Ten Mistakes Inexperienced Youngleaders Make

I read these somewhere and have them in an old notebook I dug up. If anyone has the cite please let me know!

1. Taking a rigid top down attitude - This is a biggie... how many times have we heard people say "I'm in charge..." even though we know other members of the team or organization are either really doing all of work or could do a much better job. Youngleaders need to quickly realize that a leader's power comes from his or her team/followers. Quite often they are the experts in their fields. Take the time to listen!
   
2. Putting paperwork before peoplework - This is another big one. "It can't be done that way... We NEED to do it this way..." Get these ideas out of your brain. Paperwork, and "formal" procedures for doing anything can usually be circumvented or done another way. Realize that jumping through hoops and cutting through red-tape can be frustrating for people. Cut your team some slack and be flexible. Remember that people always come first!
   
3. Not providing their teams with affirmations - See the One Minute Manager. You need to let your people know when they are doing a good job (or need improvement). It only needs to take a minute!
   
4. Leaving no room for mavericks - Sometimes you gotta just be a little crazy, bend (or break) the rules. Give everyone a fair chance to speak their ideas. No matter how crazy they may seem at first. Seriously, how crazy would the Internet seem to people in the 1950's?
   
5. Having a dictatorship in decision making - Your team members will usually perform better when allowed to make some of their own decisions. You really don't have to hover over their shoulders and make sure they are following the format that YOU think is the most efficient for writing emails to their grandmothers ^_^.
   
6. Dirty Delegation - Just Let Go!! If you've delegated a task, and assigned a firm due date (important!), let your team complete it according to their best judgment. Trust them, unless there is a good reason not to.
   
7. Communication chaos - Tangles of emails, voicemails, memos (who sends those anymore), and water cooler "meetings" just don't cut it. Have a standard method of gathering and dispersing information to/from your team. This could take the form of a standing staff meeting, a daily/weekly/monthly update email, or even some fancy shmancy collaboration website like Basecamp or Microsoft Sharepoint.
   
8. Missing the clues of corporate culture - Generalize this to the culture of any organization. To put simply you can't "beat the system". You can change it... slowly. Take your time and understand what makes the people in the system tick, then you can win.
   
9. Success without successors - This is one of the keys to Level 5 Leadership. Think about the future. When you move up or move on, you will need a capable successor.
   
10. Failure to focus on the future - All too often we are caught up in our daily firefighting, that we don't focus on the future. If you don't know where you want to go, you're not going to get anywhere.
    

I hope you all have a Happy New Year! Please keep reading the Youngleader blog in 2007, I have lots of things in store!!

-Jason

Be a Mentor

Just go and do it. Be a mentor. It's that simple!...

Ok, ok, maybe it's not that simple, but being a mentor is one of the best leadership building activities EVER. Think about it for a second. You're a Young leader with tons of ambition, ready to take on the world... But you want a little direction; you want to see some of the pitfalls that lie ahead; you want to know the best ways to achieve your goals quickly. How do you get this information?

The short answer is, it's not Google or the internet (those these can help... some). No the best answer is from a mentor, someone who has already gone through what you're going through. Now, now, don't go about conjuring up images of wizened old men with long white beards. Mentors come in all shapes and sizes, and there are plenty of mentoring opportunities for Young Leaders.

Supposed you're in college. Then, you probably know tons of high school students who want advice on what classes to take, colleges to look at, good after school jobs, and etc... But then maybe you're still in high school. Well there are plenty of middle and elementary school kids who could use a "big brother" or "big sister" to show them the value of education or help them resist negative peer pressure. To put it simply, no matter what stage of life you are in, there is always someone who would like to learn about your experiences, and I'm sure there are times in your life where you felt the same way.

Being a mentor is also an amazing feeling. Not only will you feel good because you are helping someone else along in their careers or lives, you will never forget the appreciation and respect that your mentees will show you.

Even more, as a Young Leader and a mentor, you will also be able to practice your leadership skills, by listening to what they want and helping them to shape their own personal vision and setting the goals that they need to achieve it.

So the take away is to go and be a mentor! Just remember not to just go up to a school and tell a teacher, "I want to mentor some of your kids for a few hours." People will think you're some kind of weirdo. :-) Start simple. There are probably younger people in your own family that already look up to you for advice and guidance. If not, reach out to your network of extended family and friends. Finally, remember that being a mentor isn't about "being older" or "wiser" it just means sharing your experiences with those who want to listen.

Comments are well appreciated. Leave your stories about being a mentor / having a mentor!

-Jason

Good To Great

I find many business books on leadership to be filled with a lot of fluff. Usually, they just rehash the buzzwords of the day and usually characterize leadership some sort of magical "charisma" to coerce or fool people into doing what you want. Good To Great by Jim Collins is not one of those books.

First off, Good to Great, was the result of two years of intense research by Collins' group of 21 researchers on what made a "great" company, and how a company went from just being profitable in the short term (good) to being "great", with examples of Kimberly Clark, Walgreens, Nucor...

Collins makes a number of key points:

1. Great companies have "Level 5 Leadership" (more on this later)
2. Great companies think about getting the right people before finding the right vision
3. Great companies are able to "confront the brutal facts" (not sugar coating weaknesses or faults in order to solve them)
4. Great companies know their strengths and follow the law of constant renewal
5. Great companies foster a culture of discipline
6. Great companies realize that technology is only an accelerator, a means to a greater end
7. Great companies build momentum by reinforcing their consistent efforts with success.

I'll spend this post talking a little bit more on what Collins calls "Level 5 Leadership".

Essentially Collins describes 5 levels of leadership:
Level 1: Highly capable individual
Level 2: Contributing team member
Level 3: Competent manager
Level 4: Effective Leader
Level 5: "Executive Leader"

Most of the levels are pretty self explanatory, except you might ask "What is the difference between Level 4 and 5?" According to Collins, "Level 5 leaders channel their ego away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company." They show personal humility and they never stop trying.

The problem with Level 4 leaders is that they are often wrapped up in themselves. They are "effective leaders" in a very strict sense of the term. They are able to motivate others to achieve, however because of this they often take on a "larger than life" or "rockstar" persona. We often see these types of "rockstar" CEO's flaunting their 9 figure salaries as they are surrounded by reporters from business magazines who proclaim him or her as a "genius". While they very well might be a genius, it doesn't set a very good example for the developing Young Leader.

First of all circumstances are completely different for each individual. What might work for one leader at one organization probably won't work completely at another. Secondly, a lot of Level 4 leadership success has to do with luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right people. A "great" organization needs more than just one genius leader... because no matter how long he or she stays in control, one day successor will be needed and without the proper culture, chance has it that another "genius" leader will not be the one taking the helm.

However, Level 5 leaders often breed more more Level 5 leaders. As such they will spend the time to cultivate successors who will have the discipline to keep the organization "great". This makes all the difference.

So check out Good to Great! It's definitely worth it.

-Jason

Integrity

We've all heard about "integrity". I actually, think we probably hear "too much" about integrity. We are told to "live with integrity". Many schools (especially in business in the wake of the Enron scandal) require students to promise that they will "hold themselves to the highest standards of integrity". Students are left to the conclusion that this probably means "don't do bad stuff" (cheating, plagiarism, and etc...)

Quite often though, in a display of extremely poor leadership, some smart-ass will point out that integrity is the property of "oneness", and that as long as you believe it is morally acceptable to lie, cheat and steal, you can still have rock solid integrity.

This kind of thinking is not only immature, but also potentially dangerous. Can you imagine the world that we might live in? Leaders claiming to be examples of integrity truly believing that as long as their actions aligned with their own twisted moral code (and that they wouldn't get caught), that they could get away with anything? It's not exactly the kind of place I want to live in either.

Though I do agree that integrity does in fact mean the property of "oneness", I take this in a much broader, and I believe 'truer' sense. I take integrity to mean something more like "the oneness of expectations and behaviors". This leads to something more along the lines of the "Golden Rule". No, not "the ones who have the gold make the rules", but "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

This is a simple yet powerful message that Young Leaders need to take to heart. If you have the reputation of having integrity of expectations and behavior, others will take notice. People will want to work for you, knowing that you will treat them fairly, and others will learn to treat you fairly, knowing that you expect to be treated as such.

So when was the last time you aligned yourself to your moral compass? Maybe it's about time to think about what you value in a leader (and in just a person) and to try to live up to that standard. And as always thanks for reading!

-Jason

Good Search

OK this post isn't exactly about leadership... but one thing Young Leaders must realize is that leadership takes practice. And one place where people are just dying to give Young Leaders this badly needed practice and experience is in the realm of community service! I was involved with the Penn State Dance Marathon (THON - The world's largest student run philanthropy, raising over $4 million to conquer childhood cancer in 2005.) as a technology captain, and got a unique perspective at the corporate-like organization of THON as well as seeing many examples of "Young Leaders gone bad".

OK, but the point of this post was about Good Search. Good Search is a search engine, powered by Yahoo! with a twist. 50% of all of their ad revenue goes to the charity of choice of their searchers (I have mine as THON). So check it out and get involved, and as always keep reading!!

-Jason

Time Management (II)

You might have heard of the Cult of Getting Things Done (GTD). No the people in this "cult" don't put on Nike sneakers and drink spiked Kool-ade at midnight in the hopes of being taken on some magical alien spaceship ride. Instead they are obsessed with productivity and with David Allen's wildly popular book Getting Things Done.

Smart Young Leaders typically do already have some sort of grasp of Time Management. However, most of the time this depends on our own mental prowess. We have an innate knack at keeping our every growing lists of projects, to-do's, due dates in our heads. But we all have a limit, and when people are pushed past their limits... we will get frustrated.

So how do we fix this? In its essence Getting Things Done aims at clearing your "mental RAM" by #1 Capturing all the things that need to be done and #2 Having the discipline to do them. Yes it sounds easy... but in practice we all know it's easier said than done. If you can commit to mastering Allen's workflow, your productivity can shoot through the roof.

So let me break this workflow down for you:

1. The first step in getting your life organized is collect all your "stuff". Allen recommends some sort of "inbox" where you will put anything new that you want to look at.
2. Next you need to process this stuff, i.e., Ask yourself, "Is this item actionable?"
If not, "Is it trash? Is this something I might want to think about for later? Do I want to keep this as a reference?"
If yes, decide the very next action you need to do to move forward on that task. If you can do that action in 2 minutes or less JUST DO IT! (Nike please don't sue me ^_^). If not, "Is it something you need to delegate to another person? Do you need to put it on your calendar for a later time? Should you put it on your list of actions that must be done as soon as possible?"
3. Organize all the items related to the processing in step #2. Allen loves two things... manila folders and automatic label makers... well I got to say I love automatic label makers too ^_^. He recommends having plenty of these around. Create a "someday/maybe" folder for all those things you're not sure if/when you might want to do them. Create folders for each "project" for you to store reference materials. If you delegate something, remember to record that you are waiting for something from that person. Create a tickler file, a physical calendar with 43 folders - 12 for months of the year and 31 for days in a month (You put the tasks to be done on that day or month into the corresponding folder). Finally have your iron-clad Next Actions folder (totally pwns wimpy to-do lists) for things that need to be done ASAP.
4. Review, Review, Review! What good is all this organization if you don't review your stuff regularly? Allen recommends weekly reviews of your organized items. Have you gotten the things you were waiting for? Have you completed all of your next actions? Do you still someday/maybe want to do that? and etc...
5. Have the discipline to action Do It! This is important. You don't want to let yourself fall behind, because if you do it defeats the purpose of having your trusted system where all of your things that need to get done are systematically collected and completed.

OKOK, I know this wasn't a magical cure-all for all your time management needs. But it's worth a shot. And hey, who knows you might be the next to join the cult of GTD.

-Jason

The One Minute Manager

The One Minute Manager: The Word's Most Popular Management Method. The name almost says it all. I'm sure you've all at least heard of the One Minute Manager. It is a deceptively simple book of around 100 pages and having a cute and engaging story. Thats probably why it has been so popular for so long.

Well the secret to this book's success are the three "One Minute Secrets":

The First Secret - One Minute Goals
This boils down to the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid -or- Keep it Sweet and Simple) method. Writing your goals down on a single sheet of paper using less than 250 words. Constantly reviewing and evaluating the goals and your performance, one minute at a time.

The Second Secret - One Minute Praisings
The young leader must learn that it is human nature to be appreciated. We love it. We need it. We hardly get enough of it. One minute praisings get right to the point. They tell people what they did right, and that you feel good about what they did. It also encourages them to do more of the same and create even better results.

The Third Secret - One Minute Reprimands
The converse of the One Minute Praise is the One Minute Reprimand. You also need to be specific about exactly what they did wrong and how it makes you feel. (Making sure they know the reprimand is for the action, not for the person). Then, after stopping and allowing the other person to understand this, you always need to followup with reminding them how much you value them as a member of the team.

That's about it... though you'll have to read the rest ofthe book to get the full details. Ultimately, I think the magic to the One Minute Manager is something somewhat more psychological. One minute is an almost insignificant amount of time to us. Though if we are conscious of our time, and actually use every spare minute, we can reap huge benefits.

Until next time,
-Jason