Leadership Breakfast Story
This is the second post in a series of four that tells the journey of our Focused Leader Academy (FLA) learning to tell a story with food. Click here to read the first post entitled Feeding Leadership.
We started the day yesterday with my good friend and Graphic Recorder, Mike Fleisch, and I telling a story of our six year journey working with teachers together by cooking breakfast. We had so much fun planning for this and wanted to model storytelling, like we had learned from … the night before. This was so much fun and really caused a lot of reflection on the part of Mike and I.
Most importantly, we noted the fact that we practiced our normal “Jazz Improvisation” when putting this breakfast together. I would say, let’s have this and Mike would say yes and I can bring this to top it off and make it really cool. Honestly, that’s how it works with us. We have become such great friends and convening partners that we can visualize what each other is doing and improvise the next part of the music, so to speak. That was an important part of this story for us to tell. What sets Mike and I apart from others who bring groups together for professional development is what sets jazz apart from other music – this cool thing called improvisation.
Jazz is certainly an art of the moment, but it is also an art in and of a particular history, and history flows out of every note played. Mike and I practice adaptive leadership, what I’ll call Jazz, of the moment and become artful in differentiating for the moment. Our form of leadership jazz is also rooted in life, it takes all that life has to offer and makes a rich amalgam with the history and context of the teacher leaders we serve in our Focused Leader Academy.
Here was our breakfast:
- Starbucks Coffee – coffee from a socially responsible company was important to Mike and I because we both want to be a part of social change and making the world a better place.
- Titus® Donuts – These are the official donut of FLA. We felt it was important to go ahead and make the staple and constant product available. An important thing for leaders to do, even when introducing new and exciting things.
- Mixed fruit cups – When Mike and I first met and started facilitating together, we both came with different talents, beliefs, and skills. Just like when you put different fruits together with different tastes, textures, and colors it makes something really amazing. And, Mike did his usually of adding the artistic touches of shaved lime and real whipped cream on top. Improve at its best!
- Then came an awesome cheese dish with toast that Mike made with Wisconsin Cheddar cheese since he is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
- Eggs – We wanted to serve eggs because we wanted this to represent how great leaders differentiate and meet those they serve where they are. We represented this by preparing the eggs to order – over easy, over hard, sunny side up, scrambled, or the most complex order of the morning: one whole egg and three egg whites scrambled together.
- Goetta – First let me explain what Goetta is. Pronounced “get-uh”, the sausage-type patty is pretty synonymous with Cincinnati (where Mike lives), though its roots are steeped in the “Queen City’s” German heritage. Goetta employs steel-cut or pinhead oats to extend the amount of pork and beef scraps that are then blended with spices, formed into a log, sliced, and fried. We chose Goetta because each month I go spend a day with Mike and plan out our weekend retreats. He always has some new cultural thing for me to learn and we go to his favorite places. One time he took me to a great restaurant where I had Goetta for the first time. This is one of the discoveries that has remained closest to my heart. It proves how relationships and trying new things can change our lives and cause us to grow.
- Non-alcoholic Mimosa – Bottom-line it’s elegant and can be made with so many combinations. Think about it, you can really add in any of your favorite fruits – peaches, blueberries, kiwi – the possibilities are endless. Mike and I like trying new things, putting new models into play, and iterating. It was the perfect drink to top off our breakfast storytelling.
So, let me finish by talking about the very important leadership skill of storytelling again. Everybody talks about ‘storytelling’. It’s a leadership buzzword – I hate buzzwords. That’s why we are used ‘food stories’ as our through line this weekend. Storytelling is something we’re all meant to be doing (or think we do already) as leaders. But, do we actually know how to tell a story? How are stories structured? And what makes a story impactful? It is very important to learn storytelling skills that move those you lead to action, whoever they may be.
Here are three things Mike and I expected our teacher leaders to take away from our Leadership Breakfast Story:
1. Learn how to use stories to communicate complicated messages and data without jargon and without the dreaded ‘death by PowerPoint’. If you want me to become un-engaged, just pull up the PowerPoint. Note: technology is not allowed, except for Tweeting, at any of our FLA retreats.
2. Learn how to use stories to influence others, and persuade them in a human and authentic way.
3. Learn how stories make your messages more memorable and more likely to be passed on.
Just like I said in Leading With “Food Stories”, “Subconsciously, when you eat something, your brain is always comparing it to what you’ve had previously, the place you were eating it, and the people you were eating with. Think about it – our brain tries to find connections and similarity. Just like being able to tell stories is a very important leadership trait, the more powerful story behind the food, the more it evokes the memory, which in turn enhances the flavor. There is no doubt that flavor is inextricably linked with memory and emotion. They’re all processed by the same part of the brain,’ planning the food for a meal is an excellent way to learn and model storytelling.
What foods would you use to tell the story of your leadership journey?
Feeding Leadership
Starting In The North With Chef Nick!
Really this comes down to personal influence. What is the power of personal influence? Paul Hershey and Kenneth Blanchard, in their book Management of Organizational Behavior, describe it this way: “To the extent that followers respect, feel good about, and are committed to their leader, they will see their goals satisfied through the goals of their leader.” When there is internal motivation, close supervision is not required, and the leader is effective. This is the kind of leadership that makes teachers effective in their work. It also reduces tension and stress.
Unfortunately, we leaders can tend to be more concerned about tasks than people. We have board meetings to prepare for, committees to attend, agendas to develop, phone calls to make, paperwork to do, and a gazillion other things that are, just that – things to check off mob a checklist. I would argue we communicate a lack of trust when we refuse to delegate tasks and then give people the freedom to pursue the task in their own style. By encumbering ourselves with paper shuffling, we lose contact with people. By staying in direct personal contact with the development of those we lead, we are able to develop the technical and leadership skills of those we serve.
The cure to this is spending more time with your leaders, in my case: teacher leaders. Make no mistake, this takes time and some rearrangement of your ordinary schedule. But more than that, it requires an adjustment in thinking. Here are two ways to care for and feed your leaders:
- Committing to Leadership Development
- Make it a priority to give professional growth time to developing leaders
Two avenues I have found to do this effectively are task forces and our Focused Leader Academy (FLA). The goal for both is to have teacher leaders developing while actually serving in leadership roles and working on real leadership issues. I just received a message from a teacher leader, Cassidy Thomas, that I was deeply touched by and one sentence in the note really drove home the importance of this idea of training leaders while under fire and working on real school issues: “I truly feel that I have grown so much just as a person from the opportunities that you have provided me in just a little over a year. First experience toward the end of last school year where I got the phone call, will you be a BA… I felt…anxious, nervous, flattered, several emotions.” I have always said that for real professional learning to be happening there must be both excitement and some fear.
So, let’s talk a little about what we did this weekend at our FLA retreat (design sprint). By using the through line of telling leadership stories through food, our FLA participants first learned from Chef Nicholas Townsand and Bar Manager Patrick at Ulen Country Club Friday night on how to prepare a meal to tell a story. Nick and Patrick took us from a journey starting in the north and ending in the south. Stories were told between each course and a long discussion of the meal preparation with Nick and Patrick took place after the meal. Our participants learned so much from the experience. We did a debrief Saturday morning using the prompts from the evening before of:
- Know your team!
- Where are we going to put the money, where are we not going to put the money?
- If it was just price, I’d run an Applebee’s®
- Plan, Organize, Execute
- Other Thoughts
Here are pictures of the prompts with our FLA participants’ responses:
Then a great discussion ensued about lessons learned from Nick and Patrick. Here are the Mike Fleisch graphic recordings from this design sprint:
Then we started the day Saturday with my good friend and Graphic Recorder, Mike Fleisch, telling a story of our six year journey working with teachers together by cooking breakfast. I am going to do separate consecutive blog posts from the other parts of Saturday. Here are the titles and graphic (so you don’t think Mike’s skills are leaving him, you need to know I did the agenda graphic) of our agenda from Saturday:
Get People Talking, Not Just Walking!
Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles by Chip R. Bell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
By using the metaphor of the working end of a Kaleidoscope, this book teaches us about the core characters of value-unique service: enchantment, mercy, grace, trust, generosity, ease, truth, alliance, and passion. Just like the colorful glass pieces in the end of a Kaleidoscope, the core characters don’t change, but can be moved around to fit the needs and personal development of team members in order to deliver great service experience.
~Dr. Byron L. Ernest
Delivering a Sparkly Lake Lure Experience
Guest post by Chip R. Bell
We checked into the Lake Lure Inn. Built in 1927, the antique North Carolina hotel served as command central for the making of the movie Dirty Dancing. You now can stay in the Patrick Swayze Suite or the Jennifer Grey Suite. Furnished with exquisite period furniture and meticulous attention to detail, the surroundings make guests feel elevated, enchanted, and enriched. If the experience were an object it would be a kaleidoscope!
We had dinner in their Veranda Restaurant overlooking the lake, only a stone’s throw away from our table. The staff was all locals from the small mountain town. They reached way beyond their plain heritage in a noticeable effort to create a sense of elegance and worth. After seating us at our reserved table, the maitre d’ presented the menus and wine list, and then graciously said, “Hope ya’ll enjoy”––not a phrase you’d hear at a five-star restaurant in Boston or San Francisco. There was an earnest effort to take the experience much, much higher than you would get at Nettie’s Diner down the street where the wait staff simply performs their tasks.
The difference between the Lake Lure Inn and Nettie’s Diner came primarily from a deliberate attempt to not take the customer for granted. Someone decided that this classy hotel setting should come with an equally classy guest experience. Knowing they could not afford to import a Ritz-Carlton Hotel–trained wait staff, they entrusted their valuable reputation to young people recruited from the local Burgers and More. Then they trained them to not take the guest for granted but make their experience consistently and perpetually as elegant as the old hotel.
The next morning we were in too much of a hurry to wait for the hotel’s Sunday brunch, featuring eggs Florentine and fresh mountain trout. So, we stopped at Nettie’s for scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, and biscuits. The food was just as we expected—completely routine, plain vanilla, nothing out of the ordinary. As we looked at the Lake Lure Inn in the distance, we suddenly realized that, had we stopped at Nettie’s first when we came to town, the diner might not have seemed so plain vanilla. The Lake Lure Inn had altered our service expectations and Nettie’s would never be the same again—nor, would any other service provider for that matter.
Do all customers want every service experience be a Lake Lure Inn moment? Maybe not, but most customer definitely want something special. Give your customers a Lake Lure experience and watch them “check-in” with you again!
Chip R. Bell is a renowned keynote speaker and the author of several national best-selling books. His newest book is the just-released Kaleidoscope: Delivering Innovative Service That Sparkles. He can be reached at chipbell.com.
Leaders Doodle
My Doodles From A Task Force Meeting
Drawing with pencil, pen, or brush on paper isn’t just for artists. For anyone who actively exercises the brain, doodling and drawing are ideal for making ideas tangible. In order to encourage doodling in meetings, retreats, and professional development events I put white butcher paper sheets on the tables, a box of crayons, and a small container of colored markers to use for doodling. Then there other details, like getting small flower vases and the flowers. These may seem like little things, but you have to understand that creating the perfect environment is crucial to convening great conversations.
Recall a time when you had a great conversation where real learning or new insight occurred—what enabled that to happen? In this way, participants have the opportunity to participate in an environment where the emotional context and framework support innovative thinking. If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole system turns into a learning system.
As a side note, many of our presidents, like the rest of us, doodle. Dwight Eisenhower drew images of tables, pencils, and nuclear weapons. A Herbert Hoover doodle provided the pattern for a line of rompers. Ronald Reagan dispensed cheery cartoons to aides. John F. Kennedy reportedly doodled the word poverty at the last cabinet meeting before his assassanation.
Are you encouraging your team to doodle?
Blooming Leadership: Got Flowers?
When planning big events, retreats, or task force meetings flowers should always be on the table. Flowers are every table conversation’s must-have accessory. Flowers have a place as the focal point in the middle of the table. According to a study conducted by Harvard Medical School, the right blooms may offer the perfect pick-me-up for attendees who don’t consider themselves morning people. So when you’re putting together your plans for the workshop, professional development, task force setting, be sure to include bright blooms front and center — it could have a big impact on the outcome of your meeting.
Why Flowers?
Now when you think of putting flowers on tables you may think that it is a crazy idea and no one will really pay attention to the flowers in the meeting, but it has been proven that flowers can help the mood of the meeting and add a cheerful tone to any type of meeting. Just by adding flowers to your meeting tables can help you to make a long lasting impression on your clients and anyone else that might come to a conversation hosted by you.
For a team meeting, a floral arrangement put in the middle of the table can make the atmosphere more friendly and welcoming. Choose bright colors for the flowers and types of flowers that are cheerful, such as tulips. If the arrangement is to be placed in the middle of a meeting table, keep the height of the arrangement low enough that the participants can easily see each other around the table and conversation is not hindered by the flowers.
Conversational leadership is an art, not a science. Use your own creativity when setting up the room. In addition to flowers, I like to put butcher paper on the tables and provide crayons and markers for doodling, taking notes, and graphic recording. Be sure to encourage people to write, draw, or doodle on the tablecloths in the midst of their conversations. Often these tablecloth drawings will contain remarkable notes, and they help visual learners link ideas.
The flowers on the tables creates a special ambiance. They provide a focal point. Rigid positions seem to drop away as people listen together in order to discover creative connections. The flowers give everyone at the table something in common. At a task force meeting I hosted yesterday, I asked participants to comment during our +/^ session on the flowers. Everyone had actually thought about the flowers. Thoughts like, “I wonder when the Lilly’s will bloom,” to “I’m going to match my crayon color to the flowers,” to “Im glad the flowers are not blocking my view to the person on the other side.” Bottom line is they noticed and likened the flowers and they had served as a focal point. Flowers help us focus when you’re not talking and are listening together with others focused on the ideas in the middle of the table.
I believe flowers help us focus on opportunity and fuel energy. What do your tables look like?
Listening as a Principle for Authentic Community Engagement
Lead with Listening Listening is a neglected skill, especially in change efforts. Often the leaders’ emphasis is on communicating a decision to stakeholders. When listening campaigns are con…
Source: Listening as a Principle for Authentic Community Engagement
Leading Conversations
I continue to be amazed at how many people espouse to want to have great conversations and be a conversational leader, but really can’t help themselves from becoming a pontificator and problem solver. So many leaders leap right to answering the questions themselves. There are many reasons for this, but I believe for many it is just ego of hierarchy – he wants to be seen as the smartest or person who solved the problem. Authentic conversation that deepens a group’s thinking and evokes collaborative intelligence is less likely to occur in a climate of fear, mistrust, and hierarchical control.
I believe everyone is a leader. Everyone has the right, responsibility, and ability to be a leader. In fact, I believe everyone has the obligation to be a leader. We all need to lead from where we are. How we define leadership influences how people will participate. In my world with educators, teacher leaders yearn to be more fully who they are—purposeful, professional human beings. Leadership is an essential aspect of an educator’s professional life. This is why I spend a great deal of time working directly with our rising teacher leaders in our Focused Leader Academy.
We are building an organizational community for thinking more deeply together about key strategic questions. It has been my experience that results do come from the questions. The results lie in the personal relationships, the knowledge, and the mutual caring that gets strengthened in people’s conversations together about the questions, along with the discovery of their own answers.
What kind of conversations are you leading?
The Paradox of Staying In Your Lane
Mike Fleisch Graphic Recording of Our DiscussionHave you ever been challenged or, as a leader, challenged someone else to stay in their own lane? Whether your mind conjured up a football analogy or lanes on an interstate, you got the message: Quit trying to lead everyone else’s area, and focus on yours. This really is a paradox, though.
Think about it, because perhaps you heard or have given a different message in a different meeting when the leader, or you, told the team, “Everyone must help get this done. We all must own this.” So, as leaders, what is the right message or best practice? I would argue, we must do both.
This past weekend at one of our task force meetings we got into a lengthy discussion about this paradox. While we know that it is the most efficient thing to have everyone in their own lane, we know that somtimes this just doesn’t work. Here are reasons it doesn’t always make sense to stay in our own lanes:
- Individuals have not been trained properly to do the work of his lane.
- Individuals do not have the resources to do the scope of the work of her lane.
- Individuals do not have team to do the work of her lane.
- Individuals become overly concerned with everyone else’s position, you may jeopardize playing well in your own lane.
- Individualized become overly dependent on others to the point that they do your work for you. Then, you are not serving the whole well.
I believe we must own our own areas, including your realm of responsibility. If you are a leader, you have been given responsibility for a team, and no one should outpace you in passion or concern for the area you lead and steward. If we want to lead the whole, we first lead and be a steward of our lane exceedingly well. Then we will have the respect and be invited into other lanes.
But, let’s not forget the paradox, a great team pulls together in the same direction and shoulders these initiatives together. Therefore, the answer here is to spend most of our time in our own lane, but when needed we can visit other lanes. For this to work, though, we need to make sure our team members are trained properly, have the skills necessary, and understand the nuances of working in other lanes.
Do you and your team understand how to navigate the paradox of staying in your lane?
Building S’more Leadership
Yesterday our Focused Leader Academy (FLA), aspiring teacher leaders, came into our commons area to find tables coevered in butcher paper with crayons (we’ll cover that in another post) and marshmallow manufacturing machines. Also on the tables were marshmallows, liquid chocolate, liquid caramel, strawberry sauce, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate chips, and sugar sprinkles. The title of our agenda for the day was “Building S’more Leadership.” The through line for the day was, of course, marshmallows.
Here Is What The Agenda For Our Day Looked Like
Mike Fleisch Graphic Of Our Discussion
In normal fashion, we circled our chairs and shared out upon completion of the creations. I was struck by the trust and openness we have developed in this community. Here are a couple of their stories that we live tweeted during the sharing:
Byron's Babbles 
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