As 2008 comes to a close, the Monday Missive wishes you and yours the happiest of holidays. When the Missive began, two years ago this month, our goal was to learn and to share that with others. We hope that you find some measure of insight and inspiration from these messages. And we thank you for inspiring us in return.
Happy Holidays from our family to yours.
Once again, the Monday Missive presents our Holiday gift to you - the most rockin' digital holiday cards from around the Net. Enjoy. (Please send us any that you are think are totally amazing. We're collectors. But don't send us anything lame. Or we will FedEx you a lump of coal.)
http://fl-2.com/giftofcode/index.aspx (Via the Denver Egotist - who you should read cause they totally rock.) Site takes a while to load but your patience will be rewarded. Crank the sound - it's groovy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBUqJzgvBo One word: Awesome.
http://andrewhoffmandesign.com/egotistholiday/ Note the subtle colour boxes. Yes, go on .... from left to right ...
http://liquidgivesagoat.com/ Despite the recession, Liquid is still hiring. Unfortunately, these candidates just didn't work out.
12/18/08
Leadership and Management Are Not Synonyms
First, we hope you don’t mind the multiple Missives this week. We just find these Brand Autopsy posts about Peter Drucker to be massively important. Today, Drucker describes the difference between leadership and management. So often, we confuse the two. With predictable results. Second, the Monday Missive hopes to acquire this book. It may even be necessary for us to send a holiday gift to ourselves. If so, we will share the lessons with you, dear readers, in the new year.
“Leadership is not magnetic personality … it is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is salesmanship.” — Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker clearly delineated the difference between being a leader and being a manager. He famously riffed, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” The right things for a leader to do, according to Drucker, include these ideals:
1. Courage with Character
It takes courage to practice “purposeful abandonment." It also takes character to make connections with people who are genuine and compassionate. Natural leaders do both.
2. Articulate a Clear Mission
“The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards.” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
3. Foster Loyalty
A leader must be worthy of receiving loyalty. To be so worthy, Drucker maintains leaders must set their standards high and always live by those high standards. When loyalty is fostered throughout a business, employee morale increases as does employee effectiveness.
4. Make Strengths Stronger
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths, building on disabilities rather than on abilities. The focus must be on strength.” (THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT, 1954)
5. Hire People Smarter than You
Ineffective leaders worry about their direct reports usurping them. Effective leaders don’t. Effective leaders encourage their direct reports to assume greater responsibility and to make more meaningful contributions to the business. Effective leaders measure their success by the success achieved of the people s/he hires, manages, and promotes.
6. Earn Trust
”To trust a leader is not to necessarily like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction a leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old-fashioned, called ‘integrity.’” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
7. Develop People
Peter Drucker understood no business will survive if it is led by only one leader. A thriving organization needs leaders throughout and not just at the helm. According to Drucker, “The gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies.”
MM: If you are truly indispensable, you have failed as a leader.
“Leadership is not magnetic personality … it is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is salesmanship.” — Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker clearly delineated the difference between being a leader and being a manager. He famously riffed, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” The right things for a leader to do, according to Drucker, include these ideals:
1. Courage with Character
It takes courage to practice “purposeful abandonment." It also takes character to make connections with people who are genuine and compassionate. Natural leaders do both.
2. Articulate a Clear Mission
“The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards.” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
3. Foster Loyalty
A leader must be worthy of receiving loyalty. To be so worthy, Drucker maintains leaders must set their standards high and always live by those high standards. When loyalty is fostered throughout a business, employee morale increases as does employee effectiveness.
4. Make Strengths Stronger
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths, building on disabilities rather than on abilities. The focus must be on strength.” (THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT, 1954)
5. Hire People Smarter than You
Ineffective leaders worry about their direct reports usurping them. Effective leaders don’t. Effective leaders encourage their direct reports to assume greater responsibility and to make more meaningful contributions to the business. Effective leaders measure their success by the success achieved of the people s/he hires, manages, and promotes.
6. Earn Trust
”To trust a leader is not to necessarily like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction a leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old-fashioned, called ‘integrity.’” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
7. Develop People
Peter Drucker understood no business will survive if it is led by only one leader. A thriving organization needs leaders throughout and not just at the helm. According to Drucker, “The gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies.”
MM: If you are truly indispensable, you have failed as a leader.
Focusing on Strength
Please enjoy this Bonus Mid-Week Missive. So timely with goal-setting happening for 2009. Summaries, snippets, and takeaways from Inside Drucker's Brain (Jeffrey Krames biography of the father of management - Peter Drucker) via Brand Autopsy.
“Most organizations take their employees’ strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They [identify] ‘skill gaps’ or ‘areas of opportunity,’ and then pack them off to training classes so that weaknesses can be fixed. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.” — Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton (2001)
Psst … decades before Marcus Buckingham became the poster child for “building upon strengths, not weakness,” Peter Drucker heralded the cause. In THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT (1954), Drucker actually launched the strengths movement by writing:
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths ... The focus must be on strength.”
“One can only build on strength. One can achieve only by doing. Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do … a man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”
“One cannot do anything with what one cannot do. Once cannot achieve anything with what one does not do … Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do.”
Drucker revisited the concept of strengths-based development with a must-read Harvard Business Review article (MANAGING ONESELF, 1999). He updates his stance by writing:
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
“Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
Also in MANAGING ONESELF, Drucker explains how “measuring feedback analysis” is the best way to discover your strengths. He encourages executives to, at the time they make a key decision, write down the expectations they hope come from that decision. Then after nine or twelve months, compare the actual results with the written-down expectations. It’s a process that worked for Drucker to identify areas he excelled and areas where he struggled to meet expectations.
A more scientific way to identify one’s strengths is to use the StrengthsFinder test from Gallup. This online test formed the basis for Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and for Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007).
“Most organizations take their employees’ strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They [identify] ‘skill gaps’ or ‘areas of opportunity,’ and then pack them off to training classes so that weaknesses can be fixed. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.” — Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton (2001)
Psst … decades before Marcus Buckingham became the poster child for “building upon strengths, not weakness,” Peter Drucker heralded the cause. In THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT (1954), Drucker actually launched the strengths movement by writing:
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths ... The focus must be on strength.”
“One can only build on strength. One can achieve only by doing. Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do … a man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”
“One cannot do anything with what one cannot do. Once cannot achieve anything with what one does not do … Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do.”
Drucker revisited the concept of strengths-based development with a must-read Harvard Business Review article (MANAGING ONESELF, 1999). He updates his stance by writing:
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
“Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
Also in MANAGING ONESELF, Drucker explains how “measuring feedback analysis” is the best way to discover your strengths. He encourages executives to, at the time they make a key decision, write down the expectations they hope come from that decision. Then after nine or twelve months, compare the actual results with the written-down expectations. It’s a process that worked for Drucker to identify areas he excelled and areas where he struggled to meet expectations.
A more scientific way to identify one’s strengths is to use the StrengthsFinder test from Gallup. This online test formed the basis for Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and for Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007).
12/16/08
12/15/08
Develop a Fleet of Bus Drivers
Organizational structures traditionally center around a group of people following a leader. It is the leader’s job to create the vision for success, map out the implementation plan, assign tasks, and monitor the work. And it’s been fairly successful for a long time. But as we try to do more with less, we need to engage all the capabilities of our team members. A single person can't drive the bus all over town. But as Jon Gordon tells us in the Positive Business Manifesto, leaders can do more than drive the bus - they can develop a whole fleet of bus drivers.
Leadership is not just about what you do, but also what you can inspire, encourage and empower others to do. To build a positive business, it’s not enough to just be a bus driver yourself. You must also develop a fleet of bus drivers in your organization. This involves a process where a united leadership team shares the company’s vision with their managers and employees, invites them on the bus and then encourages and empowers them to drive their own bus.
The leadership team explains that it’s their job to create a positive environment where managers and employees can perform at their highest level and it’s each employee’s job to stay positive and utilize their gifts and strengths to contribute to the goals and vision of the organization. Individual conversations should also take place between leaders and managers, and managers and their employees. Each person needs to understand the organization’s vision and identify how their personal vision, job and effort contribute to the overall vision. When this happens, instead of one bus with one driver, you now have a fleet of bus drivers all moving in the same direction. This generates a tremendous amount of power and momentum in the organization.
MM: As you develop your goals for 2009 and work with team members to develop theirs, consider helping them create a personal mission along with their tasks. "Your mission is to improve Process X. You decide what the parameters are, you decide how it gets done, you decide who should be involved. I will be a resource if you have questions, but this is your baby. Go make it happen."
You might have some concerns: "But I won’t be able to control what they do. What if they go in the wrong direction?"
Two things:
1. Control is an illusion. We never really have control over other people. And when we try to exert control, they just withdraw their commitment. It's like trying to hold sand. The tighter you hold on, the more sand leaks out your fingers.
2. When we are passionate about something and take ownership, we are more likely to succeed. Our hearts and minds are engaged when we take personal responsibility for the outcome of the project. And even if the mission is not successful, it provides a growth experience. And that is always worth doing.
Love the Monday Missive but tired of it clogging your Inbox? We hear you. You can now access the Monday Missive anytime on the Web. Share with family and friends, post comments, or add us to your favourite RSS reader. Check us out anytime at: http://mondaymissive.blogspot.com/
Pauline Graf
Rock the Casbah.
12/8/08
Three Simple Rules
Drew
1. Love your people: Surround yourself with talent and then make sure they always know how much you appreciate that talent. Celebrate their wins. Help them grow. Push them, but push them knowing you won't let them free fall. When one of your team stumbles or makes a mistake -- acknowledge it first. Use it as a teachable moment but never let them leave the situation feeling bad. And last but certainly not least...know their aspirations and help them chase their dreams.
1. Love your people: Surround yourself with talent and then make sure they always know how much you appreciate that talent. Celebrate their wins. Help them grow. Push them, but push them knowing you won't let them free fall. When one of your team stumbles or makes a mistake -- acknowledge it first. Use it as a teachable moment but never let them leave the situation feeling bad. And last but certainly not least...know their aspirations and help them chase their dreams.
2. Success is no excuse for not staying out front: No matter how successful your team or agency is, you need to stay current and lead the way. Your clients expect you to ahead of the curve. It's also a very powerful argument for retaining your best employees. Al was always one of the first to be trying something untested or listening to the latest book. Sometimes he didn't get it or see the value in it. But that wasn't the point. He knew he was setting an example for his team and his clients.
3. Only work with clients who appreciate your smarts and skills: Al's belief was that life was too short to work with jerks, know it alls, or people who didn't have the manners to say thank you now and then. He understood that sometimes good clients had unreasonable deadlines, or had to please an ungrateful CEO, or dropped the ball on their end. He didn't mind that -- it's just a part of the business. But he wouldn't tolerate clients who berated, brow beat or were demanding in their tone. His employees didn't deserve to be treated like that and he made sure they knew he felt that way. As a result, most of his agency's client relationships were 20+ years or longer. They weren't just clients, they were respected friends.
Al had figured out the formula for success in this crazy business. Surround yourself with people who had oodles of talent and heart. Only work with clients who appreciate and value those people. And keep everything fresh by always being willing to explore something new. He led by example and with his heart.
MM: Great advice. But wait. What are you going to do about it? Challenge yourself to consider if you are weak in any of these areas. Now, it's time to take action. You have 22 days before the end of 2008. That's just enough time to start something good.
Love the Monday Missive but tired of it clogging your Inbox? We hear you. You can now access the Monday Missive anytime on the Web. Share with family and friends, post comments, or add us to your favourite RSS reader. Check us out anytime at: http://mondaymissive.blogspot.com/
Pauline Graf
CNR PUBS Ink.
Let it rock. Let it rock. Let it rock. .
12/1/08
When Less is More
Darryl Ohrt of Brand Flakes for Breakfast received this business card from Brian Shaler at SXSW [emerging technologies conference] .
Darryl writes: At a conference like SXSW, there are a lot of cards attempting to be great. Many try so hard to be "creative" that they just end up blending in. Or look like an invite to a party.
But Brian Shaler is different. Brian Shaler has reinvented. His card is pictured at right. You're probably thinking that the back of the card has all of his contact information, laid out in a clever way. It doesn't. Just his name, backwards.
At a party, I was talking to Brian, and someone came up to complain. "C'mon Brian - I need a real card. I need a card with your email address, or something."
Brian's response? "You have everything you need to contact me, on that card. If you can't find me by using that card, then we really don't need to communicate."
MM: So true. In today's ultra-connected world of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, ..., if you can't find someone, they probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Darryl writes: At a conference like SXSW, there are a lot of cards attempting to be great. Many try so hard to be "creative" that they just end up blending in. Or look like an invite to a party.
At a party, I was talking to Brian, and someone came up to complain. "C'mon Brian - I need a real card. I need a card with your email address, or something."
Brian's response? "You have everything you need to contact me, on that card. If you can't find me by using that card, then we really don't need to communicate."
MM: So true. In today's ultra-connected world of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, ..., if you can't find someone, they probably don't want to talk to you anyway.
Love the Monday Missive but tired of it clogging your Inbox? We hear you. You can now access the Monday Missive anytime on the Web. Share with family and friends, post comments, or add us to your favourite RSS reader. Check us out anytime at: http://mondaymissive.blogspot.com/
Pauline Graf
CNR PUBS Ink.
We wear our sunglasses at night.
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