Tag Archives: Books

Managing up and across

Developing as a leader, Emotional Intelligence, ,

Increasingly, business takes place within a “matrix”.  Managers manage the work of people who are not their direct reports.  People manage projects whose success depends on the inputs of people across the organisation.  Priorities shift and change.  Priorities compete.  Work styles clash.  And that’s before you factor in the boss – have you noticed yet that the boss also needs to be managed?  Not surprisingly, this new reality is rarely reflected in the literature.  A wide range of good research was conducted in a bygone era – before the matrixed organisation gained ground.


So, I was intrigued to notice recently that the Harvard Business Review is due to publish the HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across.  This is what they say about it:



Does your boss make you want to scream? Do you have more than one boss? Do you spend your day corralling people who don’t report to you? Do you work across departmental silos? Collaborate with outside contractors?


Then you know that managing up and across your company is critical to doing your job well. It’s all about understanding your boss’s and colleagues’ priorities, pressures, and work styles. You need to manage up and across not just because you may have a problem boss, an incompetent colleague, or fabulously hairy projects that touch all parts of your organization. You need to manage up and across, for example, to get your marketing and sales folks to see that your project will help them meet their goals, too; to establish authority with higher ups so they’ll bless your new product ideas; to secure people’s time for a new team when they’re already feeling overextended.


The Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you get the information and resources you need to solve your challenges, increase your effectiveness, and make your day-to-day worklife more enjoyable.

The Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you get better at:


• Getting what you need from people who don’t report to you

• Coping with micromanaging, conflict-aversive, or generally incompetent bosses

• Discovering what drives your colleagues

• Partnering with your boss

• Selling your ideas up and across your company

• Making the most of your boss’s influence

• Establishing a shared vision and commitment

• Juggling multiple bosses’ priorities

• The art of persuasion—tailoring your pitch based on your audience

I haven’t read it (yet) and still, I do know that it’s addressing challenges that we increasingly face in the workplace.

Wanting to influence your staff? Listen up!

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Research at the Columbia Business School has recently highlighted the role of listening in being influential.  Researchers asked co-workers both to assess their colleagues’ skills and habits and to assess how influential they are.  They conducted this research with students on MBA programmes as well as with executives in organisations.

The research findings do not entirely dispel the myth of the charismatic leader.  Rather, researchers found that the most influential people had strong skills both in listening and in expressing their point of view.  Why is listening so important?  On the one hand, listening helps leaders gather information about those they lead which they can use to tailor an influencing approach.  On the other hand, listening – really listening – builds trust amongst staff.

In truth, I am reminded of Gary Chapman’s little book The Five Love Languages:  The Secret to Love that Lasts.  Although its intended audience is a long way from the world of business, Chapman’s thesis – that we all like to give and receive love in five different ways – offers insights which – surely – can equally be applied in the workplace.

And if you want to learn more about the research from Columbia Business School, including five key ways in which you can listen effectively, just follow this link to read a summary.

Setting objectives that have punch in your business

Developing as a leader,

Sometimes, I come across something thought-provoking in an area of interest to my clients and take pleasure in sharing it here.  Today, I share from Alan Weiss’ newsletter at the Summit Consulting Group.  The article below is copyrighted and I share it with Alan’s permission.

I preface it by saying that Alan writes for those who are selling their services and you may be in a different position – perhaps you’re a manager setting objectives for your staff or perhaps you, in turn, are agreeing objectives with your boss.  As you read Alan’s article below I invite you to ponder what learning there is in his article for you.  And if you’re willing to share I’d love to read your comments.

Here’s what Alan has to say:

Gaining conceptual agreement

When you find an economic buyer—someone who can write or authorize a check for your value proposition as represented in your proposal—you must gain conceptual agreement on the objectives of the project, the measures for success (progress and/or completion), and the value that results from reaching those objectives.

An OBJECTIVE is a business outcome, never a deliverable or task or input. A strategy retreat is not an objective. But if you ask, “Why?” (do you desire a strategy retreat) the answer is usually the objective: “Because we want to expand into new markets and require a strategy to do so effectively.”

A METRIC or measure of success is an indicator of progress. It has to be recognized formally by objective analysis, or informally by someone charged to do so. A sales report on average size of sales is an objective measure, and your spouse’s determination of the comfort of the driver’s seat of a new car is an informal but also effective measure. There must be at least one metric for every objective.

VALUE is what is delivered by each objective, and there are usually several value statements per objective. If Increased profit is an objective, then the impact of achieving it (value) might include: larger bonuses, larger dividends for investors, more investment in R&D, and stronger ability to attract top talent.

Case study

Here’s how I would improve an example of each aspect of conceptual agreement:

Objective: Improve teamwork
Better: Create seamless client interfaces with no duplication of effort and with client concerns rectified on first contact.

Metric: People are more confident in dealing with clients
Better: Fewer client issues are referred to senior management and client complaints drop by at least 10 percent.

Value: Clients are happier and complain less.
Better: Client referrals create 10 percent more business than currently achieved, with zero cost of acquisition.

Frequently asked question

Q. What do I do if a buyer answers a conceptual agreement question with “I don’t know how to measure progress”?

A. Ask how the buyer knows that the current performance isn’t satisfactory, creating the need for your discussion. There must be an indicator of poor performance now that can also be used to determine improved performance.

Lost your temper with your staff? Turning anger into gold

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Recently, I wrote about how I experienced the behaviour of conductor Mario Papadopoulos in rehearsal in a posting entitled Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides.  When we lose our temper we risk losing our authority and the respect of those we lead.  But all is not lost when we lose our temper.  The question is what to do next – and how – to turn our anger into gold.


In what way does anger become gold?  In my experience, we turn anger into gold when we take time to connect with the unmet needs that underpin our anger.  Creating this awareness opens up the opportunity to find ways to meet our needs.  We get to feel better.  And we achieve this without alienating others on whom we depend.


How can we transform anger into gold?  Here is just one of my favourite ways, from Marshall Rosenberg.  In the approach he has called Nonviolent Communication (see his book of the same name to learn more), Rosenberg encourages the use of self empathy to get beneath the surface of our anger.


How does it work?  As a first step, you might notice what has stimulated your anger and seek to make a clear observation, cutting out any “stories” you might be telling yourself or at least owning your story.  For example, your first reaction might be to think “John’s really let me down!  He’s so unreliable!  He should have let me know if there were problems meeting the deadline!” A more accurate observation might be to say: “When I asked John if he’d finished the report yet he said no.  I felt a powerful surge of anger and I notice that I was thinking ‘I told you three weeks ago that the report was due by the end of this week.  If there were problems, why the **** didn’t you tell me?'”


In this case, the observation leads us to our second step, which is to connect with our emotion (in this case, anger) and this is something that Rosenberg also encourages.  When we feel angry, there is usually another emotion – fear – lurking underneath, so it may help to make a further observation as we examine what it is we are afraid of.  Using the same example, you might notice another layer of thinking and emotion such as:  “I realised I had really messed up but I didn’t want to admit it.  I’d been so busy myself that I hadn’t checked John’s progress and with the deadline approaching there was barely time to finish the report.  I’ve been worried about how my boss has been thinking about me and I didn’t want to give him an opportunity to think less of me”.


As we begin to turn our “story” into a clear observation and connect to our feelings, we can move to the third step, which is to notice what needs were stimulated in us and – in this case – unmet.  This is about going beyond specific actions by specific people to understand the underlying needs.  In this example, it’s possible that your most fundamental need – for security – was stimulated, especially if your thoughts included thoughts about the risk of losing your job and what that would mean for your home and for your ability to pay for food and other essentials.


Once you have uncovered your underlying needs, you have the option to make a request of yourself or of someone else.  This is the final step in Rosenberg’s four-step process.  Perhaps you might start by requesting of yourself that you take time out to relax before talking to John about next steps in order to calm down.  Or you might make a request of John that he tell you just how far he’s got so that you can assess how much more need to be done to meet the deadline.


Going through this process has the potential to transform feelings of fear and anger into a deep sense of connection with our needs.  In doing so, it moves us away from our primitive “fight or flight” response towards a more resourceful state in which we can clearly assess the situation and find ways to meet our needs.


There is another way I like to use to transform anger into gold.  If you’d like a second option – keep reading.

Lost your temper with your staff? The surprising purpose of anger

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On Monday, I published a posting under the heading Lost your temper with your staff?  You may have lost more besides.  But I don’t want to dismiss anger as a negative force.  Today, I want to say a few words about the role that anger plays in our lives – and particularly to highlight the role anger plays for those of us who find ourselves in positions of leadership.

Recently, I watched as the youngest of my nephew and nieces lost his temper in the midst of a game of frisbee.  “Nobody throws the frisbee to me!” was his desperate cry.  He was so full of emotion that it was hard for him to hear anything that anyone might say – even to show they were listening and trying to understand.  This is what Goleman describes as the “amygdala hijack” in his books on emotional intelligence (such as Working with Emotional Intelligence).  This is the body’s full-blown crisis response – a primitive flight or flight response – which is accompanied by all sorts of biochemical processes, beginning with the release of a hormone known as CRF and ending with a flood of stress hormones which then stay in the body for hours.

Adults also experience the amygdala hijack and the leader is no more immune than any other member of the population.  Goleman says of the stresses that lead to the amygdala hijack:

When stresses pile one on top of the other, they are more than additive – they seem to multiply the sense of stress, so that as we near breaking point, each additional burden seems all the more unbearable, the last straw.  This is so even for small hassles that ordinarily wouldn’t faze us but suddenly can seem overwhelming.

So, when Maestro Papadopoulos lost his temper with members of the London Symphony Chorus, it seems likely that he was feeling the burden of any number of stresses.  Whilst many conductors understand and accept the absence of a few chorus members who can’t get away from work for a 5pm rehearsal, Papadopoulos “saw red”.  For another leader it might be yet another error by a team member who is taking up disproportionate time, or the failure of another team member to meet a deadline on which a key contract depends.  No doubt you can think of your own examples.

Goleman’s description of the amygdala hijack, whilst it helps us to understand the processes involved in losing our temper, carries a risk:  by identifying the historic origins of our own or others’ responses, we may dismiss them as “merely” a primitive response – a response developed millennia ago which has now outlived its usefulness.  But there are other ways of viewing this.  One of my favourite thinkers and authors, Marshall Rosenberg (author of The Surprising Purpose of Anger, subtitled Beyond Anger Management:  Finding the Gift) sees anger as an alarm signal, signalling that we have unmet needs.  It also signals that we are disconnected from those needs – thinking about them by suppressing our feelings or blasting someone with our judgements.

When we apply Rosenberg’s thinking to our anger, we have an opportunity to really get under the skin of our  anger to understand what unmet needs we have.  I’ll be talking about ways to do this in a future posting.  First though, it helps to own our anger – and hold it with compassion.  

Wanting to engage your staff?

Developing as a leader,

How often, when preparing feedback for senior leaders following their assessments for new posts, do I find myself highlighting the need for them to develop and communicate a clear vision for their new team?  It is often a gap.

On the very day that I explore this topic with someone I interviewed recently, a quip from a colleague – sharing his lack of German alongside a famous quote (Ich bin ein Berliner) – reminds me of one visionary speech:  John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1963 in Berlin.  There is an urban myth about Kennedy’s speech, which rests on the fact that “Berliner”, as well as being someone from Berlin, also refers to a kind of jelly doughnut made in Berlin.  The myth is nicely dispelled on About.com – just follow this link.

You can also watch Kennedy make this speech on YouTube – in less than five minutes he makes the case for the free world at a time when the West was at cold war with communism.  Twenty-five years before the Berlin Wall came down Kennedy packs a punch when, whilst acknowledging the challenges of a free world, he highlights that the democratic West does not have to build a wall to keep its people in.  The phrase Ich bin ein Berliner signals his solidarity with the people of Berlin, and he repeatedly uses the phrase let them come to Berlin as a rhetorical device, countering by turn the key arguments for communism.

Such speeches may seem a far cry from the dry and dusty corridors of corporate Britain (and elsewhere) and still, the leader’s ability to engage his or her staff in a vision for the future is one of ways s/he can move the performance of a team or organisation from ordinary to great.  This is the difference – for staff – between knowing what they need to do and doing it because it moves them towards some heartfelt aspiration.  Sharing a vision – again and again and again – can capture the imagination and speak to the heart so that people want to come to work, they want to overcome obstacles, they want to succeed.

Daniel Goleman, in his book The New Leaders, positions this visionary leadership style as one of the styles that builds what he calls ‘resonance’ – it’s worth reading to understand the importance of this leadership style.  And if you want to see more footage of visionary speeches just follow the link to Kennedy’s speech and cast your eyes down the right hand side, where you will find many other examples of the visionary speech.

Listening to the wild dogs barking in your cellar

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Let me adapt some of Nietzsche’s words and say this to you:
“To become wise you must learn to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar”

Irvin Yalom
Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Dread of Death

I would read anything by Irvin Yalom, which is – far more than its subject matter – how I came to be reading his book Staring at the Sun:  Overcoming the Dread of Death.  I first encountered his deeply compassionate writings when a colleague recommended his book Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy.  I have enjoyed a number of his books including his novels:  Lying on the Couch made me laugh out loud.

Yalom’s work as a psychotherapist has contributed enormously to his field.  Whilst, historically, some psychotherapists have taken the view that psychotherapy is all about the client, Yalom has understood the impossibility for the psychotherapist of being a blank canvas – a distant and dispassionate observer.  For any man or woman brings a personal history to the role of therapist.  The therapist needs to cultivate self awareness in order not to entangle clients in his or her own unfinished business.

What’s more, dispassion and distance does little to promote healing for the client.  Yalom stands alongside Carl Rogers and others in viewing relationship and especially unconditional positive regard as an important contributory factor when it comes to the success of therapy.  His writings offer many examples of interactions with clients which might well horrify colleagues from other branches of his profession.

Now, since I work as a coach and my clients are leaders, you may well be wondering “what has this got to do with me?”  The truth is that both coaches and leaders need high levels of self-awareness if they are to be effective.  Daniel Goleman (in his book Working with Emotional Intelligence) lists three competencies which are concerned with self-awareness, based on research into what makes us effective at work.  Our self awareness is also the basis for our ability to relate to others – our ability to lead, to influence, to develop others (and so on) depends on our willingness to understand others and this, in turn, depends on our willingness to understand ourselves.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is to have empathy for others even whilst recognising the fullness of their strengths, weaknesses, quirks and limitations.  We can only do this if we can view ourselves in the fullness of our own strengths, weaknesses, quirks and limitations.  There can be a paradox here;  for if we believe that excellence in leadership depends on being better than our fellow human beings, we undermine the very basis for our outstanding performance as a leader.

It’s for this reason that the quote above strikes such a deep chord.  When we can listen to the wild dogs barking in our own cellars, we can begin to understand ourselves – and others.  It takes a huge measure of compassion to be present to all sorts of thoughts, feelings, characteristics and motivations which, as children, we have learnt to condemn.  It takes compassion, discipline and dedication.

So, if you want to get by as a leader, you can afford to read this posting – and move on.  If, though, you want to go beyond getting by, I invite you to ponder the quote at the top of this posting.  How willing are you to listen to the wild dogs barking in your cellar?

The leader’s call to power

Developing as a leader,

There’s a theme so familiar in my discussions with leaders that I wonder if I haven’t written about it before.  Still, I feel called to return to the theme of the leader’s call to power.

Now, let’s be clear, many men and women in leadership roles have a highly ambivalent response to the word “power”.  Many times I have heard some variant of the following:  “Power?  No, not me… I don’t go in for that sort of thing”.  “That sort of thing” is of course a negative sort of thing – at least in the eyes of the leader.

My experience over the years – of conducting research into what makes an effective leader, of assessing individuals for leadership roles, of working in coaching partnership with leaders – suggests that an individual’s willingness to embrace and to use power is an essential part of leadership effectiveness. The leader needs to go beyond doing everything personally to engage others to do things.  This is a fundamental shift from personal achievement to working with and through others.  The leader also needs, for example, to hold a vision for the future, sharing it with those s/he leads in ways which engage – this is the use of power to influence others.  The leader needs to use the same power to influence his or her peers, providing input to the overall direction and decision-making of an organisation.

My own observations of the use of power by leaders are intimately bound up with the research of Professor David C. McClelland of Harvard University.  McClelland’s research in the field of human motivation has been made available through his writings and through his work to establish a small consultancy which was bought, in time, by my former employer, the Hay Group.  This afforded me opportunities to apply McClelland’s techniques in my work and to test it through my own personal experience and observation.  McClelland was passionate about sharing his work and his little book Power is the Great Motivator, co-authored with David H. Burnham, is a great place to start if you want to understand his research without wading through dense and academic writings.  (If you do want to wade through dense and academic writings, you might enjoy his longer book, Power:  The Inner Experience).

So why has the exercise of power in leadership got such a bad name amongst the very people who are charged with leadership?  Recently, Art Giser put this in a broad context for me at a talk in Central London in just a few passing comments.  He pointed to the record of many leaders in the 20th Century.  We only have to think of such names as Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Mugabe, Bin Laden and Khomeini to realise just how much we fear the embrace of power and its potentially dreadful consequences for humankind.

Our ambivalent relationship with – or outright rejection of – power has also been reflected in our commercial and political activities.  On the very day that I heard Art speak, news broke of the resignation from Goldman Sachs of one of its London-based executives.  Greg Smith wrote an open letter to the New York Times (in itself an exercise of power) in which he said “I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what [Goldman Sachs] stands for” and highlighted the number of times in recent months that he had heard senior colleagues describe clients as “muppets”.

The power dilemma has been embodied in recent months by German politicians.  They are – not without reason – highly wary of embracing power in our current economic circumstances.  At the same time, many Europeans are looking to them to provide leadership.  So, whether you are reflecting on the body politic of our time or a leader seeking diligently to fulfil your responsibilities, I write this posting as an invitation to you to reflect on your relationship with power.  For as long as we reject power as an instrument of evil, we also fail to step up to the potential power has as a way of doing good in the world.  Is it not also true, for example, that many people are yearning for the responsible use of power to address the major challenges and issues of our day?

When it comes to consulting your staff

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Years ago I was involved in a project to audit the leadership “bench strength” of a company in the process of de-merger.  The company’s CEO was anxious about the capability of his senior leadership team – it seemed to him that whenever he asked them for ideas at meetings they were slow to contribute.  Interviewing members of his leadership team it became clear why.  To a man (they were all men) the people we interviewed told us how it was always the CEO’s ideas that prevailed – why put forward ideas that will only ever be dismissed?

Whether it was the quality of the leaders’ ideas that were wanting or the CEO’s willingness to explore the ideas of others, this story tells us something about the challenges of consulting our staff.  Daniel Goleman, in his book The New Leaders:  Transforming The Art Of Leadership Into The Science Of Results, highlights the democratic leadership style as one of several that builds resonance amongst employees which, in turn, leads to improved business outcomes.  At the same time, if you plan to consult your employees, you need to think carefully ahead of time.

Here are a few thoughts from me about when and how to consult:

  •  If a decision is urgent, highly critical for the organisation or if your employees lack the skills or knowledge to add value, think carefully before consulting them.  Used well, the democratic style builds commitment to a course of action but, used badly, it can also undermine it.   You need to ask for their input when you’re open to new ideas and have time to explore their input with them and to reach an agreement with them that works for everyone involved;
  • Do what you can to get clear ahead of time about why you want to consult staff and frame your questions to support your desired outcomes.  There’s a big difference, for example, between saying “let’s think about how we can save money” and “we’ve been charged with saving £3 million pounds and  I’d like to work with you to find ways to do this that maintain high levels of service to our customer and improve the efficiency of our processes”.  This is about both clarity and honesty – the more you are clear up front about your aims, the more likely you are to build trust as well as getting the input you need;
  • If you’re going to consult staff, it helps to have in place ground rules for handling the ideas that come up.  De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats provide one framework for brainstorming ideas.  I am, as you may already know, a fan of Roger Schwarz’s ground rules for effective groups – outlined in his book The Skilled Facilitator Approach.  In particular, take care to differentiate between interests and strategies – a strategy is a means to an end and the interest is the end itself.  Exploring how suggestions will contribute to an end result is one way to ensure that ideas are seen to be heard whether or not they are adopted;
  • Be clear ahead of time about how inputs will be used.  If the decision rests with you, then say so.  If it will be made at a more senior levels, then say so.  If you’d like the team to decide, then say so too – and agree up front how a decision will be made.  In this way, you support a positive experience of the democratic style;
  • Think about consulting staff on a regular basis as a way of building their skills and yours.  If your team is new to this style, you might like to start with a light touch – asking them for ideas, for example, about a non-business critical decision that you will make yourself.  Over time, your use of the democratic style will develop the skills of your staff and shape them as a team.  Ultimately, your team should be visible to your boss and to your boss’s peers and seniors as a highly effective team with plenty of ideas to offer to the organisation.  Even so…
  • Start where you are now.  Hold your team with compassion if this kind of consultation is new to them.  Take it one step at a time and use your judgement in deciding when and how to consult.
I’d like to hear about your experiences of consulting or of being consulted.  Please share the good, the bad and the ugly by posting your comment below.

Learning leadership from role models

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Harvard Business Review’s Morning Advantage came up with another neat article recently.  What did HBR say about the article?


Do you subscribe to the notion of “born leaders?” Or do you believe that the ability to lead is derived from a set of psychological properties that can be learned? The answer to that question, says Art Markman, goes to the heart of how much you’ll be influenced by role models. Not surprisingly, the more you think that leadership skills can be acquired, the greater the positive influence of others on your behaviour. Markman’s belief is that we can all learn — at the very least, improve — our leadership skills. Thus, those of us who don’t seek and study role models are missing an important opportunity.

Click here if you’d like to read the full article which is offered by Psychology Today.