October 2007 PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE TO SEE OUR LATEST 'INSIGHT OF THE MONTH' 5 KEY LEADERSHIP RESOLUTIONS #1 I Will Have Fun Movements and moments come into business no less than other aspects of life. The discovery of the season seems to be that engaged people add more value, and that in a high value-added economy, spirit matters as much as expertise. After all, the Holy Grail of leadership is what has been called 'discretionary effort'. The little bit extra that you can't mandate or demand (because by definition it is 'extra'), but which IS the proverbial extra mile (or even inch), the special act of service, the culture-restoring gesture of internal collaboration, or the additional improvement that renders a decent process exceptional. People who are ignited, people who care, people who are excited to contribute make this possible. Absent this, our talent is potential left to lie fallow And so numerous books and articles are taking up different aspects of this cudgel. From HOT SPOTS which looks at why certain workplaces buzz with innovation and others don't; to 'managing energy' as a headliner in the Harvard Business Review; to EVERY HOUR IS HAPPY HOUR a Scandinavian take on workplace fun and meaning. Whatever organizations can do to enable fun, let's never forget however that fun, engagement, meaning, are finally my own personal decisions and achievements. While we're doing something, let's get the most from it -- both in terms of our own growth, the relationships we foster, the competencies we build, and the capacity for joy and engagement that we cultivate. You can do a report in a dull listless way, or decide it to make it an outrageous adventure of research, dialogue, radical idea generation, elegant presentation and impassioned communication. Be on a project and let it lapse into formality and process checks, or decide to make it a future-influencing example of artistry, dedication and innovation. Whether you succeed fully each time or not matters as little as whether you win every Frisbee golf competition or crack every Rubick's Cube...it's choosing the game you want to play...and then playing it will all your animation, dedication and sense of humor. Fun is a way of seeing the world and our place in it, it is a choice of a slightly more whimsical rather than somber perspective, it is allowing humanity rather than bureaucracy to finally rule the roost. A culture is an accretion of our choices and behavior. Let's begin to live the culture we want to experience! #2 I Will Stay Real Too much time in companies is spent playing roles, responding to fixed mores, or going through festivals of pretense. While this will help you 'get along' it will never distinguish you in a truly dynamic workplace. Moreover, those who get to know you in this mode will never select you for the really bracing opportunities -- the type that build or establish a career. You will be a 'safe choice' for median meetings, you may be retained for your sociability...but unless that's the height of your ambition, aim higher. Staying real doesn't mean being obnoxious, or willfully contrary, or being a dedicated canker in the body politic of your organization. It means being in touch with your thoughts and feelings and sharing them candidly. However, it also means informing your opinions by listening openly and with genuine curiosity to divergent perspectives. Finally though, in choosing what to think and believe, you have to do the ultimate processing yourself if your conclusions are to matter. Make sure they are informed by other's experiences for sure, but do the necessary 'heavy lifting' internally to arrive at a point of view, a philosophy, an outlook that's yours and not a blurred carbon copy of someone else's. As you progress in work and relationships, those views and outlooks ought to get amended, adapted, upgraded and updated -- and doubtless they will. But as they do their evolution must be consistent with the evolution of your overall ideas, experiences, values and feelings. That way people know that your beliefs are congruent. And though you have to be adult enough to deliver on decisions taken even if you don't fully agree with them, your distinctive points of view will continue to increase in value if they emanate from a credible, capable person. So to be 'real' means to be authentic, open, corrigible, evolving, credible and constantly linking what your positions are to both your ongoing experiences as well as your maturing ideas. #3 I Will Keep Upgrading My Habits Successes and failures have one thing in common as we observed last month...HABITS. Successful people have successful habits and this is far more than a bland truism. No one has infinite energy. Those that focus their best energy for the best purposes will outdistance those who squander and fritter their best energy for dubious ends. A habit is powerful because it is virtually automatic action that we no longer have to wrestle with ourselves to do. Therefore all the energy goes into the doing, not the 'gearing up to do'. Imagine if we make habitual powerful life behaviors that can catapult us forward, and the bulk of the energy is reserved for the actual engagement, for the moment of truth. How much more powerful will our results be, how much more satisfying will our experience be, than if we are psychologically depleted and weary from grappling with our own reluctance on a regular basis. So pick a great habit you already have and choose to make it even more robust. For example, let's suppose you wish everyone a hearty 'good morning' and have become positively addicted to the interactions that has spawned. How can we add further luster to that now conditioned reflex? Perhaps we will choose to mentally review what we know about each person's life, or our last interaction, or a family or business update they provided us with. And now, we will make it a point to pick up on that narrative in addition to wishing them well. Perhaps we will specifically say, 'Good morning Fred, how did the week-end golf game go?' Or, 'Good morning Syliva, how did the girls do on their math test?' You may not do this for each person each morning, but this act of extending an already positive behavior will help you pay more attention, it will make people seek you out, and will amplify the beneficial impact of this habit and your presence in this business community. On the other hand, pick a habit in yourself that you deplore. Perhaps it's marathon T. V. viewing that sends you to bed too late, or excessive email checking, or being so bloated after dinner that getting up for your morning work-out is a lost cause, or reading nothing other than glossy magazines. Whatever it may be. And simply agree a simple 'baby step' you can take to move in a more constructive direction. So click the TV off half an hour earlier and read something instead; pick 2 hours daily as an 'email free zone'; eat dinner an hour earlier and eat 3/4 of what you normally would; do a simple 10 minute work-out routine in the morning as a way to chase away the cobwebs. Pick one tangible, repeatable, first step each week. Celebrate that, then take the next one, and so on. If a thousand mile journey is truly the accumulation of multiple individual steps, let's at least get on the road! Each affirmative habit we strengthen and each depleting habit that we redirect, is a massive forward movement in our own lives and leadership capability. Over time, the little things ARE the big things. #4 I Will Help Make The Service We Offer Better The best leaders are improvement fanatics. They have a messianic zeal for amplifying value. Tom Peters in his award-winning blog recently observed how his local Starbucks stays open a bit late so he and others can get their coffee, how his local Whole Foods opens at 7:45 rather than the published 8 am so people can get in and then get on with their day. And he contrasts this with his alma mater of Stanford which sent him a request for something, and the form he filled out didn't fit into the reply envelope they had included! It may seem worrying when there is more assiduous attention demonstrated by coffee and grocery retailers than a premier educational institution... but then this doesn't come down to sheer intelligence...it's design, collaboration and a self-chosen need to deliver that may be more heightened for these commercial institutions (alas) than for that particular office of Stanford University. I mention this because I can verify this from personal experience. In New York my local Starbucks stays open later than advertised, in London walking back along Oxford Street after dinner I can invariably still find one open as well. Whole Foods is reliably there in the mornings for me at home. And I too receive envelopes from Stanford with exactly the same annoyance experienced! Isn't reliability wonderful! We have to own the totality of the service experience we (our team, our department, even our company) offer. To the extent that it amplifies or undermines our own larger efforts, we have every reason to either take pride or go to war. We have an office in Dubai. Dubai currently dominates so many news reports as an iconic example of vision and development in an otherwise challenged region: the Middle East. By and large, this is well deserved. Construction is everywhere, investment flows in, and news reports show us the chic, the glamorous, the jazzy aspects of the skyline, the sporting events, the resorts and more. However, when you land in Dubai (as we recently did after a 13 hour flight from JFK), despite the excellence of Emirates Airlines in the air, you land in what seems like the airport of a Banana Republic. Walk past the glossy Duty Free, and await your baggage (interminably at times), and then fight your way past teeming crowds and poorly designed pick-up areas, and you would hardly think you've alighted at one of the crossroads of the future. We waited an hour this time for bags. One was missing. It had landed, but the baggage handlers had just neglected one of the containers from the plane with 20 bags still on it! After an hour of being told that no one knew where the bag was, we had to fill out tedious forms (no one has yet devised a way to let a harried customer more quickly fill out a report, after being already stressed, jet-lagged and significantly inconvenienced). Half a day later they meekly confessed what I had already asserted, that it was clear as no message had been sent from JFK about our bags (all bags not loaded or which had missed their transfer, in the 13 hours of flight had been located at JFK and messages sent to Dubai) that our bags had been taken mistakenly to 'transfer' or were languishing somewhere else. Over that period, I have rarely seen such a spectacle of buck-passing and ennui, and only my grim countenance and loud voice alas (deployed here strategically) got us any attention. The point is that the superb Emirates flight experience was literally gutted by the appalling inefficiency of the ground handling at Dubai airport, and then already vexed, having to fight through crowds at the worst designed arrival area I've seen in an otherwise impressive major city. Similarly, we all have to own our own company's service and delivery gaps and must fight relentlessly to improve them. Not all the press ads or themed music will mitigate the breakdown in the small essentials (envelopes, baggage handling) that bruise our brand and equate it with either lack of care or a focus on tangentials rather than essentials. So pick an aspect of the service you offer that is idiotic, frustration-inducing or aggravating. And learn this by talking to internal or external customers or simply polling for where the greatest time is expended, often unproductively. Make it a badge of pride to improve one such thing decisively in the next quarter. Then pick another, then another. If some of these are outside your ambit, campaign for the creation of a project, enroll others as part of the crusade. The act of creating such a groundswell is one of the best leadership training camps imaginable. Creating coalitions of the truly willing to improve what really matters to those we serve is one of the most impressive of leadership credentials. #5 I Will Communicate To Make A Difference Leaders communicate a great deal of the time. That much seems evident. However, they very rarely pay adequate attention to the impact of their communication. We often coach leaders who have to make a seminal presentation, or announce a key product launch, or enroll people behind a decisive strategic initiative. We are shocked and even horrified, when viewing them in action before the coaching, that otherwise capable leaders make dull, plodding presentations, against a backdrop of Power Point slides that display visual anemia and verbal diarrhea. If indeed the launch or initiative is SO critical, then why would greater preparation of how to deliver, not just constant agonizing over facts and figures not be necessary? After all, what are we persuaded by and moved by? If Abraham Lincoln had read the statistics of the battle of Gettysburg, would anyone remember the moment as we do, or be inspired by the meaning he helped us give to that tragic conflict? If Churchill had read out a compilation of troop movements after Dunkirk, would this controversial and perhaps providential moment of luck and daring have possibly become an amazing fulcrum for future resolve? Think about critical communications: of FDR during the Depression, Nelson Mandela as South Africa threw off some of the shackles of the past, of Jack Welch inveighing against bureaucracy to re-invent GE or Herb Kelleher proselytizing on behalf of loving our employees as one way to create a precedent-shattering airline. The common wick that runs through all of these is an idea held passionately, a communication that emerges from the depths of our conviction and courage, a true caring for the audiences we are addressing and an effort to connect to them at all costs. And all this has to be anchored in a realization that being aware of the impact of both our words and our selves is a critical ingredient of leadership. The ancient Greeks taught us that communication has three aspects: Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Ethos in this sense is our credibility. It is why anyone will pay attention to our words at all. Leadership bestows that, but we have to continually re-earn it. Modern day politicians know they have successfully debased their office when their words evoke almost reflexive sneers rather than rapt attention. Pathos is our appeal to common emotions, concerns and values. We have to come down from the mountain top into the valley of everyday concerns and aims. And finally Logos, we have to make a compelling, fact-based, reality-checked case for what we are proposing as a viable way forward. The more we've been clear about the result we're aiming for, and the more we've been open to scrutinizing our ideas and consulting other influentials, the more powerful and evident will our suggested approach be. Therefore to get ourselves ready, let's ask ourselves the tough questions before anyone else does. And let's ensure that what we present, answers them. Let's always realize that communication is a composite of what we say, how we say it, who we are being AS we say it, and the emphatic actions we take flowing from it. Hold yourself and others accountable for what your communication entails. Make it a rabid priority, always linked back to the company's vision, it's values, and the real concerns of the people who make up your organization. Then, people will not only hang on your words, they will help you bring them abundantly to life. Wrapping Up As we look towards wrapping up this year, let's see if we can't launch some inspiring momentum in the remaining two months with these 5 powerful resolutions. These will help us to ring the curtain down on a hopefully productive year as well as ring in an exciting new period of re-invention and value creation. A resolution is an expression of our resolve. Let's resolve to have fun, be and become real, renew and recreate our habits, ensure our service is as smart as we are, and make a powerful difference through the act of communication which is the veritable life-blood of all real leadership. Omar Khan, Senior Partner, Sensei International Phone: 1 (212) 295 2191, Fax: 1 (212) 295 2121 e-mail: omar@sensei-international.com Omar Khan is a globally acknowledged leadership development innovator and success coach. He is a sought after change catalyst and a pioneer in transformational learning. He is the author of the acclaimed book SYNERGY as well as the newly released and much awaited, TIMELESS LEADERSHIP. S To be removed from this list please visit http://www.sensei-international.com/newsletter.html.

Copyright © 2007 Sensei International, all rights reserved