Sponsorship involves 4 actions:

1. Encourage.  Express your belief in his ability to succeed, both passionately and frequently.
2. Support.  Look for all the ways you can help her get where she wants to go.
3. Authorize.  Create a culture of “yes” so he can explore what is possible.
4. Introduce.   Make sure you’re not the only one who knows who she is, sees her potential,  and recognizes her results.

When I was 23, I had a sponsor.  She made sure I was involved, connected, visible and responsible for just a little more than what was in my job description.  I loved it.  I felt engaged and I truly believed I could succeed.  I credit her with getting me a leg-up in a great 10 year career with that company.  Her faith in me and commitment to my success made me want to work harder, be more accountable, and get better results.  That’s typically what happens when someone is sponsored – they are driven to live up to the faith that is placed in them.  That’s one reason sponsorship is a powerful leadership strategy.  Another reason is that sponsorship begets sponsorship.  When you reach out and lift someone up, it increases the likelihood that she will do the same and the resulting culture is one where people help others and share in their successes.

Influence is an essential leadership skill.  You need it to sell ideas, enroll others, and create change.  Influencing others involves appealing to three different sensibilities:  logic, emotion, and cooperation.  In other words, when you influence effectively, you connect with someone’s head (thoughts), heart (feelings), and hands (action).  As you might have experienced from time to time, different people require more emphasis on logic in order to be enrolled in your project.  Others might want to feel a stronger connection to their heartstrings before being pulled into your idea.  Still others might prefer to move to action right away and learn how they can contribute tangibly.  Think about how you like to be influenced and that will help you understand what I mean here.  When someone is making a case that requires a commitment from you, do you notice that you pay most attention to:

• Logic – facts, figures, and evidence pointing to personal and/or organizational benefits?
• Emotion – feelings, experiences, and concepts that reinforce an emotional connection?
• Cooperation – action, roles, and responsibilities that define alliances and relationships?

Perhaps all three are important to you when considering the value of a proposition or initiative.  It’s important to understand the needs of those you are attempting to influence and enroll because it will help you to be more effective when making your case.

To prepare for an influencing session with others:

1. Set your goals by considering what you need from others and what you want the outcome to be.
2. Identify benefits and challenges by reflecting on the relationships you have with others, their position of power as compared to yours, and what skills and knowledge they possess that you could benefit from.
3. Develop your plan and script by outlining how you’ll appeal to the logic, emotion or cooperation sensibilities of others, anticipating their objections, and planning your counter-arguments or responses.

It’s important not to underestimate the value of planning when you are intent on influencing others.  The more time and attention you invest in planning, the greater the liklihood you’ll achieve your desired outcomes.  And, once you’ve conducted your influencing dialog, record and reflect your perceptions and key learning.  The best way to learn how to influence is to practice influencing, and then taking notice of what worked and what didn’t.

There are lots of rules for the game, and it doesn’t take long before someone breaks one or more of them.  As the teams work in silence (one of the rules), I observe them gesturing and making faces to try to communicate to another team member (against the rules).  And, I say: “If you think the rules do not apply to you, they probably do.”   I never just say it once, because in spite of making the rules really clear, someone always seems to think it’s okay to break them.  Generally, when I facilitate the game, I say the phrase a lot.  I think it is one of the most profound coaching phrases I ever use, with others and with myself.  I don’t just use it when I facilitate Broken Squares.  I use it when talking about accountability because we often look at everyone else to see if they’re being accountable and tend not to look at what we’re doing.  We think accountability isn’t an issue for us and that the rules about accountability don’t apply.  I also use it when talking about collaboration.  We often think of ourselves as the easiest people to work with.  We’re open, we’re honest, we share.  Certainly the collaboration rules don’t apply.

I notice that when I am positively convinced that the rules do not apply to me, it’s likely that I’m working really hard to rationalize, deflect, and avoid taking responsibility for my own actions.  Unfortunately, I mostly notice this after the fact . . . when I’ve already been stubborn and a bit full of myself.  I’m doing my best to shift the trend.  I think if we all looked at how well we are living by the rules instead of focusing on what everyone else is doing, things might go a lot more smoothly in our work and personal lives.

Just a thought:  “If you think the rules do not apply to you, they probably do.”

As Bridges makes clear in his book, every transition begins with an ending.  There is some form of “letting go” that accompanies a successful transition.  No matter whether the change is positive or negative, change begins with an ending of something.  For example, a new process means letting go of a strong sense of familiarity and feeling of competence with performing daily tasks.  Or, a promotion means changing peer groups and letting go of daily interactions with people who you’ve grown to know and count on.  Personal changes come with transitions as well . . . moving to a new neighborhood or city means letting go of your physicians, neighbors, and a strong sense of community.  Even when changes are good, there is letting go to do.  Leaders must allow time and space for the psychological process of letting go.

It is possible to create an environment where people are able to deal with losses openly, without it turning into the proverbial whine and moan session.  Bridges offers lots of suggestions.  Here are my favorites that through my work with clients have proven to be very effective:

1. Accept the Reality and Importance of the Subjective Losses.  In other words, everyone deals with loss differently.  What you may consider easy, someone else may consider wildly difficult.  Learn as much as you can about someone’s perception of loss.  It will make it much easier for you to address it.
2. Don’t Be Surprised at Overreaction.  The key here is to understand that if somone’s reaction to change is stronger than yours, you’re likely to call it an “overreaction”, when in fact it is simply someone’s reaction.  Loss can, however, be incremental.  That is, an initial reaction to change can be layered with another reaction to something else coming down the pike, and so on.  So, what you may view as an overreaction, might actually be reaction “overload”.
3. Acknowledge the Losses Openly and Sympathetically.  An empathic leader is a powerful leader.  So, bring losses out in the open and make them safe to discuss.  Invite others to share their feelings of loss, and share yours as well.  For example:  “I know these changes are going to pose challenges for all of us.  I’m sorry about that.” Or,  “I’m feeling a bit like a duck out of water myself.  It’s hard to learn a new process.”
4. Expect and Accept the Signs of Grieving.  People process change differently, but like stages of grief, you’ll likely notice anger, bargaining, anxiety, sadness or confusion.
5. Give People Information, Again, and Again.  Leaders cannot overcommunicate, especially during times of change.  Even if you don’t have an update, that’s information your team is likely to appreciate.  Keep them informed.

A March 2005 HBR article that I recently came across helped me crystallize my thinking about the challenges of this particular team, and for that matter, most any team seeking to improve collaboration.  Instead of taking action to boost communications, enhance teamwork, and cross-pollinate, try looking for conflicts that make collaboration difficult or impossible.  (I don’t have to point out that I still think there’s value in communications, teamwork and cross-pollination, right?)  As leaders, we need to think about what we can do to smooth the way for our team.  Sometimes, that means “clearing” the way.  And conflict can be a huge obstacle.  So, where to begin?

1. Be willing to look at conflict as constructive.  As Patrick Lencioni argues in his great teamwork tome The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, conflict is nothing more than a difference of opinion.  Generally speaking, conflict gets a bad rap.  We tend to believe that all conflict is bad, when the way people deal with the conflict is more likely what’s “bad”.  Conflict can highlight alternative perspectives, reveal underlying flaws, and create a catalyst for change.  It can be a good thing and needs to be recognized accordingly.
2. Accept that there is conflict in your organization.  This is hard for a lot of leaders to do.  Not many people like to admit that there is conflict.  (See item #1 for the reason why.)  But, where there are people and relationships, there is conflict.  So, instead of fighting it or insisting it doesn’t exist, go with the flow (so to speak) and let there be a place for conflict.
3. Create a “safe zone” for conflict.  Outside of just acknowledging that conflict exists, you need to create a culture where conflict is allowed and where individuals have the tools and time to sort things through.  What does your team see when you are faced with conflict.  Do they see you react, avoid or blame?  Or, do they see you listen, acknowledge different opionions, and seek to find common ground?  Your role modeling is the first step in creating culture.  Beyond that, you’d be well served to develop some ground rules (or “norms” as Lencioni calls them) for how to deal with conflict.
4. Invite your team to participate.  When you do create conflict ground rules or norms, invite your team to weigh in on how they’d like the environment to look or feel when conflict arises.  They’ll be more likely to practice the norms if they’re a part of developing them.  At the very least, when conflict arises, invite the team (or key stakeholders) into the resolution process.  Managing conflict takes practice, and naturally, can be a little messy.  The more your team participates in it, the better equipped they’lll be to handle it.

I think most individuals want to collaborate with others and understand the value of collaboration toward achieving great results.  But, as human beings, we all tend to let conflict get in the way of our best intentions.  So, help your team out by cultivating an environment where conflict is not a bad thing and giving them the tools to deal with it when it does arise.

Accountability starts with a point of view that you do, in fact, have the power to make a difference.  People with a point of view of personal accountability tend to look for improvement opportunities and problems that need to be solved.  These are the people who ask themselves:

• What’s my role in this circumstance?
• What can I do differently to influence a positive outcome?
• What clues did I miss?
• What risks did I avoid to take that might have improved the results?
• What practices or habits of mine get in the way of achieving the best possible results?

It takes a lot of courage to be accountable, and accountability can be a lonely country.  That’s why it’s important for leaders to create a culture where accountability is valued and rewarded.  In this type of culture, people are encouraged to ask the tough questions and are rewarded for discovering new approaches to old problems.  To create more accountability in the workplace:

1. Take a pulse check on the levels of accountability.  Is yours a “just do it” environment where people make things happen?  Or, is it more common for people to point fingers and blame others?  Depending on how accountable your culture is, start taking actions to ratchet things up – either from bad to good, or from good to great.
2. Be a role model.  Your actions speak volumes and show people the way to be accountable.  Do people see you being accountable or do they see a victim of circumstance?
3. Cultivate accountability.  Look around and see what you can do to clear obstacles that keep people from being accountable.  Eliminate policies, practices or belief systems that don’t support accountability at all levels.
4. Empower others.  Make sure people have the authority and tools to make decisions (and act upon them) that are in the best interest of the organization.

Accountability can make a big difference, even when taken in baby steps.  Give it a try and see what happens.  Here’s a closing thought from someone with bigger chops on the subject than mine:  “Make every decision as if you owned the whole company.”  Robert M. Townsend,  American Economist and Professor at MIT.

Let’s start with the definition of “critical thinking”.  After finding a few definitions that I thought were really complex, I landed on this:  purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do.  I liked three words here because I think they are the key to making really great decisions as a result of critical thinking:  purposeful, reflective, and judgment.  First, critical thinking is purposeful.  To me, purposeful means that there is intention to discover, uncover, learn, shift and see things from various viewpoints.  When someone purposefully thinks about a subject, they are, in effect, peeling back layers to reveal something beneath.  Second, critical thinking is reflective.  In my view, reflective means that there is a commitment to ruminating on new discoveries and learning.  Reflecting is taking the time to turn an idea around over and over to look at all its facets.  Third, critical thinking is making a judgment.  Of-course, one must draw a conclusion from the reflection.  But, it’s important to note here that judgment must come AFTER purposefulness and reflection.  Judgment without purpose and reflection is not critical thinking.  It’s plain and simple judging.  Therein lies the problem with lots of decisions I see being made (and sadly, have made myself from time to time.)

Decision making skills are really important in the workplace, particularly for leaders.  Certainly, decisiveness is often valued in the workplace.  But sometimes decisiveness is influenced by short-term agendas when it should be influenced by long-term payoffs.  Granted, sometimes a decision just needs to be made because there’s a burning issue to be extinguished.  But, after the fire, what kind of analysis is conducted to fix the problem that caused the fire in the first place?  And, what if there isn’t anything burning that requires a snap decision?  What can we do to think more critically and ensure that our decisions best serve the organization’s vision and mission?

• Find evidence.  Avoid heresay.  Get to the bottom of things yourself.
• Ask questions.  LOTS of questions.
• Get information from a variety of sources.  Don’t just consult the inner circle and the usual suspects.
• Be willing to recognize a problem.  In other words, call it what it is!
• Table (or toss) information that isn’t relevent to your issue and prioritize what is.
• Notice and recognize unstated assumptions and values.  Is there something people aren’t saying that you should know more about?
• Suspend your own beliefs and assumptions in order to clear the way for new possibilities.

More than anything, I believe critical thinking takes discipline.  All of the actions listed above require discipline, and practice.  Some of them require courage because when you’re in the heat of a problem, it can feel a little uncomfortable to say, “Hold on, we need to ask some questions, prioritize information, and suspend beliefs and assumptions.”  That’s why I believe leadership role modeling and support in the culture is necessary to make critical thinking valued in the workplace.

What do you think?

• We’re afraid to hurt someone’s feelings.
• We don’t want to be perceived as something other than a “team player”.
• We want to be seen as super-capable and afraid that if we say “no”, we’ll be seen for what we are: human.
• It sounds like a really good idea.

Learning to say “no” isn’t taught in business school.  Many organizational cultures don’t value saying “no” because it’s perceived as anti-team or pro-whining.  But, “no” can be a really good thing.  There are lots of reasons to say no, especially in the workplace:

• We don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings by saying yes and then not being able to deliver.
• We want to be perceived as being a “team player” and saying “no” when we know we can’t deliver builds trust and credibility.
• We want to be seen as super-capable so we make sure to say no to something that will do nothing but take our “eye off the ball”.
• Just because it sounds like a good idea doesn’t mean it is.

You get my drift.

Saying “no” effectively means thinking critically and keeping the big picture in mind.  Here are some questions you can ask yourself (or if you’re a leader, questions you can ask your team) when determining whether “no” is the right answer:

• Does the request move your organizational agenda forward?  In other words, if you say “yes”, will there be progress toward something that matters?
• Is the request in alignment with your role or responsibilities?
• Do you have the authority and resources to take on and complete the request?  Or, if you need to access shared resources, do you know how?
• If you say yes to the request, what affect does it have on other things you’ve said yes to?
• Is there someone else in the organization more skilled and able to complete the request than you?

More and more, I find myself talking with clients about why they accepted that meeting notice or how they found themselves on yet another sub-committee.  Most of the time I discover that they answered someone else’s call without any questioning or critical thinking.  In today’s workplace, resources are scarce at worst or spread too thin at best.  People need to be a little more strategic about what they take on, and leaders need to support someone’s ability to ask some key questions before taking on a request that might suck time and energy away from something that really needs their attention.

Marshall Goldsmith had it right when he said overcommitment is a happiness killer.  I contend it can also be a productivity killer, an effectiveness killer, and a mission-critical-focus killer.

Building culture starts with identifying an “end game”.  What is your company’s purpose?  What do you want to build and achieve together?  This isn’t just a “touchy-feely” question . . . it’s a strategic and critically important one.  Being part of something bigger than you are is inspiring and can yield great results.  The purpose can be really simple.  At Zappos, their higher purpose is to deliver happiness – to make people happy.  And, it’s turned out to be an incredible business plan.  The important thing for any organization is to have a clear purpose.  What is yours?  And, more important, if everyone in your organization was asked about the purpose, would they know what it is?

Next, building culture continues with identifying core values.  What guides your behaviors and decisions?  Values can help you make sure that your higher purpose is achievable and real.  At Zappos, there are 10 core values.  There is no magic number – you can have 3 or 5 or 12.  How ever many you have, you need to make sure you can live with them and commit to them and have some teeth behind them.  If you have too many, it’s easy to lose focus and ultimately, lose the meaning of the values.  If they are values you can commit to, and make hiring and firing decisions around them, then they are a solid set of values.  The values are the key expression of culture.  When you ask employees and customers to describe culture, it’s the values that they’ll speak to because your values are your culture in action.

Finally, building culture means building the expectation into the organization, through things like job descriptions and performance evaluations, that living up to the core values is everyone’s responsibility.  By living your values, you’ll build and sustain your culture.

I  love doing culture work with clients because it is inspiring and reminds me that there are fantastic possibilities to be explored if we only open our hearts to them.  What possibilities are there out there for you, I wonder?

I really appreciate his perspective.  Now, I’m not saying that annual performance reviews need to be ditched, as Colbert suggests.  I think there is great value in having documentation of performance management activities.  But, the annual performance review is often treated like a necessary task dictated by HR instead of an opportunity to take a solid look at an employees strengths, accomplishments, and understanding of what he or she should do more of to be even more successful in the coming year.  I have been one of those leaders at the end of the year scrambling to complete all the boxes on all the forms for all my employees and having all those one-on-one discussions before the HR-imposed deadline.  UGH!  That process feels forced and fake, and it often translates to employee feedback that is not authentic, and worse, not actionable.  Colbert argues that performance reviews focus too much on what’s “wrong” about an employee’s performance.  Whether they are completed annually or not, I agree with him . . . they would be much more valuable if they focused more on what the leader/manager can do to help the employee succeed. 

So, what’s a leader to do?  In most organizations performance reviews are non-negotiable.  A leader doesn’t get to say, “In protest I’m not going to do them.”  Nonetheless, a leader can make the process infinitely more valuable.  To do so means having discipline and commitment to an employee’s development.  It takes time, thought, and a little planning.  Many leaders might argue they don’t have the time.  I respectfully reply, “You must make the time because employee development is one of your top responsibilities.”  Leaders are required to lead.  And, performance management is an important part of leading.  When coaching and training  leaders, I offer these tips for making performance management an on-going and routine versus a once-a-year-phenomenon:

Schedule 30 – 60 minute one-on-one sessions with your team members every week during which time you ask them a variation of the questions below.  Your objective is to get a sense of what makes them feel strong and effective.  You also want to discover what they need from you to perform at their peak.  Finally, you must listen to what they have to say and make sure they see you listening.

• How can I help you bring your best to the job at hand?
• What are the circumstances surrounding your work when you feel the most competent and the most effective?
• What tools do you need to be even more successful?
• How are you solving problems you encounter?
• What barriers or obstacles do you need help in overcoming?
• Who do you rely on and partner with to get your job done?
• What questions do you have of me?

Before you end the conversation, after listening intently and discussing different approaches to problems, it’s really important that you provide them some feedback on what you are noticing about their performance.  This kind of feedback can either be positive or constructive.  The key is that it is timely and genuine.  Your team members need to know where they stand with you.  What’s working and what’s not?  What do you want them to do more of?  What makes you proud?  What would you like to see them do differently (and how do you intend to help them do so?)  Finally, say” “Thank-you.”  This expression of gratitude is a great way to let them know you appreciate what they bring, that they care enough to talk with you weekly about their performance, and that you honor their commitment to continuous improvement.

So, as I already mentioned, this takes discipline and commitment.  When you do it, it will pay off every day.  And, it will pay off at the end of the year when you’re required to document the performance evaluations for HR.  You will breeze through them because you will have had weekly conversations with your team members that have kept them engaged and informed throughout the year.  The annual process will become more of a formality than a forced event.

So, is the annual performance review a waste?  Not if you do your leader work throughout the year and make employee development a daily priority.  When that happens, the annual performance review can be a time when you get to celebrate that your daily work has created solid results.

With respect,

Lynae