Blanchard LeaderChat

Join The Ken Blanchard Companies for a complimentary webinar and online chat beginning today at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (12:00 noon Eastern).

Best-selling author and consultant Scott Blanchard will be sharing the results of five years of primary research which uncovers the motivational factors that bring out the natural motivation inherent in people, get employees up-to-speed quickly in new roles, and remove roadblocks to performance.
 

The webinar is free and seats are still available if you would like to join over 1,100 people expected to participate. Immediately after the webinar, Scott will be answering follow-up questions here at LeaderChat for about 30 minutes. To participate in the follow-up discussion, use these simple instructions.

Instructions for Participating in the Online Chat

• Click on the LEAVE A COMMENT link above
• Type in your question
• Push SUBMIT COMMENT

It’s as easy as that! Scott will answer as many questions as possible in the order they are received. Be sure to press F5 to refresh your screen occasionally to see the latest responses. We hope you can join us later today for this special complimentary event courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

Click here to watch complete recording.

There is one aspect of a leader’s personality that is both their greatest asset and greatest potential liability at the same time.  And if it is not dealt with correctly, it has the ability to stop a promising career dead in its tracks.

That element of human personality is ego, and its power is seductive.

Early in a leader’s career, it helps a young executive seek new innovations, stay the course when others would quit, and push through to higher levels of excellence where others would settle for less.  But if a leader does not channel their ego properly it can also lead to a willful disregard of reality, a lack of self awareness, and an unquenchable need to be the best.

When that happens, the results can be disastrous. In their book Egonomics, authors David Marcum and Steven Smith point to Ohio State research that shows

• Over one third of all fatal business decisions are driven by ego.
• Nearly 2/3 of executives never explore alternatives once they make up their mind.
• 81% of managers push their decisions through by persuasion or edict, and not by the value of their idea.

So how can you draw on the benefits of ego while avoiding the pitfalls?  How do you find the combination of intense professional will and extreme personal humility that Jim Collins describes in his best-selling book, Good To Great?  For Collins, part of the solution includes

1. Self-reflection
2. Conscious personal development
3. Help from a mentor

Madeleine Homan Blanchard, cofounder of Coaching Services at The Ken Blanchard Companies agrees and recommends a similar course of action.  In a recorded webinar on Leaders: Avoid These Fatal Flaws, Homan-Blanchard recommends that leaders keep their ego in check through three strategies.

Name it and claim it—Without self awareness there can be no restraint or modulation. Know your least desirable traits and own up to them. Learn what triggers you and leads you to engage in your worst behaviors.

Get feedback and commit to development—Ask questions. Sit down with direct reports and find out what you could do to be a more effective boss. Listen carefully and say, “Thank you,” when they offer feedback. Take action on trouble spots.

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you—Be courageous when hiring. Make sure you have colleagues and direct reports who think differently from you. Also make sure you have at least one colleague you can count on for an honest opinion and who serves as your “truth teller.”

You can watch Homan-Blanchard’s complete recording of Leaders: Avoid These Fatal Flaws here courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.  Also be sure to see this week’s live webinar being conducted by Scott Blanchard on Cultivating Employee Work Passion: The New Rules of Engagement

In a recent webinar on 6 Keys to Creating Learning Experiences that Inspire and Engage, 76% of participants said that in their opinion, at least 60% of a person’s success on the job can be attributed to their ability to learn job specific skills. Yet only 9% identified that any company they had ever worked for used a mindful process when teaching people new skills.  For most of the webinar participants, learning a new skill was something they had to figure out for themselves while on the job.

If learning is important to success in today’s complex business environment, why don’t more organizations take the time to train people in the skills they need more effectively?

It’s because most managers and leaders are not trained how to teach according to Dr. Vicki Halsey, Vice President of Applied Learning at The Ken Blanchard Companies.   Most leaders are more accustomed to telling instead of teaching—and are often disappointed when they check back to see how people are doing with applying new skills.

If you want your people to pick up new skills more quickly, Halsey recommends addressing six areas when rolling out a new initiative.  Have you got a new program that you are getting ready to launch?  See if you you’ve covered these six basics to maximize learning and application.

1. Energize learners.  Set the context for learning before anyone steps into the classroom.  What can people do to get up-to-speed on this subject?  What can they read, or who can they talk with, to become as excited about this topic as you are?
2. Navigating the content.  Is the presentation learner friendly? Have you put together a good structure that includes breaking the content down into bite-sized chunks that people can easily digest?  Or have you designed this as a lecture type presentation where you will be doing all the talking and it will be a challenge just getting through the content—let alone actually retaining anything?
3. Generate meaning.  Have you connected the dots so people see why learning this new content is important?  People need to see why they should take the time to invest in learning new skills.  Your job as a leader is to provide that meaning.
4. Apply the learning.  What does this new skill look like in the real world?  Have you included some opportunities to practice the real life application of this new skill—or is that something you are leaving up to individual learners to figure out for themselves?
5. Gauge and celebrate.  How will you measure if people are really doing something different with the content?  Don’t be vague on this point.  What is the business metric you are looking to impact?  ROI is something you need address at the beginning of a new initiative—not after the fact.
6. Extend the learning.  How will you keep the initiative alive beyond the initial rollout?  New habits take time to develop and a lot of support in the early days.  What is your follow-up plan?  How will you ensure that skills learned in the classroom are applied back on the job?

A 2010 Bersin report shows that organizations that successfully create strong learning cultures are more likely to be strong innovators in their markets, more likely to get to market before competitors, and more likely to be a market-share leader.

Learning new skills is an important necessity in today’s work environment.  Don’t leave it to chance in your organization.  Take a proactive approach to teaching people new skills.

As a young college professor, best-selling business author Ken Blanchard constantly found himself in front of disapproving faculty boards. The reason?  His insistence on giving out the final exam to each of his students on the first day of the class he was teaching.

As soon as they found out, the board would call Blanchard in to explain himself.  As Ken describes it, the exchange usually went something like this:

Ken: “I’m confused.”

The Board: “You act like it.”

Ken: “I thought we are supposed to teach these kids.”

The Board: “You are, but don’t give them the exam ahead of time.”

Ken would never listen and would actually spend the entire semester teaching the students the answers to the questions.  Ken’s belief was that his main job was to teach students the content they needed to learn, as opposed to worrying about evaluating them properly with the final exam.

Dr. Vicki Halsey, VP of Applied Learning for The Ken Blanchard Companies uses a similar approach when it comes to teaching. Instead of using tests to identify what people don’t know at the end of leadership training, she uses tests to help people claim and celebrate what they do know.  A recent example is work she did with pharmaceutical representatives who needed to learn a new skill in collecting information from doctors.  Halsey’s approach helped the learners to feel confident in what they knew and successful when they walked out the door and returned to their jobs.

How do you want people feeling when they finish a class?  Do you want people focusing on what they don’t know, or ready to put into practice what they do know? It’s a subtle difference that makes all the difference.

You can read more about Halsey’s unique approach to adult learning at Leaders Need to Be Teachers.  Also check out Halsey’s free July 20 webinar on 6 Keys to Creating Learning Experiences that Inspire and Engage courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

A lot of leaders are disappointed these days. Even though they work hard to provide clear direction to their people, when they check in on progress at the end of the month, they often find that little has changed.

The problem, according to Dr. Vicki Halsey of The Ken Blanchard Companies is that leaders confuse telling with teaching.  In a recent article for the Blanchard Companies’ Ignite! newsletter, Halsey explains that, “If leaders want people to develop new behaviors, they have to become better teachers of what to do and how to do it.”

For leaders looking to get started, Halsey recommends three strategies:

1. Break Learning Down into Manageable Chunks

Leaders need to give people an opportunity to learn the new skills over time, using a variety of different modalities that go beyond a one-time exposure to the content.

2. Create Meaning to Embed Learning

Executives need to generate meaning for the new learning. They need to answer the question “Why is this important for me to learn?” Generating this meaning and connecting it to learning the new skill helps people retain the skill over the long term because now they can see the importance of the task.

3. Remember the 70/30 Rule

According to Halsey, “When people are getting ready for a presentation they focus 70 percent of their time on what they are going to say.” Halsey believes this time would be better spent thinking about how to create a learner-centered environment that helps people learn. As she explains, “Leaders need to shift their focus and spend only 30 percent of their time worrying about what they need to say and 70 percent on how to create the greatest transfer of learning to their participants.

According to Halsey, “The biggest thing is to teach, not tell. Very often leaders think that because they are telling people what they want them to do, people are turning around and doing it. We need to realize that teaching, not telling, is a discipline at which all leaders need to become effective—because the more you teach, the more people will learn and the more successful they will be.”

You can read more of Halsey’s advice to leaders at Leaders Need to Be Teachers.  Also check out Halsey’s free July 20 webinar on 6 Keys to Creating Learning Experiences that Inspire and Engage courtesy of Cisco WebEx and The Ken Blanchard Companies.

As you look back over your work career, who is the supervisor, manager, or leader that you would identify as your best boss?  And more importantly, what was it about them that made them great in your eyes?  Take a minute now to identify that person.  We’ll use your experience to identify something that will help you in your own personal leadership journey.

Once you’ve got your best boss in mind, take another minute to identify what it was about him or her that made them special and memorable for you.  Chances are that you will identify a couple of traits similar to these that other people have identified when we’ve asked this question.

“_____________________ was/is my best boss because he/she …

• Believed in me
• Trusted me
• Gave me an opportunity to grow
• Took me under their wing
• Made work fun
• Treated me fairly
• Went to bat for me
• Stuck their neck out for me

Was your boss’s trait one of these—or something different?  While each of us will identify different specific traits that our best boss has, there is probably a word that includes any that you might have come up with.  All of us, no matter what our experience, could probably say that our best boss was so special in our eyes because they truly CARED about us.

I know that this is true in my own case. My best boss was Margie Blanchard, the cofounder of our company who I reported to from 2000 to 2003.  The traits that made Margie so special in my eyes included that she

• Connected with me
• Acknowledged me
• Respected me
• Expected more from me

Now I know that acronyms can be overdone at times—especially in the consulting business, but I couldn’t help but notice that the first letter of those traits spells CARE. 

Magic? I don’t think so, just a great reminder of a key ingredient to being a great boss.  Though it will be displayed in many forms, at its core, one of the key traits of our best bosses is that they cared about us.

A Fun Exercise and Way to Celebrate

So let’s have some fun with this and tap into our collective brilliance.  I’m a big believer in “catching people doing things right” and that “none of us is as smart as all of us.” Let’s put both of those ideas to work today with a little exercise.

Help me expand on this CARE acronym by adding your boss’s trait into the mix.  As the cheerleaders say, “Give me a C, Give me an A, Give me an R, Give me an E!”  Just use the COMMENTS button above to type in a trait of your best boss that goes with one of these letters.  (For extra credit, take a minute to identify and say thanks to that best boss while you’re here.) I promise you’ll feel good and get off to a good start this week if you do.

Who knows, together we might create one of the truly great leadership acronyms (rivaling SMART goals even!)

And even if we don’t, we will still have a great reminder of this one important trait that we can carry with us today as we work with our colleagues and direct reports.

The difficult economic situation of the last couple of years has negatively impacted levels of trust. A recent study by Maritz research found that just 11% of employees surveyed had a strong degree of trust in their organization’s leaders. Even more alarming is that only 7% of the respondents said they had a strong degree of trust in their coworkers. It paints a picture of a “dog-eat-dog” world with everyone out to protect their own interests.

This presents a huge challenge for businesses today according to Randy Conley, Trust Practice Leader at The Ken Blanchard Companies. In the latest issue of Blanchard Ignite!, Conley explains, “Trust is at the foundation of all relationships—whether it is interpersonal or organizationally… leaders face the fallout from low trust through decreased performance and increased disciplinary issues, low morale, and increased turnover and absenteeism, just to name a few.”Conley reminds leaders that trust isn’t something that happens by itself. It is developed through the use of very specific behaviors. Read more…

Boss watching is a fact of life in many organizations. Frontline employees are more concerned with keeping the boss happy than they are with keeping the customer happy. Leaders can help employees focus in the right direction by taking the mystery out of what people can expect from them as a leader.

Employees are always concerned about how their boss will react when he or she finds out about a situation. This uncertainty keeps people unwilling to step out of tightly defined roles for fear that they will do something wrong. People shouldn’t have to guess how their leader would respond. Leaders can improve the situation—and open up a little playing room for employees—by clearly sharing their expectations.

Read more…

Ken Blanchard was a featured speaker during commencement ceremonies for the college of business at Grand Canyon University yesterday. In his remarks Dr. Blanchard encouraged the aspiring leaders to remember that leadership is not about you—it is about others, and that true success in life is not about what you get, but what you give.

To illustrate his point, Blanchard shared one of his favorite stories by John Ortberg, a Presbyterian minister and best-selling author from Menlo Park, California.

Blanchard told how Ortberg used to play Monopoly with his grandmother every time she would visit. His grandmother was a good player and always won the game in short order. Read more…

Are you driven to achieve?  Are you overly concerned with the opinions of others?  Ken Blanchard left a reminder on voice mail the other day that if your self-worth is dependent on your accomplishments plus the opinion of others you are in trouble, because that means your self-worth is up for grabs on a daily basis.

We all have bad days.  We are always going to rub some people the wrong way.  Should that really be the measure of our sense of well-being? 

If you are still answering yes, consider that those two viewpoints are consistent with two of the four warning signs that you might have an overactive ego that is holding you back in other areas.  In their wonderful 2007 book, Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), authors David Marcum and Steven Smith identify the following warning signs that your ego may be out of balance. 

1. Constantly seeking acceptance—you find yourself becoming overly concerned with what other people think.
2. Feeling the need to constantly showcase your brilliance—you go beyond “tooting your own horn” to making your brilliance the center of attention. 
3. Being overly comparative—instead of being your own individual best, you find yourself focusing instead on just being better than someone else. 
4. Being overly defensive—instead of defending an idea, you find yourself making things personal.

One key point in the book is that an out of balance ego doesn’t feel dramatically different from an in-balance ego.  In fact, you might not even notice at first—even though other people will.  That’s because ego takes your strengths and subtly changes them into close counterfeits.  Now everything seems a little self-serving and things that people appreciated about you—like being able to come up with an alternative viewpoint, being able to objectively compare your point of view to someone else’s, brainstorm good ideas, and seek and welcome feedback—things that make you a good team member—are subtly changed. 

So how do the authors of Egonomics recommend rebalancing your ego?  Three ways:

1. Humility: Don’t think less of yourself—just think about yourself less.  Remember that too little ego is just as much out of balance as too much ego.
2. Curiosity: Ask, instead of tell. None of us is as smart as all of us.
3. Veracity: Find truth-tellers in your life.  People who will be straight with you and tell you what you need to hear.

Ego can be our greatest asset, or it can be our biggest liability. It’s all about keeping it in balance.