The KUPMC Blog

Comments Delivered By Lieutenant Tracy McCullough, Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department
On January 20, 2012

Hello and Good Afternoon,
I would like to personally take this time to welcome you all to the 2012 KU Emerging Leaders Academy. We would like to thank our family and friends for their continued support and for their ability to bring out the best in us. We would like to thank our Supervisors for investing in us and for recognizing that we are Emerging Leaders. Noel, I would like to especially thank you for being a great instructor and for being an inspirational and motivational leader. You welcomed our ideas and our opinions. We were able to build a strong relationship with others because we all realize how important networking and communication can be.

A few weeks prior to the start of the Emerging Leaders Academy, my grandson was born. He was only two pounds and two ounces. I can’t express to you how many times one of my classmates or Noel asked me about his welfare. I immediately knew that everybody had a genuine concern for me.

We talked about our professional goals. Education is very critical to our success. Take the time to invest in your career. Seek out training opportunities. Display good work ethics and be willing to take the next step up the career ladder. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

We also talked about our personal goals. I don’t believe that I have ever told anybody, with the exception of this class, that one day I would like to have a monkey as a pet. For the most part, my classmates were very receptive of this idea; well, with the exception of John and Carol.

During this class session, we took the strengths finder test. The test was able to determine what our five strengths are. My strengths are self-assurance, maximizer, learner, activator, and arranger. I use these five strengths every day at my workplace. Focus on your strengths and sharpen up on your skills. Use your strengths to motivate and influence others to be successful. A good leader can inspire, motivate, and lead. Be the multiplier in your organization.

I especially enjoyed the Mentor Shadowing Assignment. We were given the opportunity to shadow someone whom we admire. I shadowed Mr. Jeffery Fewell, the Administrator for the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department. I was able to have a one-on-one conversation with him. I asked him some questions about his career, his success, and about his genuine concern for his subordinates. I remember asking him, “Mr. Fewell, how did you build the morale of your troops?” He answered, “I show them that I am human and I show them that I care.” He advised me that determination is essential. Set the example and be selfless.

For all of you Newly Emerging Leaders, continue to strive for excellence and bring out the best in others.

“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” – Sam Walton

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” – Conrad Hilton, Hilton Hotels

In an interview in the New York Times, Peggy Klaus, author of The Hard Truth About Soft Skills, was asked “What exactly are soft skills and why should we be worried about them?”

She replied that “the hard skills are the technical expertise you need to get the job done. The soft skills are really everything else — competencies that go from self-awareness to one’s attitude to managing one’s career to handling critics, not taking things personally, taking risks, getting along with people and many, many more.”

Basically, soft skills are those that enable you to put your technical skills productively to work.

Can you resolve a conflict with a co-worker about a work plan or about cubicle distractions? Can you sell the value of your approach to your boss and teammates? Can you write an email that gets the results you need? Can you challenge someone’s idea in a productive rather than destructive way?

Then celebrate and thank your soft skills. And as you mentally make note of everyone you work with whose lack of soft skills makes them unpleasant–or even unbearable–to work with, the pivotal role of soft skills in the workplace becomes very visible. Without the soft skills to support the technical abilities of a staff, projects simply don’t get very far. Even the US Department of Labor sees soft skills as “the competitive edge.”

This is a hugely important lesson that most of us have learned the hard way as we struggle to work with those who make everyone around them miserable. But having learned this lesson, make it work for you: make sure your hiring processes are designed to measure soft skills as well as hard skills.

There are some terrific web resources to help you do this. The Soft Skills blog offers questions divided by skill area to ask about. And if you’ve ever heard of or used behavioral-based interviewing, the focus is on soft skills. Here’s one good explanation and resource. And here’s another.

Meanwhile, don’t pass up any opportunities to improve your own soft skills. They’ll be key to moving into the next job you desire, and in the interim your co-workers will thank you for it.

One of the foundations of our Emerging Leaders Academy is the use of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment. The intent is to offer participants some insights into their areas of strong natural talent that can inform their process of setting professional goals.

Why? Because of the benefits that flow to both the organization and the individual when someone is working from their strengths. The person themselves feels energized and engaged and is able to make significant contributions to their projects and teams. When people are working from their strengths they often willingly give 100% because it’s intrinsically satisfying to do so.

In this age of shrinking budgets and payrolls, those organizations where most people are working at the top of their abilities instead of slogging through their work at 50% will perform better and will be more competitive in keeping their best staff.

But people can land in what should be their dream job according to their strengths and still underperform despite all motivation they may have to do their best. What makes the difference?

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown offers some important insights about this in their 2010 book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. As the title suggests, their extensive research and interviews with executives in companies around the world led them to identify the characteristics of managers they call Multipliers. These managers do more that just accomplish more with less. They get more by using more of people’s intelligence and capability and make them excited to contribute at 100%–or even more when they bring out abilities people didn’t know they had.

The authors contrast Multipliers with Diminshers, those leaders who stifle others largely due to their beliefs about the limitations of the people who work for them. Here’s how they describe the mindsets of these two types of leaders:

The Diminisher’s view of intelligence is based on elitism and scarcity; intelligence is thus a scarce commodity. Further, they see intelligence as static, that it doesn’t change over time or circumstance. As the authors note, their logic seems to be “people who don’t get it now never will; therefore, I’ll need to keep doing the thinking for everyone” (19). With this approach, they can easily create environments where people are, paradoxically, both overworked and underutilized.

Multipliers, however, have a rich view of the intelligence of the people around them and see it as continually developing. They assume that people are smart and can figure things out, and that they are smart in unique ways so can make important contributions and will get even smarter in the process.

Clearly, these two mindsets lead to very different ways of interacting with and directing others.

Wiseman and McKeown’s interviews with people who’ve worked for both types of managers in the same organization has led them to assert that Multipliers can do more than twice as much with the same level of resources because they bring out the best efforts and ideas in those who work for them. Importantly, the authors note that Multipliers do this not with some sort of touchy-feely approach but by driving their people to do their best–and creating circumstances that allow them to do so.

Among the findings of their research that surprised them, Wiseman and McKeown point to the fact that most Diminishers are what they call “Accidental Diminishers” who are not aware of the restrictive impact they have on others. Most of them “had grown up praised for their personal intelligence and had moved up in management ranks on account of personal–and often intellectual–merit. When they became “the boss,” they assumed it was their job to be the smartest and to manage a set of “subordinates”" (25).

That is, these Diminishers imitate what they have observed others do. It simply never occurs to them that more could be achieved by leveraging the strengths and intellects of those on their teams–because they don’t believe there’s much there to leverage.

The book is particularly compelling because of the way it dovetails not only with Gallup’s extensive research into working from areas of strength but also with the insights from work on emotional intelligence and the need for self-knowledge and self-management before one can build effective relationships with others.

Leaders must have the self-knowledge to recognize what effects their actions have on those around them if they are to be bring out the best in people. Multipliers suggests that they must also believe in what is present in others, waiting to be brought out.

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?

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?

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.

Last week, KU Public Administration Department Chair Marilu Goodyear met with participants in our Emerging Leaders Academy to discuss the research on mentoring and offer some guidance to help them identify areas in which they might seek mentoring and people who they know who might fill that role.

Emphasis on people. Plural.

Marilu cited research by Kathleen Kram who interviewed employees in organizations about mentoring. When asked if they had a mentor, most people said no. But Kram’s research found that in fact most of her interviewees named multiple people in their work lives who served various mentoring functions. Kram thus posited that most career professionals have “developmental networks” of people in their lives rather than single mentors.

The following graphic, from Marilu’s 2006 article “Mentoring: A Learning Collaboration,” offers an example of what such a network might look like.

As she notes, “these networks consist not only of senior staff in the profession but also of peers and even junior professionals, who often can help veterans learn a new skill. Family members and friends can also play important roles in a developmental network, particularly in the areas of role modeling and psychosocial support.”

This approach takes away the expectation that one senior executive in an organization can both know and provide everything a junior executive needs, an assumption that was rarely borne out in practice.

Importantly, it also relocates the responsibility for effective mentoring relationships from the organization and the senior executives to the mentees who “develop their own developmental networks in relation to their particular needs. Mentees reach out to individuals around them to seek assistance in the functional areas where they need help.”

Have you ever found mentoring from an unlikely source who fits with this idea of a “developmental network”? What possibilities does this approach open for you? Share your experiences in the comments!

The popularity of Stephen M.R. Covey’s 2008 book, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, suggests that there’s an inherent recognition of how central trust is to pretty much everything else in our personal and professional lives.

At the most recent session of the Emerging Leaders Academy, PMC director Charles Jones spent time with the participants talking about what he foresees for the future of the public sector. His presentation focused on three issues: efficiency, adaptation, and trust.

It all goes better, Charles noted, when there is trust.

Stephen M.R. Covey agrees, offering this communication example at the beginning of his book: “In a high trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”

So how do we build trust? The circular answer is, of course, by being trustworthy. But what does this look like? Here’s the list that Charles shared:

• Tell the truth. If you can’t, explain why. Small lies kill trust.
• Keep promises. Promise less and deliver more.
• Admit mistakes; and say you’re sorry
• Trust others. To be trusted, you must first trust others.
• Don’t micromanage, use rules to empower vs. distrust.
• Hire and promote integrity.
• Walk the talk.
• Respect the ideas of others.
• Say “no” clearly when you have to, but explain.

So easy, and yet so challenging. What would you add to this list? What examples do you have of how trust really matters or how the things on this list really do build trust?

The new session of the Emerging Leaders Academy got off to a great start this week–well, at least from my perspective! I hope that the participants felt the same.

While much of the first day consisted of getting-to-know-one-another activities and discussions of what we all expect of the program, we also did our first skills session. The topic on the agenda? Communication skills. Specifically, listening.

Many people have a great deal of awareness about the importance of communication skills to workplace success. But if asked about what these skills include, most would note speaking and writing, the abilities that allow us to clearly and effectively communicate our messages, goals, and priorities.

What is often neglected in our thinking about communication skills is the piece that’s necessary in order for us to create a message others want to or need to hear in the first place.

Are our ears and our intentions open to hear what people are saying around us so that we can truly discern how we can contribute best to the projects in our organizations? Are we attuned to what our customers and clients want from us to make sure the products we offer truly serve the needs they have? This is especially important for those of us in government where we don’t have competitors offering our products and where citizens can feel frustrated when they don’t feel we’re doing our best to understand and meet their needs.

Among the many habits that get in the way of our listening is the practice of interrupting. In a recent post on her I’m Listening New website, Jill Chivers reflects on two well-intentioned types of interrupting, correcting and cheer leading, that I think nearly all of us do. She asks us to consider the effects of both of these and invites us to tune in to track our own habits of interruption to see how it affects conversations. Click here to read the full post.

What if you decided to listen more deliberately today? What would you learn? Try it and find out, and share your story in the comments below.