Posts Tagged ‘coaching’

Coaching Millennials – A Quintessential Leader Perspective

Posted: November 19, 2018 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership
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Peter Pan Syndrome - Millennials

Coaching millennials and breaking the Peter Pan syndrome and perpetual adolescence that helicopter parenting and snowplow parenting has created and embedded in Gen Y is a process. A long process that is not for the faint of heart, the impatient, or the unmerciful.

Courage, patience, and mercy are traits of people who are striving to be quintessential leaders. Millennials will test these – not even consciously, because everything they believe is so deeply indoctrinated and entrenched in them that they don’t see anything wrong about their behavior, their attitudes, and their lives – at every turn in every way until something has to give or break.

Millennials are fragile. They’ve been, in almost a cult-like way, conditioned to believe they’re special, they’re awesome, they’re talented, they’re gifted, and they’re owed everything. Because no limits have ever been place on them and they’ve been awarded and praised just for existing, Millennials live in a bubble of delusion about themselves and about the world around them.

As quintessential leaders, our responsibility is to break that bubble without destroying the person inside it. And that is a challenging task and it’s going to cause pain on both sides of the bubble.

Imagine being blind from birth and creating your world simply by the sounds and the smells and the textures and the words your read with your fingers around you. It’s not going to be the same world that someone who is not blind sees or lives in.

Then one day, you wake up and you’re not blind anymore and you can see the world in another dimension you didn’t have before.

If it were me, my gut reaction would probably be to go back to being blind, because the world I would have created in my mind would be a safer world, a prettier world, and a more perfect world than the world actually is.

The other reason that my gut reaction would be to go back to being blind would be that once I could see, I’d no longer have anyone looking for me or taking care of me to make I was safe and had everything I needed. And that would be scarier than anything I could imagine because I’ve never been prepared for that and I wouldn’t know what to do.

Millennials have been blind from birth and they’ve created a world in their minds a world that doesn’t exist (and their parents have full culpability in this as well). We, as quintessential leader coaches, have the job of restoring their sight so they can see the reality of the world, life, themselves, and themselves in relationship to other people.

They’re not happy about that. And, frankly, we’re not happy about it either. Because we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum and it takes a long, hard, painful, and, sometimes, breaking-along-the-way, journey to meet in the middle.

One of the things that’s important for us as quintessential leader coaches to remember is that this bubble, this blindness is all Millennials have ever known. For 20, 25, 30, 35 years. That’s a long time and it is going to take time to make any kind of dent and progress in getting them where they need to be.

Having said that, as quintessential leader coaches, we have to be committed to the process and to doing the hard stuff and giving them tough love every step of the way.

Millennials will get angry or upset at every little perceived hurt or slight, but they won’t say anything to us. Instead, they’ll run back and complain to their helicopter and their snowplow parents with tears (and I’m talking about 25-30-year-old males and females) about how their feelings are hurt. Be prepared for the phone call berating you for hurting their “little, precious child,” for not understanding, and then a litany of all the wonderful things about their children that you don’t know or see.

If you think I’m kidding, then you’ve been hiding under a rock. it happens. A lot.

So in the process of coaching the Millennials, you now have be a quintessential leader coach to the parents, a task you didn’t bargain for because you didn’t hire the parents or invite the parents into the relationships with the Millennials.

Firm assertion in a polite way is the first step in coaching helicopter and snowplow parents. They’re not your employees and they weren’t invited into the relationship, and, it’s really none of their business are the three things you have to diplomatically tell them.

Tell them you won’t speak with them about your relationship with their children again. Here’s the easiest way to get this across in a way that makes sense: ask them if (a) they would have asked their parents to do this for them on the job and, (b) if they would have wanted their parents to do this for them on the job.

You know what the answer is going to be, followed by “but…,” of course, but it’s a way to get the message across to the parents that they’re not welcome to be involved in something that doesn’t have anything to do with them.

Next, you have to confront the Millennials with what their upset about. This rattles them and usually you get all the body language of anger and defensiveness, but they have no skills to fight the battles themselves.

Keep at it. They’re going to break a little a little at a time, over and over, and it’s going to hurt a lot because they’ve been so overprotected, they don’t know what breaking feels like. It’s okay. They’ll heal. Remind them that you’ll help if you need to (and the need has to be something that is literally impossible for them to do, but only after they’ve spent the time exhausting every possibility, option, and idea available to them), but you will not do anything they can and must do for themselves to grow up and you will not, unlike their parents, enable them.

Millennials won’t understand for a long time that you are teaching them resilience, independence, and the ability to think and do for themselves. In fact, you’re teaching them to be accountable, responsible adults, something their parents didn’t do.

No quintessential leadership coach signs up to be a parent to someone else’s child-in-an-adult-body. But that’s exactly the extra responsibility we have when we’re working with Millennials.

We must not fail and we must not quit, no matter how hard it gets, no matter how disheartening it can be at times, and no matter how much resistance we face because we’re the last shot they have at getting it right.

How are we doing?

Some of the Attributes That Set Quintessential Leaders Apart

Posted: February 5, 2016 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership
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Quintessential leaders recognize they don't know it allNone of us know everything. None of us are skilled in everything. None of us are good at everything. And none of us know all the answers – or even all the questions.

However, many people in leadership positions often act like – and perhaps believe – they know everything, they are skilled in everything, they are good at everything, and they both know all the answers and all the questions. The harm this does to their teams is immeasurable and often leads to disastrous consequences. (more…)

Part 2 – “The End of Absence” (Michael Harris) Book Review

Posted: February 27, 2015 in Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Team Building & Development
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This is the 2nd part of the review of Michael Harris’ “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.”

As quintessential leaders, this not only affects us but the teams we lead. One of our roles as leaders is to model and coach our teams. If we’re constantly connected to technology, then that is the example we are setting for our teams.

And it’s devastatingly detrimental to us and to them.

Going Gentle Into That Good Night

information superhighway going gentle into that good nightThis is the second of a three-part series of reviews that I am writing on The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection written by Michael Harris in 2014.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael HarrisIn “Part 1 – ‘The End of Absence’ (Michael Harris) Book Review,” we looked at the definition of absence and how it relates to our quality of life.

We discussed how absence gives rise to critical thinking, problem-solving, short-term and long-term planning, concentrated focus, and creativity.

We also discussed the physical, emotional, and mental benefits of absence.

And, finally, we discussed how absence has been eroded by our constant connection to technology to the point that it is virtually extinct in our current society.

We discussed how this has dumbed down society as a whole and how susceptible that makes us to being controlled, manipulated, and deceived by technology.

And, finally, we looked at how much…

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The Quintessential Leader Perspective: Are Bossiness and Leadership the Same Thing?

Posted: November 10, 2014 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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Sheryl Sandberg bossy equals unquintessential leadership “I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills.” – Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is quite disappointing, not just as a role model for women, but also as a role model for leaders, because this quote illustrates – as does her 2013 book, Lean In – that she doesn’t really know a whole lot about what leadership really entails and that she isn’t a quintessential leader.

Sandberg is an example of someone who’s in a leadership position – she’s the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook – who isn’t a leader. In fact, she’s an example of an unquintessential leader.

Why?

This quote encapsulates Sandberg’s philosophy and lifeview. And her philosopy and lifeview are dead wrong.

But I also realize, that from time to time, we all need a refresher on and a reminder of the basics, especially as our society blurs more lines between “this” and “that” and as our language morphs into opposites suddenly equaling each other.

This is a responsibility that I, as a striving quintessential leader, have to my teams. And that includes each of you.

So let’s examine why bossiness and leadership are not the same thing and why they are, in fact, completes opposites of each other. 

While the list of differences between what bossiness and leadership are is lengthy, I’ve chosen to highlight a few of the more important differences between the two.

One important difference between bossiness and leadership is that bossiness seeks to control, while leadership seeks to guide.bossy attributes unquintessential leadershipThe trait of of bossiness is always about control – and the bossy person getting their way at all costs. This is a byproduct of narcissism, of pride, of insecurity, of fear, and of internal inadequacy.

This is also a black-and-white view of outcomes: if I don’t get my way, I lose (control and everything else) and if I do get my way, I win (control and everything else). In fact, there are no processes with bossiness, just outcomes. Everything in life is a tick in the W or L column, and ticks in the L column are unacceptable.

Leadership, on the other hand, is about guidance. It creates frameworks and teams. It recognizes that there are multiple ways to achieve the same goal and it clearly delineates guidelines (ethical, moral, functional, etc.) within which the teams are free to navigate, making the best use of their talents, their abilities, their education, and their experience.

Leadership is the glue that ensures that the dots get connected, but it doesn’t legislate every step the teams take to connect those dots.

There are failures, but not losses. There are mistakes, but not catastrophes (the guidance of leadership sees catastrophes in the making and stops them before they become catastrophes). There are successes, but not wins. Inherent in the processes of each of these areas, however, are the more important things in terms of leadership: the lessons of experience and the education of future leaders.

A second important difference between bossiness and leadership is that bossiness forces, while leadership persuades.

A bossy person has a “my way or the highway” attitude. Bossy people, who never see a reason to explain their edicts and view people who have questions about their edicts as mortal enemies, always threaten dire consequences to force people to do things their way.

This can come in the form of threats (“if you don’t do it my way, you’ll be fired/shunned/excluded/removed”), intimidation (“you won’t get that promotion/grade/position if you don’t do it my way”), and bullying (“I can make every waking moment of your life hell for you if you don’t do it my way”).

As I’ve said before, forcing people to do something may seem to work in the short-term, but it is not leadership nor is it an effective strategy for the long-term.

Leaders, on the hand, motivate their teams by persuasion. Leaders explain everything they are able to explain. They also invite input from their teams on how to address and tackle problems, issues, projects, and goals. Leaders are there to keep the big picture on track, but they are not there to force a single solitary way to meet challenges.

There is generally a best path to success, and leaders persuade their teams to adhere to that path – this is where coaching comes in – while the team works together to build the steps on that path. It’s a very interactive process where everybody on the team is invited, everybody on the team is included, and everybody on the team is expected to make a contribution.

And questions are encouraged. Every time someone starts to ask me a question with some variation of “This may be a dumb/stupid question, but…?,” I always answer first with “The only dumb/stupid question is the one you don’t ask.” I believe that and I practice that. If you don’t know the answer to something, it’s not very smart not to try to get the answer.

quintessential leadership is not bossyA final critical difference between bossiness and leadership is how things are managed. Bossy people micromanage everything and everybody, while leaders macromanage the big things and coach and help their teams as the need arises.

Bossy people literally look over everyone’s shoulders all the time. This is because when you have to force people to do things in a rigid, inflexible way, because people are individual and unique, you can’t trust everybody to adhere perfectly to that rigid inflexibility.

Most of this is a result of the “square peg in a round hole” principle: some people just don’t have the skills or abilities to follow a rigid and inflexible pattern that is diametrically opposite to how they think and work. It’s not that those people aren’t fully capable of doing the task or job right and well, but instead because they would accomplish it a different way that uses their gifts and strengths.

Leaders, on the other hand, build diverse teams that purposefully include people with unique talents and abilities so that when the teams work as units all the bases are covered. In other words, there are no gaps in knowledge, experience, and skills. Leaders trust their teams.

Leaders and their teams work together to plan and execute at the macro level. Each team member is given autonomy and authority over his or her part of the project or goal (again, within the big-picture framework in terms of scope and function and in terms of what’s ethical and what’s moral) with the understanding of how his or her part fits in with the other parts.

Leaders take care of the macro things like budgets, resources, time, as well as ensuring that things – and people – not only move forward, but move forward to successful completion. Again, it’s an interactive, but not intrusive process.

So the question I leave you with today, my fellow quintessential leaders, is are you bossy or are you a leader? 

 

The Most Quintessential Leader in My Experience

Posted: May 24, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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In my earlier post, The Most Unquintessential Leader in My Experience, I reviewed in summary form, the characteristics that made this person the antithesis of a quintessential leader. In today’s post, I will review the characteristics of the most quintessential leader I’ve had in my career. Much of what he taught me by example went over my head at the time – I encountered him on my second fulltime job out of college – but as time has passed, I find myself reflecting more and more on the invaluable lessons of quintessential leadership that he used and modeled for me and have tried to incorporate those in my own quintessential leadership.

Unlike the last post in which the unquintessential leader was nameless, I will name this person. He was Wayne Grovenburg. He died in a motorcycle accident in Oklahoma in 2000, so I’ve never gotten a chance to thank him personally for his great example, so this is my overdue tribute to his legacy as a quintessential leader.

I was hired by Wayne and another technical manager as a technical writer for a little – but growing – software company that had spun off from a larger long-established electrical components distribution company. The software had been developed in-house to handle the unique business cycle of a distribution company, but the executives of the existing company saw the potential of the need for this product by other distribution companies.

About half the employees were legacy employees with the parent company and about half had been hired when the new company started up. The person who had been writing the user documentation for the software was a legacy employee who was old compared to most of the other employees and had a quasi-marketing background. She wrote most of the marketing literature for the company and was involved in doing trade shows early on, but was phased out as the company looked for a more professional image.

The quasi-marketing person was my supervisor, but I reported ultimately to Wayne. The age difference between the quasi-marketing person and me was at least 30 years, so that alone set up the scenario for inevitable clashes. We were also both very intransigent when we believed we were right, so this added to the inevitability of butting heads. A lot. I was very young, very brash, and very confident in my knowledge and abilities. She was an aging employee who was, in the end, trying to keep a paycheck until she could retire and pursue her real interests, which were nebulous and ethereal. Her real interests were reflected in her writing style which didn’t sit well with my logical, down-to-earth, let’s-get-it done mentality. Another potential for conflict. She had no knowledge about technical writing; I had helped one of my college professors write a technical writing textbook while I was finishing up college, and I’d had about a year’s worth of experience working with real technical writers at a large software/hardware company, so I knew what I was doing.

Another technical writer was hired at the same time I was. She was a good bit older than me as well, but she had military technical writing experience, so we were okay together professionally.

My first day at work quasi-marketing person handed me one of the user manuals she had written and asked me to edit it. It was bad. I read the first of what we later covertly called “the Tony stories” and it was neither technical nor instructive. In fact, it was insulting from the perspective of the user because it basically explained the process of his or her job to them instead of showing how to use the software to do a job he or she already knew inside and out.

I grabbed one of the red pens I had gotten from the administrative assistants up front and got to work. When I handed the manual back to quasi-marketing person two hours later, she opened it up and immediately burst into tears seeing that most of the pages were bleeding with red ink. I had not expected an emotional response, but before I could even address that, she had run off to find Wayne.

Before she found him, though, she had tried to trash me, in hysterical tears by then, to almost everyone else in the company. Ironically, her first stop had been at the administrative assistants’ area. When I had met them all that morning, I made a point of noting their surroundings to see what was important to them, and had engaged in a little getting-to-know you conversation with each of them based on what I saw in their work areas. I knew, intuitively, that this group of people could make my time at this company pleasant or hell, and since I genuinely liked them, based on my brief interactions with them, I decided it was going to be as pleasant as I could make it.

Quasi-marketing person was also a bit of an elitist, so she talked down to the administrative assistants and also spent a good bit of time berating them. The only time she talked to them was when she had to, and there was no love lost between them and her (I got all of this in my introductions to them that morning). They, though, were the eyes and ears of the executives in the company, so I have no doubt the executives knew what quasi-marketing person was up to. Other than the president of the company, none of the rest of them had much use for her.

She finally found Wayne and went behind closed doors with him. I got a call from the administrative assistant to the president and she asked me to come up front (this began the pattern of how we would communicate when she was watching my back). When I got there, she and the other administrative assistants told me what happened and then said “Don’t worry. No one takes her seriously.”

After a couple more hours, Wayne came to my cube and asked me to go to lunch. We went and he gave me one of the most meaningful conversations and some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten professionally.

He wasn’t angry or upset with me. He wasn’t angry or upset with quasi-marketing person. But he realized that if the two of us could not figure how to tolerate each other without these flashfires – from her – every day, we’d get nothing done and he’d be spending all his time trying to referee between her and me, which meant he wouldn’t be getting his work done either.

He intuitively understood how to communicate with people and he was very effective in making his points without being critical or destructive to anyone. He also had that rare knack for knowing how to effectively communicate with each of his team members in spite of the diversity of our backgrounds and temperaments. And, of all the people I’ve worked for along the way, I never felt like I needed to put body armor on, even if the conversation was serious and I needed to make some changes for the good of the team and the company.

He made a very wise decision in putting the responsibility to keeping the relationship with quasi-marketing person in my hands. He knew that she was not going to change and that talking with her to help her see her deficits was an exercise in futility. So, in that lunch meeting, we had a heart-to-heart and he reminded me to stay focused on the company mission and on the big picture. He advised me to find less in-your-face ways of making changes – after all, that garbage that I’d read was exactly why he and the other technical manager hired me and he reminded me of that and the value they knew we were bringing to the company – and, if necessary, to go around her if I knew face-to-face could bring on an eruption (she was furious by the time she talked with him). He finished by reassuring me that I had his support and all of us, except her, were on the same page, but she was there because the president felt obligated to her, so I’d have to find ways to live with that and live with that peacefully.

Several things stand out in my mind to this day about that conversation. The first thing that Wayne did was refocus me on the big picture: the goal. Since I’m a goal-oriented person, this was the best approach he could have taken at the outset of the conversation.

The second thing was the balanced and gentle way Wayne discussed both my strengths and my weaknesses. Not once did I hear “you were wrong” come out of his mouth, but by the end of the conversation, I knew what I had done wrong and I knew what I needed to change.

The third thing that Wayne did was to engage me a participatory way in the process of keeping the peace while the necessary transition of redoing the documentation happened. By making me responsible for watching myself and giving me advice on what to do to help keep the peace, he made me his partner that day and it made a huge difference. I wasn’t just the new kid on the block, the youngest person in the company, but instead I was a full-fledged participant in the company and the team.

The fourth thing that Wayne did that made a deep impression on me was that he didn’t take sides. Not once did he bad-mouth quasi-marketing person to me, even though I suspect, looking back, that she was a thorn in his side, since she certainly was to almost every other person in the company. Whatever he felt personally about her, he kept to himself. And he made it clear that he would not put up with anyone disrespecting her. That was an ethical standard that I try to remember in my leadership today, because it can be a very hard thing to separate personal feelings from professional obligations.

The last thing he did was to end the conversation positively, making sure that I didn’t walk away from the conversation and lunch believing I was the worst person on the planet. He brought up some of the things that I could have done better or differently, which was exactly how he phrased it, and then gave me practical ways on how to do it better or differently – in effect, giving me tangible parameters within which to work that were acceptable to him and to the company to get the job done -, without attacking me or tearing me down. And in the end, he let me know that I had his support and everything was okay between us.

Unfortunately, that was not the last conflict quasi-marketing person and I had, but I took the wise and generous mentoring of the most quintessential leader I’ve experienced in my career, did my best to implement it and build his belief and trust in me, since he had already demonstrated that he had belief and trust in me, and eventually she was moved out of the department and out of the team.

Wayne’s gone now, but his lessons and his example resonate with me to this day. So I’m a bit late, my friend, but thank you!