The Garden of Ingenuity

Photo by tobyleah

Despite our frustration at running into limitations on our behavior, those same limitations can be the rich soil that produces an entire garden of ingenuity and innovation.

There is a wonderful scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the engineers back on earth confront a major problem: their astronauts, floating through space in a damaged ship, are breathing too much carbon dioxide. The astronauts are doomed unless the engineers can find a way to improvise a connection between two different air scrubbers.

The scene culminates with a team leader spreading materials out on the table and laying out the problem: You've got to make this (a round filter), fit into the hole for this (a square filter), using nothing but that (the materials in the ship).

Ultimately, the engineers succeed in crafting a solution and relaying the instructions to the astronauts. It's an inspiring moment of ingenuity and teamwork.

In my opinion, the creative solution was made possible because the team leader was very clear about the limits their solution must satisfy. With anything less than absolute clarity about their boundaries, it is doubtful the team would have constructed an adequate solution.

Often, when we are working with a group that is going in circles trying to solve a problem, it is because the solution criteria are not clear. Effective leaders and managers can help teams craft solutions by clearly stating the limits the solution must satisfy.

There are a number of basic solution constraints. They include:

1) Time - when must a solution be delivered?
2) Money/Material - what financial or material resources are available and from what sources? (Often teams can creatively find other sources with which to expand the resource pool.)
3) People - who can be involved in the solution?

Solution Criteria:

4) What must the solution accomplish to be satisfactory? (Reduce carbon dioxide levels!)
5) How long must the solution last? (Long enough to return them to earth.)
6) Who needs to give their approval to execute the solution? (Managers can often serve their teams by getting approval limitations before problem-solving begins.)

When made clear, limits and constraints on problem solving can produce creativity. Next time you're problem solving with a team, help everyone to clearly define the playing field and desired outcomes, then free the group to optimize results.

For more on solution-focused leadership, read: Where Are Your Eyes?

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Get Out of Your Way

Photo by Jeffrey Beall

Secrets. Of. The. Universe.

When I taught high school students, we often talked about "secrets of the universe" - those enduring, but not always well-known, principles of success. You can ignore them if you want, but they're still out there.

One such "secret of the universe" goes something like this:

Causes produce effects. When we focus on effects, rather than causes, we trip ourselves up.

Some examples of this principle include:

• You gain respect by being respectable, not by focusing on others giving you respect. (Cause: being respectable, Effect: respect)
• You become trusted by being trustworthy, not by focusing on wheedling secrets out of others. (Cause: being trustworthy, Effect: trust)
• You pass classes by truly learning the content, not by focusing on grades. (Cause: learning, Effect: grades
• You make friends by being a friend, not by focusing on how many friends you have. (Cause: being a friend, Effect: friends)
• You live by savoring life, not by focusing on being not-dead. (Cause: living, Effect: life)

Effective leaders and managers understand that real influence requires credibility and that real credibility is developed through authentic commitment to people, competence, and results.

Many leaders limit their effectiveness because they focus on the effects of leadership: achievement, influence, reputation, image, power, accomplishment, respect, security, etc.

However, all of these are effects. They are outcomes of an authentic focus on being a role model, sharing vision, building a team, encouraging others, and solving problems. Leaders cannot lead effectively while focused primarily on their own image.

In the short term, authentic leadership can feel risky...when faced with an opportunity to invest in their team or to immediately look good to others, many leaders take the path of immediate gratification. In the long run, however, when the problem is too big they won't be able to rally a skilled and committed team.

This is a basic life lesson, but one it is easy to forget in the middle of leadership and management challenges.

How do you maintain your focus on "causes" and not get caught up in "effects"?

For more on this topic:  It's Not About You

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: Death by Meeting

Meetings are maligned almost as frequently as doctors and lawyers. Just about all of us, whether volunteer or employee, have suffered through horrible meetings that can range from a pure waste of time all the way to destructive and relationship-ending.

And yet, we are social beings. We need to exchange information, problem solve, and build ideas together. What are we to do? Meetings: can't live with 'em; can't live without 'em!

Into this dilemma comes Pat Lencioni's Death By Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, the subject of this week's book review. Death by Meeting joins the Five Dysfunctions of a Team in Lencioni's management and leadership library and follows a similar format. A brief fable is told about a manager struggling with meetings and discovering the principles of making them effective. As with all of Lencioni's work, the content is very accessible, easy to grasp, and can be implemented quickly. Death by Meeting can easily be read in one or two sittings.

First, let's dispense with meeting-hatred. In reality, we don't hate all meetings - we hate bad meetings, those poorly run, soul-sucking, endless, vampiric drags on motivation and productivity.

The good news is that meetings don't have to be that way. By following a few key principles, meetings can be energizing, mission-focused, and intensely valuable for everyone in attendance. Two of the most valuable concepts in Death by Meeting are the ideas of content and drama. Throughout the book, Lencioni uses the metaphor of tv to describe meetings. When it comes to content, most of us make the mistake of trying to combine dissimilar types of content in the same meeting. For example: imagine watching an epic movie saga simultaneously with a 60 second sound-bite cable news show. The dissonance this produces also occurs in poorly planned meetings. Lencioni advocates clearly separating different meeting types by content and purpose. I have personally found this to be a vital principle in holding effective meetings.

A second important idea in Death by Meeting is the need for drama. Drama doesn't mean needless hand-wringing or conflict. What it does refer to is the need for vigorous discussion of ideas. Outside of quick briefings, if there isn't some healthy conflict around ideas, the meeting probably wasn't necessary! I've only scratched the surface of the content to give you an idea what you'll find, but I promise that just the two principles of content focus and drama will radically improve the quality of your meetings.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you might begin to see how Death by Meeting intersects with Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team in the call for healthy conflict based on trust. These concepts, combined with the dialog tools in Crucial Conversations are the foundation for incredibly effective teams.

I encourage any new leader or manager, as well as veterans struggling through meeting misery, to read Death by Meeting and immediately implement one or two of its concepts. You'll be glad you did!

Happy Reading!

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post, please retweet, like, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye 

****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Why Great Leaders Know How to Say Goodbye

Photo by Sadie Hernandez

Not everyone is meant to be a part of every team.

On the surface, this may seem self-evident and yet, most of us have probably been a part of organizations or teams that suffered because those with the responsibility to ensure fit and mission alignment did not do their job. It has been many years since I came across the results of a survey that asked, "If you were in charge for just one day, what would you do?"

The most common answer: "I would deal with poor performers and trouble makers."

In part, that answer results from the frustration and poor morale produced by leaders and managers that have not learned to say goodbye.

There are times for every leader and manager where they realize a team member is no longer committed to the mission or is not, or never was, a good fit for the organization. In these situations we need to make sure that we have made reasonable efforts to help (see It's Not About You for more), that the employee has received due process, and that they are very clear regarding the needed behaviors. But if these actions have been taken and it is clear the person needs to move on, the most important thing we can do for our teams, for our own credibility, and for the employee is to help them go.

This is a vital part of knowing how to say goodbye - to realize that we do an employee no favors by tolerating poor performance, mission misalignment, or abuse of coworkers. In the case of mission misalignment, we are preventing the individual from learning more about their own strengths. In the instance of negligence or abuse, we enable poor behavior and prevent the individual from learning how to succeed in the real world.

In either case, while saying goodbye to employees is usually not pleasant or something we would look forward to, it can definitely be an act of caring if our motivations are concerned with what is best for the individual.

Great leaders know when and how to say goodbye because they recognize that in doing so they express value for their team, for the mission, and even for the exiting staff member.

Sometimes it's good to say goodbye.

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Nine Ways to Access the World's Best Leadership Resource!

Photo by Tela Chhe

Many emerging leaders and managers don't take advantage of one of their best, most effective, and readily available learning resources. Lacking this resource, many never will increase their influence.

Recently, I posted about the vital role a focus on results plays in effective teams. Staying focused on results requires leaders and managers to regularly evaluate both the environment (external conditions) and processes (internal conditions) impacting their teams. This learning is a key responsibility of leaders and managers.

You may have heard the old saying that "leaders are learners". I might modify it slightly in keeping with the theme of this blog: Effective leaders and managers incorporate learning into everything they do.

Even so, ongoing learning is a challenge for many of us. If it is not given regular attention, learning easily takes a back seat to today's urgent issues. It is easy, and sometimes accurate, to claim as so many do - "I don't have time to read or take a class."

I suggest that one way to overcome these obstacles is take advantage of the most effective textbook or classroom you will ever have. The good news is that you have complete and ready access to this resource. This amazing resource?

You.

Or more specifically, your experiences.

Leaders and managers can increase their competence and credibility by intentionally soaking up all the lessons available in their own experiences. There are many ways to do this:

1. With every project or activity your team does, automatically include a review. What worked? What didn't? Do we know why things worked or didn't work? What would we do differently next time? I think of this as institutionalizing learning. Make learning unavoidable!

2. Mentors and coaches. I've never met anyone who couldn't benefit from having one more mentors to help them make sense of their experience. Sometimes the lessons in our life are not immediately obvious to us. So get help!

3. Make it safe for people tell you the truth. I discussed this topic in a 6 Ways Not to Walk Naked Down the Street. Ensure you know the truth.

4. Apply what you learn. Our life is the best laboratory we have. When you learn a new leadership or management concept from a book, a seminar, a blog, your own reflection, or a mentor - apply it! Too often we hear a great concept, put it in our mental "great concept file" and never use it.

5. When you don't know, ask. I frequently observe newer leaders experience a conversation they did not understand, but fail to ask questions because they don't want to "look dumb". Ultimately, we all have to learn. If someone thinks you're dumb for asking questions...they're the one lacking intelligence.

6. Spend time with effective leaders (in real life - not television or movies). If you can, watch them in action. Think about how you would handle the same situation.

7. Make it automatic. Blogs like this one allow you to subscribe via email and automatically receive material you can apply. You look at email every day - does what you're reading have a ready application to a situation in your life?

8. Take time for reflection. Yes, this one includes the word "time". There simply is no way to learn and incorporate knowledge into your mind and habits without giving your body time to absorb it. This is a principle in every area of life.

9. Be patient. Learning takes time. Increasing the pressure on yourself to be "perfect" will only prevent you from learning what life has to teach you here in this moment.

How do you ensure you learn all your own life has to teach you?

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: Strengths-Based Leadership

Only strengths are useful for building - nothing is built on weakness. This is another of Peter Drucker's succinct messages to managers. Quit fooling around trying to eliminate people's weaknesses and begin building on their strengths. It is a vitally important message made all the more so because emerging leaders and managers often do not recognize their own strengths and spend tons of emotional energy trying to be something they're not. In the process, they lose credibility - much like the middle age father that tries to throw around teenage slang with his kids' friends.

If building on strengths is important for every leader and manager, then today's book review subject: Strengths-Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie is a blue print for the building's foundation.

Strengths-Based Leadership is another product of the Gallup groups extensive research of effective managers and leaders. On the basis of this research they identified three common practices of effective leaders:

1) Effective leaders recognize and build on strengths in themselves and others.
2) Effective leaders ensure they have people with the needed strengths in the right positions on teams.
3) Effective leaders are aware of team members' needs and ensure they are met.

On the surface, these may not seem like profound truths, but think about the normal employee performance appraisal - how often is it a conversation about how to leverage your strengths? Or about how you can help leverage the strengths of your team members?

The key to these practices is found in the Strengths-Based Leadership's identification of the many many strengths people possess. The book includes a code to access an online StrengthsFinder survey which identifies your top five leadership themes as well as a guide in how to effectively apply and lead from these strengths.

If you are not fully aware of your own leadership strengths, I recommend Strengths-Based Leadership as a good starting point to begin the process of self-discovery. Once you begin to value your own, it becomes easier to identify and value the strengths in others and know how to support them.

As a bonus for those interested (and some incentive to read the book), in the Strengths-Based Leadership model my top five are:

1) Learner
2) Intellection
3) Relator
4) Input
5) Achiever

Happy Reading!

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post, please retweet, like, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye

****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Avoiding the Waterfall

Have you ever led, managed, or been a part of a team/organization that was:

a) constantly bickering?
b) so tied up in bureaucracy that every form had a form to request the form?
c) hamstrung by office politics?
d) full of people lacking passion and energy?

If one or more of these characterize your organization or team, it's often because the team lacks a vital ingredient. The missing ingredient?

A focus on results. 

When an organization lacks a clear focus on results, its attention becomes scattered on trivialities, turf-wars, and passion-sucking processes that exist only because someone wanted a process - not because it accomplishes anything meaningful.

Effective leaders and managers maintain a consistent focus on results. Those outcomes are the reason the team and organization exist in the first place. A focus on results provides clarity, it prevents organizational navel-gazing, and it energizes individual's with a passion for the outcomes.

Management guru Peter Drucker defined results as the things that take place outside of the organization. Everything inside the organization is a process to produce those results.

Examples of results (what happens outside the organization) include:

• Customers purchasing products and experiencing the benefit of those products (the results of a retail business)
• Children benefiting from their education (the result of a school)
• Citizens experiencing safety and a decline in crime (the result of a police department)

In each of these examples, multiple internal processes might take place to produce the results. Each internal process can be weighed against how effectively it contributes to the desired outcomes.

In our day-to-day work it is easy for us and our teams to run in circles chasing all the small distractions that come our way. Long ago I learned that a group of people in a boat headed toward a waterfall don't spend a lot of time arguing - they all grab an oar and paddle. Their clear results (get to shore and continue living) produce clear action (paddle!). One significant way we can serve our teams is by regularly and passionately calling our attention back to the desired outcomes.

Next time you are part of a team that feels confused or unproductive, clarify what results they want to achieve. It brings everything else into focus.

Take care,

David M. Dye

Know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog?

Please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @davidmdye

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye

****

David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Keep It Flowing

Photo by Catherine V

I am writing this sitting beside a Colorado mountain stream. The air is crisp, the water cold and clear, and morning sun shines through the willow and aspen leaves until they almost glow.

Rivers and streams are something of a minor miracle to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m a native of Colorado, an arid state where water is a precious resource and nearly every stream in the state originates high in the Rocky Mountains. What amazes me is how the water keeps flowing. To look at a river is to see millions of individual drops of water that originated in a cloud, or a melting snowfield, or burbled up from some subterranean spring. And these rains, snowfields, and springs happen out of sight, over and over again in sufficient quantity to fill this river. It’s beautiful…and amazing.

I think of motivation like these mountain streams. Effective leaders and managers maintain a flow of motivation and encouragement throughout their teams. If you’re new to these roles, it can sometimes feel like this job is something only you can do, that you’ve got to provide all the positive energy and motivation for your team. But you don’t. That would be like one rain cloud hovering over this river to keep it full of water.

In a healthy team, motivation and encouragement come from every person being empowered to work from a place of personal vision and energy. Water flows because it’s water…and in healthy teams teachers teach, builders build, gardeners tend and cultivate, writers write, nurses care, chefs cook, pilots fly, and so on. Each person can become a source of motivation and encouragement.

Creating these teams is work – the real work of management. Ensure people are aligned with their vision, that they are not unnecessarily burdened with junk that keeps them from being effective, and equip them with skills to communicate, resolve conflict, and be leaders themselves.

How do you keep motivation flowing?

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

There are a number of different team-work formulas that have circulated over the years. Some of them rhyme, some require sophisticated knowledge of varied personality profiles, and some rely on boundary-pushing activities to bring members together. Most of these frameworks have an element or two that are worthwhile, but none of them have the simple elegance of this week's book review subject: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni.

Like all of Lencioni's books, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team begins with a fable. In this case we follow the journey of a supervisor who has just been hired into a new team. Lencioni's five principles of successful teaming (and their corresponding dysfunctions) are illustrated through the story. Following the fable, the book concludes with a more formal analysis of the five dysfunctions and their remedies.

What I most appreciate about The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is that the framework makes sense, the key elements are communicated quickly and clearly with a minimum of abstraction, and that the model can be implemented in just about any team setting. This book is an easy read - you can do it in one or two sittings if you desire. But don't confuse brevity and clarity for lack of impact. The five fundamental elements of successful teams are easy to grasp, but they require real work to consistently implement over time.

I want to be careful not to reveal the choice material, but The Five Dysfunctions of a Team really shines in its discussion of the role of conflict in healthy teams. This book, paired with the tools found in Crucial Conversations, give teams an incredibly powerful set of tools to consistently produce results. Lencioni is not suggesting we build foo-foo, hold hands and sing songs teams. His framework aims for teams featuring healthy relationships and a strong commitment to meaningful results.

I recommend The Five Dysfunctions of a Team for any leader, manager, or team member wanting to learn the critical elements of building a high caliber team. For those who might want to work through this material with a team, I can also recommend the companion field guide or facilitator's guide.

Happy Reading!

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

It Never Gets Old

Photo by HuNo

I recently spent time with a group of nonprofit leaders discussing a wide variety of issues relevant to the sector. When I reviewed their written evaluations of our time together, I was surprised at the frequency with which one concept was mentioned as their most valuable take-away.

The prized concept of the day? Saying thank you.

We had discussed how gratitude is so vital to everything we do and we had discussed practicalities - how to say thank you in ways that are meaningful to the person you're thanking. The reminder to be consistent and relevant with our gratitude was easily the most frequently cited material we discussed.

Some of the most lasting, fundamental, and impacting truths are also some of the most basic.

But sometimes these are also the most difficult to implement consistently. Do we let ourselves fall into habits of entitlement or do we recognize the miracle that is another person freely giving of their time, love, energy, or skills?

Effective leaders and managers are consistent and precise with their gratitude. Remember that "keeping a job" or avoiding being fired only produces a minimum amount of effort. Everything beyond the minimum - we do that because we want to.

When I am teaching leadership to young people, I encourage them to start with the basics. Surprise whoever cooks their food with a specific bit of gratitude: "This chicken is great - thanks for taking the time!" But the same goes for adults - is their any marriage that couldn't benefit from more frequent "thank you for washing the laundry or taking out the trash" ?

Basic appreciation - it never gets old.

Thank YOU for reading today and for sharing this blog with those who might benefit!

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

It's Not About You

Photo by cobalt123

Have you ever found yourself intensely frustrated or angry at a team member?

Frequently, this happens because we take what they said, did, or didn't do very personally. Consequently, we start saying to ourselves something like, "How could that little so and so treat me like this!" It is not long before we're mired in anger and adrenalin.

Every emerging leader and manager I've worked with (and not a few veterans!) has experienced this. It takes many forms depending on our own reactions to frustration, but the pattern is the same: someone else does something we don't like and we conclude that they did it to us.

However, effective managers and leaders understand an important secret: it's not about you.

Most of human behavior is not intentionally designed to irritate you, to be disrespectful, or to make you angry. (For everyone starting to shout exceptions - please read on to the end.) To the contrary, most of an individual's behavior is about them - their problems, their needs, their pain, and their view of the world.

A quick example: It is common for a new manager to become frustrated with a team member who does not perform as the manager expects. Often, the manager assumes the employee doesn't respect them or that they're intentionally trying to undermine the new manager. However, the employee may not have performed as expected for any number of reasons:

• They might not have understood expectations.
• They might have had competing expectations from another source or previous employers.
• They might not have the skills to perform the task.
• They might not have adequate time given other demands.
• They might be in a position unsuited to their skills.
• They might have had a bad day personally. The day I found out my wife had cancer, my performance was not up to normal.
• They might not realize their behavior is off-putting or inconsiderate.
• They might not understand the importance of the task and so lack motivation.
• We might have inadvertently hurt them and they lack the skills to deal with this productively. (A partial exception to the "it's not about you" rule.) 

And so on - you can add many more items to the list. The point is that effective leaders and managers are able to step back from their tendency to personalize someone's behavior and investigate why it is taking place.

Please understand, these are not excuses for team members to under-perform. We want to help the individual either acquire the skills and motivation to succeed in this role or to help them find a role more suited to their skills and motivations. You simply cannot do this effectively if you're caught up in personalized anger.

Finally, yes, I know there are rare times where individuals are truly malicious, mean-spirited, and personally disrespectful. In these instances, however, it is often still about them. They have their own reasons, dysfunctions, and pain for acting the way they do. If we refuse to personalize these attacks, reinforce expectations, motivate, and equip for change, we still have acted with compassion and helped them - even if it ultimately means they need to leave the team.

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post or the entire blog, please retweet, like, share, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye
****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.

Book Review: Getting to Yes

Recently, I observed two business professionals get locked into a heated exchange that went something like this:

A: "I want you to give me cookies."

B: "We don't give out cookies."

A: "If you don't give me cookies, I won't work with you."

B: "We don't give out cookies. I have repeatedly found it is bad for business."

A: "Fine, I'm leaving."

I've replaced the actual subject matter with cookies to illustrate a concept known as positional bargaining. Rather than focusing on what both parties really wanted, the focus was on a position - the cookies. They reached an impasse and their discussion rapidly deteriorated.

Overcoming this challenge is one of a number of important concepts discussed in this week's book review subject: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Fisher, Ury, and Patton. This book is a classic. First published in 1981, it has continued to sell and serve people in all walks of life.

All of us find ourself in negotiations of one sort or another. Getting to Yes is a guide to successfully navigate those negotiations as well as to diagnose when things are not going well and take steps to correct it. One of the most valuable lessons in Getting to Yes is to focus on interests and not positions. In the example above, Person A's interest in having the cookies is never stated. Had the reason behind the request been made clear, the two of them could have focused on addressing the issue and explored solutions that could meet both their interests.

I just want to tease some of this subject matter - my goal with these book reviews is always to encourage leaders and managers to read and absorb the material. The book itself gives a much deeper explanation and is full of additional useful tips. I highlight one of the most important.

One criticism I've encountered Getting to Yes is that it is too idealistic. These critics will often poise a scenario:

Person A: I want you dead.
Person B: Well, I want me alive.

Hmm...is this an irreconcilable difference of position? Maybe...but not necessarily. Again, what are person A's interests? If they truly are mutually exclusive with Person B staying alive, then sure, negotiation probably won't work. But in my professional life I have very very rarely encountered anything approaching that kind of scenario. In general, people do have interests that can be met if they will put the work in.

I recommend Getting to Yes for team leaders, managers, and anyone involved with regular negotiations of any kind - and yes, that includes all of us.

Happy Reading!

David M. Dye

If you know someone who would benefit from this post, please retweet, like, +1, or email it on. Thanks!

Subscribe today or join the discussion at: http://davidmdye.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @davidmdye
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmdye

****
David shares twenty years experience teaching, coaching, leading, and managing in youth service, education advocacy, city governance, and faith-based nonprofits. He currently serves as Chief Operating Officer for Colorado UpLift and enjoys helping others discover and realize their own potential.