Leadership Archives

Lessons from My Father

In the post on my friend Pete Remembering What Matters, One Step at a Time, (thanks again to those of you who supported him by donating via his blog), I mentioned my dad. It reminded of an article I wrote about him titled “Lessons from My Father.”

It was printed the first Father’s Day after his death and was published in Octane, The Entrepreneur’s Organization Magazine. Below is a copy.

Lessons from My Father

For many, Father’s Day is a holiday of the worst possible definition: a phony event designed to sell cards and neck ties.

For me, though, this Father’s Day has special poignancy: It’s the first time I’ll be celebrating as a dad myself, and the first time that I won’t be able to tell my own dad how much he means to me.

My father, Theodore, died last year in a farming accident. It was a terrible shock, to say the least, and it put my life in perspective. In the months since, I find myself remembering all the things he taught me; lessons that I want to teach Theodore, my young son.

In 2001, a local newspaper published an article about how my company, Intertech, was named one of the 500 fastest growing firms in the nation. In the article, I credited some of my success to simple lessons that my dad taught me. Now I realize that my dad taught me so much more, and those lessons have been critical to my company’s ongoing success.

“Tell the truth and you’ll only have one story to remember” was one of his favorite sayings. After being in business for 20 years, I have repeatedly experienced the merit of my dad’s wisdom. Recently, an important client of ours hired a CIO who turned out to be a dishonest bully. He hoped posturing, changing his story and saying whatever would resonate with me would make me complicit with his deceit. It didn’t. The company fired him, but Intertech is still engaged.

This particular experience taught me that while it’s easy to encourage others to tell the truth, it’s harder to create an environment where truth-telling feels safe. To create an atmosphere of honesty, I’ve learned to support people when they fail. I also encourage my managers to tell those people who make mistakes that they’re OK. I’ll never forget how grateful I was when my dad did that for me.

“If you do nothing, you won’t make any mistakes” were his first words after I accidently sheared the axle on his truck when I was a teenager. After reminding me that only those who do nothing are perfect, he said, “Now let’s go take a look at the truck.” No shaming reprimand; just a straightforward focus on solutions. When mistakes happen in my business, I acknowledge it, learn from it and move on to the next step. At the end of the day, the mistakes are what make us great.

“If someone does something you don’t agree with, tell him directly” was another belief my dad modeled. He wasn’t confrontational, but he did speak his mind if he disagreed or had something corrective to say. When I asked him if this was hard to do, he would just shrug his shoulders and say, “I’m not trying to win a popularity contest.” I was able to apply this lesson when a valued business partner of mine messed up. We talked through the issue and he realized that, while I recognized his mistake, I was more concerned about the future of our company and his role in helping us move forward. I’m happy to say that he’s still with us today.

While popularity wasn’t his goal, my dad was beloved by many. At his funeral, many people recalled stories of how he turned their lives around or did good work. It made me realize that sharing sincere praise is precious. This is something I have institutionalized within my company with a program that encourages employees to nominate each other for demonstrating our company values. Sometimes as leaders we get so busy that we don’t give people the acknowledgement they need to excel. At the end of the day, awareness begets success.

My dad was a modest farmer, but he left a rich legacy of integrity, authenticity and kindness. His wisdom has helped me grow as a business owner and father. I only hope I can be at least half as effective in passing that legacy on to his namesake.

A digital copy of the printed magazine with this article is available at: http://www.intertech.com/downloads/pr/eo-octane-june-2011.pdf

Leadership as a Conversation: Intentionality

The last element in leadership as a conversation is intentionality. Authors of the book Talk, Inc. Groysberg and Slind state, “(intentionality) enables leaders and employees to derive strategically relevant action from the push and pull of discussion and debate.”

Further, they note, “One way to help employees understand the company’s strategy is to let them have a part in creating it.” Years ago, I attended Dale Carnegie leadership training. There the instructor echoed this same idea, “People want to live in a world they help create.”

So how does a leader involve everyone in the company’s strategy? At Intertech, we do a “Town Hall.” Once a year, all employees take part in the half-day Town Hall session. At the Town Hall, leadership isn’t present. Employees share ideas and provide feedback. This information is used in the leadership team’s SWOT analysis at our yearly strategic planning session. Three of my favorite questions Town Hall questions are:

What’s one thing we should stop doing?
What’s one thing we should start doing?
What’s one thing we should always continue doing?

Well that’s it… this is the final post in leadership as a conversation.

Up Next: How to get IT and the overall business working effectively together.

Dialogue and Roles in Leadership as a Conversation

The second element of leadership communication is interactivity. In the book Talk, the authors note, “The pursuit of interactivity reinforces and builds upon intimacy, but employees need tools and institutional support to speak up and talk back.”

At Intertech, we’ve institutionalized “speaking up” thru:

A yearly town hall where employees share insights on the business without leadership present

A yearly survey, via a “Best Places” to work competition, where employees rank the firm on the major areas of engagement including benefits, job satisfaction, feeling valued, trust in senior leaders, manager effectiveness, trust with coworkers, individual contribution, alignment with goals, retention risk, and teamwork
Quarterly review of an employee’s Key Result Areas where they can note tools or training needed
Yearly reviews
Informal conversations at social events

We also encourage inclusion. Inclusion in the sense of leadership as a conversation means expanding employees’ roles as industry leaders. At Intertech, this has means members of our firm are:

working with Microsoft’s product groups to give them feedback on our use of their products in the field;
starting user groups at the forefront of technologies like Java and Windows Azure;
participating on sites like StackOverflow, DevX, and CodeProject;
being named a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) for their elite thought leadership;
speaking at conferences and user groups.

Up next, the final post in this series: The Agenda

Leadership Communication Elements

Related to the Harvard Business Review article being discussed in these blog posts, from the same authors, is the book Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations. In it, they list the four I’s of conversational leadership:

1. Intimacy

2. Interactivity

3. Inclusion

4. Intentionality

This post covers intimacy. Intimacy in the context of conversational leadership means shortening distances between leaders and team members thru:

Listening. Many years ago, I asked a board member, the best advice he ever got. He paused and said, “First seek to understand then seek to be understood.” This is habit number five in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As a leader, we need to make a lot of decisions. For me, it can be tempting to make a decision quickly before listening/getting input. Every week, I can point to an example where following this advice (of waiting, listening, and getting input) resulted in not only better decisions but a better experience/process for those impacted by the decision.

Equality. Managers using a conversational approach to leadership won’t dictate or demand based on their title. They let the best idea win.

Transparency. In a conversational approach to leadership, the authors note, organizations and leaders need to be willing to “share sensitive data such as financials.” Intertech has been open book for so long, I can’t remember when we didn’t share financials. When other business owners have questioned me on this practice, I share most people in an organization want to know how the organization is doing financially. This is especially true in tougher economic times. If people don’t have information they’ll make it up. What they make up will be way better or worse than the actual situation.

Next: Dialogue and growth as ways to improve communication

Facilitating Leadership Communication

At Intertech, we start setting guidelines for communication on a new employee’s first day. We hand out an Intertech Communications Guidelines document. At about a dozen pages in length, this document has a series of practical bullet points on communication. Below are just a few:

“I don’t know” is okay, especially when teamed with “I’ll find out.” This is much safer than bluffing. It shows you are honest and you are not panicking in the face of a challenge. If you follow up with an answer quickly, it shows you are responsive.
Listen. Seek first to understand then to be understood. When you sense someone’s upset or miscommunication has taken place, listen without going through what you plan on saying in your mind. If appropriate, to make sure you’ve understood the issue(s) restate what the person said.
Act with character, be committed and divide and conquer. Adversity tests character and shows others how we are “wired” at our core. Our leadership and the customer will reward and remember behaving with character and being committed to solving problems. If you lose heart when adversity comes, your only strength will be weakness.

We’ve institutionalized communication through:

A yearly “Town Hall.” At our Town Hall, employees discuss, in the absence of the leadership team, how we’re doing as a firm. After the Town Hall, an employee who facilitated the event anonymously shares the feedback.
Huddles. Throughout the firm, we use huddles – stand up meeting where we’re talking about what’s happening – big updates, stuck items or problems, and track metrics. Huddle frequency is based on a person’s role in the firm. For example, at a leadership team level, we do daily huddles. For our software teams, we call out to them once a week to check in on project status (many of our teams use Agile and Scrum approaches to application development so they’re doing daily huddles).
A weekly newsletter. This newsletter shares what’s happened over the past week and important upcoming events.
A monthly all company meeting. In this meeting, we cover updates on strategic goals, sales, R&D, and our P&L.
A social network. We use a product called Yammer for internal dialog throughout the day—employees post ideas, questions, and updates.

Along with the institutionalized communication, nothing beats just talking with people as you run into them in the hallway. A simple, “What’s the best thing that’s happened today?” can get a good conversation going.

Next: Leadership communication elements