LeadWorkPlay

Lead Work Play is a blog for leaders – in the best and broadest sense.  Here I talk to and about 2 kinds of leaders – positional and situational.  Positional leaders are those with titles and formal positions in a company, such as the Vice President of this or the General Manager of that.  Where these kinds of leaders sit in an organization means that they often have a big impact on the lives of many people.  I love coaching these kinds of folks because (despite the justly-outraged press on a small population of greedy and immoral senior executives) I have found that most leaders are ethical people who want make a difference in the world and be of service to their people.

Situational leaders don’t hold a title.  They lead from where they are.  Most corporations today have become highly-matrixed organizations, where professionals must impact and influence many constituents, most of whom do not report to them.  (By the way, if you are a parent or the head of a household, you are very much in this category.  As the leader of your home and your family, you may lack the corner office, but all the joys and cares of leadership fall very much on your shoulders.)

Across all the realms of your life today – work, home, community, church – you probably hold multiple leadership roles at the same time, some positional and others situational.  All the more reason that this blog is FOR YOU.  So that you can lead successfully with your best self, and still get to lead your best life.

Welcome to Lead Work Play!

For those of you who are here for the first time, nice to meet you. For those of you who were subscribers to my previous 2 blogs (Green to Great & Making Whitespace) thanks for being loyal readers – I hope you will find here the best of both previous blogs, all in one place.

Lead Work Play will integrate the two areas around which I am deeply passionate:  leadership — growing leaders from green (high potentials) to great (high achievers); and life — grounding leaders in practices like mindfulness and work-life balance as strategies for professional and personal success.  In this new blog, I will reflect a bit more on my own, imperfect life, as well as continue to feed you with insights, resources and best practices in the areas of high potential leadership, career and the new world of work I see evolving.

I will also be writing much more about the explosion of research on the brain and how investing in greater mental capacity (with practices like mindfulness, white space and work/life balance) is now critical to our success and failure in this new “normal.”  More to come – stay tuned!

Below is an excerpt from my most recent article, published in December 2009 in the NeuroLeadership Journal, and co-written with my friend and colleague Dr. Angela Love.  We wrote this article because in our global economy, the future belongs to those with the information, technology and brainpower to create and capitalize on what’s NEXT.  However, our brainpower is fast becoming an endangered species, and we are deeply in need of a fundamental shift in how we sustain and grow this precious resource.  From the article:

“In terms of brainpower, two factors are waging guerilla warfare on the ability of individuals and companies to compete in the global economy. The first is a drain on the pool of available leadership talent.   Global demographic trends are already generating a talent deficit that will continue decades to come.    For professionals in the age category between 35 and 49 — the traditional pool from whom emerging and future leaders are sourced — forecasts are for minimal to negative growth.  By 2015, demographic shifts are expected to result in a 15% reduction in ready talent.

The second is that talent is being drained – physically, emotionally, and spiritually, in ways that decrease their mental performance at work.  Knowledge and creative workers daily face chronic high-stress; increasing complexity; information and communication overload; rapidly evolving technologies; and a hyper-competitive, 24/7 work world.  One management study found that even the smartest and most senior leaders are struggling to keep up to the point that they often don’t know what decisions to make or actions to take.  Consequently too many of us are trying to achieve more with much less, primarily by defaulting to multitasking and technology (from apps and productivity software to smart phones and laptops).   But these tools and techniques only take leaders and workers so far; what is really required is a fundamental re-thinking of how leaders value and use this mental capacity.”

To learn more about how mindfulness can be the breakthrough, inner “technology” you need, email me at julie@juliemaloney.com for your free, electronic copy of Mindfulness as Capacity: At the Threshold of Leadership’s Next Wave?

Here’s how most of us work – we are constantly ON. Period, end of story.

We are constantly on-line and on our cells.  We seldom take vacations and even then we check email and voice mail.  We use our weekends to “catch up” on family time, household chores and yes, to do more work.  Even when we try to sleep, work thoughts are running rampant through our brains.  So it doesn’t really matter whether we left the office at 5 p.m. or midnight — we are mentally on-call for work any time day or night.  We never turn it off.  Why does that matter?  Because:

THIS IS THE REASON MANY OF US DON’T REALLY LIVE.
THIS IS THE REASON WE DON’T REALLY ENJOY OUR LIVES.

Despite our best intentions (to paraphrase Deepak Chopra) we turn ourselves into machine-like “human doings” and leave on the table the many joys of “human beings”.  We literally miss the happiness that is available to us, in any given moment – because we are constantly chasing after what’s next or worried about what might be.

In my previous post, I gave a definition of capacity that is actually not the number one definition (aka, in the order listed in the dictionary).  The #1 definition of capacity is the ability to receive or contain.  So here I am talking about the importance of expanding our ability to receive and contain happiness – our own very personal experience of fun, laughter, peace, hope, faith and love.  On a very practical level, this looks like regularly practicing our ability to play.

There is solid business sense for this – play is the brain’s mechanism for creativity and innovation.  (A company with no room for play will not evolve its products/services and eventually fall behind its competitors in the rapidly changing, global marketplace.)  In the Information Age and with the rise of the Knowledge/Creative Worker, the winners will be the companies who proactively invest in their employees’ ability to play, innovate and create.  (One company comes to mind here that you might have heard of — Google.)  More on this topic later.

But for now, I don’t want to take away from my bigger message here: success without play, without happiness in your life every day, is no success at all.

The good news is that you don’t have to leave your job to find it (while at times you may feel like you’d be crazy NOT to leave it, if you could). I find that is rarely necessary and truly a place of last resort.  Leadership coaching is a powerful process and support to help you live more of the life you want and still have the career you’ve worked so hard to build.

I heard once that the definition of “capacity” literally refers to one’s ability to do work.  Dictionary.com defines capacity a bit more broadly, as the actual or potential ability to perform, yield or withstand.  Given the crazy-busy, 24/7 world leaders operate in today, that second definition is worth thinking about.  Is your capacity as a leader–to perform, yield and withstand–growing? Shrinking?  Or sitting at rock-bottom?

If you’re like 95% of the leaders I see, you are probably somewhere between shrinking and rock-bottom.  From my recently published article on mindfulness and leadership in the December 2009 issue of the Neuroleadership Journal: “Across the globe, people today deal with a veritable tsunami of chronic high-stress, increasing complexity, information and communication overload, rapidly evolving technologies, and a hyper-competitive, 24/7 work world.  As a result, leaders are trying to achieve more with less, primarily by defaulting to various forms of multi-tasking and hoping that technology (from their ever-present Blackberries to their Outlook email and calendar) will save them.  These tools will only take leaders so far; what is really required is a fundamental re-thinking of how leaders value and use their capacity.”

Because global business is driven by technology, which is in turn driven by ideas and innovation, there is no more important business resource any of us have today than our own brains.  In fact, most of you reading this blog were hired and advanced in your career because of what you can do with your brains, not what you can with your hands.  (In the heyday of the Industrial Age, that would have been a very different story.)

Yet, there is nothing that most of us take for granted, neglect and abuse more than the care and feeding of our own brain.  Contrary to popular belief, neuroscience is showing us just how delicate brain matter is and how incredibly energy-intensive it is to run.  Literally in terms of brain functioning, no human being can perform at their best 24/7.  It is physiologically impossible. Yet, most of us are trying to do just that – because our jobs, our families and the world today now require us to be on top of our game, every day.

Whether you call it by the name of “work/life balance” or “energy management”, your brain requires that you learn to take some regular time-off-the-clock.  In our work-addicted society, it can be challenging to do that on your own.  Leadership coaching can make the difference between breaking through to a new level of self-care you can sustain …or breaking down because engrained habits keep pulling you back.

So why would YOU ever want or need leadership coaching?   First, because of who you are. If you are reading this blog, you already deeply care about your professional success and personal growth.  And second, because to achieve the kind of growth and success you know you are capable of, you know that you have to invest in yourself.

More than ever, you cannot rely on your boss or your company to develop you.  While you can ask for their help and support (including making a financial investment in your coaching program) at the end of the day you are the one who must manage your own your career. Growing your skills (capabilities) to lead is the obvious place to start.

Leadership is not just a job, it is a profession that requires certain abilities, both obvious (e.g., to set strategic direction for a team) and subtle (e.g., how to convey a tough message with realism and optimism, so employees don’t disengage).  I’m really talking about much more here than learning a few techniques about how to make a presentation, or just smoothing out your rough edges.

According to Charan, Drotter and Noel’s seminal The Leadership Pipeline, “at least 50 percent of the people in leadership positions are operating far below their assigned layer.  They have the potential to be leaders, but that potential is going unfulfilled.”   The reason why? Once you move from being an Individual Contributor into your first role as Manager (and at EACH new level of leadership beyond) the authors’ research shows that you must continually “acquire a new way of managing and leading, and leave the old ways behind.”

In my 20+ year career in business and human resources, I have coached and trained literally thousands of leaders.  Even the shining stars — when they stepped into their next, bigger role — had to unlearn old skills/behaviors that once helped them succeed but now could sabotage them.  As the old saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there (e.g., the skills that made you top performer hitting your quarterly sales may make you a mediocre to bad performer as a leader responsible for an operating division with a 3-year strategy and plan for growth).

To grow your leadership capabilities, you need to ask yourself two questions to get to the next level or role you want:  What do I need to learn?  And what do I need to let go of? These can be hard questions to answer on your own (we can’t always see ourselves objectively or know what it is that we are missing/should know).  Leadership coaching brings assessment tools, research and best practices to help you customize a plan to get you where you want to go.

Executive coaching has become an accepted best practice in the field of leadership development.  My colleague Brian Underhill, Ph.D., outlines some of the reasons why in his book Executive Coaching for Results:

• The ever-increasing pace of change that forces organizations to develop leaders more quickly and more often on-the-job;
• An intensifying talent war to obtain and retain top leaders and performers; and
• The wide-spread use of 360-feedback which pushes leaders to cultivate their strengths and address their blind spots (critical, yet hard to do on one’s own).

Brian goes on to say that “many organizations are now making external coaching a high priority in their leadership development strategies.  Some are now five to ten years into an in-depth coaching implementation, serving hundreds – if not thousands – of their executives.”  These type of development programs for high-potential leaders (HIPOs) are where I spend much of my time as a coach and a trainer – including a Fortune 50 technology company and a Big 4 accounting firm.

As I said in my last post, coaching is a highly personalized, on-the-job development program that delivers real-time results that leaders can sustain over time. In terms of qualitative measures, these results show up in things like talent retention and improved job performance, including gains in: productivity, quality of work, customer service, work/life balance and job satisfaction.

The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that large corporations spend over $2 billion a year on training.  Yet studies show repeatedly that the impact of traditional training can be notoriously short-lived due to: a) a lack of transference into the “real world”; b) a lack of reinforcement on-the-job; and/or c) a one-size-fits all approach.  So much of that spending literally never sees the light of day.

While attempts to quantify the ROI of coaching are still in their infancy, at least two studies found that the return on executive coaching is, on average, 5-6 times the dollar amount invested in coaching.  As great as that financial return can be for the company, the return for an individual leader is equally as powerful.   And sustainable – the leader carries these benefits forward, wherever they go in their work and their life.

Leadership coaching is coaching is a highly personalized, on-the-job development program that delivers real-time results that leaders can sustain over time. In my next few postings I’ll talk about how coaching as a best practice in leadership development and share with the ROI (return on investment) for companies and for leaders, like you.

So what happens in coaching?  A leader and a coach agree to work together for a period of time (typically six months).  The leader, with help from the coach, prioritizes his/her goals:

• What does s/he need to learn and/or to change, to succeed in their current role?
• And then to move forward, to the next level or role in their career?

The leader and the coach puts together a plan and then meet (usually via phone) on regular basis to discuss progress being made, work through barriers, integrate best practices and reinforce learning/changes in behavior.

In my 10+ years as an executive coach, I have worked with leaders across the spectrum of requirements for executive maturity and peak performance, including helping them:

• Manage successful role transitions
• Accelerate their learning curve/ability to deliver results in the first 90 days of a new job
• Use 360 feedback to improve current job performance (leverage their strengths and minimize their weaknesses)
• Develop new leadership competencies and skills
• Increase their self-awareness and self-management
• Improve their interpersonal skills (e.g., ability to listen, communicate, etc.)
• Sustain their performance through better energy management and greater work/life balance

What kind of results/return on investment can you and your company expect from leadership coaching?  Read my next three posts to find out.

Since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with the spiritual dimension of human life – who are we?  Why are we here?  What is Divine and how do we find it?  I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools from grade school through college.  But thanks in large part to the Jesuits who taught me during my four years at Loyola University of New Orleans, my mind opened up to learn about many other spiritual traditions as well.

In particular, I’ve found tremendous value in the beliefs and practices of Zen Buddhism.  Not as a replacement “religion” for Catholicism or any other “ism” –  but rather as very practical and simple wisdom for how to lead a successful human life.  I’ve been meditating since my mid-twenties, when I took my first meditation/yoga class to help me deal with the stress of graduate school.  Since then I’ve: invested regularly in many more classes/training/retreats; read more books than I can count on Buddhism and mindfulness; and am part of a Buddhist here in my home town.

I tell you all this because, if you become a regular reader of this blog, you’re going to hear me talk about mindfulness A LOT.  Mindfulness is awareness – a very powerful form of awareness that comes from being fully present to the moments of your work and life.  (While meditation is just one technique to get you there, mindfulness is the end game.)  In terms of business/work/career, mindfulness helps you to see clearly what is present and to know with certainty what choice to make or action to take.  In terms of life, mindfulness is the best way I’ve found to live deeply and happy, every moment.  The path of mindfulness has been my route to professional success and work/life balance.  There is no bigger, better gift I could hope to share with you.

Seven years ago, at the time of my work/life breakdown the only coping strategy I had was to try to do more, do it faster, and more efficiently. Until I tried something else.

I tried an experiment.  I gave myself the one break I thought I could manage – 30 minutes for a quiet cup of coffee at a Starbucks, early on a Sunday morning.  I took a book, just planning to read and unwind a bit.  Nearly an hour later, I hadn’t read a page.  I found myself sitting there, reflecting on my life.  Surprisingly I wasn’t worrying or freaking out or feeling overwhelmed.  I was just thinking about what was going on and what I wanted, going forward.

I started to look ahead to the week to come and think about what I could try to do a little differently.  I realized that, as crazy and stressful as things had been across the past weeks and months, that things actually were a bit calmer in this present moment.  And that I had  (in the coming weeks) a window or two of opportunity to deal with some outstanding issues, and to get out ahead of some things.  But I literally hadn’t seen those windows — until this very moment — because I’d been too worried, afraid and stressed out to notice them.

I had a physical sense of relief when I walked out of Starbucks that morning.  And my week that followed was the calmest, most productive and most energized week I had had in many, many months.  Not perfect, but noticeably better.

So I found it a bit easier to grant the self-permission I needed to make another Starbucks date with myself, the following Sunday.  I kept making those dates, for many Sundays after that.  Over time, I found it easier to carve out even more time for me — to rest, recharge, refocus and re-engage my best self — because I saw living proof of how it made me mentally sharper, emotionally happier and physically more energized to deal with my crazy-busy life.

Especially for the mothers who may be reading this posting, I need to add one last piece of this story.  I turned off my phone and did not even bring my laptop for that time at Starbucks.  I completely unplugged for a little quiet time for me.  And nobody died, literally.  I took a small chance, a calculated risk that I wouldn’t be there for two of the people I loved most when they needed me.  Not only was I there to say goodbye to my dad when his time came, but my daughter is now a thriving and confident 22-year-old, college senior.  Just as important, I’m still here too and doing more than well – the proof in the pudding.

I’ve learned a lot about my own thinking processes, the mechanics of the brain, and the wisdom of  most ancient spiritual traditions when it comes to rest and play.  I know there’s so much more that’s possible and needed in terms of work/life balance in our 24/7, global world.  Bottom line — mindfulness is a big part of the story I have left to tell.