Handyman or Expert?

A number of years ago I undertook a rather massive home improvement project with the help of some friends.  The project in question was construction of a nearly 500 square foot stone patio in my back yard.  I enlisted the help of some friends, some of whom had some experience in similar projects. The factors that I weighed in the decision came down to cost and perceived complexity (e.g., puffing out our chests and declaring our manliness we said "We Can Do It!").  There was also going to be the satisfaction of a project that I could physically and mentally participate in and achieve.

Things turned out well enough at the time, I learned a lot - most of it the hard way - had some relatively cheap manual labor at my disposal for a weekend, and impressed my girlfriend at the time with my physical stamina in shoveling load after load of crush and sand, placing stone after stone, and finishing a large project in relatively short time.

Several years later, however, I find that I've had constant repair work to do on my masterpiece, dealing with some subsidence in key areas of the stone patio and now worrying about at least one retaining wall needing an extensive redo.  Perhaps the "cheap and cheerful" way associated with my amateur handyman approach several years ago isn't leaving me with quite the legacy I hoped for??  Maybe an "expert" would have been better engaged despite the up-front cost??

So how does this story relate to leadership?  Too often I see some of the same mentality coming into play during evaluation of personal or organizational coaching, leadership development or consulting requirements.  Cost definitely comes into play as it should.  But rather than evaluating such expenses as an investment and weighing such against the hard outcomes desired there is a decided emphasis on cost-control.  A "good-enough" mentality enters the equation and a desire to either do-it-ourselves or hire a "handyman" for truly foundational work.  So can you do it yourself or hire on a non-certified coach or consultant to support your efforts?  Sure, but you might wonder if the investment of time and effort really gave you the return you required or ended up being sustained beyond your initial intense effort.  Like my home improvements, you might have been better to engage an expert at the beginning rather than engaging in constant "repairs" or investments to achieve the product or results you hoped for in the beginning.

I'm suggesting there is a leadership lesson to be learned from my home handyman approach noted above.  Leaving aside the do-it-yourself effort for now - which requires a great deal of personal or in-house skill that most don't have - how do you discern the "handyman" from the professional support you might need in coaching or consulting?  Solid track record and referral base are clearly good indications but I'm also going to recommend that you look for impeccable credentials including certification in national or international regulatory bodies.  Holding or pursuing such a credential (e.g., International Coach Federation, Canadian Association of Management Consultants) is a sign that the individual professional not only demonstrates knowledge and skill in their chosen field, but also holds themselves to the highest professional standards and are prepared to be judged according to a strong code of professional ethics.

Further, certified members of these professional associations have chosen to contribute to a broader body of knowledge, to regulate themselves and provide accountability to clients and their profession as a whole. Credential-holders complete rigorous education and practice requirements, providing testimony to their commitment to excellence.  These professionals look to protect and serve consumers of their services, measure and certify competence of their members, and inspire the pursuit of continuous development.

At the end of the day the choice of how to deal with your coaching, leadership or consulting requirements is fully in your court.  Credentials are certainly not a 100% guarantee of success but just like in home renovations they are a better bet than just looking for the cheapest bidder. As in my do-it-yourself reno, you can pay now or pay later (or both).  Make the time and investment pay off.  In this case, It's About Leadership!  And there is nothing more worthy of your investment than that which leverages all of the rest of your success - your leadership assets.
______________________________

Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC
TEC Canada Chair/Executive Coach/Senior Consultant
hadubiak@wmc.ca

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.

Great Leaders

What makes a great leader?  These days, with the ubiquitous nature of social media, there is no shortage of published opinion, top ten lists and assorted other commentary on what makes a great leader.  The challenge seems less in knowing what great leadership should be than in actually finding sentinel examples of such in real life!  Without a doubt we have individual leaders who command great power and reap great rewards in all sectors of society.  But as I pen this note I'm reminded of an exchange between two characters from the 1995 movie "The American President" which for me encapsulates the challenges we face in seeing leaders for what they are or are not:

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it they'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand. 

Lewis, we've had presidents who were beloved, who couldn't find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference. 

A damning statement on "our" collective ability to evaluate and select the quality of leaders we need!  Even more so when we consider how much more complex and challenging our organizational environments are becoming. It seems to me that this fictional representation and discourse on leadership is highly reflective of the issues we face in assessing and evaluating leaders in a variety of circumstances.  In my home province we recently made a political choice between three very different leadership personalities and visions.  Time will tell whether we have assessed and chosen correctly.  This fall, Canada will likewise have the opportunity to select its Prime Minister to govern us for the next number of years.  Likewise the United States gears up to choose its next President and may have the opportunity to choose between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.  So on what basis do make these momentous decisions?  My hope is that in all cases - political or otherwise - we choose less out of historical reflex, anecdote and emotion and more out of thoughtful consideration of what makes a great leader.

As you may have already ascertained from past blog posts, I operate from a certain perspective on what makes a great leader.  I offer you this short list of factors to explicitly identify what I believe are important considerations on leadership choices.  These build upon my own personal experiences of great - and not so great - leaders.

One -Visionary.  This may seem completely self-evident but I daresay there are a number of leaders in positions of substantial power that have a less than well-developed vision to guide them and their followers.  Vision for me has a very specific connotation.  It is a perspective or destination that extends beyond anyone political term or short-term horizon.  It is also clearly resonates and motivates others to action and is not simply about profit and loss, stock options, dividends or executive bonuses.

Two - Authentic.  Great leaders and strong leaders are authentic.  There is no mask or pretense about them.  They don't pretend to be who they are not.  They recognize and own their strengths and their weaknesses.  Too many leaders try to present as the perfect specimen of leader, without flaw and without doubt.  To my mind this simply reinforces a perception of their own insecurity and prevents them from truly connecting with their followers.

Three - Focus.  Hand-in-hand with being visionary, great leaders ensure that they and their followers focus on work that matters to achievement of the vision.  They don't allow themselves to be distracted and similarly help followers stay focused on critical elements of work and success.  Great leaders continue to stoke passion and hope in achievement of vision despite challenges and inevitable setbacks.

Four - Stay True.  Perhaps similar to focus, but great leaders aren't afraid to chart their own course, to take the path less traveled.  They distinguish themselves from the pack and similarly help their organization distinguish themselves in their marketplace.  Great leaders seek out new markets, new methods and new ways of thinking and acting to build success.

Five - Risk Taker.  Success and greatness often requires risk.  If there is no risk there is no reward.  Each of us has our own definition of and means of assessing risk.  Great leaders may sometimes be perceived as taking foolish risks but in many cases they just have a different mental mindset about what constitutes acceptable risk.  They also appreciate that "playing it safe" also carries it own risk not the least of which is being left behind and becoming irrelevant.

Six - Inner Strength.  Great leaders recognize that not everything goes as planned or as desired.  But they are resilient in the face of such challenges.  Moreover, they don't look to assign blame to others or extraneous variables.  They assess, analyze and find a new path forward, learning from failure, continuing to move forward to on their personal and organizational vision.

Seven - Build Relationships.  Great leaders recognize that leadership is not a solo endeavor.  By its very definition leadership requires that there be followers.  Effective relationships are built on a foundation of trust, respect, belief in and commitment to a common vision, authenticity and integrity of word and action.  Without relationships leadership cannot, by my definition, be great.

So as you assess your own leadership ambitions or are in position to evaluate the leadership aspirations of others, I encourage you to critically evaluate yourself or other candidates against these criteria or those of your own choosing.

The most important request is that you indeed critically evaluate before choosing.  It's About Leadership!  It's About Great Leadership! 
______________________________

Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC
TEC Canada Chair/Executive Coach/Senior Consultant
hadubiak@wmc.ca

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.

Taking on Doubt

It's been an interesting few weeks from both a personal perspective and as it relates to delivering value to my clients.  On the one hand, I've been working diligently to further develop the strength and depth of my executive coaching practice for some months now and this has had me contemplating additional certifications, partnerships and business development strategies.  I've found myself in almost parallel discussions with more than one of my coaching clients who in similar fashion have been looking to take the next strong steps in achieving their goals either in developing their own business or making a transition to a new career.  In all cases, one of the common subjects for discussion has been in respect of taking on doubt.

In these conversations one of the phrases used was "mastering self-doubt".  To me that sounded like a very grand idea but not necessarily an achievable goal.  Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic or have been raised or experienced too much self-doubt in my lifetime to truly believe that one can master such a beast.  I've never lived without some measure of self-doubt - whether in career, academics, athletics or even personal relationships (never was a lady's man so count myself extremely lucky to have found my soul mate!).

Now if you don't take quite as extreme a view as to what "mastering" implies for me at this point - complete lack of doubt for example - then there is a middle ground to taking on doubt and that implies application of some personal strategies in recognizing doubt when it shows up, assessing the degree of reality that this doubt does or does not represent, and then taking determined action to mitigate the potentially paralyzing impact of such doubt.  So rather than mastering doubt, I propose to confront it and put an action plan in place that helps me - and you - manage through it.   

And let's be clear.  You may know those that state they don't suffer from any form of doubt.  I don't believe them for a second.  This perspective demonstrates to me a lack of thoughtful insight and self-awareness.  So, needless to say, I'm not addressing myself to those who are in denial about their personal challenges.

So whether you have doubted yourself, doubted some of the people working for you or doubted whether your company could succeed in meeting a particular challenge, there are strategies that I have offered and have worked through with many of my clients that helped them move forward effectively, productively and successfully.

One - Own your Past Achievements.  All too often too many of us focus on what we have not yet done, what we have "failed" at, and what remains unaccomplished.  We do a great job of owning "failure".  In contrast we lose track of or readily dismiss the accomplishments and successes we have experienced that have actually got us to this point in our lives, our careers or our organizations.  Most of us did not become leaders by default.  Nothing has been given to us.  Own your past achievements and recognize that they set a pattern or base for you to take on the next impossible dream.

Two - Own Your Strengths.  In similar vein, I find that if I were to ask anyone what their weaknesses were they would respond without hesitation and rapidly and completely fill a page with perceived and actual shortcomings.  Flip the coin and ask for a similar listing of strengths and hesitation would take over with results far less expansive.  Often then I push my clients to look back on their past accomplishments and experiences and be honest with themselves about what it really took to achieve success.  I also suggest or recommend they get some perspective by asking others they trust and respect for their assessment of strengths.

Three - Set a Plan.  Self-doubt seems to be particularly magnified when we think about a long-term goal but fail to establish the small steps and actions that will progressively move us forward.  We become overwhelmed by the enormity of our grand goal or vision.  Setting the grand or compelling vision is something I DO advocate but similarly work that through with my clients and identify the small steps they can take in the next week, month, quarter or year to ensure movement to the long-term goal.  In the absence of that we easily fall back on "documenting" failure in becoming an overnight sensation, give up the ghost, and move back to mediocrity or the next big thing.

Four - Phone a Friend.  As one of my coaching colleagues south of the border said to me "Your mind is a dangerous neighborhood to go into alone."  This reflects the danger of merely having ourselves to rely on and the many voices in our head that conjure up images and the potential for harm and failure that subsequently paralyze us to the real opportunities that lay ahead of us.  So get the plan and the fears out of your head.  Write down your goals and plan.  Share them with your team of trusted advisers - an executive coach, a peer advisory panel (e.g., TEC Canada CEO group), other trusted colleagues or peers.  Talk it through, walk it through, make the possibilities real and wipe away the cobwebs of your mind.

Five - Work the Plan, Evaluate, Recommit.  Setting the plan and visualizing success is one thing but we all need ongoing motivation and encouragement to keep moving forward.  Ensure that as you set the plan and get feedback from your advisers that you also establish milestones and metrics for yourself to monitor progress for yourself.  Seeing and experiencing tangible evidence for yourself on progress on your plan will keep you motivated as you put in the hard work to achieve your impossible dream.  And make sure that you celebrate - in some small way - each milestone achieved.  Reward and recognition are just as important as the sacrifices you are making on your journey.

One final word on doubt.  It's not all bad.  Doubt can also serve you well if only to have you appreciate that you alone are not infallible and all-knowing.  Doubt serves to remind us that our perspectives, decisions and actions are subject to the limits of our own knowledge, experience and biases.  Doubt at some level should compel us to continuous learning, ongoing engagement with others, and appropriate analysis of options presenting to us.

In my estimation, leadership should come with a good mixture of confidence, ability, experience, challenge, hard knocks, humility and self-doubt.  When lacking this balance we are more prone to hubris and spectacular failure.

Don't let yourself be paralyzed by doubt, going into the dark alleyways of your mind whistling a hopeful tune, but rather seek to manage your doubt so as to afford yourself the greatest possible opportunity for success. 
______________________________

Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC
TEC Canada Chair/Executive Coach/Senior Consultant
hadubiak@wmc.ca

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.

To Declare One's Vision or Not

As is often the case for me, this latest blog post came directly from recent work with one of my executive coaching clients.  One of the angles we took in our work was around the advisability of publicly declaring one's personal/business or organizational vision.  In contrast to my own long-held belief that documenting and declaring a personal and/or organizational vision is key to moving strongly forward to a new and better future state my client had a contrary perspective brought to his attention.  This contrary perspective, backed up by empirical evidence, suggested that those who publicly talked about their intentions were less likely to make them happen!

From my personal and business standpoint this assertion has significant implications.  Not only does it have bearing on my own personal/business efforts and direction, it would also impact how I work with my individual and corporate clients.  As an entrepreneur I have just recently updated my own personal business plan, refocused efforts, targeted new avenues of work, and strengthened my marketing focus.  In similar fashion, whether working on individual plans for success or supporting strategic planning efforts with organizations, a key element is development and articulation of a vision statement and supporting strategies, goals and objectives.  So how to reconcile this contrary perspective with my current work and historical efforts?

The assertion made is that by announcing one's plans to others (e.g., colleagues, stakeholders) is that enough action has been taken and enough of an "emotional/intellectual" high obtained that you or your corporation's ego is sufficiently satisfied to obviate the need for actually taking action and achieving the endpoint described in the vision.  In essence, "we" are mistaking or substituting a declaration for achievement of the actual goal. To put it more simply, it's like me saying that I have a vision for completing an Ironman triathlon, getting a "high" off of the declaration, getting satisfaction from the accolades that come in from my friends and acquaintances, and becoming complacent in taking the steps necessary to actually get to the start line of the race.

When this "counter-factual" perspective was brought to my attention I rapidly dismissed it and its implications.  After further reflection, I'm not so sure now.  If I think about some of my own recent history (e.g., signing up for a half Ironman race in 2015 and not following through), there may be something to this theory.  In some respects, it may not be all that different from those of us (all of us??) who have declared a fitness or weight loss goal (sometimes associated with our annual New Year's resolution) only to fall off the wagon within a few short weeks of the often public declaration of the stretch goal. 

Yet, I'm not ready to give up the ghost so easily.  I know that my personal and business achievements have not come about due to silent reflection, hoping for the best or casting my fate to the winds.  Where I have strongly succeeded I believe comes from a strong declaration of the goal, the support of friends, mentors and colleagues, and a specific plan of action to move me towards my vision.  And perhaps it is this latter factor in particular that makes the key difference between delusional self-satisfaction and true outcome achievement.

In one respect then there may be agreement between myself and others who believe vision - or delusion - may be a dangerous thing.  I certainly can attest to friends and colleagues of mine declaring grand objectives only to recast them and boldly declare a new vision every few months.  In this regard, I can agree that vision is not enough.  Without action, concrete steps, perhaps even small steps, milestones, evaluation and re-commitment to a goal or set of objectives, vision is likely to amount to no more than delusion.

It is for this reason that I drive myself to develop very specific strategies, actions, goals and measures by which to track my own personal progress to my grand vision.  I also review the vision regularly and recast specific actions on an annual if not quarterly basis.  It is also why an executive coaching process should work with the individual being coached on developing an action plan as part of the overall process and as an outcome arising from each coaching session.  In a similar way, I work through a strategic planning process with organizations that goes from environmental scan; affirmation of mission, vision and values; through to the specific strategies, key results, individual accountabilities and key metrics that moves us from vision to concrete steps necessary to achieve that vision.  Otherwise, what we can be left with is a strategic plan that is glorious in its conception and glossy production but becomes no more than an expensive paperweight fated to be reproduced by another expensive process 2-5 years in the future.

So at the end of this you may consider me to be firmly planted on the fence on this subject.  Maybe you are right, but I hope that my commitment to vision - personal or organizational - is clear as is my commitment to what it takes to make a vision reality.  Your vision can be made real, declaration can be part of that commitment, but so too must real, short-term actions.  Without that real effort vision is in fact delusion.
______________________________

Greg Hadubiak, MHSA, FACHE, CEC, PCC
TEC Canada Chair/Executive Coach/Senior Consultant
hadubiak@wmc.ca

Helping leaders realize their strengths and enabling organizations to achieve their potential through the application of my leadership experience and coaching skills. I act as a point of leverage for my clients. I AM their Force Multiplier.