Staying Liquid
I already blogged once about the newest episode (S6.E16) of S.W.A.T. this morning in Context Matters. Another thought provoking moment was when Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson (Shemar Moore), a Los Angeles S.W.A.T. lieutenant, said, “Let’s fill the gaps.” The rest of the team immediately said, “Stay liquid.” A pretty amazing team/leadership mantra. I love this, because on great teams there are clearly defined roles and responsibilities, but there are always gaps that arise. When every person knows their role, they are better able to become flexible, or liquid, to fill those caps. Also, when every team member has the proper technical training they are able to become fluid and fill in the gaps. This allows for situational and adaptive leadership at all levels.
Make no mistake, however, staying liquid is not possible without a culture of innovation and experimentation. Also, those clear roles and responsibilities I mentioned earlier enable having processes in place that allow for quick decision-making and rapid response to changing circumstances. Finally, having the necessary and appropriate resources and information in real-time can enable individuals, teams, and any organization to make informed decisions and fill the gaps quickly when necessary.
Treating Each Person Situationally
Last week at the SMART Factory League 2022 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, one of our speakers said that flexibility is not efficient. He said this to remind us that we need to be flexible, but sometimes we avoid it because it is not efficient. We discussed this in the context of employees as well. Loving our employees looks different for each employee. Today’s employees want high level challenges and the ability to have choices in the paths they take. Our people we serve need agency and the ability to be core players in their future.
This highlights the fact that leadership is not one-size-fits all. Everyone cannot be treated exactly the same. As Randy Conley pointed out in Simple Truth #40: “There’s Nothing So Unequal As The Equal Treatment Of Unequals (Anonymous)” in Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways To Be A Servant Leader and Build Trust, Making Common Sense Common Practice, Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley, “Of course, certain rules, policies, and legalities require everyone to be treated the same – but when it comes to the matter of leading individuals, you need to treat each person situationally” (p. 105). One example might be the need for a flexible schedule. Giving those we serve the latitude to approach objectives in their own ways can enable them to unleash their creativity. Any creative person can tell you that inspiration strikes at the strangest times.
If we are situational in our leadership, it means embracing change and new challenges. It also means using them as opportunities to create new and improved systems and processes; it’s not just being able to change, but also being willing to, and maybe even excited about it. This is really about personalization, which will make us more effective employers. It means we need to create environments where those we serve can stay open and creative, always keep their skill set up to date, and learn how to balance personal needs with the needs of co-workers and the organization overall.
Challenging Assumptions With Lateral Thinking
In the great book The Martian, Andy Weir uses the term “lateral thinking” to describe what NASA was doing a lot of to keep astronaut Mark Watney alive and bring him home from Mars. It won’t surprise anyone who knows me that I love lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is a tool used worldwide, knowingly/unknowingly by many individuals for a creative output/product. Psychologist Dr. Edward de Bono originated the term lateral thinking and is a proponent of the teaching of thinking as a subject in schools. Imagine that – teaching students to think. Lateral thinking processes provide guidance for thinking out of the box, thinking and creating something that has never been thought of. Just what was needed for Mark Watney’s success return to home in the novel and the real life return home of Apollo 13.
” Intelligence is something we are born with. Thinking is a skill that must be learned.”
~ Dr. Edward de Bono
Lateral thinking looks at things from a sideways perspective in order to find answers that aren’t immediately apparent. In other words, being able to think creatively or “outside the box” in order to solve a problem. Lateral thinking is very situational. Lateral thinking leads to changes in attitude and approach; to looking in a different way at things which have always been looked at in the same way. Liberation from old ideas and the stimulation of new ones are twin aspects of lateral thinking.
With lateral thinking we challenge assumptions and generate alternatives – what many call “out of the box thinking.” I didn’t even know there was a box! This is why I am such a believer in using real world and relevant contexts when facilitating learning. Notice I didn’t say teaching. When students are in a productive struggle working out a real world problem or issue, they are learning to learn and think and be creative. Whether we serve adults or young scholars we need facilitate learning that hones their ability to develop original answers to difficult questions. Why is this so important? Because in our world today, traditional solutions are unlikely to get the desired result. We all remember that failure was not an option on Apollo 13. How was failure averted? The “voyage and return” lateral thinking.
Using Different Strokes For The Same Folks
With this week’s simple truth, I realized just why Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley wanted to name their latest book, DUH! Why Isn’t Commonsense Leadership Common Practice? instead of Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways To Be A Servant Leader and Build Trust, Making Common Sense Common Practice. Simple Truth #10 entitled “Effective servant leaders don’t just use different strokes for different folks, they also use different strokes for the same folks” reminds us that the people we serve will be at different development levels for the different goals, projects, and initiatives they are working on. Therefore, our people will need different strokes (leadership styles) for the different things they are doing.
“Managers who are servant leaders take a situational approach in leading people. They know they sometimes need to use not only different strokes (leadership styles) for different folks but also different strokes for the same folks in different areas of their job.”
Ken Blanchard (2022). Simple Truths of Leadership, p. 31.
So many leaders believe project improvement is all about emphasizing efficiency measures instead of the behavioural or interpersonal factors. While achievements of performance measures such as time, budget, and functionality are important, leading people to deliver results is needed instead of managing work. This also means that leadership style and the ability to practice situational leadership and use the right style in the moment for each individual. Let’s also not forget that this also reaffirms how important relationships are to leadership. We must really know those we serve to know the different strokes.
Saying Nothing
I really enjoyed the most recent article by my friend, Maya Hu Chan, “7 Steps to Take Managing to the Next Level,” published in Inc. It caused me to reflect on how important relationships are and how dignity, trust, and respect play into those relationships – and our everyday interactions. Then, this week through some encounters I either witnessed or was a part of, I thought about how sometimes saving face is not saying anything. For example, is anything gained by reminding someone that we were supposed to leave at 11:00 and it is now 11:18 serve any purpose? If you think it does, I won’t argue, but I don’t really think so. My point here is that our emotional equilibrium requires inner strength and a sense of self. We need our protective inner guardrails. For me, a good question to ask is: will what I’m about to say serve any valuable purpose?
Sometimes our comments only serve to humiliate. I am guessing you are like me and have been guilty of embarrassing someone, either willfully or inadvertently. I have learned from Maya and her great book, Saving Face, that we many times accidentally cause another person to lose face due to misunderstanding, lack of information, or because we’re startled or shocked. That’s why, again, as I analyzed some interactions I was witnessing or a part of this past week I was reminded that a tool in our saving face toolbox is to just not say anything. To be clear, I am not saying that’s always the best tool; it is not. But sometimes it is. Situational awareness is key here.
The idea of saving face is so important. Take a few minutes and think of scenarios. For example, you might be in a group where someone asks if you saw the new Spider-Man movie. Do you immediately say that you hated it and it was the worst made movie in history? Or, do you just acknowledge you have seen it and save face for the person raising the question if she loved it? See the difference? You can still express why you didn’t like the movie after the discussion gets going. You haven’t lied, you just didn’t say the first thing that came in your mind. I get it! This is tough! Frank and “straight-shooters,” are often viewed as uncultured, overbearing, and even rude. I have to watch this. Some of you probably do too. It is particularly important to put this in check when dealing with other cultures.
In thinking about the idea of sometimes not saying anything, I believe my three rules for tweets applies here. I believe tweets should be light, bright, and polite. I leave it there for you to ponder.
2020 Third Quarter Book Inspired Posts
Here is the third of five posts highlighting the books that inspired blog posts throughout the year. These are from the months of July, August, and September. The last post will name my top books of 2020. You can bet that some of these books that inspired posts will be on the top books of 2020 list. President Harry S. Truman said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Reading gives us the opportunity to experience and understand the lives and actions of others, the lessons learned from others, or how someone did something. These opportunities are readily and economically available through reading. We can learn a great deal about someone we might not, and probably won’t, ever meet. In some cases we may be learning from someone who died long before we were born. Being a leader is very complex. Leadership involves technical skill and knowledge, relationship building skills, and skills that we won’t know we need till the situation arises. Thus we need the mental exercise sessions that reading provides. So, as President Harry S. Truman also said, “The Buck Stops Here!” if you want to tap into some of the greatest knowledge from our past, present, and future the buck stops with you starting to develop your reading habit.
July, 2020
What The H@#* Is A Team Player
August, 2020
Become More Human & Less Machine
September, 2020
Explicitly Rethinking Your Leadership
“What Might Have Beens” Are Risky
Don’t Overlook The Brilliance Of Our Students
Impossibility to Possibility Thinking
Gift Yourself Being Present For Your Own Personal Time
Belief Is The Price Of Admission
Seeking Opportunities to Observe & Update Our Worldview
Leaders Crashing & Flying Higher
Leaders Crashing & Flying Higher
So what traits do great leaders have? That’s such a loaded question – different great leaders demonstrate different traits. If you ask a group of teacher leaders to select the top traits they think are important in a leader, you’ll find as many answers as you have teacher leaders. No one has ever been able to come up with a definitive list of leadership traits that everyone – or even a majority of people contemplating leadership – agrees on. This doesn’t stop me from trying however. During our August 3D Leadership gatherings I always do a discussion/activity called “Good Leader/Bad Leader: Crashing & Flying Higher.” This involves an activity where participants fly paper airplanes to each other with good leadership traits on the left wing and bad leadership traits on the right wing. They then keep adding to the lists as we fly the planes. This is really fun virtually on Zoom. Yes, you can fly paper airplanes virtually! Ultimately, their task is to develop a top five good leadership trait list and a top five bad leadership trait list,
The exercise enables a great discussion and thought provoking debate. What we find is that each person’s list of good and bad traits is heavily dependent on her or his experience with different leaders. I get to do this activity 9 or 10 groups per year and every group’s lists are always at least a little different, but many times are very different. Things like who is leading the school, turnover of leaders, style of leadership of leaders, culture of the school, et cetera. This activity somewhat reinforces the idea that the trait theory of leadership is not the end all be all. “The trait theory of leadership focuses on identifying different personality traits and characteristics that are linked to successful leadership across a variety of situations. This line of research emerged as one of the earliest types of investigations into the nature of effective leadership and is tied to the “great man” theory of leadership first proposed by Thomas Carlyle in the mid-1800s. The idea with trait theory is that if you can identify the personality traits or characteristics a great leader has, you can look for those same traits in other leaders, or even develop those traits in people who want to be leaders.
The differences that I see when doing the “Good Leader/Bad Leader: Crashing & Flying Higher” activity suggest that this may due to situational variables in which different leadership skills emerge when opportunities for leadership arise. These situations might include turnaround work, poor leaders in place, war, a political crisis, or in the absence of leadership. As a believer that everyone in an organization is leader, I believe that there must be adaptive leadership for many situations.
I just finished reading Robert Gates’ great new book, Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World. Having served for eight Presidents of the United States, he certainly saw different leadership styles and traits. He explained that most want to put Presidents into ascribing to idealism, realism, or transactional. As he stated, great leaders must be all three. He gives examples of Presidents being all three. In other words, to be effective, leaders must be able to adapt. When I reflect on the top five “good leader” traits that our 3D Leadership group from Tennessee came up with this past Saturday, I believe they are traits that would serve all leaders well. Here is there top five list:
- Listening to understand
- Authentic
- Being consistent
- Straight forward
- Relationship builder
Here of the top five “bad leader” traits causing leaders to crash, from our Tennessee teacher leaders if you are interested:
- Insecure
- Belittling
- Negative
- Leads by intimidation
- Doesn’t walk the talk
Day 💯 – Getting To Know People In A Different Way
Well, here we are; day 💯 of the Covid-19 Global Pandemic. During this time of discovering a new normal, I feel more connected than ever before. I have met the children, spouses, pets, and even a grandmother of people I never would have thought possible. I’ve even introduced some of our Jersey dairy cows to others while connecting virtually. Additionally, I’ve witnessed parents attending school events virtually, while at work, that never would have been able to attend before. My point? There are things that we need to consider becoming normal. I’m not saying replace necessarily, but supplement.
Having said that, I now begin to think about what else do we need to be thinking about? How do we leverage technology? How do we stay human? How do we get the right tools in the hands of everyone? How do we decide what the right tools are?
It’s interesting to me that before the WHO (I thought that was a rock band) named this a Global Pandemic we were talking about sustainability and the environment, health care, education, and many other things. While in the education realm we have been focused on connectivity and providing meaningful virtual education, and in healthcare our actions have been around caring for Coronavirus patients and stopping the spread of the disease, we will get back to talking about the major issues in the way we were before the pandemic took over. For example, we will, no doubt, be rethinking health care and how it is delivered. In education, I continue to argue that our conversation needs to shift to the idea that school is no longer a place.
Even though I served as moderator for an awesome global event last month that was virtual with 47 countries represented, I also wonder if our assumptions about globalization have been challenged. We had been talking about distance no longer being a factor, but in some ways I’ve seen us become more isolationist and seeing us care more about the locality we operate in and what we can touch and feel. But, we’ve also seen that we can hire the best talent from anywhere and bring them onto teams. The only remaining question related to that is how to do remote working well.
I don’t think I am alone with all of this thinking and pondering. We are now entering a time of needing to decide which practices still make sense and which need to change. We need to come together as families, businesses, schools, communities, cities, states, and nations to answer the question, “What can we create together?”
“Life Isn’t Fair, But You Can Be”
We need to develop dexterity when dealing with others and leading. One uniform way of doing things will not work in all contexts. We all have micro-behaviors we can use to be agile according to situation at hand. We have seen this first hand from many leaders during the COVID-19 Pandemic. During this time we have become, in some ways, more atomized and insular.
The is a great line by Frank Reagan, played by Tom Selleck, to his granddaughter, Nicky Reagan-Boyle (played by Sami Gayle), in the television series Blue Bloods where he says, “Life isn’t fair, but you can be.” It’s true, life is not fair. Life happens in the context of others. Our actions affect others and their actions affect us. However, the actions of others are not some cosmic judgement on your being. They’re just a byproduct of being alive.
As I stated earlier, there just isn’t a uniform style of leading or dealing with others that works for everyone, every situation, or every relationship all the time. When dealing with people, we must remember that most are just trying to do their best, under different circumstances than your own.
Therefore, we, ourselves, can be fair. But, the idea of life being fair isn’t obtainable. Nor would we want it to be. Life would be insane if it actually was fair to everyone. There would be no choosing of anything. There would be no failure to understand success. It’s actually mind-boggling to think about. Many times we get too hung up on our view of how the world should work that we can’t understand how it actually does work. Embrace that life is not fair, but that you absolutely can be.
Easter Isn’t Canceled
Baseball was not canceled during the Pandemic of 1918-1920
Today, I chronicle thoughts, here in my blog, on a new page in the book that is the story of my life. I have been doing some personal growth studying, with the help of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum, on the pandemic of 1918-1920. My motivation this morning is that I am always moved by the personal stories written by people experiencing an event first hand. The most interesting and compelling speak of what was happening, the mood of the country and those around them, and what he or she was feeling at the time. I’m going to attempt a little of that this morning. I also believe if we are not using this as an opportunity for our children and students to write an account of something that will be undoubtedly written about in textbooks, or whatever our kids’ grandchildren will be using, we have missed a chance to process and save the realness of our experiences real-time.
Queen Elizabeth II shared a video message yesterday that was quite moving. Click here to watch it. The genius of her message was how different parts of the message have and will inspire different people in different ways. For me it was when she said, “But Easter isn’t canceled; indeed, we need Easter as much as ever.” No doubt things will be different today for most of us. But, Easter isn’t canceled, and different doesn’t have to mean bad.
One of my fondest memories growing up was of our Easter morning Easter egg hunt. We’d get up and go find the eggs hidden all over our very large yard that included barn lots. Interestingly, the one thing that I remember most vividly is the blue egg, and it was always a blue egg, put on top of an electric box on the back side of the house. I need to point out that these were real boiled eggs, usually a few duck eggs mixed in because we raised ducks, and my mom and sister colored them – I wasn’t much into coloring Easter eggs (that involved being inside and standing still – some things don’t change with age). My dad was so proud of that hiding spot on the electric box (not sure why). That became a special spot, however, because the first Easter we lived in that house my dad, after I spotted and claimed the egg, had to lift me up to get the egg. The next year I could reach it and every year after that that egg was mine, and my dad would always laugh and say, “You need me to help you get that one?” I’d say, “No!” We’d make eye contact and now having a son of my own I think I know what was going through his mind.
Easter isn’t canceled because of the COVID-19 Pandemic and my son will have an Easter basket (yes even at age 19) this morning. We will go to church via Zoom and then have the traditional Easter brunch of “One Eyed Connelly’s (that is the family name for a piece of toasted bread with a hole cut in the center and an egg cooked in that hole), sausage links, and cinnamon rolls. I’m sure there will be Easter egg hunts with the nieces and nephews to be joined virtually on some electronic platform or another. And, how cool is it we have those platforms? We are connecting more, socially, than ever before. Physical distancing (as I am calling it because I hate the term social distancing) is not keeping us from socializing.
I went to my first virtual Happy Hour last week – very fun. Also, I popped into a teacher’s lunch bunch. She has all her students get their lunch and they all log into Zoom and eat together. Students get social time with their fellow students and teacher. Everyone turned their mic on and it sounded just like a traditional school lunchroom. I hope we use our pandemic experiences to get education in our country to a place where we could say, “School isn’t canceled.” I realize that is a tall order, but we need to contemplate what that would mean. We need to think about the fact school is no longer a place. We need to think about the why behind professional working parents being so frustrated with being adjunct teachers now. Continuing to educate, which I believe we need to be doing, cannot be about providing busy work and crappy worksheets. It needs to be about great content, accessible by all, and delivered in a way the student can easily access. Now becomes the time to decide what education will look like during the next pandemic, other crises, or just moving us into the next decade.
Today, however, Easter isn’t canceled. During the pandemic we are distanced, clouded by the threat of disease, but stubbornly persistent. Realizing this is usually a pastel colored and celebratory day, this might just be a season of clarity about what it means to be a person of faith.
Byron's Babbles 
leave a comment