The KUPMC Blog

With the recent reading recommendations of the Emerging Leaders Academy experienced public servants panel, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m listening to it this time, actually, on cd during my drive time and it seems particularly meaningful to hear the guidance in Covey’s own voice.

I’ve just gotten to habit 3, put first things first, where he discusses the value of planning your time so that you’re spending much of your energy in “quadrant 2″ (see graphic below), on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent.

They are the things that are most likely to get sidelined when we operate in a more reactive mode, organizing our time around oiling the squeakiest wheels rather than around our principles.

This reminded me of the terrific opening of a post on the Be Awesome Online blog from last week. Catherine Caine writes:

“Do you know, dearest, why to-do lists, vision boards and affirmation notes on your mirror work?

“It’s because of attention. We direct our attention to the things in our field of vision. If we don’t give ourselves conscious reminders then we default to whatever’s around: our inbox, the thousand-fold distractions of social media, the furniture… nothing meaningful, nothing long-term, nothing great.

I’ve deliberately added more reminders to myself as the study has become my work-centre. I have Charlie Gilkey‘s famous line Do Epic Sh** on a sign on the study door. I have artwork I bought because it reminds me of how I want to rock the world. And I’ll be daring the Wrath of the Real Estate Agent to put up some work on the wall behind my monitor. All of these small changes have helped, a lot.”

What Catherine Caine and Stephen Covey both want to remind us of is that we can all be pretty willing to be distracted from the Important Stuff when it can be hard and even scary to dive into it. But by scheduling our time around it, putting reminders in our field of vision, blocking out the “urgent” distractions (that generally aren’t quite so urgent), we can dip our toes into working on the Important Stuff and start to feel some of the satisfaction that comes from doing what matters.

For me, this has meant actually turning off my email for a couple hours at a time over the last week in order to get some writing done on my dissertation. It’s just too easy to attend to the urgent otherwise. And you know what the best part is? It’s working.

What do you do to make sure you’re spending some time on the important-but-not-urgent?

I remember being puzzled when I learned about plate tectonics in elementary school. The various continental and oceanic plates, I was told, moved incredibly slowly–only a few inches a year. Yet somehow this generated enough pressure and force, as they pushed into one another, that it caused explosive events like volcano eruptions.

I could vaguely grasp the idea of that much pressure–I mean, thinking of something the size of the continent moving, it made sense to me that there’d be some friction and force there.

What I struggled with was the idea that only a few inches of movement a year could result in changes significant enough to yield such explosions. And yet, over time, those inches add up to wildly significant change.

I thought of this today as I read Seth Godin’s blog post “Resilience and the Incredible Power of Slow Change.”

Most people I know seem to be frustrated with the slow pace of change in their organizations. And yet most of us, unfortunately, have plenty of experience with change processes that were implemented badly–often too quickly without enough information about the value of the change–and died on the vine.

His post reminds us about the shocking amount of change that actually does occur when we step back and look at the big picture. He has a point. I mean, whatever one’s politics, it’s amazing to think of the violence that met efforts to integrate lunch counters less than 50 years ago while we now have an African American man in the office of President.

Or, for a more mundane example, how quaint those old-fashioned toy telephones on wheels now look given that most kids will never encounter a rotary dial.

Seth suggests that we “Don’t worry about what happened yesterday (or five minutes ago). Focus on what happened ten years ago and think about what you can do that will make a huge impact in six months.”

What changes do you see if you look back 10 years? What can you do to influence the direction of the tectonic plates’ movement in your organization?

Last week the Emerging Leaders Academy participants heard from a panel of experienced public servants who offered some career perspectives.

I want to thank Hannes Zacharias, Johnson County Manager; Norton Bonaparte, Topeka City Manager; Jen Church-Duran, KU Libraries Assistant Dean of User Services; and Julie Loats, Director of IT for KU Enterprise Applications and Services, for taking the time to reflect on their experiences with the group.

At the end of the session, the panelists were asked for their recommendations of good business books–ones that have been useful and made a difference for them. Their picks included several classics:

• Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

And one that’s less well-known:
• Yamashita and Spataro’s Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World.

Julie Loats also added that in terms of organization, for her nothing beats David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

What would you add to this list? What serves as a “great text” for you as you think about productivity, effectiveness, and relationships in the workplace? What book have you gone back to again and again?

The first ASPA luncheon of the 2010-2011 series will feature speaker Tom Coyle, Planning and Development Director for Kansas City, Missouri. He’ll provide an update on current sustainable development activities in Kansas City, Missouri. Topics include the new development code, streamside protection, stormwater management, and other programs focused at promoting sustainable development.

Location: Hereford House Restaurant & Hollywood Room | 100 East 20th Street | KCMO 64108
Date & Time: Wednesday,August 25th, 2010 @ 11:45 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Cost: $20
Registrations: Please email with your lunch choice to aspakc@gmail.com or visit us as www.aspaonline.org/ASPAKC/

About Tom Coyle: Mr. Coyle has been the Planning and Development Director for the City of Kansas City, Missouri since 2005. In this capacity, Tom oversees the coordination of all elements of private development within the City.

His background includes planning management in the states of California, Texas, Oregon, and Missouri. He has also served as a contractor for the Army on a base expansion at Fort Irwin, California. He holds degrees in public administration and city planning from San Diego State University. He is a member of the American Planning Association and the Urban Land Institute. He has attained certification from the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Tom lives in the Northland and his daughter, Kelsey, is a sophomore at Park Hill High School. His hobbies include long distance running and coaching his daughter’s softball team.

It may be as easy as learning to say no to what you don’t love and don’t have to do. Of course, this requires recognizing which things we don’t actually have to do even though we might feel some twinges of guilt in letting them go.

For those who struggle with this (that is, most of us), blogger and simple living advocate Tammy Stobel offers some excellent guidance on how to decide what you can indeed say “no” to and how to do so gracefully. Click here to check out her advice.

Useful guidance? Any tips you’d offer that she leaves out?

I noticed a trend in the course materials I’ve been creating and revising lately. No matter what the main topic, I found that somewhere in the handouts I noted that the skill wasn’t just about improving or mastering a series of tasks or honing a new ability. Rather, it was also about building and maintaining relationships.

So in the business writing handouts, for example, I highlighted that it’s worth taking the time to compose clear emails with a relevant subject line, that stick to a single message and note what, if anything, is needed from the reader in return and by when. The most immediate reason for this is that it wastes less of everyone’s time: the recipient doesn’t have to wade through unnecessary information and/or you don’t have to send a follow up asking for information that you didn’t give a due date for, for example.

But the more important issue is that business communication is about relationships. It’s worth paying attention to who, in your inbox, always starts their messages with a salutation and returning the favor–even if this isn’t your standard practice. Creating documents and writing presentations that acknowledge the humanity of those who will receive them reaffirms that we are more than the sum of what’s on our task lists.

And the business etiquette handouts likewise center the issue of relationships, building on a comment by Emily Post about the profound misunderstanding most of us have about what etiquette is. It’s not about putting on airs: it’s about how our behavior touches one another whenever our paths cross–that is, relationships.

Valuing what’s human in each other certainly has a payoff in productivity. If we’ve built relationships with our co-workers and colleagues we know who to turn to for guidance on particular issues or who to call to make sure an important piece of paperwork makes it to the top of the pile.

But I hope it’s more than that. It’s also about enhancing the time we spend at work and about making sure we get and give the encouragement we all need to have days filled with as many activities as possible that speak to our hearts as well as our minds.

So be efficient, but not to the point of being brusque and negatively impacting a relationship (thanks to Paul for commenting on this in a recent post!).

And be chatty and personable, but not to the point of frustrating your partner in the conversation who may have some important work to do.

Does remembering that it’s about the relationship as much as accomplishing the task at hand cause you to rethink you’re approach to anyone or anything in your work environment?

In planning the curriculum for the business writing class I teach, I reviewed George Searles’s text, Workplace Communication: The Basics, a book that I found to be very readable and very helpful.

Searles offers many terrific lessons and a great deal of succinct advice. But there was one “aha!” tidbit in particular that I found to be profoundly important for those who represent the public sector in their communication. That tidbit was the idea of reader-centered phrasing in one’s writing–that is, phrasing that focuses on the reader’s interests and knowledge rather than the writer’s.

For example, a listing of office policies and contact information may indicate that “We don’t take phone calls after 3pm on Wednesdays.” With reader-centered rephrasing, this becomes “You may reach us by phone until 3pm on Wednesdays.”

Where the first statement is likely to elicit a frustrated sigh and perhaps a knowing statement made to a friend about the expected work ethic in a government office, the second is unlikely to even give the reader pause.

It’s amazing the difference a few words can make, isn’t it?

Compare: “We cannot process your claim because you did not submit the required forms,” with “We will process your claim as soon as we receive the required forms.”

If this latter statement also includes a second sentence listing what those required forms are, so much the better. Perhaps this information was shared in a previous communication, but when it takes only 20 seconds of your time to list itagain, you gain that much additional goodwill from the reader. Just imagine yourself as the recipient and you can see the difference it makes.

Heaven knows that goodwill from citizens toward government offices is something it would behoove us to cultivate any chance we get.

Now, it’s one thing to resolve to use this sort of reader-centered phrasing as we go forward responding to inquiries, applications, and the like. But what about all those templates you use to streamline your communications: the files you open, change the name of the recipient, update the date, and send to print? What about all those form letters used by your colleagues?

I invite you to pull out one of the letter or email templates you’ll be using in the next week and review it for any opportunities to revamp the sentences to be more reader-centered. Then share any changes you made in the comments below!

There’s a rather hilarious moment in the video “Trombone Player Wanted” where Marcus Buckingham shares the most common answer he gets when asking people he interviews to share a strength. The answer?

“I’m a people person.”

It’s funny because as viewers we recognize how common an answer this is–perhaps most of us have even said it ourselves when floundering to answer this question in an interview or some other setting. From the voice in which Marcus shares this, we also get a sense of how frustrating he finds this answer because of everything it leaves out: “Which people?” he asks. “What are you doing with them?”

What’s interesting to me is how much easier it becomes to answer the question, “what are your strengths?” as soon as he adds these additional, more detailed questions. Asked the general question, we tend to stumble over our words, trying to think of something to say that offers a decent answer but that also doesn’t make us look full of ourselves.

But asked which people we like working with, or which writing we like to work on, or which teams we are energized by being part of, or which details we like working with–asked any of these things most of us can immediately start narrowing this down and, after offering some descriptive information about times we have and haven’t enjoyed people or writing or teams or working on details, can likely come up with a relatively clear statement that’s far more informative about a strength or talent we have.

The other important aspect of this is that in sorting through elements we like and don’t like about a particular type of task, we end up becoming aware of those things that others might tell us we’re very good at–things we might know ourselves that we’re good at–but that in fact we don’t like very much.

Becoming aware of this keeps us from mentioning them when we’re asked about our strengths! This is key in making sure that we don’t forever get assigned to a role we don’t like in teams we’re part of. Because if I mention that I’m great at tracking budgets, it’s pretty likely I’ll get volunteered to track the budget whether I like doing it or not.

So in thinking about your strengths, bring some detail to the questions you ask yourself. You might start with what you like doing, but then take your answer further. Do you always enjoy doing that, or only under some circumstances? If it’s only sometimes, start listing the circumstances. Who else is involved? Which pieces would you rather not have to handle?

What other questions would be helpful to ask to get at what we love to do? Is there anything you’ve realized that you need to stop volunteering for because, in spite of your skills, you just don’t like it very much?

In a post today on the Harvard Business Review blog, Marshall Goldsmith makes this very important point:

“People have less time today, which means the value of that time has increased. Leaders who waste their workers’ time are not looked upon favorably.”

I’d simply add that this applies to co-workers as well. If you make an effort to be sure that you’re using your portion of the meeting time and presentation time well, your colleagues and staff will notice and appreciate it.

The challenge, of course, is asking ourselves which details are truly relevant to the situation at hand. We’d love it if others were interested in the full back story and all of the supporting reasons for our decisions.

But in practice, we get antsy and impatient when others share more information than we need. We need to get in the habit of remembering this when we’re doing the sharing.

What can you do to make sure you aren’t eating away at others’ time and patience when you have information to share?

So it occurs to me that we’re nearly two months into the current session of Emerging Leaders Academy and we haven’t had any explicit discussions about what we all mean by the term leadership.

This isn’t to say we haven’t been discussing the topic in all sorts of ways. We’ve pondered what the future might look like in the public sector, a world where efficiency, adaptation and trust may be crucial to getting anything done.

We’ve talked about listening skills as a way to make sure we’re remembering to tune into others’ needs and desires as we forge ahead in sharing and implementing our ideas and plans.

And we’ve talked about identifying areas of strength and passion that we can build on as well as areas where we have a need for skills development if we’re to attain our goals in order to identify and reach out to the right people to play mentoring roles.

Implicit in all of these discussions, from my point of view, is the issue of leadership–the Public Management Center approach just happens to be one where we assume that each of us has to define what leadership looks and feels like for ourselves.

A class can offer tools to facilitate that development and some suggestions about what approaches might most enrich those who lead and those who would follow. And a class can offer stories and examples that reflect what leadership has looked like in particular times and places. But our classes won’t offer lessons or stories that assert this is what leadership should or must look like.

Because of this, we fall squarely into what Dr. Ronald Riggio calls “new wave” leadership–a belief that there is no fixed set of theories or practices to guide decision-making and a belief that good leadership requires a focus on the followers as much or more than a focus on the leader.

According to Riggio, “the most popular leadership theories today are transformational leadership and Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory. Both of these theories assert that effective leadership depends on the leader’s ability to engage, energize, and develop followers. In addition, theories of shared leadership are emerging. In shared leadership, the decision making power and responsibility of leading the team is dispersed among many members.”

Riggio asserts that there are 3 main themes in this new wave approach, which he describes as follows:

1) A Greater Focus on the Follower. The successful leader is able to engage and motivate followers. There is shared, or at least consultative, decision making and followers are empowered to take on responsibility and act independently. In transformational leadership, for example, the leader’s goal is to develop followers’ leadership capacity – eventually turning followers into leaders. Moreover, effective leaders recognize the individual strengths and needs of followers in order to allow each follower to maximize potential.

2. Decentralized Decision Making/Empowered Followers. Often speed of action is critical, so followers need to be empowered to act without direction from the leader. In today’s knowledge-based world, a leader cannot hope to lead alone. In all likelihood, followers have more accumulated knowledge about the team or organization’s purpose than does the leader, so it makes sense to share the responsibility.

3. Recognition of the Complexity of Leadership. The increasingly interconnected and international world of the 21st century, the ever evolving technology, and the constantly changing environment, means that this is not your father’s or mother’s world. Today’s world is fantastically complex and requires all of a leader’s capacity, and the shared capacity of the team, to stay competitive and effective.

I lean towards agreeing with Riggio and find myself keenly aware that this means PMC Director Charles Jones was right when he identified trust as a key element of public sector leadership in the future: relying more on one’s followers means that a leader must believe in their capacity to act in the best interests of the leader and the organization without paternalistic oversight.

This also points to a challenge, however, in that we’re in a moment of generational transition in the workplace.

Some, perhaps many, of today’s agency and department heads learned leadership and management skills in a much more Theory X era, one which understood motivation as coming more from sticks than from carrots and which assumed employees had little intrinsic motivation to perform or achieve. This tends to make for controlling leadership behaviors.

Today, however, hese folks have been joined in the workplace by Generation X and Generation Y who, as employees, generally expect their needs, opinions, and expertise to be at least consulted but more often actively taken into account in planning and decision-making processes.

So this leads to several questions. First, do Riggio’s views of the characteristics of today’s leadership ring true? If not, what’s missing?

Beyond this, though, how do we keep Gen X and Gen Y–and, of course, those baby boomers who also believe in a more shared sense of leadership–engaged in the workplace when they’re reporting to more “traditional” managers? How big an issue is this?

Chime in below in the comments.