Approachable Leadership Blog
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Panama Papers Leadership Lessons: 3 Tips to Increase Transparency
By now you’ve probably heard about the Panama Papers – the 11.6 million files leaked from the database of the world’s fourth largest offshore law firm in, you guessed it, Panama. The documents name a number of notable international politicians, business leaders and celebrities who are said to be using offshore bank accounts to hide their money or avoid paying taxes. Click here to brush up on details of the scandal.
Leadership Lessons from the Panama Papers Scandal
One important leadership aspect of this story was first called out by Geoff Colvin in his Fortune article. He states that discoveries like the Panama Papers – where we find that our elected leaders aren’t what we thought they were – are becoming less and less of a “scandal.” Sadly, we are beginning to expect this kind of reality from our leadership. This begs the question: “Are today’s leaders more corrupt, venal, or dishonest than yesterday’s?”
“Human nature being what it is, it’s hard to believe that they are,” Colvin writes.
But they appear to be. And that’s all that matters.
Taliesin! Watch This Week’s Approachability Minute with Phil
My team and I are excited to bring you the first video in a series, The Approachability Minute. In these videos, I will touch on some of the main concepts of Approachable Leadership. Each video will be just a few minutes long so you watch quickly, gain some insight, and hopefully leave that minute with some new ideas to improve your leadership immediately.
Our first video asks, “What kind of space are you creating at work?”
Batman, Superman and Positive Leadership
This weekend I subjected my wife and daughter to Batman v Superman. Critics are panning the movie, calling it dark, humorless, and too long. All true. I can pick out many things I would change. Instead let me tell you what I appreciated about it. This is a big movie...
9 Tips to Disagree with Your Boss
You disagree with your boss. How should you handle it? Healthy disagreement among colleagues is completely normal and, in my opinion, critical to making a business as strong as it can be. But what if you disagree with your boss? The problem is that disagreements often...
Fast Company Features Phil Wilson: 6 Signs You’re Management Material
Fast Company published an article last week detailing what makes a person "management material." After consulting a number of experts, they came up with these 6 traits: You're good at building relationships. "You cannot be a leader unless people are willing to follow...
Creativity and Frontline Employees: 4 Ways to Bring Them Together
We should encourage creativity in our frontline coworkers.
One study found that “service creativity,” or the creativity of frontline service employees, “directly [affects] customer service ratings.”
The problem in today’s workforce is that most of the time, frontline coworkers aren’t given the freedom to be creative.
How can leaders help create an environment like this? Approachability doesn’t hurt. Here’s Burkus:
“Managers can play a key role in facilitating the creativity of front-line staff by expressing confidence in their service employees and seeking out employees’ opinions on resolving customer issues or providing service.”
Nothing makes you more approachable than seeking out your coworker’s thoughts and opinions. You show them their views are valuable to you and the organization. The more you invite creative thinking, the more coworkers will embrace it on their own.
6 Leadership Tips from a Three-Star General
"Leadership is deliberate: You don't accidentally have successful teams." This was one of the leadership tips retired Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney gave to executives at a recent West Point training. Lt. Gen. Kearney served as deputy commander for the US Special Operations...
Lessons from Google: 5 Ways to Create Psychological Safety
Companies do better when workers collaborate. Employees who work in teams produce better results and report higher job satisfaction. It's been proven over and over again. Most recently by Google. In 2012, Google decided to ask itself a really important question: why...
Management Advice From Steve Jobs
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg] In two and half minutes, Steve Jobs nails one of the most important pieces of management advice out there. Steve Jobs is not the poster child of approachability. I get that. But he was very successful at attracting...
Why Gaining Trust is Hard: 4 Ways to Get it Back
Gaining trust is hard, especially for leaders. One study finds that just being in a leadership position (a power position) makes gaining trust more difficult. Why? Because people in the low-power positions tend to have a natural assumption that those in higher-power...
Toxic Employees: 5 Classic Types and Why They Need More Attention
Superstar hires don't make up for toxic employees. This is the conclusion of a Harvard Business School report. The researchers looked at over 50,000 workers at 11 different firms to evaluate the benefits of highly productive employees versus the cost of toxic ones....
7 TED Talks to Improve Your Leadership
Many of them actually want to be better too. But even for those visionary leaders, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a lot of advice out there and quite a bit of it actually conflicts with each other.
Time magazine put together a list of 7 TED Talks to become a better leader. Each TED Talk brings its own message. Here they are:
1. Own Your Title – Drew Dudley: “Our society spends a lot of time idolizing people who achieve what very few can, making leadership feel like some far-off, earth-shattering thing that you’ll someday be worthy of. ‘Who am I to lead?’ Who are you not to lead? Your first act as manager should be casting aside any signs of imposter syndrome.”
2. Find Your First Follower – Derek Sivers: “‘The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.’ It only takes one person to support what you’re doing to bring along more follower, so long as you embrace them as equals and let them be partners in your plan.”
3. Don’t Favor the All Stars – Margaret Heffernan: ‘Margaret Heffernan cites evolutionary biology, which shows that extreme Darwinian environments full of only star players and top performers actually create such fierce competition that innovation and collaboration can’t happen….”
Power Distance Killed Nokia (Plus 7 Tips To Discover Your Gaps)
Power distance killed Nokia. Not Apple, Microsoft or Android. A recent study investigates just how it happened.
It is almost impossible to believe, but the iPhone isn’t even 10 years old. If you used a cell phone before 2007 you almost certainly owned a Nokia product at some point. They were THE mobile phone company.
But Nokia is gone now. Many reasons are given for Nokia’s decline. Most observers blame the iPhone or the fact that Nokia just didn’t have the capacity to keep up.
But those stories don’t add up. Nokia’s problem was cultural.
Nokia’s leaders never took Apple seriously until it was way too late. A key reason for this misstep was that mid-level managers did not feel safe confronting their leaders. There was too big a power distance gap between top leaders and other coworkers.
Helping Others Makes Better Leaders (5 Tips to Grow Others)
“Helping others can actually create the sense of meaning we’re seeking. Rather than ruminating on what makes our life worthwhile as we work toward burnout, we can find the answer outside ourselves, in human connection.”
This was the conclusion drawn by Elizabeth Hopper, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Berkeley. Hopper began her research with the understanding that there are two types of well-being: “hedonic well-being (a sense of happiness) and eudaimonic well-being (a sense of meaning and purpose).”
One study sought to look specifically at those differences and found that while “having strong social connections was important for both happiness and meaningfulness…helping others in need and identifying oneself as a ‘giver’ in relationships were related to meaning alone.”
10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation | Celeste Headlee TED Talk
Spoiler alert… here are the 10 ways to have a better conversation:
1. Don’t multitask – be present
2. Don’t pontificate (she suggests writing a blog instead 🙂 ) “Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t” (Bill Nye)
3. Ask open ended questions – start with who, what, when, where, why or how
4. Go with the flow – whatever you think of, let it go
5. If you don’t know, say that you don’t know…
Managing Millennials: Only YOU Can Stop Generational Profiling
Stop Generational Profiling
Targeting someone because of their race is called profiling. Targeting someone based on their age is no different. It’s called it Generational Profiling and we are in the middle of an epidemic.
For some reason people who should know better have built a cottage industry around teaching people how to get all these generations to work together. However, most of what I’ve seen about managing Millennials is a hodgepodge of worse than useless advice. It focuses managers on exactly the wrong things. It focuses on the often meaningless differences between people, instead of looking at the massive number of things we have in common.
In her book Retiring the Generation Gap Jennifer Deal discusses a study of 3000 people across generations. Her finding is that the differences between generations are minor compared to the things we all share in common. For example, all three generations want to feel respected at work. They want leaders they trust. They dislike change (yes, even Millennials). They want to learn and receive feedback.
Why Approachable Leadership?
We know there’s a lot of great leadership advice out there already – 5 Dysfunctions, 7 Habits, Crucial Conversations, Situational Leadership, Start with Why. So why doesn’t it stick? Well, it’s a lot like saying I know how to swing a golf club, why aren’t I a scratch golfer?
Let’s face it, most leaders know what they are supposed to do. But when you get into the heat of battle a lot of times you end up falling back into bad habits. The more you do to complicate things the more likely you are to abandon it early. Like the esteemed management thinker Mike Tyson once said:
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
