their tasks?

And how much better of a father, husband, writer, and leader would I be if I could speak and write the truth as I see it without worrying about how it would make me look?

My heart is beating hard as I think about posting this and exposing the sides of me that brag and cry. It feels scary and also great. It feels radically alive.

About the Author

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change.

(Via HBR)