Leadership Paw Prints
Cam
For those that are regular readers of my blog, you know that I love cats. To be clear, however, we have no cats in the house and none that curl up in my lap to watch TV. Ours are farm/barn cats that play an important role in rodent control and are free to roam the entire farm. Nonetheless, I love them and they are very well taken care of. Ours are not typical barn cats in that these are all pets and are always sitting on bales of hay or up on posts waiting to be petted. And…always lined up ready for me to feed them morning and evening. For me, they are just fun to watch.
This morning it was raining and as I walked through the barn to start the morning feeding I looked down and saw the wet paw 🐾 prints, pictured here in this post, on the barn floor and I knew exactly which cat they were from – Cam. Cam is always the first cat to stir and I knew he would be up on his tower waiting for me to acknowledge him and pet him. Sure enough, there he was. This got me to thinking about what footprints we are leaving behind and what our predictability/dependability is.
As a fan of Winston Churchill, I am reminded of his saying, ‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” So what are our footprints doing to make a life? We could even divide this into some of the different roles we play in life.
Think about our role as a parent. Most children imitate their parents, copying mannerisms and ways of responding to situations. As parents, we walk through life leaving footprints that express the qualities we value for our children to follow. We need to make sure we leave lasting imprints and not ones that quickly dry up and disappear like the wet cat paw 🐾 prints that inspired this post.
We all have mentors/coaches in our professional and personal lives. We need to make sure we are leaving lasting and life-giving footprints for our mentees. Also, we need to make sure to honor and follow in the footprints of our mentors/coaches. By doing so, we honor the people who invested their lives into us and our organizations. By following their footprints, we recognize that we have been given a “step up” by standing on what they have already accomplished.
Footprints clearly leave an impression. The way we lead, transact our personal business, and interact with others should leave an impression, too. We need to make sure the impression we leave has a lasting impression.
Our footprints show where we have been, what we have done, what direction we are headed, and what course corrections we have made along the way. Our footprints are the diary of what we have done. The pattern of your footprints is a testimony to the kind of person and leader we are.
Take a look over your shoulder at your footprints. Do they express the values and actions that you want others to associate with you? Have your footprints made a clear impression? Finally, are your footprints making a lasting impression?
Employers Need To Know What To Expect
In meetings this past week a theme developed: Employers need to know what to expect. This was referring to the fact that employers need to know what to expect that students coming to work for them will know. As I have continued my work, as an Indiana State Board of Education member and Chair of the Indiana Graduation Pathways, I am spending a great deal of time with employers, learning the employee skill needs. It is abundantly clear there is a skills gap, but I do not believe it is insurmountable. I believe the answer is to identify those transferable skills and competencies that every student needs. Additionally, the transferable skills and competencies needed for specific trades need to be identified.
Even though the study dealt with college students, The Chronicle For Higher Education reported on a study that dealt with the question of “The Thing Employers Look For When Hiring Recent Graduates.” What the study found was that employers really value experiences outside of academics: Internships, jobs, volunteering, and extracurriculars. I have to believe this would also apply to high school graduates. From the many employers I have visited with, I would have to say that these things do apply to high school students. Maybe even more!
Below is the graph of the results from what employers want:
One of the pieces of our Indiana Graduation Pathways we were very explicit about was the need for Work Based Learning and Project Based Learning. Just so we are on the same page, Work Based Learning is an educational strategy that provides students with real-life and real-world work experiences where they can apply academic and technical skills and develop their employability skills in a relevant context. Work-based learning encompasses a wide array of learning experiences, from exposing high school students to careers through activities like job shadowing, to providing incumbent workers with specialized training. Work-based learning extends into the workplace through on-the-job training, mentoring, and other supports in a continuum of lifelong learning and skill development. I really want to highlight the point of lifelong learning. We really need to get out of the fixed mindset that the pathway everyone should take is to graduate high school and go straight to a four year college/university. This is not for everyone and Work Based Learning can help provide an avenue for our students.
Work Based Learning is at its most powerful when experiences advance along a sequential, purposeful continuum. Experiences along the continuum are increasingly personalized and aligned with specific industries and occupations, providing participants with opportunities to contextualize what they learn and build their skills and knowledge. This also can provide the employer with a pipeline of employees that have been trained in their own environment and on their own equipment. In this setting employers know exactly what they are getting.
Even beyond the Work Based Learning, however, employers need to know what to expect from the students that will become their future employees. We need to partner with employers to develop transferable skills and competencies that all students need to know. We really need to take a step back and fully develop what every high school needs to know when he/she graduates. Make no mistake, I am not saying students do not need math, English, and the other cores we always discuss, but that there is more. Employers need to know what to expect from the future employees, that are our students. We need to listen and make sure what employers expect is what employers get. Furthermore we must also make sure our students know what to expect they will be expected to know when entering the workplace.
The Great & Humble Leadership Of Calvin Coolidge
This past July my family and I spent the day in the beautiful Green Mountains of Vermont in Plymouth Notch. We went there to learn more about one of my favorite Presidents, Calvin Coolidge. I have read many books about our 30th President and studied many of the papers he wrote. I am fascinated with his leadership style, path to the Whitehouse, and his upbringing. In our quest to get my son to all 50 states before he graduates high school, we thought it fitting to spend time at the birthplace and childhood home of President Coolidge as our way of seeing Vermont.
Snow Roller
As soon as we walked up to the visitors center, we understood the draw of this place known as Plymouth Notch. It was beautiful! Then as we learned about President Coolidge’s grandparents and parents, it became very evident how he could grow up to be President of the United States. His father was born in Plymouth, Vermont. John C. Coolidge was truly a servant leader. As I see it, he was the guy who held the town together. He was a farmer, store owner, and worked at a variety of other occupations. He served as the postman, snow roller (there was no way to plow snow at that time so they rolled it – see picture), town police, cheese maker, and he even made carriages. In addition, he was a veteran of the Vermont militia, and was in charge of the area militia. As you can see, he was a prominent local leader, he served in numerous Plymouth town offices, and was elected and served in both the Vermont House of Representatives and Vermont State Senate. What a role model for our 30th President.
This was quite the example for the young Calvin Coolidge growing up. President Coolidge learned hard work on the farm and developed a love of agriculture and farming that never went away. I wonder if there will ever be another President of the United States who grew up on a farm or who was a farmer like Calvin Coolidge or Harry Truman? It was amazing to stand in the sitting room, known as the “Oath of Office Room.” Coolidge was back home when President Harding died, so was sworn in by his father, there in that room, to be President of the United States. The room displays the table, Bible, and kerosene lamp used in the swearing in and then his inauguration. President and Mrs. Coolidge occupied a second floor bedroom during their many visits. Here we were, standing where all this happened.
“…to walk humbly and discharge my obligations.” ~ Governor Calvin Coolidge when asked his goal as Governor Of Massachusetts
Calvin lived in Plymouth Notch until 1887, when he left for school. In 1895, he graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts and moved to nearby Northampton to study law. Northampton, Massachusetts would be home for him for the rest of his life. After admittance to the bar in 1897, he established his law practice and soon became involved in local politics. Here are some key milestones in Coolidge’s rise to the presidency:
• Began a steady rise in the State Republican Party in 1899
• City Councilman of Northampton, Massachusetts
• Mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts
• Served in both houses of the Massachusetts State Legislator
• Served as Massachusetts’ Lieutenant Governor and Governor
• Gained national attention during the Boston police strike of 1919
• Elected as Vice President to Warren G. Harding in 1920
• Became President in 1923 upon the death of Harding
• Elected President in 1924 after gaining the faith of the American people in only 15 months
President Coolidge was an outstanding example of a President who regarded his office, the most powerful in the world, as a stewardship–rather than as an opportunity to remake civilization. He proceeded from practical considerations of government, politics and popularity, applying his life-long experience as an elected office-holder. His decisions were usually compromises, made after long consideration of the conflicting interests involved. He announced them in as few words as possible and committed himself only so far ahead as might be necessary. During his administration the advance of the United States into the future was distinctly experimental–always in search of the sound course.
“They criticize me,” Coolidge said, “for harping on the obvious. Perhaps someday I’ll write On the Importance of the Obvious. If all the folks in the United States would do the few simple things they know they ought to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves.” ~ President Calvin Coolidge
I am so glad we had the opportunity to walk among the houses of President Coolidge’s family and neighbors, the community church, taste cheese in the family’s cheese factory still in operation today, one-room schoolhouse, and general store which have all been carefully preserved. We also were able to pay our respects as the President is buried in the town cemetery. From walking where he walked we can understand why all during his life he would never waiver in his character or methods. He listened, he assimilated, and he waited until there appeared what seemed to be the soundest course. He did not try to make circumstances; but, when they appeared in the right configuration, he acted. By spending time there I learned where he had learned to be the principled and outstanding humble leader. I have been a student of Calvin Coolidge leadership for many years, and have now had the experience of seeing and understanding where his principled and conservative beliefs came from and were developed.
Refreshingly Organic Leadership
Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust by Edgar H Schein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a refreshing change to other leadership books and theories that have multiple steps that really only work in an ideal culture or environment, or when everything is going perfect. Humble Leadership is not about doing this and then that; it is about building authentic relationships and trust, and then letting the group growth and development happen organically. This book starts out by posing the question as to whether the leader makes the culture, or the culture makes the leader. The authors also posit that leadership exists at all levels and everywhere in the organization. This helps the reader view leadership as multidimensional as opposed to a two-dimensional, top-down hierarchy. Humble Leadership is about relationship building and trust. Humble Leadership teaches the reader how to be adaptive and practice adaptive leadership while letting the individual team members and organization grow in an organic way. There were great examples of how Humble Leadership works with the Air Force Thunderbirds and David Marquet’s turning around of the Navy submarine, USS Sante Fe. This book is a must read for all leaders who want a culture where every person is empowered to be a leader and is working to make the organization great.
The Implications of What We Call “Level 2” Relationships at Work
The following is an excerpt from Humble Leadership
The Implications of What We Call “Level 2” Relationships at Work
By Ed and Peter Schein
Organizations today are doing all kinds of experiments in how work is defined and are showing great flexibility in how roles and authority are allocated. What we see in these experiments is that they encourage relationships that are more personal. Bosses, direct reports, team members, and resources from other teams are making it a point to get to know each other at a more personal level, fostering more openness and, in time, more trust and the psychological safety to speak up and be heard.
In a Level 2 relationship, I convey that “I see you.” This is not necessarily “I like you” or “I want to be your friend,” or “Let’s get our families together,” but I let you know through my words, demeanor, and body language that I am aware of your total presence, that in this relationship we are working together and are dependent on each other, are trying to trust each other, and should each try to see the other as more than a fellow employee, or associate, or team member, but as a whole person. By conveying that “I see you”, we are also conveying that we will not allow “professional distance” to separate us; we are forming a personal-working bond that will not tolerate obfuscation or deception. Seeing each other as whole persons is primarily a choice that we can make. We already know how to be personal in our social and private lives. Humble Leadership involves making that conscious choice in our work lives.
Six Principles of Humble Leadership
- Humble Leadership builds on Level 2 personal relationships that depend on and foster openness and trust.
- If Level 2 relationships do not already exist in the workgroup, the emergent humble leader’s first job is to develop trust and openness in the workgroup.
- In a Level 2 workgroup Humble Leadership emerges by enabling whoever has pertinent information or expertise to speak up and improve whatever the group is seeking to accomplish.
- The process of creating and maintaining Level 2 relationships requires a learning mindset, cooperative attitudes, and skills in interpersonal and group dynamics.
- An effective group dealing with complex tasks in a volatile environment will need to evolve such mindsets, attitudes, and skills in all of its members.
- Therefore, Humble Leadership is as much a group phenomenon as an individual behavior.
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About Authors
Edgar H. Schein is Professor Emeritus from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. He’s a pioneer in organizational studies, organizational culture and leadership, process consulting, career development. Ed’s contributions to the practice of O.D. date back to the early 1960s and continue with the recent publication of Organizational Culture and Leadership 5th edition and now Humble Leadership, co-authored with Peter A. Schein, co-founder of OCLI.org who brings 30 years of hands-on experience in large and small companies leading growth initiatives in Silicon Valley.
A New Approach to Leadership
The following is an excerpt from Humble Leadership
A New Approach to Leadership
By Ed and Peter Schein
This book introduces a new approach to leadership based more on personal relationships than transactional role relationships.
The good news: employee engagement, empowerment, organizational agility, ambidexterity, innovation . . . all of this can flourish in the rapidly changing world when the fundamental relationship between leaders and followers, helpers and clients, and providers and customers becomes more personalized and cooperative.
The bad news: continued deception, scandals, high turnover of disengaged talent, safety and quality problems in industry and health care, all the way to corruption and abuse of power at the highest levels of industry and politics, driven by financial expediency and the obsession with retaining power as primary success criteria . . . all of this will continue to happen as long as leader-follower relationships remain impersonal, transactional, and based on the roles and rules that have evolved in the current culture of management that still predominates in our hierarchical bureaucratic organizations.
The Leader-Follower Relationship
“Leadership” is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along. This definition applies as much to senior executives developing new strategies, new purposes, and new values as it does to a group member down in the organization suggesting a new way of running a meeting or improving a process to drive better results. Both the word new and the word better remind us that leadership always refers to some task that can be improved and to some group whose values and culture will ultimately determine what is better.
What is new and what is better will always depend on context, the nature of the task, and the cultural values that are operating in the group or organization that is doing the work. What we later may label as “good or effective leadership” thus always begins with someone perceiving a new and better way to do something, an emergent leader. Our focus will be not on the individual and the desired characteristics of that emergent leader, but on the relationships that develop between that person and the potential followers who will have influenced what is finally considered to be new and better and who will implement the new way if they agree to try it. Those potential followers will always be some kind of workgroup or team, so our focus will also be on the relationships between them. They may be co-located or widely spread in a network, and their membership may change, but there will always be some kind of grouping involved, hence group dynamics and group processes will always be intimately involved with leadership.
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About Authors
Edgar H. Schein is Professor Emeritus from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. He’s a pioneer in organizational studies, organizational culture and leadership, process consulting, career development. Ed’s contributions to the practice of O.D. date back to the early 1960s and continue with the recent publication of Organizational Culture and Leadership 5th edition and now Humble Leadership, co-authored with Peter A. Schein, co-founder of OCLI.org who brings 30 years of hands-on experience in large and small companies leading growth initiatives in Silicon Valley.
Community: Aggregating For Innovation
Last week I had the opportunity to be part of a webinar with Peter Block, author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, 2nd Edition. I already blogged once about this webinar hosted by Becky Robinson at Weaving Influence in honor of the release of the second edition of this book last week. Click here to read, Why Does Community Matter?
During the webinar I had the opportunity to ask a question of Peter Block. My question was, as a public policy maker, how can we scale the use of community and convening of people to really solve the issues at hand; in my case in education? You can listen to Peter’s response to my question here:
This was such a deep and thoughtful answer from Peter, don’t you agree? I had to do some follow-up study to really get my mind wrapped around all of the thoughts he presented here. First of all, this idea of aggregation. There are so many ways you can use and think about the idea of an aggregate. Many times the aggregate is thought of as the whole, like a country, and then the community as part of that whole. Peter challenged me to think about aggregating as opposed to bringing something to scale. He said, “When I aggregate I bring big things and people together that do not need to be alike.” This was powerful and made me think about aggregates like components of a composite material that resist compressive stress. In other words, we need to aggregate people who are co-creating what education, in my case, needs to look like.
Peter was also very clear that legislation follows the innovation phases; you can’t legislate innovation. You innovate through experience. As I was putting this thought process together I realized the aggregation theory was so powerful because by aggregating we are developing by the merging of the differences of the people we are bringing together. Therefore, when we aggregate people together, we get a great deal of experiences to draw from. Peter also pointed out we need to make visible the people who are doing great and important things with the idea of replication. I believe an aggregate can also be made up of many different communities with diverse experiences. Across the country, we find a wide array of communities. However, when you put all of them together, we get an aggregate or the whole.
Then we need to begin aggregating for co-creating for education (in my case), and we then get people talking to each other. I love the question that Peter suggested we should be posing when convening, “Who wants to participate with us by making it real for you?” Two other things I have learned from Peter Block are to always ask, “What can we create together?” and elected officials and policy makers need to be conveners and not problem solvers. I have always tried to take this very seriously and convene communities with no preconceived solution. This idea of aggregating really drove home the value in convening groups with a wide array of experiences and then valuing those differences – not being afraid of them.
As you can see, this was a very thought provoking webinar that caused a lot of reflection. Here is the entire webinar for you to watch:
Why Does Community Matter?
This past week I had the honor to be involved in a webinar put on by my friend Becky Robinson at Weaving Influence. The webinar featured a hero of mine, Peter Block. I consider him to be the father of Community. In fact, he literally wrote the book on it – Community: The Structure of Belonging, 2nd Edition. The webinar was held to launch the 2nd Edition of the book that was released last week. Peter Block was introduced to me by my good friend Mike Fleisch. Mike has literally shown me all the great community work that Peter Block has done in Cincinnati. I have read Peter’s books and was excited to be on the webinar with him. Peter is truly helping to change the world.
“The best way to connect is with groups of three people with their knees 9 inches apart.” ~ Peter Block
Let me tell you, there was a great deal of content in a one hour webinar. Peter is very philosophical, but is also able to bring his philosophies and core values to a practical level as well. I want to provide you a bulleted list of some of the more salient points that I believe Peter made during the interview. I will provide you with the link to the webinar and you can make your own list later in this post. Here is my list:
- We’ve reached a limit as to what professionals can do.
- Schools cannot raise our children.
- PowerPoint pretends our conversations are predictable.
- How can you have learning, if all you have is content?
- We need to ask the question, “why did you show up?”
- All cultures value depth of relationship!
- We are afraid of the stranger.
- Working of deficiencies just makes the deficiencies stronger.
- Using community strategies creates real and concrete outcomes.
- You can’t innovate through legislation.
Wow, I just realized I created a top ten list from the webinar. I am not going to go back and number them because there is no real order to this list, but all important points that Peter covered in the webinar. I need to go back and blog about each one (we’ll see if I get that accomplished or not). So, I promised you the opportunity to make your own list. I want to provide you with the link to the YouTube video of the entire webinar, including the chance I had to visit with and ask a question of Peter Block. My next post after this one to my blog will specifically deal with my question and the conversation that followed. But for now, click here to watch the whole webinar (again my thanks to Becky Robinson and Weaving Influence for making this possible):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUPAFSbcEHY&feature=youtu.be
As you can see, this was a very powerful webinar. I would love for you to reply to this post with your top ten (or however many) takeaways you have from the webinar. By replying you will be creating the strong aggregate Peter talked about. Notice I am trying to practice the teachings of Peter by not offering my own thoughts on each of the bulleted points, but asking you to give your thoughts. I really do want to hear from you. Peter Block really is the father of using Community to change the world.
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