Management Leverage Blog

Memorial Day is a time for us to remember our country’s fallen soldiers. And for the last 20 years, this holiday has also symbolized a long weekend at  Schlitterbahn water park with my extended family.

Schlitterbahn isn’t about water rides. It’s not a destination on the map; it’s a time and place for relationships – for watching the young grow up or helping the old stay young.  

When I worked at bTrieve (now Pervasive Software) we shared a keg of Shiner every Friday. But the ritual had very little to do with beer, or Fridays. For us, it was a keg of teamwork and camaraderie. Shiner symbolized our workplace culture. We worked in jeans while our competitors still wore power ties. We weren’t IBM, damn it. We were cool. We drank Shiner, not Merlot. We were a new breed, with radically different values.

Symbols are a rallying cry for a culture, and for change. Symbols are metaphors that define who we are, what we are about, and how and why we spend our time. But they lose their power when they replace their meaning: when presents become Christmas/Hanukkah/Chinese New Year. When meaningful words become clichés. When the anthem for the generation becomes a soundtrack for a TV commercial.

Or when the personality of the leader becomes the soul of the organization.

Photo by tsevis

1. TMI Mike:Explains his work in detail  in order to look important
2. Social Sally: Treats each meeting as a social hour
3. Nodding Nancy: Agrees with everything in order to leave sooner
4. Nodding Nancy’s Cousin: Agrees with everything in order to avoid criticism. No one knows his name or his opinion.
5. Harry Potter:  Believes his cloak of invisibility hides his Blackberry (or needle point)
6. Clock Challenged Cara: Avoids work by giving the impression that she will be unable to meet important deadlines (she arrives 15 minutes late to every meeting)

At least one of these people is stuffed inside each of you, fighting to find their way out (Sally is inside me). 

But meetings are an opportunity to shine (i.e. build our personal brands). Unlike a conversation, meetings provide you the time to carefully craft your thoughts. Map out the “who”, “why”, “when” and “where” to your comment before speaking up.

Speaking of speaking up, who is missing from this list?

Image courtesy of Ron Mueck

Looks like the top brass at USAA saw my first video blog about how smoking can help your career. And now their poor smokers can’t even smoke outside the building.

I guess they will have to network like the rest of us.

I first saw this video on Jeet Blog. I have since seen it around several other places (here is the original TED talk). The general message is that this guy is a leader, as

1. he has “the guts” to stand alone and look stupid
2. he wasn’t a leader until he had at least one follower

And I can’t really disagree with any of it.

I can’t help but wonder, however, what we could learn  if we took the discussion in other direction.

This leader is one type of leader. He is front in center–a classic LAME (Look AT Me, Everyone!) leader. Even those who aren’t dancing, can’t help but watch him. As crazy as he looks, he has a certain charisma, albeit possibly drug induced.

Thanks to the media, this video is not inconsistent with how many think a leader should behave. It may be a caricature of reality, but it rings true.

And it is. Some very effective leaders are LAME leaders. Steve Jobs and Herb Kelleher come to mind here.

But there are other styles that are equally effective. And if you only consider the charismatic to be leaders, then you may never reach your true leadership potential if you didn’t happen to be blessed with the charisma gene.

Who else could be a leader in the video?

1. The Participative Leader: Maybe the girl in the white skirt and yellow top dreamed up the entire stunt, fully delegating responsibility to the first dancer as to where, when, and how to dance in order to get the most people to join him.
2. The Servant Leader: Maybe the videographer charged the dancer with the stunt and posted the clip on YouTube in order to help him achieve his dream of appearing on Dancing With The Stars (see Steve Farber’s post for a wonderful example).
3. The Situational Leader: Maybe the real leader is actually working the crowd, adapting his or her style from participative to autocratic (and everything in between) to the style to which each individual dancer is most receptive, beginning with the very first dancer.

Who else could be a leader in this video?

Edit: Rosa’s new post puts us smack dab on the same page

“Someone’s been sleeping in my bed and she’s still there!” exclaimed Baby bear.

Just then, Goldilocks woke up and saw the three bears. “Sorry for the intrusion,” she said, “but I needed a little rest after eating all that porridge.”

Unable to resist the power of the magic word ‘because’, the bears apologized for waking her and quietly closed the door.

Or how about this one…

“We will wait for until Wednesday for BP to again attempt to stop the oil that is flowing into the gulf, because they are ultimately responsible for this disaster”.

Maybe the story about Goldilocks doesn’t end like this because it is much less believable than the ending we tell our children (but talking bears are somehow believable?) And maybe if the world’s greatest scientists met to plug the leak, they would have already solved the difficult problem at the bottom of the gulf.

But witness the power of the word ‘because’.

It’s the difference between “I deserve a 5% increase in my salary” and “I deserve a 5% increase in my salary, because that would bring my compensation in line with what people with my qualifications earn with my responsibilities.”

When it comes to asking for a raise, we are all salespeople. And the power of ‘because’ works like a charm when people

1. Are looking for an excuse to help you. In a now famous research study, Ellen Langer and her colleagues asked the Harvard librarian to turn off all but one of the Xerox machines. They then instructed a student to try and cut to the front of the line that formed in front of the one Xerox machine that remained operational. When the student asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?” Their fellow students granted their request 60% of the time.But they were able to cut in line 93% of the time when they said “Excuse me, I have 5 pages, may I use the Xerox machine because I have to make copies”. Here ‘because’ is powerful enough to work even when the justification is utterly stupid. Of course they have to make copies. That’s why they wanted to use the photocopier. Consistent with Cialdini’s principle of liking, when it comes to favors, these students were just looking for a reason to help each other. Even when the justification was stupid.
2. Aren’t knowledgeable about your subject. According to MSNBC, the stock market is in a correction phase, because of uncertainties surrounding the Greek debt crisis. Most of us, including me, don’t fully understand the complexities of the world financial markets. But there are so many variables at play that a single factor, that we have known about for months now, is unlikely to be the single cause of this correction phase. Yet unless we take time to educate ourselves, we nod dutifully at this explanation when given reason to believe. At least I do.

But if I justify my requests at work, won’t they just use it as ammunition against me?

In other words, if I offer data to support my request for a raise, won’t they just cite examples to show how my case is different?

Maybe. Which is why the more sound your justification, the more likely you are to get what you want.

But don’t overestimate the knowledge and hostility of your audience. Rarely do we encounter man-eating bears with a thorough grasp of the English language.

Photo by Horia Varlan