The KUPMC Blog

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.

As we have watched and listened to the news from Japan for the last few weeks, our hearts go out to the people and we marvel at their perseverance in the face of such tremendous challenges. We also are clearly reminded of our professional obligations to do our part in preparing for such events in our backyards.

A recent article published by Public Administration faculty member Chris Silvia is directly relevant to this need. Since natural and man-made disasters rarely occur within a single jurisdiction and the ability of any one organization to effectively respond by itself is frequently exceeded, a collaborative approach to emergency management can best address the resulting needs.

But organizations cannot wait until the moment of crisis to establish these collaborative relationships. Effective collaboration requires that the collaborative partners have the time and opportunity to:

• see that their ability to achieve their individual goals and mission can be enhanced through teamwork,
• build a shared understanding of the resources that each partner brings to the table,
• establish a shared vision for their work together,
• engender the support of stakeholders, and
• build trusting relationships.

To read more about this research, see Chris Silvia. 2011. Collaborative Governance Concepts for Successful Network Leadership. State and Local Government Review 43 (1): 66-71.

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?

Every night as I set my alarm, I think about what time I need to be at work in the morning and back into the time I need to get up. It’s not an exact math problem as there are many variables: do we need to get the baby to daycare or is it a morning that his dad stays home with him? Which of my offices am I headed to? Is there something I want to get done before I head out the door?

But even when I think I have built in enough extra time, I nonetheless often find myself leaving later than I intended. I can’t seem to get a handle on the “how much time will it take?” equation.

According to social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, I have fallen victim to my own version of the “planning fallacy,” the rather predictable human tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task–no matter how much experience we have with how long it really does take.

Yesterday’s post on Heidi Grant Halvorson’s blog, The Science of Success, reviews some interesting research on the planning fallacy and offers some useful tips on being more realistic in planning how much time something will take.

Are there certain tasks that you consistently underestimate how long it will take you to complete? What strategies can you recommend to make sure we really allow enough time to get something done?

As I recently told the participants in our Emerging Leaders Academy, grammar, punctuation, and word use issues may not be a big deal to you. But for many of the people who read what you write, they are. The people who pay attention to grammar, punctuation, and wording issues can’t not pay attention, and they cringe a little when they see writing errors.

The goal of this post is not to make you self-conscious about your writing. It’s to suggest that it’s worth brushing up on some of the basics to make sure that you’re creating a positive impression of your abilities with what you write.

With that in mind, I direct you to a practical and entertaining post on the Copyblogger site: The Inigo Montoya Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words. Did you know you might be using “less” when you should be using “fewer”? Afterward or afterwards? Compliment or complement? (This one gets me every time.) The Inigo Montoya Guide offers direction on these and 24 other word use issues.

Are there words not on the list that you commonly see misused? What words have you had to correct your own use of?

If your “to-read” stack looks anything like mine, it’s piled high and always getting higher as I add books to it far faster than I manage to actually read them. When I do finally get a chance to spend some time with one, it’s very disappointing when the book turns out to offer little substance.

Thus, I was delighted to see information about a new book by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten called The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. In his review, Kevin Kelly writes that the authors “seem to have read all of the ones in print, and they have done the world a favor by selecting the 100 best business books ever, and then packing summaries of them all into one meta-book” that is “much better than a simple list. The two have reviewed, abstracted, and compared all the best 100 in the context of thousands of similar books…You get context instead of content.”

Read Kelly’s review here, and/or visit the book’s website here to check out the list.

What business books make your “best of” list? Anything they left off that you think deserves a read?

The idea of council-manager government is that political and administrative realms can be in partnership and not dependent on the system of checks and balances that characterizes our state and federal governments, where separation of legislative and executive powers is valued.

In a recent article in Public Management, KU Public Administration Professor John Nalbandian and KU MPA graduate Julia Novak outline strategies for city managers to facilitate the building of council capacity to help establish this crucial partnership between the council and professional staff.

Join Julia Novak, President of The Novak Consulting Group, for a roundtable discussion on this topic at the upcoming Kansas City County Management Conference, April 22-23, in Lawrence.

I recently stumbled on a terrific resource for those interested in improving their abilities in public speaking and presentations–hopefully, that includes most everyone who ever speaks or presents! Nick Morgan has coached many public figures to improve their speaking skills and has published several books, including Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action.

He also has a terrific blog offering thoughtful tips, reviews of well-known speakers and general encouragement. As the intro to his blog indicates: “His passion is to connect the latest brain research with timeless insights into persuasive speaking and writing in order to further our understanding of how people connect with one another.” Review the list of his many posts here.

What are the characteristics of really great speakers you’ve heard?