Leading Questions

Circle of Impact 2010 Planning Guide update

Recently, I posted a two part 2010 planning series at Weekly Leader. Thanks to many of you who responded with your suggestions for changes. I've revised the questions in the guide. The guide itself is in the process of being updated and will be available in the next couple of days. I thought I'd share the revised questions with you.

What matters to me?

1. What does it mean for my life and work to be personally meaningful? What values and/or activities give meaning to my life and work?

2. What does it mean for my life and work to have socially fulfilling relationships?

3. What does it mean for me to make a difference in the world that matters?

Reviewing 2009.

1. What has changed in my life and work this year? How are these changes a transition from one stage of my life to the next?

2. What difference have my Ideas made over the past year?

3. What difference have I made in my Relationships over the past year?

4. What difference have I made in the Social and Organizational Settings where I am involved?

5. Whose life or work have I made a difference in over the past year?

6. What opportunities have I had this year that made a difference in my life and work?

7. What problems did I create that I resolved during the past year?

Planning for 2010.

1. What changes are taking place in my life and work during the next year?

2. What is the difference I want to make in 2010? What are my Impact Goals?

3. Who do I want to impact in 2010?

4. What opportunities do I have now that I’d like to fulfill in 2010?

5. What problems have I created that remain to be resolved in 2010?

Three Keys for Effective Planning:

Do it in Conversation with Others

Write it down

Execute and Review Consistently

Defining Life / Work Connections

A number of years ago when I first conceived of the Circle of Impact, my focus was primarily, and almost exclusively, on organizations.

What I saw, and still do see, is the dynamic interplay between a person's ideas, their relationships, functioning within the context of the structure of an organization. In other words, how do people work together in a business to achieve the goals of the company. It is a powerful dynamic because it encompasses all aspects of what takes place in an organization. Name any issue, opportunity or problem, and the dynamic is at work.

Over the past five months, through interaction with a group of professionals from the wealth management industry, I've been pushed outside of this limited perspective to address how this circle relates to individuals not explicitly related to the functioning of an organization. Instead of being focused on organizational structures, the focus is a single person. 

This experience has been a tremendously challenging, invigorating and personally expanding one. The dimensions of ideas and relationships remain relatively the same. It is the third dimension of structure that has forced me to think more deeply about what I'm seeing.  I have used two different phrases to capture a broader perspective about the structural dimension. One is life / work context. The other is social and organizational settings. Neither has been particularly inspiring.

A few days ago one of my wealth management colleagues suggested that I restate this dimension in terms that a sixth grader might understand. As a result, I decide to ask people what they thought. I posted on Twitter and Facebook my request for a single word that could incorporate social environments, organizational structures and physical places.

Now you may wonder why I lump all three of these very different "things" together into one category. It is rather simple. These are three areas where we spend our time.

Some of the ideas suggested were venue, milieu, ethos, school of thought, connected world, and situational space. In asking for suggestions I didn't initially stipulate that the word had to be on a sixth grade level. I should have because I found that my responders are way beyond sixth grade in their intelligence, beyond me to say the least.

I also did a Thesaurus check for the work context. Here are some of the words that I found - framework, circumstance, ambience, background, conditions, connection, frame of reference, relation, situation, environment, habitit, setting, location, locality, area and place. 

The result of this exercise is the following suggestion. 

Life / Work Connections are the situations where we invest ourselves in real world situations. They encompass all of our social environments, the organizations where we have involvement and the physical places that command our interest and allegiance.

The Life Connections are all those personal ones, like our family, our childrens' school or soccer team and favorite vacation locales.

Our Work Connections are the management team meetings, the role and responsibilities that we have at work, and our office environment.

In every social setting, work setting and physical place where we are present, we are engaged in relationships and in conceptually trying to make sense of who we are and where we are headed. We don't simply live in our heads or just relate to people. We are involved in places where we seek to create impact.

Over the next weeks, I'll address this facet of impact creation more specifically. However, I wanted to get this out there to see what people think. I welcome your comments as they are very helpful to me in clarifying what I'm trying to understand. 

Starting with a client's perceived need

Where do you begin with clients? 

Are you selling?

Do you begin with what they want?

Or, do you explore what they perceive their need to be?

I start with the transition question. 

What's the transition question?

It is a question about what they perceive as having changed. It isn't just that it has changed, but change in some relatively permanent way, as if there is no going back.

Most people have a sense that something has changed, is changing or needs to change, but don’t have a way to see it very clearly or completely.

That is where I begin.

Once they see this transition, they are more motivated to make changes that take advantage of the transition they are in.

People see problems. They know when things are not right or in decline. They know it intuitively, even though that can't describe it precisely.

Once they begin to see the transition they are in, I begin to talk with them about the dynamic of the Circle of Impact. This dynamic is an interplay between our ideas, relationships and the contexts where we are involved. They are always touching one another.

For example, your client's perception of transition is not just an idea. It is also a product of their interaction with people and their involvement as participants and contributors in the social and work contexts where they are involved. These contexts are impacted by the quality of relationships and by the ideas that govern how the structure and relationships function.

If your client's group is in transition, meaning that change is happening to them, and it isn't clear where it is going, then a lack of clarity (Ideas) about policy and procedures may be affecting the comfort and security that people feel in their relationships with each other. If there is a lack of trust then the group has less capacity to manage well the transition they are in.

See how this dynamic is played out? Try this exercise.

Make a list of your clients and ask the following three questions about their situation.

1. Is my client clear about who they are and what they stand for?

2. Do they trust the people with whom they are involved?

3. Do they feel that they have an opportunity to contribute their best?

If the answer is no to any of these questions, then there is a breakdown in the dynamic of the Circle of Impact.

Helping people move from a vague sense of change and need to a clearer one provides a foundation for addressing the deeper issues of their mission, vision and values. I call them the deeper issues because these are not simply ideas, but the ways we connect the dimensions of the Circle of Impact together.

Look at the above illustration.

A mission is an idea that connects a social or organizational context not only to its purpose, but also how it is organized to achieve its mission.

If your client's stated mission and the organization of their life and work are not in agreement or alignment, then you know there is an issue to address.

How will they see this disconnect between mission and structure? One way is that no one takes their stated mission seriously. They are simply empty words.

A vision is a word-picture of the effect of a group's mission. It captures the impact that people create through the social or organizational context where they participate?

If there is not actual impact, then you know that there is a breakdown in the Circle of Impact. Is the breakdown an Idea, Relationship or Structure problem? Until you look closely at the dynamic you don't know. However, it is less important where the problem is than realizing that the solution comes from all three dimensions.

My experience is that all people have values, but often don't know what they are. They need help in identifying them. And we need a real world impact picture in order to identify them.

Values function in two ways.

1. Values unify relationships. They are the bond that unites people within a social or organizational context together.

2. Values also create the strength that everything else is dependent upon. A mission is simple a statement of identity and purpose. A vision is a statement of the results of that mission. Underlying both ideas are values, and the values really are used to create the strength that we see in collaboration.

Real strength comes from our interaction with people, whether as partners, employer/employees or with clients.  Ideas and the structure of social and organizational contexts are the tools that we use in our relationship to make a difference that matters.

The problem for most of us, including our clients, is that we have not been taught how to see this dynamic between our ideas, structure and relationships.

Helping your clients clarify the perception of their problems and the transition they are in is the first step toward bringing significant, sustainable solutions to their situations.

Next week, I post at Weekly Leader, Part 2 of a process that you can use with your clients to help them identify the impact that they want to have next year. When you use this methodology together, you build trust and a vision for how your relationship can make a difference beyond what you have been able to do up to now.

Conducting your own 2009 review

We are all approaching our end of a year of many transitions.  

In the past I've written about using my Four Questions that Every Leader Must Ask as a guide for an end-of-the-year review and a way to plan for the next. 

This year, I have been impacted by people who have helped me see beyond the organizational leadership work that I have been doing for a decade and a half.  The result is a reframing of this material for individuals who living on the thinning line of life and work, and the expansion of my consulting work to include a new coaching program. 

While we do look at the change of the year as a time of reflection and new beginnings, the reality is that we can do this year round. However, if you have not, then there is now time like the present to begin to think differently about yourself as the new year approaches.

Today, in my Weekly Leader column - Reviewing Your 2009 Impact - I present the first step in a process of review and planning that will conclude in next week's column. I've prepared an one page listing of the questions that I ask in the column. I suggest that you print the list and the column and spend a few moments over the next week reflecting on the past year to 18 months.

I've said many times over the past couple years that I believe we are in the midst of one of the most significant transitions in all of human history. This is bigger than President Obama, the IPhone, the recession and the combine effects of 9/11, Katrina and the Iraq/Afghanistan war. The transition is, regardless of what you see happening in Washington, is a shift towards individual responsibility and collaborative relationships that transcend the old bureaucratic structures that are no longer able to manage the complexity of life today.

In order to be at our best, for ourselves, our families, our co-workers, our communities and for the world at large, we each need to thinking clearly about what we believe and the difference we are committed to making today. A starting place is gaining perspective and understanding about where we are and what we need to focus on next year.

I invite you to read today's column and begin to answer for yourself the Life / Work planning questions and if you are so inclined, share them with me. I believe that as you go through this process of reflection, that you'll begin to discuss opportunities that were always there, but that the lack of clarity of insight blocked your vision of them. It is my hope that from this exercise you'll find new opportunities in life and work that will enable you to have an impact that is far beyond what you would have imagine a year ago, or even yesterday.

Is Small Business at a Crossroads

In my browsing this morning, I came across this article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta - Prospects for a small business-fueled employment recovery.  Here is a quote from a speech given by William Dudley of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

"For small business borrowers, there are three problems. First, the fundamentals of their businesses have often deteriorated because of the length and severity of the recession—making many less creditworthy. Second, some sources of funding for small businesses—credit card borrowing and home equity loans—have dried up as banks have responded to rising credit losses in these areas by tightening credit standards. Third, small businesses have few alternative sources of funds. They are too small to borrow in the capital markets and the Small Business Administration programs are not large enough to accommodate more than a small fraction of the demand from this sector."

Whether you work in a small business or patronize one, it is an important article to reflect upon. Look at this chart that I've posted from the article and especially the results from 2007-2008.

Job losses from late 2007 through 2008 were 43% from businesses with less that 50 employees.

Let me pose a question. What if 43% of the stimulus money went to these small businesses. What do you think would have happened? Do you think those dollars would be sitting in a bank? I don't think so either. They would have been spent, and real stimulus and real economic strength would have been built.

Having spent the last fourteen years working with small businesses as an organizational consultant, my perspective is different than Washington's. I take a micro, localized view of the economy. Global businesses are not really global, but a collection of local economic operations. There maybe a global headquarters, but it nothing but a building with offices. The real economic engine of those companies is local. The global nature of them makes them efficient. But they are still localized operations where people go to work, pick up their pay check, deposit it in the bank and pay their mortgage, bills, insurance and buy food and other necessities for their families.

We live in a networked age. A local jewelry maker in Indonesia can sell her product line to customers in the US or Europe. She can because of the internet and the global reach of package companies like UPS and FedEx. Here a smart business person on one side of the world can have a successful company selling to people in a nation where 43% of the job losses in one 15 month period were from businesses virtually the same size as her's. What does this tell you about the business climate in the US today?

Linked is a New York Times article - Are Medium-Size Businesses the Job Creators? - that suggests that we should change the way we look at business size. Look at this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was included in the article.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (Numbers do not total 100 percent due to rounding.) Job Creation by Firms of Different Sizes, 1992-2008

What should those of us who are small business owners and serve small businesses take away from these two articles?

1. Scale matters. The most productive small companies in regard to job creation are those between 50 and 500 employees. If you are starting a business today. You should consider as a part of your business planning process what it would take to reach that threshold of 50 employees. In a number of client situations, the idea came to me that many of their problems would be solved by being just a little bit larger. Then the scale of costs would be more favorable for them.

What if you don't want to grow that large? What are you alternatives?

2. Collaboration leverages size for small businesses. Becoming a collaborative partner with other business provides a way to be big while remaining small. The skills and perspective required to be a good collaborator are not the same as being good at running a small business. 

What if you feel like you've reached a crossroads, a transition point, in both your business and professional life?

3. Impact determines what business you are in rather than the activities that you do.  To be successful today requires a change of mind about what business you are in. If you are in the business of providing the same products and doing the same services over and over again for customers, then you may find yourself irrelevant and out of business. However, if you understand the impact you want to create, then you can change your business and/or employment status to put yourself in the best possible position to achieve that impact. If this means that you close your small business and go to work for a medium size one, then that is what you do. In so doing we become a mission-driven workforce, rather than a job activity driven one.

My main concern is the lack of recognition by Washington of the situation of small business. This isn't a Democrat/Republican, or Bush/Obama issue. It is a national issue that is impacting people, families and communities across our nation. 

What if these are not my issues? What can I do to make a difference?

4. Support local small business groups in your local community. In most communities there is an economic development agency. Check with them and offer support to helping attract and support new business. Check and see if there is a local chapter of SCORE where you live. Offer to teach a class on some aspect of being a small business. Check and see if there is a micro-enterprise organization in your community. Each of these organizations provide help and support to small business. Get involved and you'll be strengthening your community.

Is small business at a crossroads? Based on these job numbers, I'd say yes. Support your local small business while we learn to make the changes that are necessary to survive in a very tough climate for business.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership - A Leading Questions review

Almost twenty years ago, the conventional wisdom about organizational leadership began to change. Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline was the first to acquaint me with the ideas of systems theory. Then Stuart Kaufman's At Home In the Universe came along to introduce me to the ideas of self-organization and complexity, followed by Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and The New Science. Since then, there have been many, many more writers that have come along to explore the nature of leadership from the vantage point of science.

My problem, and I'm sure this is true for many people, was the lack of background in quantum physics and evolutionary biology. As a result, applying these ideas was frustrating and discouraging.  Part of the problem was the conceptual difficulty of the ideas themselves, and the lack of a suitable organizational environment for them to take root.

The world has changed since this new world of leadership science began to be developed. Today, these ideas are finding greater receptivity as their application becomes more refined and real tools and guides are developed.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World is an important and welcomed addition to the growing body of thought on adaptive change in organizations.  The authors are Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Harvard's Kennedy School colleagues and co-founders of Cambridge Leadership Associates, and Alexander Grashow, CLA's Managing Director. Heifetz is the author of Leadership Without Easy Answers and co-author with Linsky of Leadership on the Line They bring not only a first class understanding the theoretical understanding of leadership, but a real world perspective of having worked with leaders from around the world.  Since I first became acquainted with Heifetz's perspective in the early 1990's, I have found their perspective on leadership uniquely insightful.

The value of this book is its practicality. It is a guide book for how to be an adaptive leader.

This book is about possibility. Not daydreaming, wishful-thinking possibility, but rather a roll-up-your-sleeves, optimistic, realistic, courage-generating, and make-significant -progress kind of possibility. Leadership for change demands inspiration and perspiration.

The core focus is on learning to be an adaptive leader, with adaptation being the key idea. Here is their basic understanding of the adaptive nature of leadership.

Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. The concept of thriving is drawn from evolutionary biology, in which a successful adaptation has three characteristics: (1) it preserves the DNA essential for the species' continued survival; (2) it discards (reregulates or rearranges) the DNA that no longer serves the species' current needs; and (3) it creates DNA arrangements that give the species' the ability to flourish in new ways and in more challenging environments. Successful adaptations enable a living system to take the best from its history into its future.

For the authors, evolutionary biology is an analogy for how we function as leaders. Not to over simplify, but from this perspective leaders are change agents who practice the art of preservation and change. Leader is not a title or a role, but rather how one approaches ones relationships, decisions and activities.

Recently, I completed a two year long project with a client whose constituency was so focused on the past that you could consider them a museum. Over those months of work, they began to see how the values of the past could be actively lived out in the future with vitality and growth. The above quote describes what took place over those months.

The authors provide six ways to understand how being an adaptive leader makes a difference.

• Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive.
  
• Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it.
  
• Organizational adaptation occurs through experimentation.
  
• Adaptation relies on diversity.
  
• New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate, and rearrange some old DNA.
  
• Adaptation takes time.

Even though this book is a guide to how to be an adaptive leader, it should not be read as simply a book of tactics. It builds upon a systems view of human interaction and organizational life. They provide a basic understanding of systems thinking in order to fully benefit from their practical wisdom.

There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be "dysfunctional" in some respects to some members and outside observers, and even though it faces danger just over the horizon.

If, then, you are in an organization that some people think it is broken, and others do not, as the person in authority, what is your job? Do you treat the critics as an annoyance and do everything possible to run them off to preserve peace and tranquility? Or is your job to look at the big picture and realize that there may be some truth in their criticism. To take this view means that you potentially become disliked by everyone because the steps you take as an adaptive leader please neither side.

To approach leading from this perspective requires a different view of the role of leader. The old paradigm held that there are a few leaders and the rest followers in an organization. The new paradigm is much different.

People have long confused the notion of leadership with authority, power, and influence. We find it extremely useful to see leadership as a practice, an activity that some people do some of the time. We view leadership as a verb, not a job. Authority, power, and influence are critical tools, but they do not define leadership.

It is important to understand the implications of this perspective. As a leader, you are not a place holder on the organizational chart, or some gatekeeper who believes that all decisions must come through you as the authority figure.

Exercising adaptive leadership is dangerous. ... The dangers reside in the need to challenge the expectations of the very people who give you formal and informal authority.

From my personal experience, what they say is true. To be a change agent, to create change, especially when you are unsure how it will be received, is one of the hardest aspects of leading. Yet, it is what secures the impact of we desire.

Leaders are change agents. My own perspective is: Leaders take personal initiative  to create impact with ideas, through relationships and in organizational structures. A person's tolerance for change factors into how well they can be an adaptive leader. This diagram illustrates the various levels of tolerance of change that people have.  There are those people who are change-phobic, who resist change at all costs. There are those who embrace change to such a degree that there is no continuity established that allows for strength to be built and sustained. As a result, I find that people who are impact leaders have a change tolerance ranging from receptive to active initiation. It is never change for change sake, but rather, change that serves a higher purpose. This is why I too see leadership as a behavior that arises in the initiative of the individual regardless of what role they have in an organization.

I highly recommend The Practiced of Adaptive Leadership. Master the lessons that Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky provide us, and you'll begin to make a difference which encourages others to join you in leadership. I also recommend that you pair this book with Seth Godin's Tribes. Two very practical books on leadership, though very different, that provide an excellent grounding in the new paradigm of 21st century leadership.  I will carry both in my bag to use as reference in my own leadership opportunities.

Impact, not Balance

Is there such a thing as balance between personal and professional life?

Twice this week I saw the question raised. Once in a webinar and the other in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece - Work and Life -- and Blogging the Balance.

The WSJ article was prompted by a comment Jack Welch made at a SHRM conference in June. He said, "There's no such thing as work-life balance ... There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."

I agree with Welch. I don't know what work-life balance looks like.  The issue, for me, is a question of the impact that I want to have.

One of the ways I answered this was to work for myself. While it is never perfect or in balance, it has given me more freedom to be with my family in ways that people in typically corporate jobs cannot. On the other hand, my work does require 24/7 attention. I know there is a price for this. As Welch says, there is a consequence.

The greater question for us is whether our lives have an integration that allows for us to make a difference regardless of the situation. Balance isn't trying to find some median point of activity concentration between personal and professional life. We end up measuring our lives by the activities that fill up our schedules. That is not an effecive measure of much of anything, except energy. It is like going on a vacation trip, and only telling people how many miles you drove, and how much gas you used and what you spent for food and lodging. Not an accurate picture of vacation.

Impact, integration, wholeness, and congruence are better ways to approach the balance question. Find your purpose, make a difference and live your life as if it is a whole thing, not just a collection of parts. You will have to make sacrifices. But if you are doing what you love, and making a difference, then you have a type of balance that really matters in the long run.

Follow Up in Response to Comment below:

Thanks for your comment, Becky.

Women are more expressive about the issues. Men are (I'm over generalizing here.) just think of this as the way things are and deal with it in a more private, less open way. Listen to what they complain about and the issues of balance emerge.

A friend of mine used my Four Questions guide to focus his week. Within a few months his emotional intelligence website became the most visited in the world. He attributed it to focusing on the impact question.

Let's ask the Four Questions about the question about balance.

1. What is the impact we want from finding balance between our professional and personal life? 

2. Who do we want to impact through this balance?

3. What opportunities do we gain from achieving this balance?

4. What problems of balance have I created that I must address in order to achieve balance?

If we approach the balance question from an impact context, I think we can find some clarity that leads to real action that makes a difference.

Leadership Q&A: Measuring Impact

This week's Leadership Q&A column at Weekly Leader is on how to shift our perspective to create impact. Read "Creating the Change that Matters."

Leadership Q&A - What's On Your Checklist?

My latest Weekly Leader Leadership Q&A column - What's On Your Checklist? - is posted.

This week I'm addressing an issue that I see in many places. It is the issue of staff who tend not to look at the big picture, but rather simply treat their job as a daily checklist to complete.

The antidote is to become an impact leadership business. Focus on the change you want to create, rather than the tasks that need to be created.

Use the Circle of Impact guides to help build awareness and communication to make the transition. If you would like to talk about how, let me know. I'll be glad to help.

Resolving Complex Issues Simply

I'm involved in a process of listening and learning about a local organization that is very complex. As I've talked with a wide cross section of people, and this has been going on for over a decade, there is one theme that continues to resonate.

Working within this complex organization are a group of professionals who provide their services on a contractual basis. Over the years, I've been told that the relationship between the organization and these professionals is not healthy. Based on what I've seen, heard and encountered, this a well-functioning organization at the top of its class in its industry. I'm very impressed with the people whom I've met who work there. They are big picture people who see how it impacts the daily work as leaders. That is a rare commodity in today's business world.

I'd like to use this scenario about relationships of professional service providers working within a larger complex organizational system to make a point about how to resolve complex issues simply. Let's use my Circle of Impact diagram as a guide to understanding the real nature of the problem and its solution.

The problem as it continually gets portrayed to me is a Relationship problem. However, if you really listen to what they are saying, two other perceptions emerge.

The organization and the professional group do not share the same perception of what their mission is. A Mission is an Idea that becomes the rationale for how we organize our businesses. If we have competing conceptions of what our mission is then we are going to have conflict about how we Structure our organization.

The Relationship problem, therefore, is also a Idea and an Organizational Structure problem.

Within our scenario, the group of professional service providers work within the structure of the larger organization. The issue is not simply, what should our financial and operational agreement be. Those issues are more easily resolved. The deeper issues are ones of values and mission.

Based on what I've learned, the differences in their individual conception of mission become less distinct when viewed from the perception of what their shared Impact should be. Ultimately, they both want high quality service provided to their clients.  If this conception is too general a Vision, or not clear in terms of how they organize their work and relationships to achieve it, then the problems will persist.

How do you resolve such a complicated scenario?

It starts with the relationship. Establish respect and trust, and work from there. If there is no respect, then mistrust grows. If there is no trust, then division also grows. And the shared values that matter erode. While every issue has a relational, conceptual and organizational component to it, resolution begins with resolving the relationship question.

There is one additional ingredient to add. It is important that leaders structure their organizations so that issues get resolved where the solution will be implemented. If you don't then the issue rises up through the structure to become a crisis that requires intervention, not simply resolution. We can achieve this through training supervisors and managers to equip the people they lead to resolve issues before they grow. The Circle of Impact can help make this easier. I just takes some training to know how.