Tag: pragmatic leadership

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Creativity Managerial Competence Proactive Leaders

Labor Day


Through a sea of glistening blue (jeans), you spot a current of croissants and crullers rippling through the break room. Confetti streams the walls in tribute to Ralph from HR’s birthday and hints of nutmeg and cinnamon perfume the room. The mailboxes, disguised as Christmas stockings, contain beckoning paychecks and invitations to a weekend cocktail party celebrating the impressive numbers released from finance earlier in the week. A rare laughter swells out of Ethan Marcus’s office where a group is gathered watching viral YouTube gems. It must be Friday.

This phantasmagorical scene may be deep-fried in hyperbole but it still conveys an essential point of organizational culture: Fridays are different. Office norms loosen and a euphoric air envelops a once stale workplace. As a proactive, engaged leader, the challenge then becomes how to accommodate and engage in this culture shock, while simultaneously advancing an agenda that can’t break for Falafel Friday.

So how do you remain chill without exhausting air conditioning resources and freezing your agenda? A politically savvy leader knows how to infuse some productivity into the celebratory croissants. With your coalition partners congregated and their guards down, you have a unique opportunity to solidify the relationships that will ultimately mobilize your agenda. While your colleagues may burrow into their silos on Monday through Thursday, Friday pops these bubbles and allows information to waft around with the nutmeg already saturating the air.

Today is the shooting star of organizational phenomena; it’s a casual Friday preceding a long Labor Day weekend. My office is a ghost town and I think I saw a lonely hay bale blow by my desk 15 minutes ago. I have a creeping suspicion that my calendar is off and I’ve accidentally come into work on a Saturday or, more troubling, that I missed the meteorologists warnings to evacuate the area.

Nevertheless, I’m not squandering a perfectly fertile labor day. While I munch on abandoned pastries, I chat with coworkers and gain casual background on this office and my current campaigns. Without the pressured angst that pervades other labor days, I gain privileged insight into my organization. Meanwhile, I break to blog about this to the anonymous masses quietly celebrating their Labor Day Fridays in other office nooks and crannies. I hope this message reaches you in time before your day dissolves into a haze of lazy celebrations. If not, no worries. There’s always Monday.

Pic Credit: amirjina

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BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Three Blind Mice

This post is the first in a series that dissects classic nursery rhymes in search of helpful leadership lessons for the proactive, politically savvy manager. Enjoy.

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Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

See how they run. See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer’s wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a sight in your life,

As three blind mice?

Organizations are laboratories of two conflicting, oscillating elements: competition and uncertainty. This is not to say that a leader perpetually operates in a competitive paradigm or that every detail ranging from an annual budget to a lunch special is uncertain, but nevertheless competition and uncertainty are omnipresent in organizations. When we then add the economic reality of scarcity into the equation, leaders are effectively transformed into blind mice.

Like the eponymous mice in this nursery rhyme, leaders rapidly mobilize agendas while understanding that their agenda is likely at odds with someone else’s campaign.

If a startup is attempting to corner the online cheese industry, it understands that other startups are pursuing the same consumer wheel and slices are limited. There are a finite number of farmers’ wives, seeking only so many discounts on aged Gouda spreads, and only the first mouse will reap the rewards.  Leaders at each startup then run alongside each other as they attempt to innovate and outperform their competitors on the road to execution.

Compounding their challenge is the reality that each manager is blind as she mobilizes her agenda. In an uncertain world, no one knows exactly where the expressway ends. Even if one knows her destination and scurries ahead of her competitors, there is no guarantee that a plate of cheese awaits the victor.

One startup could successfully monetize their cheese service only to discover that the dairy craze has ended and the market has shifted to a new sector. Or the farmer’s wife consumers may have changed their preferences and no longer want your gorgonzola. Here, executing the agenda can unfortunately mean executing yourself as you discover all your time and invested resources only lead you to the chopping block.

So the next time someone asks if you’ve ever seen such a sight in your life as three blind mice, open your eyes and find a mirror. You work in a challenging environment and it helps to pause occasionally and confirm that you’re not trapped in a fruitless (or cheeseless) rat race.

Pic credit: snacktime2007

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Creativity Features Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Pragmatic Fun

Some people say I have an unhealthy (but vigorous) obsession with antonyms. While my friends (and enemies, no doubt) whittle away their mornings (and evenings) scanning their Macs and PCs for videos of gullible cats and paranoid puppies, I skim and scrutinize online antonym lists. Many would consider my behavior the opposite of sane, but occasionally I stumble upon some colorful or inspiring pairing. Last night, I stumbled upon a unique coupling: pragmatic fun.

I’m perfectly aware that the average excitement explorer would likely spurn a pragmatist like a steakhouse rejects vegan patrons. Pragmatism and fun certainly share an oil-water complex and, as a unit, would be a strong candidate for oxymoron induction. Yet I reject both of these labels and believe that proactive, politically competent leaders forge an unlikely bond between these discordant words.

Conventional wisdom says that the pragmatist is gripped by a rationalism that spoils any reasonable attempt at fun. Amusement parks are rarely arenas of efficiency and streamlined direct deposit systems are not particularly exciting. The same logic would then follow that an aspiring leader should check their sense of humor at the door and submit to a career of pragmatic monotony; unfortunately there are ample case studies to illustrate this assumption. Few would accuse Mark Zuckerberg of being fun and Rod Blagojevich, in spite of Celebrity Apprentice, was not exactly rational. Yet conventional wisdom foolishly forgets that organizations are full of people and personalities.

A proactive leader understands that organizations don’t function like the alienated machines cast in Modern Times or The Matrix. To sustain a motivated and mobilized coalition you must engage your peers. Consider a skydiving president like George H.W. Bush or an eccentric mogul like Virgin CEO Richard Branson. Even pragmatic leaders like Bob Dole or Arianna Huffington find ways to create entertaining organization without resorting to transparent pageantry.

In your organization, you need to find a sincere way to reconcile competing pragmatic and fun impulses. Don’t resort to a canned Michael Scott style pep session but find ways to infuse pleasure into your workplace. Put down the human resource guide to humanity and actually talk to your peers. Every organization houses unique coalitions with unique interest. One organization’s pizza parties could be another’s Origami Club. The key is to be adaptable and engaged. It’s the first step toward marrying pragmatism and fun in your organization and divorcing yourself from the corporate drone stereotype.

I hope I’m right and pragmatic fun supports your leadership agenda. I’d certainly hate to be left.

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BLG Leadership Insights Proactive Leaders

It’s Never about the “I”

Yesterday, my beloved Red Sox pulled off a great comeback. Down 6-0 after 5 1/2 innings they stormed back for a walk-off 8-7 win. It was quite the victory, especially for a team that has underperformed much of the year. At the same time their arch-rivals, the New York Yankees, have been falling apart lately thanks to internal strife and uninspired play. Both teams are flush with cash, both teams have rabid fan bases, both teams have talent laden rosters. Why then the current divergent paths?

While there are many different reasons, one stands out: a lack of cohesion.  Whether you are Major League Baseball’s #2 most valuable team ($912 Million) or a small business with five employees, having a common vision is one the true keys to success.

In the case of the Yankees and the Red Sox, we can get a feel of how they are heading in two different direction by looking at two very different player quotes.

Following last night’s aforementioned game, the Red Sox’s Dustin Pedroia told the Boston Herald:

“The game plan’s winning, that’s it…I tell…all the guys, we’re here to win. It doesn’tmatter if you hit .270, .280 with the personal stuff…It doesn’t matter what you do. It’s what we all do. It’s been fun lately. We’re climbing, man. That’s what we’re going to do. Get on the elevator and go.”

At the same time following their 6th straight loss the Yankees’ Rafael Soriano, who has been sidelined with an arm injury, was asked if it’s been hard watching all the losing from the sidelines, he responded:

“Right now, I don’t think the bullpen (is) the problem. It (is) the hitters. A lot of games we’ve been losing by two or three runs, I wouldn’t be in those games anyway.”

When you have true continuity, when you have a true sense of commonality, it shows. As a pragmatic and proactive leader it is this level of togetherness that must be attained to succeed. You want more “we” and less “I”.  It works in baseball, it works in business and it works in life.

Right about now you might be asking, “Hey Sean, it’s easy to be a positive, team player when things are going great, how about when you’re in the pits?” Glad you asked. When the Red Sox started the 2011 season 0-6, Dustin Pedroia responded to doubters by telling reporters:

“You’re either two feet in now or you’re two feet out. Let us know now because we’re coming.”

Even in the roughest of times, it’s about a shared sense of responsibility and accountability. If this message never wavers, then you have a better chance at success.

As far as the Yankees go, it’s now up to their leader/manager, Joe Girardi, to get his team on the same page. No more “I” and “me” and a lot more “us” and “we”. As simple or as difficult as it might sound, if you can gather your direct reports into a tight, cohesive team, then no amount of six-game losing streaks can keep the whole from succeeding.

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BLG Leadership Insights Creativity Proactive Leaders

Leadership According to Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood: Modern-Day John Wayne, an icon in American cinema, Dirty Harry himself. Clint Eastwood: Pragmatic leader? Yes, it’s true the man who made his bones as the king of the Spaghetti Western in the 1960s has evolved into one of the most celebrated auteurs of our time.  Although a film director must answer to a producer and, quite often the studio, once the cast and crew begin shooting, the director becomes CEO of the film set.

 A new book by Michael Henry Wilson, Eastwood on Eastwood, presents a series of conversations between Eastwood and Wilson over a period of 30 years. Unlike other books on Eastwood, Wilson doesn’t concern himself with Eastwood’s private life or political beliefs, but rather his work as actor and director. Eastwood’s onset demeanor is far from the archetypical temperamental, perfectionist, dictatorial tortured genius, but rather that of an efficient and pragmatic leader, who operates based on knowledge of what he knows of the medium and instinct.  

As Wilson says of Eastwood in relation to noted perfectionist, Martin Scorsese, “Marty uses every fiber of his soul… Clint is much more detached.” In other words, Eastwood remains cool, calm and collected in the high pressure, high stress atmosphere of a film shoot. He is able to channel his inner-Dirty Harry as it were. Eastwood is famous for doing as few takes as possible.  He hires a competent, highly-skilled crew and trusts that those who he hires are capable of executing in the jobs they were hired to do. Here are the top Clint Eastwood Leadership quotes. Hopefully, one or two of these will help “make your day.”

-“A good man always knows his limitations.” –Quote from the film, Magnum Force, 1973

-“I don’t believe in pessimism. If something doesn’t come up the way you want, forge ahead. If you think it’s going to rain, it will.”

-“After directing awhile, you get an instinct about it, but you have to be able to trust your own feelings. Invariably, two-thirds of the way through a film, you say, ‘Jeezus, is this a pile of crap! What did I ever see in it in the first place?’ You have to shut off your brain and forge ahead, because by that time you’re getting so brainwashed. Once I commit myself to a film I commit myself to that ending, whatever the motivations and conclusions are.”

-“As we grow old, we must discipline ourselves to continue expanding, broadening, learning, keeping our minds active and open.”

-“…I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed.”

-“Most people like the magic of having it take a long time and be difficult . . . but I like to move along, I like to keep the actors feeling like they`re going somewhere, I like the feeling of coming home after every day and feeling like you`ve done something and you`ve progressed somewhere. And to go in and do one shot after lunch and another one maybe at six o`clock and then go home is not my idea of something to do.”