How do you seek out bad news?

Our teams want us to be the leaders we read about in the books on our nightstand. Courageous enough to challenge the bureaucracy, willing to lead at the pointy end of the spear, and prove that we are all in this together. A leadership maxim is to share bad news early since it never ages well. This is a great statement for the employee manual, but are you sincere?

It is tough to hear the barrage of what is wrong. We either seek it out from those closest to us or wait for it to show up in the news. How you spend your time reveals your priorities. How much time do you spend asking the hard questions to expose the bad news?

Does your team believe bad news is welcomed, and something will be done, or is it easier to just smile and wave? The silent majority of team members will keep their opinions close to the chest for fear of reprisal unless we are intentional to draw them out. How many "whys" are needed before you surface legitimate concerns during your daily walkabouts with the team?

Today, we choose what kind of team to lead. One that is characterized by charging forward with gracious transparency or hunkering down in a protective defense of the status quo. Each day, this unique team is investing their precious lives to achieve a common mission, and the opportunity is missed if their observations and insights are ignored. Feedback is a gift, and if improperly handled, it is squandered. The team deserves better from us, and we must deliver.

Going Further: How are you building a culture that is free to share bad news early? What bad news surprised you? How has this freedom influenced the team and helped the end customer? What is your process for collecting candid feedback? What action have you taken as a result? What culture needs to change? What can you do today to start required changes?

How do you energize those you are passionate about?

You don't have to be loud to encourage the crowd, but it helps. The political pundits talk about using strategies to rally the base for their particular candidate. Whether it is advertisements, rallies or fundraisers, there is a process for getting people fired up about a cause.

What is your strategy for getting your supporters, co-workers or customers excited about the passions you share? The tribe looks to the leader for vision and direction to keep the momentum going. Your enthusiasm for the product and the people will have a contagious impact on those around you.

What insights do you have about the idiosyncrasies of your community that allow you to know them better than they know themselves? This understanding supports knowing when the masses will bob and weave and let you be the DJ. 

What do you respect the most about your community? Since you chose these people as your own, part of the deal is to work like crazy to ensure success is achieved. Your appreciation and respect for the group you serve can inspire action and devotion as you share your pursuit of the mission.

Where do you see the tribe waning in their passion? Derek Sivers (@sivers on Twitter) gave a TED Talk about "how to start a movement" and describes the transformation of one crazy guy into a dancing movement all within 3 minutes. Leading is hard and requires massive effort to maintain the momentum necessary to accomplish anything great. How can you reinvigorate the community?

This is our opportunity to drive change, create something bigger than ourselves and inspire those around us. You must pursue your passions, and they matter; the tribe is waiting.

YouTube Link: How do you energize those you are passionate about?

What is your process to find the right fit?

The electronic stack of resumes arrive in the inbox ready for your perusal and is generally best paired with an adult beverage. After fighting upper management to defend the budget and fund your new hire; the tough slog of finding the right match ensues. TaskRabbit founder, Leah Busque, stated "hiring's tough. The difficult thing is the nagging feeling that, despite your best efforts, the perfect candidate will somehow fall through the cracks."

The replacement cost is targeted between 16-20% of the annual salary and is a pricey endeavor in time and resources. After all the work, there is still the chance that after a couple of months you find your hiring system and gut instinct was wrong and the new hire isn't the right match. Having been on both sides of the interview, asking the right questions to ensure there is alignment between the hopeful new hire and the prospective company is critical.

If you have been in the game any amount of time, you have refined your skill at determining the best candidate for the position. I am now far more at peace arriving at an interview with a boatload of questions to ensure expectations are understood than when I wore a younger man's clothes. The hiring decision is an opportunity to propel or disrupt the entire team. Beyond finding capable hands to accomplish the work, you are influencing the organizational culture with each new personality. Your current team and customers are counting on you to use your process to correctly discern who to offer a handshake and offer letter; choose wisely.

How much does your gut instinct play a role in hiring a candidate? What are the key "tells" that a candidate is the right or wrong fit? Who were your best/worst hires and what lessons did you learn that you now apply? How has your process changed? What innovative and creative processes do you use to really know the candidate? What are your hiring blind spots that may allow the wrong person to be hired?

How do you empower your team?

Sergeant Major Alford McMichael was the most senior enlisted Marine from 1999 to 2003, serving as the fourteenth Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. In his book, Leadership, he writes, "one of the most fundamental aspects of effective leadership is leveraging power by distributing it among your people". The necessity to teach and train your people to take initiative is on your shoulders as a leader. You will restrict your growth potential if every decision must be cleared through one choke point.

Your hiring process includes finding the best and the brightest to help execute the vision and mission of the organization. If top talent is brought onboard and not given the chance to exercise their capabilities then everyone loses. A lever is a powerful tool that can move mountains and properly enabled your team can achieve the impossible. Giving the authority to make decisions and impact the end user at the lowest level places the lever in the hands that can influence the greatest change. This freedom provides the quickest response to the customer and a sense of ownership for those working the process.

No doubt, you have experienced the micro-managing organization at some point in your life and encountered the stifling effects that ripple through the organization. Controlling all elements of the activity feels safe, but is safe really the goal if it hamstrings the organization for fear of something going wrong? The reality is that things will go wrong, the difference is the strong army of dedicated and empowered people that are invested and want the achieve the vision vs, the cogs punching the clock because of a lack of ownership. Vibrant health or a safe death, the choice is in your hands.

Going Further: What do you think and feel about relinquishing control and driving authority deeper into the team? When have you seen it work well? How has this process failed and why did it fail? How do you evaluate the effectiveness of empowering your team? Who is someone you can enlist to help enact needed changes? What is one element of authority you can empower a team member this week?

How do you lead by example?

Your kids hear what you say, but remember what you do. This was sober advice given to me as a young parent and has proven to be true. Maybe a bit of what I said stuck, but the overwhelming ratio of remembered lessons for my kids favors my actions. This principle is consistent throughout the business world and any other leadership sphere. Kids are pretty good at calling us out on the inconsistency between what we say and what we do. Others may not be as vocal because a job promotion may be on the line, but our hypocrisy will be discussed at the water cooler or the lunch-line.

If the boss says that it is important to have a work-life balance to maintain employee health and spends the weekend sending out email and making calls, she will loose credibility with the staff. Eventually, the organizational morale starts a downward spiral and requires a targeted effort to recover what was lost. Retired Army General Norman Schwarzkopf stated "Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy." Your character is revealed through the consistency of your words and actions. Be intentional, the world is watching.

Going Further: Where is your example inconsistent with your words? What standards do you hold for others, but not yourself? What changes need to be made to bring words and actions into alignment? What were the results of making these hard changes previously? 

When have you led well?

I am Frodo; I approach this inquiry as a fellow traveler, seeking to grow in my abilities. I have been in the trenches as a worker-bee and middle manager, having experienced leadership on each end of the good/bad spectrum. I have in-turn provided a spectrum to the teams I have led. Having completed some self-awareness work along my journey, I am far more aware of shortcomings than successes. This can be par for the course for a recovering perfectionist. To read how to do it all perfectly, the Amazon business section is chock-a-block of the latest leadership insights.

Take the opportunity to pause and reflect on those times when you led like you intended. You know, living the life your dog believes you live; a hero to the world. We will often skip the celebration, thinking that is for those other people and miss the chance to catalog our strengths. These pauses allow for insight into our talents and leadership styles.

Journalist, Sebastion Junger discusses how the American Indian tribes would choose their leaders based on the environment. They understood that the same leaders are not perfect for all circumstances. A reigning peace-time chief would step aside if the tribe went to war and when the fighting was complete, the war-time chief would relinquish power to a peace-time chief.

This insight may provide great encouragement as you determine where your leadership strengths exist and how they can be employed within an organization. I always wanted to believe that I was the special snowflake that was a great leader in all circumstances. This is not the case.

Insulting a contemporary, Winston Churchill stated, he is "a humble man, who has much to be modest about". This quote helps to keep me grounded and recognize that each of us has a set of strengths that need to be used just like any other specific tool in the tool belt. This realization was liberating as I was viewing leadership as an all or nothing situation. I was wrong. 

What are your leadership strengths? What was a leadership win? What historical leaders are you most alike? What successes surprised you? How do you invest in developing your leadership skills?

What is your leadership metric?

There are many ways to measure success; how do you know you are successful as you lead your family, Cub Scout troop or Fortune 100 company? Lord Kelvin stated, "when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it." Each leader has a style where they are comfortable and have found success. Most often, it will be borne out of personality and experience of what they have seen works. Some experiences will provide negative training, and the leader will commit to running their organization directly opposite of their experience. Paying attention to the numbers can help understand your leadership effectiveness.

A friend was discussing his job transition into a new field and took a significant pay cut to right-size his work/life balance. His last company would grind through managers at a rate of three per year after demanding 100 hour weeks at the job and sparse vacation days. The union labor force was competent and stable, allowing for managers to be overworked, quit when exhausted and quickly replaced. Leadership had determined that these managers were expendable for the short-term gains. I mentioned that even with the pay cut, his hourly rate probably skyrocketed due to the normalized hours at the new job where he was finding great satisfaction.

As a leader of people, your responsibility goes beyond the easy metric of units produced, dollars collected and the least amount of time spent with each customer. Your investment in those you lead will pay dividends beyond the basic spreadsheet. Like any investment, you want to understand your returns. Lord Kelvin's statement reminds us that once we can quantify what is important then we "know something about it"; so, what do you know about your people? 

Going Further: Other than required company metrics, what do you use? How do you track the success of those you have led? How do you know that you are not a negative learning experience for your people? What else should be asked?

How do you lead?

You lead, but are you doing it well? The question quickly expands to whether you are intentional or abdicating the responsibility that is in your hands. Leadership is needed in all areas of society; the pick-up game on the middle-school playground, the fight for rights, the race for the White House, the midnight shift manager at McDonald's, the parent raising kids or the leader of an elite team of Marines. Many are groomed for stepping into the role and others find the responsibility thrust upon them at a critical moment. Leaders receive and ever shrinking honeymoon period to deliver direction and become the required leader.

Leadership is not about a personality or charisma, but rising to the occasion and caring for those in your charge to accomplish the mission set before you. Bookstore shelves sag under the weight of volumes filled with lists of how-tos and endless week-long seminars to help close knowledge gaps are offered through pop-up ads. Successful leaders recognize they are not all knowing in all areas and perfect in all disciplines. They will surround themselves with the strengths of others, knowing they have gaps and can't do everything on their own. My history includes abdication in personal, social and work leadership settings. Recollection of these missed opportunities has fueled greater intensity to ensure I am self-aware and growing to ensure the mission is achieved in the various settings.

The pantheon of past and current leaders you desire to emulate had a starting point and grew into the hero's you respect today. Before those trailblazers, of the past, closed their eyes in death, they would concede they could not have projected their lives, every twist, and turn. These leaders took the risk and chose to make deliberate decisions and take deliberate actions, without the assurance of the desired outcome. Most often, this course of action was pursued with an incomplete picture, leading an imperfect team to make the most of the opportunity and accomplish the task. Their experiences created a legacy that delivered their story to you and reminds you perfection is not the standard. Setting aside personal preferences and comforts to graciously use your talents and skills to fulfill your commission, through inspiring those you lead to do the same, will be your proof you lead well.

Going Further: What leaders inspires you, why? Who do you depend on for leadership mentoring? Who is counting on you to lead? What will result from you succeeding and failing as a leader? Where have you abdicated leadership responsibilities? How can you address this leadership gap? What other leadership points come to mind?

What is a key life lesson learned in college?

Beyond a higher level of your ABC's and 123's; what did you learn in college that really stuck? Assuming you learned skills beyond playing quarters, draining the contents of a red Solo cup or proving the salt content in a weeks worth of Ramen Noodles doesn't preserve your body like a dried fish. The college years are a time of discovery, of both the world around us as well as who we are as an individual. Hopefully, for all the late nights of study, tuition paid and scholarships earned there were some life lessons that have endured the transition to post-graduation life.

The opportunity to expand the influences beyond those of your home and local schools, allow for a diversity of thought to permeate our minds. The lessons of how to put on your shoes and socks by, UCLAs, Coach John Wooden or the structure of a poetic sentence by, Princeton's, Toni Morrison, leave impressions and practices far beyond the classroom. No doubt, you had professors that revealed their humanity through practical advice that has long since been internalized. In many cases you may have heard, for the first time, lessons your parents have been teaching for years, but it took a different voice or a changed circumstance for you to have ears to hear the old teaching. 

What other lessons were learned during college that has stayed with you? What were some unlikely sources of college learning? What was learned from a college enemy? How were your expectations of college learning fulfilled? What college related question did I miss?

How do you combat gossip?

The corrosive nature of gossip will quickly cripple any community. The cancerous tendrils quickly divide friends, family and co-workers. This division scars and shuts down the creativity and prevents the interaction of everyone delivering their best.

Bad enough, is when leadership is silent or looks the other way and the cancerous cells multiply. Worse yet is when leadership actively engages in the practice. The task to kill the cancerous effects, will be nothing short of a herculean effort.

Those supporting an organization decided that it was worthwhile to dedicate their precious lives to the common cause. They only have one life and they chose you. You decided to bring them on as the best candidate and gossiping will only prevent them bringing the best they have to offer; aim carefully as you shoot yourself in the foot.

Each one of us must take the opportunity to combat the cancer. Out of the heart speaks and your words are your choice. Choose wisely.

Going Further: Where have you given into the temptation to gossip? What harm have you seen as a result? How have you felt when you have been gossiped about? Where do you need to grow in this area?