Archive for Featured

Business Info Guide’s Interview with Entrepreneur, Rebecca Reynolds

June 27, 2012 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Leadership
This interview, focused on entrepreneurialism, was conducted by Stephanie Chandler, author and CEO of Business Info Guide, where it was originally published. I share it here to give Call to Contemplation readers some additional background on my perspective, and also as an entrée to the ongoing dialog about new lines being drawn in the business space. Or should I say, old lines (like those between for profit, nonprofit, and government sectors; employee/employer; doing good/making profit, etc.) being blurred or erased. It is republished here with permission.

What does your company do?
RRC is a management consulting firm specializing in leadership development and organizational transformation. We use clients’ current projects as the applied learning environment to develop their leadership mastery and achieve superior results. Client achievements range from buildings built, watersheds cleared, and balance sheets balanced, to forests renewed, homeless sheltered, performances sold out, refugees protected…and so much more.

Was there a specific turning point when you realized your business was moving to the next level?

Over 20 years, my business has up-leveled several times. The cycle of my firm’s growth and expansion parallel my own readiness to stretch, and each cycle has been prompted by a desire to broaden the reach and application of my expertise.

For example, I first started RRC as an outgrowth of my executive leadership roles in nonprofit organizations. At that time, I realized I was a change agent and that striking out on my own would enable me to apply my skills to a wider range of situations. Then, after nearly 10 years consulting with hundreds of nonprofits, I felt ready to apply my capabilities to a broader arena – RRC immediately started getting clients in the public sector and began our focus on multi-stakeholder collaborations and executive leadership development there. Now, 10 years later, we are moving into the international arena. So, our growth is a consequence of my evolution, in tandem with the opportunities of our changing environment.

What processes or procedures have you implemented that have helped grow your company?
There have been two very significant processes that have supported RRC’s growth – one more obvious and one perhaps less.

First, we strive to systematize everything we do – my team’s vernacular includes “maintenance” versus “development” efforts. Whatever is maintenance, we codify as standard process (SOP) in our team handbook and in RRC’s policy/procedures manual. This serves as our foundation. Then when we move into development – e.g., creating our social media strategy, we are much more attentive to exploring and validating what works and what doesn’t before we identify SOP. We do a lot of innovation and creating at RRC, so this clarity helps everyone know what mode we’re in!

The second, perhaps less obvious process is the use of collaboration tools. We teach collaboration to our clients, so we must excel at it ourselves. We have worked with most of the basic tools out there (Central Desktop, SharePoint) and continually push the boundaries of how we use them, both internally and with our clients.

What is most rewarding about running your business?
Bar none, it is experiencing people achieve much more than they ever imagined possible. To see someone – whether a client executive, a client group member, or an RRC team member – realize their heart’s desire is inspiring and energizing for me. I never tire of it.

What challenges have you faced and how have you overcome them?
My challenges generally fall into one category: dealing with my limitations. These may result from different causes: what I don’t know or am blind to, what I am afraid of, what I don’t think is possible. But ultimately, each are addressed the same way – by examining my thinking and making shifts. Over the years I have made it my practice to use RRC as my own learning environment. This mindset enables me to overcome any challenge since all challenges are simply my current curriculum for growth.

If you were starting over today, what would you do differently?
I would network more. Before the terms existed, I was a “solopreneur” and a social entrepreneur. A common trait of both is the “go it alone” mentality. I started RRC after just six years in the work world, which was possible because of that mentality. But what I didn’t know then was how much more was possible and faster by connecting with others with whom I share values and vision. Since I have opened to this, my business and my own growth have expanded exponentially.

What advice do you have for other business owners?
Document your business strategy and processes early. One of the defining characteristics of entrepreneurs is our unique ability in some area or other. Too often we take this ability for granted – since it’s easy for us, we assume it isn’t worth much. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The entrepreneur’s unique ability is the source of everything in their business. Documenting it means you can more easily replicate it, teach it and productize it. This can seem like tedious work, but the payoff is enormous.

Please list any favorite books, tools or resources (software, website, etc.) you would recommend for others:
Warren Bennis’ books on leadership.
James Gleick’s The Information – essential reading for understanding the role of technology and information today and its fascinating evolution.
Twitter: following broadly and using theme lists and Paperli.com enables me to tap into the global consciousness in a flash.
For my blogs, WordPress has been a terrific tool – both versions (.org and .com)

What is something that people might be surprised to learn about you?
I am a sports movie junkie. The irony is I don’t follow any professional sports, but a good sports movie (has there been a bad one?) enthralls me. The reason is simple: even though sports movies are formulaic, the formula of teams triumphing over adversity is what I live for. My favorites are Remember the Titans, Mystery Alaska, and now Moneyball.

Is there anything else you would like to add?
Entrepreneurial businesses are the way business is moving, so many more people of all ages, situations, and with every possible idea are getting into them. This is tremendously exciting for a variety of reasons: greater opportunity for personal satisfaction and purpose; further democratization of the economy; increased possibility for collaborations, partnership and joint ventures; and more flexible business models that are resilient to change – to name a few. I would encourage anyone with a passion to explore the entrepreneurial business model – but don’t think you have to go it alone or start from scratch. There are tremendous resources out there (the Business Info Guide being a terrific example), as well as myriad mastermind, networking and mentoring groups. This is a truly exciting time for small business entrepreneurship!

 

 

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South Africa: A Trip in the Making

December 15, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Leadership

This is Part I in a series on my experiences in South Africa.

I left for South Africa just three weeks ago, flying from Denver to Frankfurt to Cape Town for a three-week stay. The trip was the zenith of a ten-month journey into the subject of leadership, which I started as part of a sabbatical.

I’ve worked with leaders my entire career, partnering with them and their teams to solve big problems and achieve big goals. In the last few years, I’d noticed that many of the principles that are core to my work – strategic thinking and big vision, broad collaboration and innovative governance, and the idea that working toward the greater good can be profitable in ways a balance sheet can’t count – seem to be gaining traction in our increasingly complex and changing world. I set out on sabbatical, in part, to validate this impression.

The sabbatical would involve travel to a wide range of leadership enclaves: the World
Business Forum in New York, the Aspen Ideas Festival in the high mountains of Colorado and the Management of Change Conference in Washington DC. But I also hankered for an international component to add a global perspective to my study. Then, on a phone call a month or so into it, the invitation to South Africa was presented.

In that moment, South Africa sounded at the same time ideal and impossible. Ideal because it involved spending a week with world leaders exploring my very topic. Impossible because I had no previous experience of South Africa, no connections to it, and not even much of a desire to go – or at least, not at the time.

The invitation came from the Aspen Institute. It involved joining a group of fellows from the Institute’s global leadership network for a week’s exploration into leading in this age of globalization. An opportunity ideal for me, to which I said yes.

As the months passed, I went on the other trips and heard all kinds of people talking about leadership. Big names like Bill Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, media monarch Arianna Huffington, and many others less well known, but just as passionate and articulate. At each leadership forum, I’d mention South Africa, and from this, the trip began to plan itself. One person led to another and then more,
sprouting opportunities, ideas and connections that steadily grew into an itinerary.

The first week was spent with Aspen Institute in Stellenbosch, famed wine country known for its Mediterranean-like climate. The seminar was hosted by Spier, a wine farm and conference center with an ecological mission. In that spirit, Spier donates land to two conservation projects: a Cheetah protection effort and a Raptor Sanctuary.

During the seminar, we took time out for an excursion to Robben Island, where we toured the island and then the prison in which Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and many more anti-apartheid activists were incarcerated up until the early 1990s.

The second week I was in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg for meetings with prominent South African leaders, whom I interviewed about their road to leadership and their challenges as leaders today. Interspersed with these were various tours, through which I gained a deeper understanding of the rich history and culture of South Africa.

My travel consultant, Sandy Salle of Hills of Africa, provided exceptional tour experiences with guides who were the perfect combination of knowledgeable and personable. Visits to Table Mountain, Cape Point, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, the townships and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg were all memorable and meaningful.

The final week was for safari. Two different bush camps adjacent to Kruger National Park were the base for forays into the wild of wilds, to experience life at its most essential. In just five days, I saw, not only the big five, but many more species ranging in size from dung beetle to leopard to hippopotamus.

Careening down tawny dirt roads through brush as green as green can be, with intoxicating fragrance and the music of a thousand birds filling the air, I felt life’s magic bursting all around me.

And most magical of all was the reminder that, for all humans have accomplished, we are still children of the veld, so vast and mighty it dwarfs us with its presence. Now that’s a leadership lesson worth traveling half way round the world for.

 

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Secrets of a Fast Learner

October 12, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Leadership

One of my clients recently made a quantum leap in her thinking in under an hour. It was stunning.

That got me to thinking about what she did that enabled her to move so fast. You see, it had little to do with the issue (the content) she was dealing with, and everything to do with the way she went about addressing it (the process).

As I broke down each step of her process, I quickly realized that these steps are common to many of my most successful clients. In fact, they’re what you might call “the secrets of fast learners” – and the speed with which you are able to get through a problem, barrier or challenge is directly proportional to how quickly you do them. They are:

1. Get what you need.

2. Release emotional baggage.

3. Grasp the essence of the issue or lesson.

4. Integrate new information.

5. Apply it in real-time to a current situation.

6. Acknowledge your change.

7. Show gratitude for all the above.

In order to make each of these seven steps clear, let me first share a bit about my client’s situation so we can use it to illuminate how she applied each one.

The Story

The client, whom I’ll call Margaret, runs a pioneering small business she founded several years ago. She crossed my mind as I was driving home, prompting me to give her a call. The line was busy, so I hung up. Seconds later, my phone rang – it was Margaret. Turns out she’d been on a call with one of her team having a heated argument.

After a quick hello, Margaret immediately started telling me about it, her words tumbling fast from her mouth. Examples of how this person had a bad attitude and wasn’t doing a good job were punctuated by various self-recriminations. Margaret was clearly agitated, and each example of the staff person’s unwanted behavior only added to her upset.

After a bit, Margaret mentioned that the staff person had threatened to quit, to which I remarked what good fortune that was. Margaret stopped talking. A few seconds later she asked slowly, “Why is that good fortune?” I replied that it sounded like it was time to part ways, and it works out nicely when the person being let go offers to go instead. Margaret then explained that the person had said it in anger and would likely reconsider. I then asked her whose decision it was who worked for her. Again, quiet…and then, as if the answer slowly dawned on her, she said “mine.”

In that moment, Margaret shifted from complaining about the person’s behavior to realizing she had the opportunity to work on a core leadership issue: how to effectively manage a team - one of the key aspects of which is knowing when to let someone go.

The moment Margaret’s frame changed, she was able to see clearly that it was past time to let the person go. With this clarity, she began working through the issues of making it happen. Margaret walked into the future, imagining how she would inform the person, what the next few weeks would be like without the person’s help, and what potential consequences there might be.

The possible backlash is what got her. So, we surveyed Margaret’s concerns about the person’s ability to sabotage, and she soon saw these were fears more about her own insecurities. We worked a bit on those, and she decided that the possible negativity the person might stir up was trivial compared to the energy drain that resulted from keeping the person on the team.

About 30 minutes later, Margaret’s tone had returned to normal, her breath came easily, and she was laughing. She hung up to go take care of the matter.

The Fast Learner Steps

Now let’s look at each step Margaret used to enable her to shift from a resource-less state to a capable one, getting to the heart of the issue, in remarkable time.

1. Get what you need: fast learners don’t sit around stewing over things. Instead, they’re proactive about getting help in learning about it, solving it, or delegating it. They notice problems as opportunities for learning and then bring the learning in, by asking for it, manifesting it, noticing it when it shows up – no matter what form the learning takes.

Margaret knew that she wasn’t at her best on the call and immediately reached out for help; she brought the issue right out, right away.

2. Release emotional baggage: fast learners recognize when their own familiar patterns and stories bring only pain and suffering, and willingly let them go to open space for new experiences and the feeling of curiosity intrinsic to learning.

Margaret didn’t continue venting her emotions about the person and the call, which only caused her more discomfort, but instead noticed how this was a situation she was ready to change.

3. Grasp the essence of the issue or lesson: fast learners watch and listen for key information that helps them with their situation – these “nuggets” stand out for them because they ring true. When they get a nugget, they ask questions to further their understanding, knowing that the nugget holds the gold of new learning.

Margaret heard the words “good fortune” for what they were: a non sequitur to get her attention. She stopped telling her story about the employee to ask what they meant, and then continued to ask questions to get to the heart of her issue.

4. Integrate the new information: fast learners are open to new ways of thinking about something, to new language and metaphors, and begin to explore the new thinking, turning it in their minds using their own analogies and examples as the way to make it their own.

Margaret listened to the idea of the person quitting as good fortune and found the metaphor for herself: her opportunity to learn and to meet the challenge of taking charge of her team. This was indeed her good fortune since it is something she desires to master so she can grow her organization to match her vision.

5. Apply it in real time to a current situation: fast learners put new information into immediate practice in a real situation so that it becomes part of them as quickly as possible. They do this first by using their imagination to “see” how it will go, trying different approaches to find what’s best, and identifying any additional issues to address before acting. Then they act on the new learning, and from this, are able to validate it and internalize it.

Margaret explored the different ways she could let the person go, as well as the consequences of this action. She anticipated issues that could potentially cause her more problems in the future (risk management) and used that information to guide the development of her solution.

6. Acknowledge your change: fast learners acknowledge themselves for the learning accomplished, rather than giving all the credit to something or someone else and becoming dependent on that.

After we hung up, Margaret wrote the email accepting the team member’s resignation. She then wrote me an email reporting her action, including how she felt after doing it. I didn’t suggest this; Margaret did it for herself. Putting accomplishment in writing, especially to someone you have asked to hold you accountable, concretizes it and makes it yours.

7. Show gratitude for all of the above: fast learners are sincere in their gratitude for the ability to transform problems into learning so that it becomes an easy way of life that they can share with others. Gratitude makes a thing precious.

Margaret not only thanked me on our call, but also wrote a testimonial of what she’d learned and how, expressing her appreciation for the process that helped her move out of useless story and into enlivening learning and action. Again, putting this in writing serves to make the experience more real. She created her own diploma.

The Sum Up

This process, when mastered, results in quickly transforming a perceived problem into an opportunity for learning – out of which comes effective action. Think about it: how much time are you wasting getting to your own greatness by stumbling on one or more of the Fast Learner’s seven steps?

Remember, life will always (thank goodness) throw us curve balls, put up apparent barriers, and give us challenges. It’s our job to learn from them, and the faster we do so, the greater our capacity for learning and for achieving great things. The slower we learn, the more our life will feel like it’s stuck in a rut. And, as Ellen Glasgow so pithily wrote, the only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.

 

 

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Give Me Relevance or Give Me Death

June 17, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

Lately, I’ve had a few conversations with people whose organizations are going through a not uncommon, but often painful and sometimes even terminal, phenomenon: questioning their relevance, their place in the world.

Even as I type those words they feel heavy. There is weight to the idea that a thing, once useful and full of life and purpose, is now struggling. The warning signs are clear: fewer dollars, programs that aren’t working, staff attrition and low morale, confusion over mission and leadership apathy. Look around. Things may even look dreary: piles of boxes and papers strewn about, too much furniture crowding the space, faded posters hanging askew.

The weight may have to do with grief over the loss of something once great; it may be about the lack of energy to face the situation; it may be because this time in organizations is metaphorical for something we also experience as individuals.

Think of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play. It epitomizes the sheer torture of what losing relevance, one’s place in life can mean. It is one of the most brutal plays I know, and everyone should see it. Once. For my part, I will never, ever see it again because I am too afraid I’ll jump up on stage and shake the living daylights out of Willy Loman. Yell at him to wake up, to get him to see that he has choices, and they are way beyond what he has known. Poor Willy. There weren’t any coaches or transition consultants in his day.

Enter the good news: today we know that the phenomenon of declining relevance is part of a natural cycle, like the seasons. All living things, including people and organizations – for profit, nonprofit, and governments - traverse through stages in life. These stages of growth, maturity, harvest and repose may take place over different time spans (months, years, even eons – remember the dinosaurs?), but they are inevitable. And seasoned leaders are seasoned because they have learned to watch for the symptoms, the harbingers of each, and to act in accord.

Without such seasoned leadership, the first of these stages is usually the most uncomfortable in an organization. Each stage comes as a surprise, throwing people into a reactive mode rather than a responsive one. On one end of the cycle are start-ups. Many more start-ups fail than make it because the people running the start-up fail to recognize and anticipate the symptoms, have no plan for addressing them, and otherwise are as spring green as their organizations are.

On the other end of the seasonal spectrum, an organization (or an industry, a sector or even a nation) that’s been around for a substantial amount of time and achieved relative success, even major success, may begin to experience signs of decline. If this is the first time this has happened, leadership is often confused by what’s going on and may or may not even be willing to name it. The more seasoned leaders utter the word “relevance.” The bold ones look it square in the eye and start getting creative (Steve Jobs is the stunning example of this kind of bold creativity at work).

Relevance is a great word. It stands for currency in the world. Does the organization do something, make something, serve something that is currently recognized and needed? Does it do this in a way that people respond to, that works now? Relevance is not about resting on our laurels. We once could have been the greatest thing since sliced bread (or Polaroid or Blockbuster), but now is what counts.

The key to relevance is knowing that it is all about currency, all about the NOW. And for this reason, everything, every organization has a shelf life. The question then becomes, how do we recognize the signs before we are obsolete? And what will we decide to do when those signs are in our sights?

How do we recognize the signs? Should we wait until the catastrophic ones like apathy, attrition and bankruptcy are looming? Of course not. The best way to see the signs is to develop a regular process for taking a look, for assessing institutional viability in the marketplace. Most organizations do this to some degree. Combine this with a regular process for looking out into the world, to watch for shifting trends that may affect your business, and now leadership can effectively maintain a course for continued relevance.

Then, when the signs are in our sights, what are we willing to do? Is leadership willing to act on the signs, swiftly and decisively? Are they willing to do what it takes, to reinvent the organization, if called for? This could mean shutting down a major part of the business or opening a new one on the other side of town or the other side of the world. It might mean giving away a whole line of products to ensure the continued vibrancy of the core business. (Sound familiar? Google does this.) It might even mean shutting things down altogether. If relevance is so threatened, is it better to choose death or to go down by increments, painfully, publicly, perhaps even infamously? (Circuit City comes to mind.)

I suggest choosing death, remembering that death too, is part of the cycle. Willy Loman killed himself, and maybe, in the end, it was his best choice. I like to think that, with a little (ok, a lot) of coaching and perhaps some skills development, Willy could have reinvented himself. But unlike Willy, in the case of organizations, even death isn’t final. It can result in rebirth, in a new beginning toward relevance, even greatness.

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Memorial Lessons

March 31, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Facilitation, Featured, History, Leadership

How often do we reflect on memory? Surely, we think about it when it fails us. We may damn it when we lose our keys or forget someone’s name, or dread it in the case of Alzheimer’s, robbing mind of memory as bleach leaches color from cloth. We may also think about memory when our memories disagree with each other, in conflict over whether this happened or that. But how many times have we asked ourselves what is memory? Of what and how is it made? What is the difference between “good memory” and “bad?” And what of the role of memory, both for the individual and for a group – family, community, society?

Whether we think about it or not, memory is one of the key pillars of existence, of identity; one could even say, “I remember, therefore I am.” And this holds not only for the individual, but also for the collective, for society. What we choose to remember and then to memorialize is as much a commentary on who we are as anything. This act of memorializing - the act of canonizing memory – is exactly what concerns Dr. James Young.

La Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation, France (1962)

Recently, I heard Dr. Young speak at the annual Fred Marcus Memorial Holocaust Lecture in Denver, which is itself a tribute to the memory of a remarkable man and Holocaust survivor. Young, a professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, is an expert on Holocaust memorialization and memorials, and memory in general. The theme of Young’s talk was trends in memorials since World War II, and he traced the lineage of the 9/11 memorial (Young served on the jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition) back through a wide range of them, starting with Georges-Henri Pingusson’s stark monument to the French deportees under the Nazi occupation.

What’s remarkable about Pingusson’s memorial is that, unlike the usual larger-than-life edifices towering overhead, his design descends into the earth, an open pit below ground, a kind of grave from which to contemplate loss. According to Young, this monument was a bellwether of future memorials, influencing many, not only those about the Holocaust, but others such as Maya Lin’s design for the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, DC (it too slopes down into the landscape, and adds the symbolism of one’s reflection in its polished black granite) and now, the one under construction commemorating 9/11 (the footprint of both towers will be negative space, reminding us of where they once stood). Young talked about the idea of memorials as places that open up the remembering in each of us, instead of remembering for us. What he meant was that we each have different memories and ways of remembering, and these are often quite personal. He described a memorial’s job as being like that of a witness: standing for the memory, but not supplanting it, rather than bestowing memory, providing a space for memory to emerge.

World Trade Center Memorial (Model)

That got me to thinking about other human processes that, like remembering, are best facilitated, not taught. And I likened those architects and artists of memorials to others who take the care to figure out how to facilitate experience – how to support the ones doing to do it for themselves. To learn, to remember, to create, to release, to build muscle, to reason, to experience in all the infinitely varied ways humans do requires a carefully constructed space for all experience to be okay, to be both acceptable and accepted. To thoughtfully provide such a space – whether physical or intellectual or both - is, in my mind, the highest form of service, the highest form of teaching, the highest form of leadership.

Coaches, parents, teachers, therapists, all when at their best, facilitate experience for those they serve. And it takes considerable time and attention to do this well, which is often completely invisible to those who benefit. Who realized just how much deliberation, angst, trial and error, even sacrifice there is behind the memorials we have visited? How much thought went into each stone, each word, each placement of living thing? All designed to help us make meaning for ourselves of a collective memory, and perhaps also a personal one. I find this so magnanimous, so full of humanity, so awe-inspiring – and I feel a particular debt to Pingusson, for his innovation on what a memorial can and should be that has illuminated this concept ever after for all who follow.

And it reminds me that it is just this humanity, this compassion that is behind all the greatness, all the lasting innovation we ever experience. It is this quality of attention and care for others that separates those who are serving from those being served. Let us make a monument to that.

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Strategic Planning: A State of Mind

March 25, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Featured, Leadership, Technology

“Leading isn’t doing. Leading is thinking.”

The pace of change in our world is much more rapid than it was a decade ago, and with the influence of technology that makes access to information constant and infinite, combined with the human thirst for knowledge and the new, this pace is not likely to slow in the next ten. In response to this, I am hearing more and more about the need for true leaders, for those who can think strategically and critically, who can develop innovative and creative solutions, and who can maneuver with alacrity. And I agree.

And yet the capacity for strategic thinking seems to be rapidly dying, if not dead already. Thinking beyond the moment is apparently too difficult, too boring, or too old-fashioned. Somehow, being reactive is in vogue. I think about this a lot. The great teachers all preach being in the moment, that there really is nothing else but the present, the here and now. And oddly enough technology seems to line us up well with this credo. The cell phone rings; it is picked up. The email comes in; it is opened. The tweet is posted; it is read. The text appears; it is answered. We are in the moment, responding to each cling and clang of whatever electronic device we are hooked to. And it is as if this constant exercise of responding has spilled over into all areas of work. We race from meeting to meeting, making lists of things to do, arguing over this tactic or that, and struggling hard to check some of them off so we can feel like we are getting something done. But is this what the teachers meant? I think not.

And for leadership, this reactive drive is disastrous. The very meaning of leader, in my mind, is synonymous with vision. Afterall, who wants to be led by someone who is wandering around, or worse still, running in place? Leaders have followers because they are headed somewhere exciting, compelling, somewhere we are not now. And the big leaders ought to be taking us into the future. Into the future, brightly. They ought to be shaping the future with big ideas, big connections, big innovations. What we are getting instead is mostly management.

There’s nothing wrong with management, except when it stands in for leadership. Simply put, managers maintain, leaders innovate. I dare say, we need innovation now.

So what’s the answer? Strategic planning, believe it or not.

Strategic planning was all the rage a while back, but evidently, at some point, people wearied of vision and mission statements. After all, they didn’t seem to work, right? You spent a day writing up a cool vision or mission (and no one really knew the difference), it would get posted in the break room, and things would swiftly go back to normal. Strategic planning became a lackluster, go-through-the-motions exercise, so leadership stopped even trying.

But all strategic planning was ever meant to be was a practice, a discipline, a rigor to remember to think beyond today. Strategic planning was the time out for reflection from the daily distractions, when everyone was allowed to dream, to reach for the impossible, and to develop the steps together to get there. It was a time to flex the muscle of thinking big (being visionary), out of the box (innovating), and getting full buy-in (collaboration). The reason this fell out of fashion had something to do with it not working, but underneath that was the real cause: people not really knowing how to do it. After all, an organization’s ability to recognize the harbingers of change and stay abreast of the change curve is a highly evolved skill - one that often means the difference between average performance and brilliance.

It’s time to reclaim strategic planning as a vital leadership capability. And it is past time to make strategic planning much more than a day or two off-site to write a tag line. It is time to remember what strategic planning was always about in the first place: leaders leading. What else is there on the leadership front than convening a group of diverse thinkers to look out into the world and make sense of it? Make sense of what’s on the horizon. Look squarely in the face of what looks threatening, and reframe it into an outrageous opportunity. More than just a day or two’s dabble, this is the work of leadership every single day.

Instead of the common complaints about strategic planning - that people spend way too much time doing it (I really doubt this); it doesn’t result in anything; and not nearly enough time is spent on getting the real work done, I would cast it more like:

  • people spend not nearly enough time being strategic,
  • the time that is spent is wasted for lack of good process on how to do it,
  • and lots gets done (busy-ness), but has very little real impact.

So how does this get solved? First, being strategic is not an exercise; it’s a state of mind. It is just dandy to take time away once a year, or once a quarter, to rev the engines by going somewhere new, having an engaging speaker to prime the pump, and using a facilitator to open up the process. But this is just the icing on the cake. Real strategic planning takes place every day, in every meeting, in each conversation. To think strategic planning is ever done, or that anyone is spending too much time on it is ridiculous, especially now when the pace of change dictates that a long-range plan must be, by necessity, both six months (to keep up with change) and 100 years (to keep an eye on the effect we are having) out.

Second, if you don’t know how to be strategic, learn. There is not a human being on the planet who will not be served by learning the difference between strategic and tactical, since this difference applies in every context no matter how high up or on the ground the person is. To prove it, I heard about a Libyan man who had made the decision 25 years ago to continue studying English after Gaddafi banned foreign language instruction in schools. He told Jason Beaubien, NPR reporter, who was aided by this man on a recent trip to Tobruk, that he kept studying English on his own in preparation for this day – the day when he would have the opportunity to tell his story to the world. This simple man made a very strategic decision based on his long view of the future. And it paid off.

So, there is absolutely zero excuse for any person in a leadership position to say “Well, I’m just not strategic.” (By the way, this is a direct quote from the opening remarks of the leader of a client I was hired to assist with strategic planning some years ago.)  The response to this should be: “You’re demoted until you can learn.” We need our people, but especially our leaders, to be able to flip between the strategic and tactical all day long. We need this precisely because the tendency to the tactical has reached epidemic proportions in this age of instant technology.  And the tactical just becomes busy-ness without the bigger view to inform it.

Finally, busy is a poor stand-in for results. We need all the activity of our workers to have an impact. To make this so, leaders must do their job. Their job is to convene and get to the decisions that then empower their people to do the work. I have never met a human being who cannot be motivated by a clear task, fully within their capability, connected to a desired outcome. If your people are not motivated or producing, one of these things is the problem. And the root of that problem is usually leaders not doing their job. Leading isn’t doing. Leading is thinking. Deep strategic thinking that sets the direction and then checks to see if we’re getting there.

So let’s stop responding to every bleat of our tech gear, every blip of information across our screen, and let’s get back to strategic planning. Better yet, to being strategic, to thinking strategically. If we start looking out regularly to the horizon’s edge and beyond, if we gather and look, we might be surprised at just how amazing what we come up with can be.

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Leadership in Crisis

March 17, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Featured, Leadership

I wrote this blog a few weeks ago, before the recent natural disaster in Japan. This event has added greater significance to the context in which to read it. For a post script on this, see below.

I went to hear a talk on leadership the other night. I love the subject of leadership. It has intrigued me since I was a child. Who gets to make decisions? Who do others follow and why? Is it a matter of popularity? Smarts? Good looks? I have pondered, written about, and worked with leaders and leadership issues my entire career, so when I get a chance to hear someone speak about it, I go.

The thing is, this talk reminded me of so many others on leadership. At the outset, the audience was asked to consider the attributes of a leader. Right off the bat I felt a bit deflated. This question has been asked and answered to death – just look at the more than 800 books dealing with it on Amazon. But, I told myself to be patient, give the guy a chance, and wrote my list. It wasn’t that far off from what various audience members replied when called upon by the speaker. Integrity was first. Then came vision, and a plan of action. Communication – both expressing and listening. Strength of character. All good – the usual suspects. To that list I added what I had written first: compassion. I saw it sitting at the top of my list, and I asked myself, do all leaders really need compassion? But we’ll get to that…

My musings were interrupted by the speaker offering examples of great leaders who demonstrated the group’s identified characteristics. He started with Lincoln and his trials during the Civil War. And from Lincoln, the speaker moved to a discussion of Appomattox and the leadership displayed there by General Joshua Chamberlain. From the battlefield, he transitioned to the October 2010 mining accident in Chile, where he asked the group to consider what their first actions would have been after having arrived on that scene. The story the speaker wove was compelling and dramatic: time was of the essence, the 33 miners’ lives were at stake and every moment was one more nail in their coffins. From the mining accident, the speaker discussed wildland fire fighting, citing the US Forest Service’s Incident Command System as one of the best for dealing with leadership in emergency situations. And there it was: my patience worn thin from one crisis situation after another used to amplify what it takes to be a great leader.

Now, there is no question that leadership in crisis situations is important and, in extremely time intensive circumstances, where lives are on the line, we all want leaders who are at their best. And it is those leaders and the governance process they command that is often the difference between a desired result and disaster. But my point is, if we are in crisis, hasn’t leadership to some extent already failed?

I know this may seem like an almost blasphemous kind of question, and I also know that sometimes, life does just happen and the unexpected takes us all by surprise, even when we think we are well-prepared. But, I do believe that leadership is first and foremost about preventing crisis - the disastrously unexpected, and this is accomplished by being strategic. And by “strategic” I mean looking out into the future for the possibilities of what might occur and being prepared. Planning for how risk will be minimized and how opportunity will be leveraged. This exercise of looking out beyond where we are is one of the most important qualities of a great leader. Think about it. Every game-changing leader there has ever been was someone who saw something, had a vision of something that did not yet exist, that may even have looked impossible. That vision can be of something to be strived for or something to be averted, but vision is what all leaders have, without exception. Without vision, a leader is really a manager, and in the event of a crisis, a crisis management expert. And that may be exactly what is needed, but I would like the general discussion of leadership to get beyond crisis situations that, hopefully, are the exception and not the rule.

Leadership in crisis, or great crisis management, is the stuff of mythology. The ones who take charge are our heroes. We love to tell the battle stories of their accomplishment because they are exhilarating. The decisions, the moments of deliberation, the pressures all make for great theatre. We celebrate the leaders who save the day, who narrowly escape disaster, and who do so at great sacrifice, sometimes even die for it. But what of those leaders who have a vision of something far off on the horizon – something few people see, who strive to bring people together for a common purpose, who maintain momentum over months and years, and who arrive at an innovative solution that the group fully owns? Is this kind of leadership festooned in glory, written and sung about, lauded as heroic, feted with a ticker tape parade? Not often.

As Lao Tse said: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” And this may be exactly why true leadership is most often anonymous. True leadership dies a healthy death under the rubble of the followers dancing with glee over their own triumph. A true leader teaches only common sense, for that is what prescience becomes when it is recognized by many.

So, how do we teach something so invisible? How do we encourage this kind of leadership when it brings no promise of fame or glory?  How do we celebrate what this leadership accomplishes when so often its greatest achievement is something awful, that few saw coming, prevented? These are tricky questions. But at the root, I believe, is the notion of service. Service to the common good, rather than to the self.  And that is where I think many of our leadership conversations, classes, programs, bootcamps, and workshops are failing us. They are busy teaching about glorified leadership, the glory of being the individual leader, the star, the hero. While that is certainly a part of getting there, this curriculum is not reaching high enough.

I remember a client once asking, when he’d achieved the position of chairman of the board, “So does this mean I finally get to have my way?” I looked at him and replied, “Nope.” “Well, when will that be?” I looked at him kindly and said, ”That would be never. Your job is to lead the group to find and have their way.”  This is what Lao Tse was getting at: the leader is BEST (in other words, the ultimate mastery of leadership) when in service to those being led, whose reward is their arrival at a destination they learned first to dream of and then to achieve. And that brings me back to that first quality on my list of leadership attributes: compassion.

What I meant when I wrote “compassion” was care for others, for the greater good, for the big future. This compassion balances the ego that is so vital to a great leader. The ego is what much of our leadership talk and teaching seems to appeal to: the lead dog gets the best view, and all that. And the ego is extremely important to leadership. To stand up for what is right, to describe what others are not seeing, to question the status quo, to throw off the blinders of habit – this takes the fortitude from which ego is made. But compassion tempers the drive, the charisma, the force of the ego, and makes the true leader a most powerful engine for good. And it is compassion that enables the leader to stand down, when it is time, and to cheer from the sidelines before turning quietly away to the next thing.

Will everyone achieve this selfless service? Doubtful. Should our leadership institutions and gurus teach it, talk about it, even model it? Absolutely.

PS: In light of the Japan earthquake and its aftermath, some comment is warranted about how to view that situation in the context of this blog. Japan is recognized as one of the best prepared countries in the world for disaster response, which came as a strategic decision following a series of earthquakes (1923 Tokyo, for example) and Hiroshima. The earthquake last week is a poignant example of how even extraordinary preparation can be thwarted by the unexpected, calling for exemplary crisis management capability. This cannot be overemphasized. At the same time, there are important lessons about strategic leadership in other areas to consider. For example, site placement of nuclear power facilities is exactly the type of decision that requires a long view and consideration of a broad range of complex issues and perspectives. Hopefully, this tragic event will serve to inform future such decisions throughout the world.

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