It’s lonely at the top. Nowhere is this more clear than when a leader has to make a decision. Because of the number of voices urging different alternatives, making the final decision is a lonely process. Even a decision to let the majority opinion prevail is a decision. And no matter what the leader decides, someone will disagree, will second-guess.

It’s just as lonely in the middle. A salesperson has to create a forecast for next year’s revenue. An accountant has to decide on a proposed overhead rate, which will directly impact costs, selling prices, and profits. A supervisor has to decide whether to keep or terminate a new employee before the probationary period ends.

Finally, it can be lonely as an individual. What should I do about my career? My relationship with my significant other? My investments?

Making a major decision can be difficult for 3 reasons:

1. A major decision almost always involves considerable uncertainty. How successful will the new product line (or second office, or ???) be? If things were relatively certain, the decision would probably be relatively easy. How do we decide when our intuition strongly favors one choice, but the hard data strongly suggest a different choice?

2. A major decision can involve competing values. How does one choose between family and career? Or which candidate to hire – the one that fits better culturally or the one who can do the current job better?

3. Making a decision means running the risk of being proved “wrong” as future events unfold. Thus, making a decision is basically the same as speaking in public, which scares some people so much that they would rather die first! Since our society is so quick to criticize and so slow to encourage, the act of deciding can require real courage.

There is a more fundamental reason that deciding can be difficult: The root of the word “decide” is “cide” – which comes from Latin “caedere” which means to cut. (The word “homicide” comes from the same root.) “Decide” means to cut off. Deciding cuts off the non-selected options and alternatives. Personality types who revel in possibilities have great difficulty with this.

No wonder it’s lonely at the top! And in the middle! And even as an individual!

What do you think? I’d enjoy hearing from you.

Gary Langenwalter

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple weeks, but I kept putting it off J. So yes, I can speak personally about the cost of procrastination.

Until I did some deep-dive introspection, I assumed that the cost of procrastination was the total cost of leaving something not done. For example, not registering in time for a course and paying a late registration surcharge. Or not fixing a leaky roof until the rains set in, making the job much more difficult (or impossible). And yes ,those are real costs, and real consequences.

However, I now perceive that those are not the biggest costs of procrastination. They are merely the most visible and most direct costs, the tip of the iceberg, as it were.

The larger costs are guilt and shame. Here’s why:

Guilt: When I don’t do what I’m supposed to do or what I promised to do, I feel guilty because of my actions or inactions. The disappointment that others express reinforces that guilt. And I also remind myself of my failures. Unfortunately, guilt can be cumulative. Excising the accumulated guilt is a major topic by itself.

Shame: I used to think that guilt and shame were almost synonymous. They are not – guilt is about wrong actions (or lack of actions). Shame relates to the person instead of an action; it says I am a bad person. It is deeper and more powerful than guilt. Procrastination causes shame, because a person knows that they have made the decision to put something off – therefore, they are a bad person. They can’t count on their promises to themselves and others; their word is not worth the breath it takes to speak it (or the time to think it and make a promise to oneself).

Procrastination, by its very nature, feeds both guilt and shame, causing it to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Procrastinators tend to beat themselves up for the act of procrastination. Since the procrastinator is feeling pretty low about their inaction, they tend to not have the energy to go ahead and what needs to be done (unlike the Norwegian bachelor farmers on Prairie Home Companion who eat Powdermilk biscuits). Thus, the procrastination continues in a reinforcing, destructive loop, creating a ravenous beast that can finally completely destroy a person’s sense of self-worth.

So, what are you procrastinating about?

What is it really costing you?

What can I do to help you take that first step to doing what you have been procrastinating over? Let me know – I’m here to help (and I won’t judge!) PS – please don’t say “I’ll e-mail him tomorrow.” You can do it now; my e-mail server doesn’t care what time of day you send it.

Gary Langenwalter

“A person is most productive the day before they go on vacation” – Bridgeman’s Principle

“A person is least productive the day they return from vacation” – Bridgeman’s Corollary

These principles were postulated by Bill Bridgeman, Vice President Commercial Sales, Bestbath, and a former senior partner in Portland Consulting Group. Having just returned from vacation, he put into words what many of us have experienced for years.

Why does this happen?

As we get closer to vacation, we get laser-focused on the tasks that need to be completed before we can leave. The closer we get to quitting time on our last day before vacation, the greater the intensity of our focus on making sure everything that HAS to get done gets done or offloaded, so we can leave. Of course, this intensity costs us the first or two of vacation as we let the adrenalin seep out of our systems so that we can actually enjoy our vacation (what a concept!).

And when we return from vacation, we’re still in the vacation “whatever…” lassitude, not really wanting to get back on the gerbil wheel of deadlines and activities and pressure and expectations and all the other frustrations of being part of an organization. Even worse, we return to all the emergencies and problems that have accumulated during our absence, making us fervently wish that we were still on vacation. So our productivity is about as low as a snake in snowshoes.

PS – today is the day before my 2 week vacation J

What has been your experience? I’d enjoy hearing from you.

Gary Langenwalter

Most of us are scheduled wall-to-wall with appointments, deadlines, etc. I had a gift Tuesday afternoon – an appointment finished 30 minutes early. I had nobody and nothing clamoring for my time. I had an unexpected oasis in my schedule. J

Too often, I use the oasis to power forward, starting work on my next “to-do” or pulling a task out of my overflowing “long overdue and I’ll do it as soon as I get a chance” bin. I fidget, get impatient, become more Type A.

But Tuesday afternoon I chose to listen to my still, small voice – the one which encouraged me to just “be”. So rather than starting to work on my next task sooner or pulling a long-overdue task out of the “long overdue task” bin, I decided to just veg out. Meditate. Count my blessings. Breathe. Observe the trees just outside the window, with their leaves weaving and dancing in the breeze. Watch the clouds as they moved slowly across the sky. And be still and restore my inner peace.

And the rest of my afternoon flowed so much more smoothly.

What do you do when you have an oasis? Fidget? Get impatient? Be grateful for the oasis?

I’d enjoy hearing your reaction.

Gary

Organizations would run SOOO much better if they didn’t have all the drama and disagreement that people cause! Even small organizations (think of families) can have underlying tension, disagreements, or outright hostility. That is the human condition. And, unless we have an organization with only one person, that’s the reality we get to live in.

The healthiest organizations have learned to deal with these tensions and disagreements in healthy ways. They understand that conflict is not necessarily a bad thing – that HEALTHY conflict can actually be essential to an organization’s continued vitality.

Healthiest organizations start on the basis of respect for our underlying similarities (virtually all people want their families to be happy and safe). When we use those as the foundation, we can understand and appreciate that different cultures, different personality types, and different ages (e.g. boomers and. millennials) will have differing viewpoints. Appreciating those viewpoints can make the organization stronger and more resilient.

Example: Before I started my consulting firm, I worked for several managers in various large organizations. One manager in particular was an engineer’s engineer. HE was a brilliant engineer! Unfortunately, he focused completely on data; intuition was worthless, and human emotions were an alien (and highly uncomfortable) concept. He unintentionally alienated virtually everyone who worked for him, including me (I’m an ENFP – an intuitive feeler). Several people left the organization before this manager was replaced with a different manager, who had a better grasp of how to deal with people, and who appreciated the insights that intuition can provide.

The art of leadership is having people work well with each other. There are 2 basic ways to accomplish this:

1. By creating rigid rules – this is how we will act, and work, and think. My way (the boss’s way) is the right way. Period. That’s how the engineer’s engineer operated.

2. By being a healthy organization, as described above. That’s how the manager’s replacement operated.

Your choice – which style of leadership will you use?

If you’d like to learn how healthy your organization is, I encourage you to check out Vantage Point, a web-based organization health assessment. http://www.synermetric.com/products/vantage-point Full disclosure – I’m one of the authors.

Gary Langenwalter

A typical job description defines the duties and responsibilities of a role, sometimes in great detail. This type of job description is a checklist to insure that a person performs the tasks that are listed. It creates a standard so we can judge right/wrong.

Written in this manner, job descriptions do not inspire; they do not encourage a person to be creative and take risks. Instead, they basically treat the person as a robot – an interchangeable cog in the corporate machine. Is it any wonder that suggestion boxes routinely fail to attract suggestions?

One potential antidote is to include a section in the job description that outlines the areas in which organization wants the person to:

1. Exercise judgment,

2. Be creative

3. Take risks

4. Be proactive (create recommended solutions to a problem)

With clear parameters on the limits (e.g. risk not to exceed $1000 without approval from person’s manager).

Example: Singapore Airlines gives each customer-facing employee a checkbook, with the authority to write a check to compensate a customer for whatever problem the customer has encountered. For example, employee in the baggage claim area can write a check to repair/replace damaged luggage, in about 1 minute. No other signature or approval necessary.

What do you think?

Gary Langenwalter

What does Memorial Day have to do with effective leadership? Quite a bit, actually. Memorial Day honors people who have died. But on Memorial Day, we should not honor their deaths – we should honor their lives – what they stood for, how they made their corner of the world a better place. We should honor the way they challenge us to become better, to emulate the best parts of their lives.

Honoring the best aspects of people – holding it up for others to emulate – is one characteristic of an excellent leader. This practice gives people a good example to emulate, a positive goal to strive for. It is far more effective in creating desired attitudes and behaviors than negative reinforcement.

Who does your leadership honor? How do they do it?

Gary Langenwalter

A “compliment sandwich” is a widely accepted practice of delivering bad news that a person’s performance needs improvement. A compliment sandwich starts with praise, then adds criticism, then finishes with praise. It’s supposed to make the listener more receptive and leave them feeling better. In fact, the more praise at the beginning and end, the better the recipient of the criticism will feel, and the more receptive he or she will be. Great theory, right?

BUT – that’s not how it works in the real world. Think about it. If you praise your dog, giving it a doggie treat and patting its head, then you scold it and spank its nose, then praise it with another treat, how does the dog respond to praise and doggie treats after you’ve done this a few times? It has learned that praise precedes scolding, so it will start being afraid of praise. Last I heard, humans are smarter than dogs. So if a person is working for a boss who uses the compliment sandwich technique, and the boss compliments the person on their performance, what do they expect next? Exactly. They don’t even hear the compliment; they just prepare themselves against the expected criticism.

The art of effective coaching is to deliver a single, clear message. And a large part of the art of coaching is praising people when they do things well. Period. No other zingers, no other hooks. Just straightforward praise. So people get comfortable being praised. With that as a foundation, when it’s time to criticize, the person will be better equipped to hear the criticism, especially if it’s delivered from the standpoint of missing expectations that were already agreed upon. The criticism should end with a clear understanding of how the person can improve (with measurable goals and dates), and the commitment of both parties to help that happen.

Have you used compliment sandwiches? How did they work for you? Or have you had compliment sandwiches used on you? What was that like?

Gary Langenwalter

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, body thoroughly worn out, and screaming, ‘Woo hoo, what a ride!’” Plaque in the window of Found Objects, McMinnville, Oregon.

When I coach teams and individuals, I encourage them to fail, because that’s the only way to learn and grow. That’s the only way to live life fully. Tony Robbins has said that there is no such thing as failure. You try something, you get a result. If you don’t like the result, you can change one of the input parameters and try again, and get another result. Or you can decide that you have learned enough and walk away. In either case, you haven’t “failed”. You have conducted an experiment and seen the result. Martin Luther, who created Protestantism, agreed when he told people “Go and sin boldly!” He knew that we can’t grow, we can’t make a difference, until we are willing to “fail”.

We, as individuals and as groups, are more powerful than we want to admit. Because if we admit to our power, we feel compelled to start using it. It is much easier, and much safer, to arrive at the grave in a well-preserved body. But that is not our purpose. If we do that, we have arrived at the grave emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually long before our body finally ceases breathing. A ship is much safer in the harbor – but that’s not its purpose.

My colleague Mike Burr asks a really excellent question: “What are you tolerating?” And that begs the follow-up question, “Why?”

What are you tolerating? And why? And what would your life be like if you stopped tolerating whatever it is, claimed your power, and changed something?

Gary Langenwalter

How do you revive a failed implementation (assuming that you want to)? Whether it’s a new system, Lean, sustainability, makes almost no difference. If the failure was not caused by issues with technology (which can be fixed for a re-implementation), the real issues are the damaged morale and the strained relationships.

Morale – when a team has been part of a failure, they lose confidence in their ability to deliver. Therefore, telling them to “hitch up your britches and get back on the horse” probably won’t work. The participants need time to process the failure. Each person processes failures differently; some require more time than others. They need to learn why the implementation failed, so that they have a reasonable chance of success the next time. Also, it really helps when the leadership views failures as a “learning experience” for the organization, instead of doing the “heads will roll” routine. The team needs to re-establish their sense of confidence in their abilities.

In my experience, one typical reason for poor or failed implementations is lack of education and training investment in the people who have to make the new “system” work. This is NOT the fault of the team. Since education and training typically show a soft ROI, management often minimizes that investment to save money on the implementation– the first time through. Wise companies learn this lesson and invest appropriately so the desired change will succeed.

Relationships – relationships are the glue that keeps an organization functioning. They are based on trust, on being able to count on another person to keep their word, to do what they said they would do and have it work the way they said it would. When those relationships get strained, performance suffers. And when an implementation fails, relationships almost invariably suffer. In many organizations, the finger pointing starts and, sometimes, the long knives come out, further fraying and sometimes severing already strained relationships.

Until the finger pointing stops, the long knives are put away, and trust is somewhat re-established, trying to re-implement the failed process will be an exercise in futility. Even worse, any setbacks during the second attempt will exacerbate the already existing wounds, probably dooming any subsequent attempts at implementation.

Have you been in an organization when an implementation failed? Does this fit your experience?

Gary Langenwalter