Leadership

What does it require to be an inspirational leader?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

The concept of being inspirational may feel overwhelming to some. We tend to associate inspirational with icons of business like Richard Branson or monumental politicians such as Churchill or Kennedy.

But if you did the little exercise I invited you to try out last week, trying to identify leaders who in your career have been inspirational. I am sure you came up with a few even if you have not been fortunate enough to work for someone in the Branson category. Leaders with a lot less punch than Branson can still come across as very inspirational.

So, is the ability to be inspirational something we are born with or is it a learned skill? Maybe a bit of both. It is probably true that for some people, this comes more naturally than to others. But there is also lots of evidence that becoming more inspirational can be learned.

It begins with awareness. Awareness precedes change.

If we can identify the gap between our current skill level and the results we would like to see, then we have the best possible starting point for learning.

So, looking at what it takes to become inspirational, we can start with the very basics. Two things need to be in place for you to come across as inspirational and followership to occur as a consequence.

1) You need to be there.
2) You need to know where you want to go.

Yes, the first step is presence.

Only if you are fully present can you hope to be an inspiration to anybody. If you are distant, unfocused, distracted, frustrated or otherwise multitasking. You not only don’t have the necessary connection with the people, you are also undermining whatever trust there was between you.

No trust, no followership. David Maister has written extensively on how we compute trust in others. You can find more here.

What now?

Try and observe yourself over the next few days as you interact with your team. At the end of the day, rewind the day and think about the encounters you had. Were you fully present? Yes or no? Presence is a bit like pregnancy in that you cannot be somewhat present. Either you are there or you are not.

If you can identify situations when you were not fully there, ask yourself why. Was it your mood, external interference or what? Did you forget to reset you mind and body as you drifted from one meeting to the next? Was half of you still arguing a point in the previous meeting as you started the new one? If you are unsure how to reset your body/mind to a more present state, check out my friend Anouk Brack. She and her colleagues do a great job teaching this stuff.

Once you have mastered being present – it’s time to get clear about where are you going. Sometimes we call that vision/ mission work, but again that can become awfully theoretical and highbrow. I like to ask myself the question: So what are we trying to create?

Think of yourself having a coaching conversation with me. What would you answer be if I asked you: So if we were having this conversation one year from now and you were to look back on the past 12 months, what would have happened in your (department, company, team) for you to feel that you had made some real progress?

If you can answer that, gather your team and have a conversation about how they feel about this and what they think it is going to take from all of you to get here.

Now you have taken a first important step to becoming much more of an inspiration to your followers. At the same time, this is also a first step to creating the Dream Team that is the foundation of implementing the Service Profit Chain.

Let me know how it works or if you have any questions.

And if you have not yet downloaded my e-book on engagement, you might find some ideas in that to swell. You will find it HERE.

Enter your email address below and download the ebook now!

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Are you an inspiring leader to work for?

Are you an inspiring leader to work for?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

As I promised last week, this is the first in a very practical series of blog posts focusing on practical aspects of leadership: Why is it important? What does it mean and how can you do it?

If you did not read last week’s post, you might want to read that first – you will find it here.

I have over time become aware that many of you find that the management part of your job is pretty clear and relatively straight forward but as for the leadership aspect, it sometimes feels fluffy.

So let’s take the fluffiness out of leadership and make it very practical and hands on.

Over the next month, we are going to cover three main leadership themes: Inspiring others, Leading my team and Developing my people.

So starting with inspiration, we need to understand why being an inspiration to your followers is an all important part of your leadership skills.

Below is a graph that illustrates how the hierarchy of employee’s needs looks.

At the bottom, we have the foundational stuff. Without that being in place, we don’t even get basic satisfaction. This is more or less all basic management stuff that you are probably (hopefully) already doing. The next level, on the other hand, is where your leadership skills start to make a difference and what drives engagement. Finally, we have the top layer – Inspiration which is driven by the style of leadership you are providing.

There are, as you can see on the graphic, two aspects to Inspiration. There is the Vision/Mission for your company, department or whatever. That should answer the question: Are we trying to achieve something that is meaningful? And secondly it is about you. Are you the sort of person that inspires followership?

So why is this important?

Well if you are the sort of persona that likes the fluffy soft to be backed up by hard facts then take a look at the graph below.

At the end of the day, this is about productivity. People who are inspired produce twice as much as people who are just satisfied with their job. If you check out the Gallup engagement scores, you will see that around 63% of employees are not particularly engaged in the job. So from a leadership point of view, there is plenty of room for improvement in most places.

This is a pet subject of mine as you may have noticed. When we are talking Service Profit Chain implementation, employee satisfaction as such is not particularly interesting. What counts at the end of the day is enthusiasm and engagement.

But productivity is just one aspect of why being inspirational. The other aspect is linked to rapidly changing demographics – all the indicators are clear, within a few years we are going to be scrambling to find the employees we need.

In Northern Europe especially, the stats are clear. Soon we will see that for every four people that leave the industry (pension, age etc), only one new young person signs up. That is a disaster waiting to happen.

So you basically have two choices. Try and automate like crazy – but that does not provide especially breathtaking service experiences, nor are they easy to differentiate from the other offerings out there. Or you can choose to create a place to work that stands head and shoulders above everyone else in your region and therefore become the employer of first choice. Too bad for the rest but you will do fine.

So hopefully you now see my point – focusing on what it will take to provide an inspirational environment for your people is a strategic issue and you need to get better at it than your closet competitor. Or if you look at it from a career point of view, managers who understand how to do this are going to be in high demand.

So what does it take to become inspirational? That is the theme for next week’s blog post.

In the mean time, I would like you to reflect a bit on what bosses you have had in your career that you found inspirational and what was it they did? And of course, the opposite. Who were the absolute joy killers and what was it they did that would instantly makes us feel disengaged and lethargic?

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Leaders found less than proficient at leading others…

April 14, 2022By Mike Hohnen

Leader

Would it be fair to say that an important part of leadership has got to be the ability to lead others?

Yet, in a survey published by Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), only 45% of leaders are rated ‘proficient’ at this by their boss.

Wait a minute, are you saying that more than half of the European leaders out there are not considered very good at leading other people by their boss?

Yes exactly.

That is, if not shocking, then at least seriously thought provoking.

But the sad fact is that it correlates very well with the Gallup surveys that say that 60+% of our workforce are not particularly engaged in their job (and 23% are actively disengaged.) Engagement is, to a very large extent, a function of leadership.

These are depressing stats and to me, it just confirms that there is a serious challenge out there to improve our leadership capacity.

CCL recommends 3 ways to improve that situation:

Challenging assignments that offer opportunities to practice new skills in the workplace;
Relationships with other people who can provide feedback and support, including bosses and trusted colleagues; and
Coursework and training focused on leadership competencies needed by your organisation.

In all immodesty, this is exactly the way we do it and have been doing it on our GROW leadership program for some years now. We combine all there elements in one program.

You (and maybe your boss) define a challenging assignment that you would like to work on over the next 12 weeks. We prefer wicked problem to puzzles.

We use the Action Learning format for our work, which means you will be working in different constellations with your colleagues, sometimes the full set (a class), on other occasions, in table teams of five and most of the time, more intensely, in small triads that are supported by your coach.

The curriculum or course work is mainly introduced on a 3 day workshop that starts the 12 week course. We kick-off the leadership course with this workshop that introduces participants to a number of practical approaches on how to lead others, that they can pick and choose from – depending on the challenge they are working on.

The driving design principle is to take participants through as many interactions of the learning circle as possible.

If you are interested in learning more about how that works, you can watch a brief video below – and if you have the curiosity to take a deeper dive into the subject of how we produce engagement on our teams, you are welcome to download my ebook Understanding Engagement.

In this brief e-book, we will look at how the lack of engagement is to a large extent a function of leadership. And that if we really want to change the engagement levels on our teams, we will need to make radical shift in how we understand the world of work. The shift is all about moving from a transactional mindset to a transformational mindset. We will look into what that means, how it can help you as a manager and why it is so important.

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This is the 15th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

ETC is at the heart of your employee experience.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

ETC

What kind of employee experience are we delivering? That has been the theme of my blog posts over the past 3-4 weeks.

A few years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review ran an article entitled “Designing the soft side of customer service”. In it the authors argue that regardless of whether we are talking a pizza delivery or a complex consulting agreement, emotions are lurking under the surface and that our job is to make those feelings positive.

If we are aiming to create the optimal customer experience, we will need to start off by examining the kind of employee experience that is going to be the foundation of the customer experience.

A miserable employee is not going to provide your customer with a breathtakingly positive emotional experience – no matter how much you train them.

But this is not just about the full employee journey: recruitment to exit-interview. As managers, we need to focus on the day to day experience as well.

We have looked at endings, consequences and psychological safety in previous posts, so this week let’s take a look at what else we can learn from the field of behavioural science that can help us understand what drives a great employee or customer experience.

You need to focus on the “ETCs”.

Emotions influence what we remember. Emotionally charged episodes are easy to recall. “Experiences” that triggered no emotional reaction, positive or negative, are quickly forgotten.
Basically our emotions are triggered when something turns out better or worse than we expected. And the corresponding emotional response is then either positive or negative. A good manager does her best to manage the emotions of her team – and sprinkles the day with a few unexpected positive surprises as well. Positive surprises are anything from throwing a pizza and beer party to celebrate a win, to the simplest little gests of encouragement during the day.

Trust is the basic psychological variable that is essential to any form of relationship. No trust, no relationship. If we want engagement, there needs to be trust. And trust is the mirror of how we show up on a day to day basis as human beings. Are we reliable? Do we do what we said we would do? Do we care for and stand up for our team?

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to unfold are fundamental psychological needs. But control is also linked to trust. In a high trust environment, the need for control is less. There is one more aspect of control when we are talking employees and that is the sense that I have some degree of control over how I do my job. This is one of the foundational cornerstones of employee engagement.

Every situation in the day that involves uncertainty either in outcome or in process will cause our team members to experience a loss of control – and that closes the loop back to emotions because a sense of loss of control creates some very negative emotions.

So there it is, as a manager, I need to manage the emotions, trust and sense of control of my team if I want to make sure that they are in the best possible shape to create a fabulous customer experiences.

It sounds complicated, but it does not need to be – In our next manager’s toolbox workinar*, we will talk about some simple tools and tips that can help you do a much better job at this.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 14th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

No fear, it is the foundation of a great team.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

No fear

The past weeks, we have been looking at the employee experience. If we buy into the whole concept of the Service Profit Chain, it makes perfect sense that creating a great employee experience will help us create the best possible guest experience.

So let’s explore another element of the employee experience.

At a very basic level, we all have a need to feel safe. Only when we feel safe can we do our best work – if we feel anxiety in some form or the other, our system directs our resource toward coping with whatever we feel as a threat and, at a very deep level, tries to answer the question: Fight, Flight or Freeze? Obviously none of these modes are conducive to producing great customer experience or anything else for that matter.

When we dissect great customer experiences, most of them are the result of one of our team members deciding to do something ‘different’ in a given situation. The guest’s situation does not fit ‘the script’ and there is a need for an improvised solution. The last thing that guest wants to hear is “Sorry, we can’t do that”. But in order for our frontline staff to produce those creative alternatives that win us customers for life, they need to feel safe.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, and successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison. – Charles Handy

That is also confirmed by research from Google where they have identified psychological safety as the number one driver of great team performance. Teams that experience a high degree of psychological safety outperform teams that don’t.

But what does psychological safety actual entail?

The research breaks it down into four components:

Tribe – A sense of belonging
Expectations
Hierarchy – what are the roles
Autonomy

So in simple terms, that means it is important that everyone feels included, that we set clear expectations and that we try and limit the surprises; that there is not an excessive focus on authority and positions – and finally the ultimate motivator: do I get to have a say in how I do my work? (Not what I do, that is a management decision, but how I do it.)

This is all fairly easy to understand and makes perfect sense to most of us. But how do you as a busy team leader actually do that?

Well it so happens that there is a very nifty way to approach this. It is called the high performance team model and I plan to explain how it works in details on my next managers workinar*.

If you have this approach in the back of our head as you tackle your day, you will notice a marked difference in team performance.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 13th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

You won’t get results by pussyfooting around the issues!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Ed Catmull called Creativity Inc. Now you may not be familiar with the name Ed Catmull, but if I tell you that he was one of the three original founders of Pixar film then you’ll probably have an idea of who I’m talking about.

In the book is a chapter where Catmull describes the process behind making a successful animation movie. Catmull writes “Early on all our movies suck!”. This makes sense when you think about it. But when we see that fabulous animation, we often forget how that represents three years of hard work from an awful lot of people. And of course that rough idea was not born a box office hit. It was worked, reworked and polished endlessly until it became that work of art.

One thing is being a lone genius, a Picasso or a Rodin – tirelessly and self critically continuing until you get it right. But how does that work when you are 60, 70 or even 200+ people?

According to Catmull, one of the secrets to Pixar’s success is that they have this culture of candour. A feedback culture that is open, straightforward and honest – and maybe most importantly, never compromising.

So once a month, the management team sit down with the team working on a given animation project for the monthly review. Imagine this is meeting #24 i.e. 24 months into the project. Probably still another 12 or 18 months to go. The team that has been working on the project has been working long and hard on it, and they are probably relatively proud of what they have come to see as their baby.

“Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm” – Sir Winston Churchill

But there is still work to do. So the challenge for the management team is, to give the ‘creatives’ the necessary feedback without them losing motivation and enthusiasm. So each management team member voices their opinion but in a very precise format. They explain what they feel worked well for them and they state very clearly what did not work well for them. “If the scene at 37 minutes, was supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t find it funny.” The management team makes a point of not suggesting what needs to be fixed or what they felt was wrong. They only communicate very clearly: Is this working for me or is it not working for me?

And so it goes on and on, iteration after iteration, and gradually the rough sketches and crazy ideas are honed into one smooth and fabulous animation movie. Management gives straightforward no nonsense feedback – but the project managers are always left with their ownership for the project intact. They must come up with a new solution or improvement.

It’s not personal, it’s a challenge

Note also that this type of feedback is not personal. This is not feedback that says you are a bad animator. It just says we need to try something different. It’s a challenge, not a criticism.

But now think of your own team and how you are conducting team reviews, feedback sessions, evaluations of past performance? Do you have a culture of straight talk?

Do you as the boss fall into the trap of telling them what was wrong and what they need to do in order to fix it?

No feedback, no progress.

Feedback is crucial to our progress, without it we would not see improvements in anything we do. But the wrong kind of feedback, the criticisms, the ironic comments, sarcasm and lukewarm endorsements, just kills motivation and engagement.

What is needed is a culture of candour.

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the tenth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Conversations, not small talk

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Before you plunge into this, take a moment – and think about leaders that you have admired in your life. This could be a teacher, a scout leader, a sports coach or a boss. Go on – do it now.

When you think of a leader in your life that you have admired, does a specific conversation come to mind?

I think most of us can remember at least one (maybe even several) conversations that we have had with a great ‘boss’. A conversation that somehow shifted something in our thinking, understanding or behaviour.

Great conversations have a powerful impact.

But great conversations are also time consuming and for exactly that reason – they are also often the most neglected part of your leadership toolkit. We don’t seem to find the time.

That is a shame because when we neglect our conversations, we miss out on one of the most effective leadership instruments at our disposal.

Now, conversations are not just conversations, they come in many forms, some are constructive/destructive, important/irrelevant or inspiring/draining etc.

So as a first time leader, the first step is to become more aware of our conversations and in that process look at:

The quality
The participants
The frequency

What is a Quality Conversation?

Most conversations can be categorized as anything from weak at one end of the spectrum to strong at the other end.

A strong conversation has three key ingredients:

Advancement of an agenda
Shared learning
A strengthening of the relationship

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the weak conversations. At best they lead nowhere. And at worst, they produce confusion and distrust.

A high-quality conversation typically has three stages:

The initiator of the conversation sets up her agenda with an honest feeling or sincere expression of need. This signals to the other participant(s) in the conversation the importance of the agenda. At the same time, it can also a request for help and an invitation to contribution.

Strong conversations often follow a natural path of divergences / convergence that goes something like this:

In the first phase, you establish rapport and set the scene.

You ‘frame’ the situation, explain your view and if possible, illustrate what you mean.

The second phase, you explore, primarily using questions. You are probing in an effort to uncover and surface the real assumptions behind the issue as well as to make sure that we have as many facts as possible on the table.

Once we have a common understanding of what is going on, we can move to a third phase where we examine alternative ideas and solutions. This is a phase where we can try and stretch our thinking and not fall into the trap of grabbing the first solution that surfaces.

Finally, we need to make choices and decide what actions to take. This is a critical phase because often we assume that everybody is in agreement about what it is we need to do and everybody sees everything the same way and therefore there’s no need to going to details about this. (and time is running so we all nod and grab our stuff and rush of to the next thing on our agenda.)

But more often than not, this is not the case. We all hear what we would like to hear and we can all fall into the trap of going with half baked inferences and assumptions.

So in the final phase of a great conversation, we agree on explicit action steps: Who does what and when.

In order to move elegantly through this diamond, it is helpful to learn certain communicative dance steps. We call them advocacy and inquiry. We can get back to them in a future post.

Who are you talking to?

The next thing I would like you to consider is who are you actually having conversations with?

Take a moment and think about the week that has passed. Who did you talk to beyond just “So how are you?” or “Did you watch football yesterday?” etc.,

What quality conversations have you had and with whom?

And maybe even more importantly, who did you not have conversations with?

Why do you think you did not have conversations with exactly those people? Often our most immediate answer to that is “No time” or “They weren’t available.” or something else in that category. But often these are just excuses.

When we explore this question deeper, we often realise that there are some people we have a tendency to avoid having real conversations with. There can be many reasons for this, from simply we just don’t really enjoy those people, or that those conversations always end up negatively, or that we know that we have disagreements that we don’t want to resurface.

But also, be aware if there are people that you’re not having conversations with because you are assuming that it’s not necessary. “They know where to find me, they are capable and will tell me if they need me.” etc. That may be true but my suggestion is to test your own assumption on this. You might be surprised.

Whatever the reason is for avoidance, it should be a big red flag waving in front of you telling you something needs sorting out.

Because having or not having conversations and with whom is part of your behaviour pattern – see my previous post and it sends strong implicit signals about what you are interested in/ focused on.

How often are you having quality conversations?

The next thing to consider when you look at the people that you are responsible for is to evaluate the frequency with which you have powerful conversations with them.

Look at the list of the people on your team and think through how often do you actually sit down with them and have a powerful conversation?

Are you happy with this frequency? What do you think would happen if you increased the frequency for all or some of them?

If you think back to the first post in this series on Action, Behaviours and Conversations, we looked at the concept of powerful and powerless. That applies here as well. Powerless leaders have weak wichy washy conversations – powerful leaders have strong engaging conversations.

Generally, there is a huge need for more real conversations out there, not less. Quality conversations are the glue of our relationships, they are highly motivating – and they generate trust.

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This is the eighth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

Behaviour

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Behaviour

Last week, we looked at the first of three essential tools that are at your disposal as a first time manager. We looked at how action and non action ends up defining you as either powerful (in the positive constructive sense) or powerless.

Now it’s time to look at the next key instrument – your behaviour.

When I work with young managers who are in their first leadership position, I always give them a brief talk about being ‘on stage’.

And goes something like this:

The moment you become a leader of any kind, you are on stage 24/7 – what I mean by that is that everything you say and do is registered, compared and interpreted by your followers.

The way you get out of your car on the car park in the morning, how you walk across the parking lot, what you say as you come in through the door, who you talk to first and who you don’t talk to … on and on it goes throughout the day.

It’s as if you have a GoPro camera mounted on a rod on your back and it is registering your every move.

Each person on your team makes their own video – each from their perspective and as they are not ‘inside you head’ at any given moment, they don’t have enough information to understand what is going on – so they fill in the blanks as best they can.

They interpret what they observe and from that they make their own assumptions and with that a story.

As you got out of your car, you had a deep frown on you brow (you were thinking about your 5 year old and her bad cough in the night) but your followers may say to themselves: “Oh she is still pissed off about that incident yesterday” – even though the last thing you said as you left the day before was: “ Ok – let’s forget about this and move on”.

It is not what you say that counts, but your behaviour, and as each of your followers has only part of the story, they compare notes at the water cooler, over lunch or whatever and see if they can make up a complete story between them. A story that helps them predict the future. Because essentially that is what they are trying to do.

Don’t believe me? Well just think of the ways you observe your own boss…

You are the role model.

If you have had the experience of bringing up children, I am sure you will recall a time when you overheard your 3 or 4 year old suddenly trot out a sentence to her favourite doll or best friend and you realised that it was a word perfect recording of something you had said to your child in another situation.

If you have, you have probably also had the two following reactions. First, you find it hilariously funny, then you have this chilling realisation that this is what you sound like to your 4 year old… and you are possibly less thrilled.

As a parent, you are the role model as you are the role model when you are the leader. What you do gets registered and copied.

So as a leader, you need to be aware that every little thing you do gets interpreted and that there is never a period where you can claim a time out. At any given moment 24/7, you are communicating and there is no “off” button.

The only way you diminish their need for interpretation and story making is to be very aware of your behaviour and very clear and transparent in your communication. (We will look at the verbal communication part next week) You will need to leave as little as possible to their interpretations and imagination.

So how do you do that?

It’s all about being clear and consistent.

Some leaders try the joke about don’t do as I do, just do as I say. It may be funny but it does not work.

It very simple: What you focus on is what is important in their eyes – what you are not focused on is judged to be of less importance.

And your behaviour, not your words, shows them what is really important.

So what are you paying attention too? Whom do you speak to? What questions are you asking? What do you follow up? What do you ignore?

It is all observed and registered.

I was once coaching a reception manger from a large hotel and she told me that she has trouble getting her team to understand that they must take their lunch break, in peace, and in the canteen – because it was important that they get the break and anyway it is not appropriate to snack at their desks.

But no matter what, she would keep catching them taking their plate into their desk and having it next to their computer. So she wanted me to help her work out what sort of punishment would work to make them stop. Instead, I asked her: “So where do you have your lunch?” she said :“Well you see, I don’t really have lunch – I just bring some fruits, nuts or a carrot and have them during the day – you see, I am too busy most days…”

No matter what she says, it will always be overruled by her own behaviour. And nothing will change until the day she changes her behaviour.

So what are you paying attention to?

Whom do you speak to?

What questions are you asking?

What do you follow up? What do you ignore?

How do you come in to work in the morning?

Whatever is important to you is important to them – and from their perspective, if you, their busy boss, pay attention to something, it must be because it is important – that is the cue that they take from you.

Oh and never forget as Steven Covey said: You can’t talk your way out of something you behave yourself into – you have to behave yourself out of it.

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This is the seventh article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out