Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Why most definitions of leadership are wrong

• Travis Bradberry

What makes someone a leader anyway?

Such a simple question, and yet it continues to vex some of the best thinkers in business.

We've written several books on leadership, and yet it's a rare thing to actually pause to define leadership. 

Let’s start with what leadership is not…

Leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of a company. 

Too many talk about a company’s leadership referring to the senior most executives in the organization. They are just that, senior executives. Leadership doesn’t automatically happen when you reach a certain pay grade. Hopefully you find it there, but there are no guarantees.

Leadership has nothing to do with titles.

Similar to the point above, just because you have a C-level title, doesn’t automatically make you a "leader." We often stress the fact that you don’t need a title to lead. You can be a leader in your workplace, your neighborhood, or your family, all without having a title.

Leadership has nothing to do with personal attributes.

Say the word "leader" and most people think of a domineering, take-charge, charismatic individual. People often think of icons from history like General Patton or President Lincoln. But leadership isn’t an adjective. We don’t need to be extroverted or charismatic to practice leadership. And those with charisma don’t automatically lead.

Leadership isn’t management. 

This is the big one. Leadership and management are not synonymous. You have 15 people in your downline and P&L responsibility? Good for you, hopefully you are a good manager. Good management is needed. Managers need to plan, measure, monitor, coordinate, solve, hire, fire, and so many other things. Managers spend most of their time managing things. Leaders lead people.

So, again, what makes a leader?

Let’s see how some of the most respected business thinkers of our time define leadership, and let’s consider what’s wrong with their definitions.

Peter Drucker: "The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers."

Really? This instance of tautology is so simplistic as to be dangerous. A new Army Captain is put in the command of 200 soldiers. He never leaves his room, or utters a word to the men and women in his unit. Perhaps routine orders are given through a subordinate. By default his troops have to "follow" orders. Is the Captain really a leader? Commander yes, leader no. Drucker is of course a brilliant thinker, but his definition is too simple.

Warren Bennis: "Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality."

Every spring you have a vision for a garden, and with lots of work carrots and tomatoes become a reality. Are you a leader? No, you’re a gardener. Bennis’ definition seems to have forgotten "others."

Bill Gates: "As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

This definition includes "others" and empowerment is a good thing. But to what end? We've seen many empowered "others" in life, from rioting hooligans to Google workers who were so misaligned with the rest of the company they found themselves unemployed. Gates’ definition lacks goals and vision.

John Maxwell: "Leadership is influence – nothing more, nothing less."
We like minimalism but this reduction is too much. A robber with a gun has "influence" over his victim. A manager has the power to fire team members which provides a lot of influence. But does this influence make a robber or a manager a leader? Maxwell’s definition omits the source of influence.

So what is leadership?

DEFINITION: Leadership is a process of social influence which maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a greater good.

Notice the key elements of this definition:

• Leadership stems from social influence, not authority or power.
• Leadership requires others, and that implies they don’t need to be "direct reports."
• No mention of personality traits, attributes, or even a title; there are many styles, many paths to effective leadership.
• It includes a greater good, not influence with no intended outcome.

Leadership is a mindset in action. So don’t wait for the title. Leadership isn’t something that anyone can give you — you have to earn it and claim it for yourself.


Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, "Emotional Intelligence 2.0," and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world's leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.

These 10 Peter Drucker Quotes May Change Your World

Jeff Shore

My first college business professor was a fanatical Peter Drucker devotee.
He launched our course with a dissection of Drucker’s The Effective Executive and concluded with a thorough reading of The Practice of Management.

Through my professor's tireless evangelism, I developed a keen appetite for the timeless wisdom of this prescient thought leader.

Young entrepreneurs unfamiliar with Drucker would do well to study his insightful commentary on the world of "management." Millennials mired inside a traditional corporate environment and people living life inside lean startups will find his thinking particularly spot on.

Even after all these years, 10 Peter Drucker quotes still bounce around in my head constantly:

1. “Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”
2. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
3. “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
4. “What gets measured gets improved.”
5. “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”
6. “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
7. “People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
8. “Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”
9. “Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
10. "Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things"

My cynical side (and my short attention span!) feels especially drawn to number eight on that list.

But the quotes that really excite and ignite my entrepreneurial imagination are numbers two and five.

Which quote resonates most deeply with you? Most importantly, which of Drucker's words will change your world?

The 9 Books Every Leader Should Read

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There are more than a million business books in print, and thousands more published every year. But what if, for some reason, you were only allowed to read nine books about managing people? (Why nine and not 10? I’ll explain at the end of the post.)

After giving it a lot of thought, here are the nine that I would recommend: 

The Effective Executive
Subtitle: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
Author: Peter F. Drucker

Why it’s a must read: This book is literally definitive in the sense that it definesmanagement at the executive level so clearly that most other serious management books takes this book’s concepts for granted. The Effective Executive also rejects the concept that an executive should encourage a personality cult among employees and the press. For Drucker, management means getting things done without grandstanding or being concerned about your public visibility.

Best quote: “Men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination, or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders. While others rush around in the frenzy and busyness which very bright people so often confuse with ‘creativity,’ the plodder puts one foot in front of the other and gets there first, like the tortoise in the old fable.” 

The One Minute Manager
Authors: Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

Why it’s a must read: The One Minute Manager, along with The Greatest Salesman in the World, is the best of the “teach through parables” style of business book. The advice it offers is mostly common sense, but it’s laid out in such easily understood terms and actionable advice that it makes common sense into something that’s uncommonly valuable.

Best quote: “The managers who were interested in results often seemed to be labeled ‘autocratic,’ while the managers interested in people were often labeled ‘democratic.’ The young man thought each of these managers–the ‘tough’ autocrat and the ‘nice’ democrat–were only partially effective. ‘It’s like being half a manager,’ he thought. He returned home tired and discouraged. He might have given up his search long ago, but he had one great advantage. He knew exactly what he was looking for. ‘Effective managers,’ he thought, ‘manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the organization and the people profit from their presence.'” 

Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
Subtitle: A Guide to Outwitting Your Boss, Your Coworkers, and the Other Pants-Wearing Ferrets in Your Life
Author: Scott Adams

Why it’s a must read: Adams’s earlier book, The Dilbert Principle, outlined the absurdity and inconsistency of the business world. This book goes deeper into management and decision making, explaining why everyone’s experience at work differs so greatly from the idealized picture that’s provided in books like The Effective Manager and The One Minute Manager. If you’ve got a sense of humor, this book will definitely make you laugh, but it will probably be the uncomfortable laugh resulting from seeing a bit too much of your own inner weasel.

Best quote: “There’s a gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities. I call that the Weasel Zone* and it’s where most of life happens. (Note: *Sometimes known as Weaselville, Weaseltown, the Way of the Weasel, Weaselopolis, Weaselburg, and Redmond.)” 

The Age of Unreason
Author: Charles Handy

Why it’s a must read: Every book you’ve read about the digital age, disruptive innovation, massive change, etc., is based on this book. This was the first book to really nail the fact that what we now call the Mad Men era was disappearing and that we were about to slip into a crazy period where none of the old rules work and nothing makes much sense. It’s a quick read and some of his observations are dated, but it’s really amazing how much he got right and how much later business writers have stolen his ideas.

Best quote: “We are now entering an Age of Unreason, when the future, in so many areas, is there to be shaped by us and for us–a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no predictions will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imaginings in private life as well as public, for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.” 

The Art of War
Author: Sun Tzu

Why it’s a must read: This book is usually read as if it were a collection of fortune cookie proverbs. That misses the point, though, because this book is actually a philosophy of life that extends to every type of leadership. It’s one of those books that you can read 50 times and get something different with each successive reading. The edition that I’ve linked into the heading above is not just a beautiful work in the art of publishing but also contains the best commentary and notes, all of which can deepen your understanding.

Best quote: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.” 

Don’t Bring It to Work
Subtitle: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success
Author: Sylvia Lafair

Why it’s a must read: If you’ve ever wondered why the people you work with behave in such strange ways, wonder no more. As this book clearly explains, whatever happened or is happening in their family is reflecting and repeating itself at work. What’s truly valuable about this book is that it identifies the personality types that cause problems and then explains exactly how to use and redirect the problematic behavior so that it serves the goals of the team.

Best quote: “Once you learn how people’s past family life and their work behaviors connect at a core level, you’ll know where performance problems originate and conflict starts. Then you’ll gain skills to do something about it. The reason most organizational programs abort is that they fail to deal with our life patterns, which are at the foundation of workplace anxiety, tension, and conflict.” 

The Prince
Author: Niccolo Machiavelli

Why it’s a must read: This is a book of bad advice. It was supposed to be “how-to” guide for leaders in Italy at a time when every city was fighting every other city and the entire region was full of mercenaries, inquisitors, and other unsavory types. Why do I include it? Simple. This book accurately predicts the decisions of a sociopath in a management role. As such, it’s perfect defense against predatory competitors and allows you to keep one step ahead.

Best quote: “And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” 

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
Subtitle: Follow Them and People Will Follow You
Author: John C. Maxwell

Why it’s a must read: Sometimes it seems like everyone in the management consulting business has a list of principles, habits, laws, rules, and so forth that explain everything you really need to know. What’s funny about all those books, though, is that they’re all valid! Leadership is such a complicated phenomenon that it’s possible to describe it in hundreds of different ways. That being said, this book (of all the other books of this type) is the easiest to read, with techniques that are easy to apply. (Note: In this category, I went back and forth between this book and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But 7 Habits gets a little preachy, so I finally settled on this book.)

Best quote: “Instinctively, successful people understand that focus is important to achievement. But leadership is very complex. During a break at a conference where I was teaching the 21 Laws, a young college student came up to me and said: ‘I know you are teaching 21 Laws of Leadership, but I want to get to the bottom line.’ With intensity, he raised his index finger and asked, ‘What is the one thing I need to know about leadership?’ Trying to match his intensity, I raised my index finger and answered, ‘The one thing you need to know about leadership is that there is more than one thing you need to know about leadership!'” 

How to Win Friends and Influence People
Author: Dale Carnegie

Why it’s a must read: The writing style is a bit corny and the anecdotes incredibly out-of-date, and yet it’s a well of wisdom that has yet to run dry. Everyone I’ve known who has read this book cover to cover (and made the effort to implement its lessons) has been successful, if not in business then in their personal life. This book has been a bestseller for decades and is likely to be a bestseller for decades to come. There’s so much in this book that for the quote, I just plucked out one that’s helped me in my interactions with colleagues and family members.

Best quote: “Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

Decluttering the company

Businesses must fight a relentless battle against bureaucracy

 

PETER DRUCKER once observed that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” Nine years after the management guru’s death, his remark is truer than ever: employees often have to negotiate a mass of clutter—from bulging inboxes to endless meetings and long lists of objectives to box-tick—before they can focus on their real work. For the past 50 years manufacturers have battled successfully to streamline their factory floors and make them “lean”. Today, businesses of all types need to do the same in their offices.

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The most debilitating form of clutter is organisational complexity. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been tracking this for a representative sample of companies in the United States and Europe since 1955 (when the Fortune 500 list was created). BCG defines complexity broadly to include everything from tiers of management to the numbers of co-ordinating bodies and corporate objectives. It reckons that, overall, the complexity of organisations has increased sixfold since then. There has been an explosion of “performance imperatives”: in 1955 firms typically embraced between four and seven of them; today, as they strain themselves to be kind to the environment, respectful of diversity, decent to their suppliers and the like, it is 25-40.

A second form of clutter is meetings. Bain & Company, another consulting firm, studied a sample of big firms, finding that their managers spent 15% of their time in meetings, a share that has risen every year since 2008. Many of these meetings have no clear purpose. The higher up you go, the worse it is. Senior executives spend two full days a week in meetings with three or more colleagues. In 22% of these meetings the participants sent three or more e-mails for every half an hour they spent sitting in the room.

These e-mails constitute the third form of clutter. Bain estimates that the number of external communications that managers receive has increased from about 1,000 a year in 1970 to around 30,000 today. Every message imposes a “time tax” on the people at either end of it; and these taxes can spiral out of control unless they are managed.

Some clutter is inevitable. The point of companies is to get people to achieve collectively what they cannot do individually, so some meetings and memos will be needed to co-ordinate them. Complexity may often be the price of success: companies that have grown to great size and operate in many markets face far more complicated problems than smaller ones operating on home turf. But Drucker was surely right that co-ordination has a tendency to degenerate into clutter. Meetings multiply. Managers build empires. And clutter feeds on itself. Bain calculates that adding a new mid-level manager creates enough work for half an assistant. Adding a new senior vice-president creates enough work for one and a half assistants.

Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity. As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.

One solution to clutter is a periodic spring-cleaning to sweep it out. Big companies need to have campaigns against internal complexity: Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s boss, is seeking to introduce a “culture of simplification”, as part of a plan to cut the giant conglomerate’s overheads from a peak of 18.5% of revenues in 2011 to 12% in 2016. Joe Kaeser, his counterpart at GE’s archrival, Siemens, is abolishing a whole management tier and reducing the number of divisions below it. When Ford’s previous boss, Alan Mulally, took over in 2006, he called for an audit of all its meetings. He replaced “meetings week”—five days each month in which executives held non-stop gatherings—with one tightly scheduled weekly meeting at which managers are under orders to cut the crap. Mr Mulally’s successor, Mark Fields, had to prove himself first by chairing those meetings efficiently.

Spring-cleaning needs to be reinforced by policies to stop clutter accumulating in the first place. Though it may seem obvious, Intel, a chipmaker, felt the need to impose a rule saying: no meetings without a clear purpose. Lenovo, a Chinese computer-maker, lets its staff halt meetings that are going off-track, in the same way as Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, gives production workers the power to stop assembly lines when they spot problems. Bain says a manufacturer it studied made savings equivalent to cutting 200 jobs by halving the default length of meetings to 30 minutes and limiting to seven the number of people who could attend.

Some employers are seeking ways to let staff at least manage the clutter, if not reduce it. Intuit and Atlassian, two software firms, offer workers a regular quota of clutter-free time. Volkswagen has spared its German staff from having to read work e-mails after hours—and even BCG has introduced rules on when its consultants are entitled to go “offline” in the evenings.

Wasting time, wasting money

The best way to institutionalise decluttering is to force managers to justify any bureaucracy they introduce. Seagate Technology, a data-storage company, and Boeing, an aircraft-maker, both hold their executives accountable for the “organisational load” that they impose on their subordinates in terms of meetings, memos and initiatives, and measure them against their peers. As Bain points out, the most valuable resource that many companies have is the time of their employees. And yet they are typically far less professional about managing that time than they are at managing their financial assets.

100 Great Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask

Paul Graham, Jim Collins, Tony Hsieh, and other business leaders share the questions you should be asking if you want to improve your company.

 

 

There’s no Superman versus Iron Man face-off between questions and answers over which is the better tool for innovation. But if there were, questions would be winning. 

Questions ignite imaginations, avert catastrophes, and reveal unexpected paths to brighter destinations. Jim Collins, Marshall Goldsmith, and other thinkers have compiled their own stocks of questions, which they urge leaders to pose to themselves and their teams. The right questions don’t allow people to remain passive. They require reflection, followed by action.

Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, praises inquiry’s ability to trigger divergent thinking, in which the mind seeks multiple, sometimes non-obvious paths to a solution. Asking good questions and doing so often “opens people to new ideas and possibilities,” says Berger.

To compile this list of provocative questions for business owners, we reached out to entrepreneurs and management thinkers, scanned blogs, and revisited our favorite business books. (Though we tried to identify the origin of each question, some had competing claims of authorship. In those cases, we made our best call.) Have you got a great question that you use at your company? We welcome you to add your own to the list via the comment box below the story. Rigid mindsets are dangerous things. We hope the following will keep your mind supple.  

1. How can we become the company that would put us out of business? -Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group 
2. Are we  relevant? Will we be relevant five years from now? Ten? -Debra Kaye, innovation consultant and author
3. If energy were free, what would we do differently? -Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
   Hsieh explains, “This is a thought experiment to see how you would reconfigure the business if you had different resources available or knew that different resources would one day become available. Another question might be, what if storage was free? Or what if labor costs half as much or twice as much?”
4. What is it like to work for me? -Robert Sutton, author and management professor at Stanford
5. If we weren’t already in this business, would we enter it today? And if not, what are we going to do about it? -Peter Drucker, management expert and author 
   The late Drucker posed a variation on this question to Jack Welch in the 1980s. It inspired General Electric’s “fix, sell, or close” strategy for exiting or restructuring unprofitable businesses.
6. What trophy do we want on our mantle? - Marcy Massura, a digital marketer and brand strategist at MSL Group 
   Massura explains, “Not every business determines success the same way.Is growth most important to you? Profitability? Stability?”
7. Do we have bad profits? -Jonathan L. Byrnes, author and senior lecturer at MIT 
   Byrnes explains, “Some investments look attractive, but they also take the company’s capital and focus away from its main line of business.”
8. What counts that we are not counting? -Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality and head of global hospitality for Airbnb 
   Conley explains, “In any business, we measure cash flow, profitability, and a few other key metrics. But what are the tangible and intangible assets that we have no means of measuring, but that truly differentiate our business? These may be things like the company’s reputation, employee engagement, and the brand’s emotional resonance with people inside and outside the business.”
9.  In the past few months, what is the smallest change we have made that has had the biggest positive result? What was it about that small change that produced the large return? -Robert Cialdini, author and professor emeritus of marketing and psychology at Arizona State University
10. Are we paying enough attention to the partners our company depends on to succeed? -Ron Adner, author and professor at Tuck School of Business 
    Adner explains, “Even companies that execute well themselves are vulnerable to the missteps of suppliers, distributors, and others.”
11. What prevents me from making the changes I know will make me a more effective leader? -Marshall Goldsmith, leadership coach and author
12. What are the implications of this decision 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years from now? -Suzy Welch, author
13. Do I make eye contact 100 percent of the time? -Tom Peters, author and management expert
14. What is the smallest subset of the problem we can usefully solve? -Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator
15. Are we changing as fast as the world around us? -Gary Hamel, author and management consultant
16. If no one would ever find out about my accomplishments, how would I lead differently? -Adam Grant, author and professor at Wharton
17. Which customers can’t participate  in our market  because they lack skills, wealth, or convenient access to existing solutions? -Clayton Christensen, author, Harvard Business School professor, and co-founder of Innosight
18. Who uses our product in ways we never expected? -Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne, authors and strategy consultants
19. How likely is it that a customer would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? -Andrew Taylor, executive chairman of Enterprise Holdings 
    "Taylor’s use of this question at Enterprise Rent-A-Car inspired Fred Reichheld to create the Net Promoter Score, a widely used metric for customer loyalty.
20. Is this an issue for analysis or intuition? -Tom Davenport, author and professor at Babson College
    Davenport explains, “If it’s a decision that’s important, recurring, and amenable to improvement, you should invest in gathering data, doing analysis, and examining failure factors. If it’s a decision you will only make once, or if for some reason you can’t get data or improve the decision-making process, you might as well go with your experience and intuition.”
21. Who, on the executive team or the board, has spoken to a customer recently? -James Champy, author and management expert
22. Did my employees make progress today? -Teresa Amabile, author and Harvard Business School professor 
    Amabile explains, “Forward momentum in employees’ work has the greatest positive impact on their motivation.”
23. What one word do we want to own in the minds of our customers, employees, and partners? -Matthew May, author and innovation expert 
    May explains, “This deceptively simple question creates utter clarity inside and outside a company. It is incredibly difficult for most people to answer and difficult to get consensus on--even at the highest levels. Apple = different. Toyota = quality. Google = search. It’s taken me three years to get one of my clients, Edmunds.com, to find and agree on their word: trust.”
24. What should we stop doing? -Peter Drucker, management expert and author
25. What are the gaps in my knowledge and experience? -Charles Handy, author and management expert
26. What am I trying to prove to myself, and how might it be hijacking my life and business success? -Bob Rosen, executive coach and author
27. If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he do? -Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel 
    In 1985, with the company’s memory-chip business under siege, CEO Grove famously posed this hypothetical to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, leading them to ditch memory for microprocessors.
28. If I had to leave my organization for a year and the only communication I could have with employees was a single paragraph, what would I write? -Pat Lencioni, author and founder of The Table Group 
    Lencioni explains, “Determining the substance of this paragraph forces you to identify the company’s core values and strategies, and the roles and responsibilities of those hypothetically left behind.”
29. Who have we, as a company, historically been when we’ve been at our best? -Keith Yamashita, author and founder of SYPartners
30. What do we stand for--and what are we against? -Scott Goodson, co-founder of StrawberryFrog
31. Is there any reason to believe the opposite of my current belief? -Chip and Dan Heath, authors who teach at Stanford’s and Duke’s business schools, respectively
32. Do we underestimate the customer’s journey? -Matt Dixon, author and executive director of research at CEB 
    Dixon explains, “Often, companies don’t understand the entirety of the customer’s experience and how many channels may have already failed them. They don’t understand that the customer goes to the website first, pokes around but can’t find the answer to their question, and then tries to start up a chat with an agent, only to get frustrated by the delayed response. Only then do they go to the Contact Us tab and call. From the company’s perspective, the call is square one. The customer sees it as, you’ve already wasted 15 minutes of my time.”
33. Among our stronger employees, how many see themselves at the company in three years? How many would leave for a 10 percent raise from another company? -Jonathan Rosenberg, adviser to Google management
34. What did we miss in the interview for the worst hire we ever made? -Alberto Perlman, CEO of Zumba Fitness
35. Do we have the right people on the bus? -Jim Collins, author and management consultant  
36. What would have to be true for the option on the table to be the best possible choice? -Roger Martin, professor, Rotman Business School 
    Martin uses this question when members of a group bring diverse opinions to a decision. It allows people to step back from their strongly held beliefs and contemplate a range of circumstances that might--or might not--support each option.
37. Am I failing differently each time? -David Kelley, founder, IDEO
38. When information truly is ubiquitous, when reach and connectivity are completely global, when computing resources are infinite, and when a whole new set of impossibilities are not only possible, but happening, what will that do to our business? -Jonathan Rosenberg
39. Do we aggressively reward and promote the people who have the biggest impact on creating excellent products? -Jonathan Rosenberg
40. What is our Big Hairy Audacious Goal? -Jim Collins
41.  Is our strategy driving our strategy? Or is the way in which we allocate resources driving our strategy? -Mark Johnson, co-founder, Innosight Johnson explains, “You might think you have a strategic plan, but your people may be doing things on a day-to-day basis that are undermining it. It’s essential that people believe in the strategy so they can make the daily decisions that support it.”
42. How is the way you as the leader think and process information affecting your organizational culture?  -Ari Weinzweig, co-founder Zingerman’s Community of Businesses  Weinzweig explains, “Describe the culture you'd love to have in your organization. Then check the desired characteristics of the culture against the way you think and process information. Are they congruent?  Do you want collaboration but think in isolation?  Do you want a flat organization but think hierarchically?
43. Why don’t our customers like us? -James Champy
44. How can we become more high-tech but still be high touch? -James Champy
45. What do we need to start doing? -Jack Bergstrand, CEO, Brand Velocity
46. Whom among your colleagues do you trust, and for what? -Charles Handy 
    Handy tells this story: “One CEO had a problem with his best subordinate, who was very good at his job. But he was also personally ambitious, so the CEO could not trust him to be totally loyal. The dilemma was whether to keep him because of his abilities or lose him because he couldn't be sure of him.  The answer was for the CEO to either assign the subordinate jobs where his loyalty wasn’t relevant or to confront him with his feelings. After some pushing from me. the CEO did the latter, and it cleared the air.”
47.  Are you satisfied with your current role?  If not, what is missing from it? -Charles Handy
48. Do you keep 50% of your time unscheduled? -Dov Frohman, engineer and executive, author The 50% stat may be somewhat arbitrary. But Frohman’s point, laid out in his book “Leadership the Hard Way,” is that leaders should make sure they maintain sufficient “slop” in their schedules to allow space for reflection and the assimilation of lessons learned from experience.
49. What would I recommend my friend do if he were facing this dilemma? -Chip and Dan Heath
50. What kind of crime could a potential new hire have committed that would not only not disqualify him/her from being hired by our organization, but would actually indicate that he/she might be a particularly good fit?  -Pat Lencioni Lencioni explains, “In this case "crime" is a metaphor.  This question speaks to values. A particularly idealistic organization may be okay with hiring someone that was previously reprimanded for standing up for his beliefs or blowing the whistle on something. A particularly competitive organization may be okay hiring someone who in prior positions was reprimanded for being overly arrogant or difficult to work with.” 
51. If our customer were my grandmother, would I tell her to buy what we’re selling? -Dan Pink, author
52. If our company went out of business tomorrow, would anyone who doesn't get a paycheck here care? -Dan Pink
53. What is something you believe that nearly no one agrees with you on? -Peter Thiel, partner, Founders Fund
54. Do you have an implicit bias for capital investments over people investments? -Tom Peters Peters explains: “Capital enhancements are important. They're also cool. You can get your picture taken next to a new robot. People investments are invisible and hard to measure. The tendency is to favor the hard stuff over the soft stuff. But the soft stuff is invariably more related to long-term strategic success than the hard stuff.”
55. Do we have enough freaky customers in our portfolio pushing us to the limit day in and day out? -Tom Peters
56. Who are you going to put out of business, and why? -Brad Feld, managing director, Foundry Group
57. What happens at this company when people fail? -Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer, Stanford professors
58. How will you motivate the dishwashers? -Bill Keena, independent casino consultant 
    Job interview questions comprise a genre unto themselves, so we chose not to include them in this article. With one exception. Keena says the only correct answer to this question, posed to manager candidates in a hotel chain, is “If they are overloaded I would roll up my sleeves and start washing right alongside them.” That speaks to the candidate’s ability to create employee engagement. Turned inward, however, the question reveals even more about culture. Ask yourself this: Are we the kind of company that cares whether our dishwashers are motivated?
59. Do your employees have the opportunity to do what they do best everyday? -Marcus Buckingham, author
60. Where is our petri dish? -Tim Ogilvie, CEO. Peer Insight
61. What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? -Paul Graham
62. Do we say “no” to customers for no reason? -Matt Dixon
    You may have created your customer policies at a time when you lacked resources, technology wasn’t up-to-snuff, or low service levels were the industry norm. Have those circumstances changed? If so, your customer policies should change too.
63. Instead of going to current contacts for new ideas, what if you reconnected with dormant contacts--the people you used to know?  If you were going reactivate a dormant tie, who would it be? -Adam Grant
64.  Do you see more potential in people than they do in themselves? -Adam Grant
65. Are you taking your company in the direction of better and revenue or cheaper and cost? -Michael Raynor, director, Deloitte Services LP
66. Would you rather sell to knowledgeable and informed customers or to uninformed customers? -Don Peppers, founding partner, Peppers and Rogers Group 
    Partly it’s a matter of values: uninformed customers can be easy targets who swallow your pitch without pushing back. Selling to knowledgeable customers, by contrast, “is a mark of a trustable firm--one that is working to advance its customers’ best interests,” says Peppers. And there’s another benefit: “Your most valuable customer references are not the ones who spend the most, but the ones who have the most expertise and authority. That gives them credibility with their peers.”
67. What are we challenging, in the sense that Mac challenged the PC or Dove tackled the Beauty Myth? -Mark Barden and Adam Morgan, founders, eatbigfish 
    Barden and Morgan explain that for companies challenging market leaders with greater resources, competing on the status quo is death. Instead they must assault the dynamics of a category (the dominance of PC) or a cultural meme (what society defines as “beautiful” in women).
68. In what way can we redefine the criteria of choice in our category in our favor, as Method introduced style and design to cleaning and Virgin America returned glamor to flying? -Mark Barden and Adam Morgan
69. In the past year, what have you done (or could you have done) to increase the accurate perception of this company/brand as ethical and honest? -Robert Cialdini 
    Cialdini explains: “Of course, the preferred way to increase the perception of a company as ethical is to foster ethical practice within the organization. However, sometimes a company can be ethical without a corresponding perception in the marketplace that this is indeed the case. Therefore, companies should strive not only to enhance and reinforce an ethical culture but also to arrange for a warranted perception of that ethicality to be part of their brand.”
70. To whom do you add value? -Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood, co-founders, The RBL Group
71. Why should people listen to you? -Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood
72. How would our PR, marketing, and social media change if we did not use outside agencies? -Guy Kawasaki, founder, Garage Technology Ventures and Alltop 
    Kawasaki explains, “Let’s see what happens when a company can't abdicate these functions to hired guns. I'd bet that employees, because they know and love their product more than any agency, can do a much better job at less expense to boot.”
73. What was the last experiment we ran? -Scott Berkun, author
74. Are your clients Pepsi or Coke drinkers?” -Marcy Massura Massura explains: “This is a symbolic question that gets at how deeply you have researched your target clients. Business leaders can find out more about their customers than ever before thanks to the ability to collect data on a grand scale. Such detailed information allows the company to interact with targets in new ways and to assess current product development and marketing roadmaps.”
75. What is your BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement)? -Roger Fisher and William Ury, negotiation experts
76. What's the best design framework for an organization in a post Industrial-Age if the top-down, command and control model is no longer relevant? -Traci Fenton, CEO, Worldblu
77. Who are four people whose careers I’ve enhanced? -Alex Gorsky, CEO, Johnson & Johnson
78. Where can we break convention? -Shane Snow, co-founder, Contently
79. Whose voice (department, ethnic group, women, older workers, etc) might you have missed hearing from in your company, and how might you amplify this voice to create positive momentum for your business? -Jane Hyun and Audrey Lee, partners, Hyun & Associates
80. In retrospect, of the projects that we pulled the plug on, what percent do we wish had been allowed to keep going, and what percent do we wish had ended earlier? -Ron Adner
81. Do you, as a leader, bounce back quickly from setbacks? -Bob Rosen
82. Who do we think the world wants us to be? -Geoffrey Moore, organizational theorist and management consultant
83. How will we build a 100-year startup? -Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
84. What successful thing are we doing today that may be blinding us to new growth opportunities? -Scott D. Anthony, managing partner, Innosight
85. If you could go back in time five years, what decision would you make differently?  What is your best guess as to what decision you're making today you might regret five years from now? -Patrick Lencioni
86. What stupid rule would we most like to kill? -Lisa Bodell, CEO, FutureThink
87. What potential megatrends could make our business model obsolete? -Michael A. Cusumano, professor, MIT
88. What information is critical to our organization that our executives are ignoring? -Max Bazerman, professor, Harvard Business School
89. What have we done to protect our business from competitive encroachment? -Tom Stemberg, managing general partner, Highland Venture Capital
90. If you had to rebuild your organization without any traditional competitive advantages (i.e., no killer a technology, promising research, innovative product/service delivery model, etc.), how would your people have to approach their work and collaborate together in order to create the necessary conditions for success?” -Jesse Sostrin, founder, Sostrin Consulting
91. What are the rules and assumptions my industry operates under? What if the opposite were true?Phil McKinney, innovation expert
92. Do the decisions we make today help people and the planet tomorrow? -Kevin Cleary, president, Clif Bar
93. What is your theory of human motivation, and how does your compensation plan fit with that view? -Dan Ariely, professor, Duke University
94. How do you encourage people to take control and responsibility? -Dan Ariely
95. Who do we want out customers to become? -Michael Schrage, professor, MIT
96. How do I stay inspired? -Paul Bennett, chief creative officer, IDEO
97. Do I know what I’m doing? And who do I call if I don’t? -Erin Pooley, business journalist
98. Do they use it? -Howard Tullman, CEO, 1871
99. What is our question? -Dev Patnaik, CEO, Jump Associates
100. How is business? Why? -Thomas A. Stewart, executive director, National Center for the Middle Market

IMAGE: Shutterstock

LEIGH BUCHANAN is an editor-at-large for Inc. magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture.

To Get Honest Feedback, Leaders Need to Ask

"The only way to discover your strengths,” wrote Peter Drucker, “is through feedback analysis.” No senior leader would dispute this as a logical matter. But nor do they act on it. Most leaders don’t really want honest feedback, don’t ask for it, and don’t get much of it unless it’s forced on them. At least that’s what we’ve discovered in our research.

We have the benefit of rich data thanks to the more than one million individuals who have completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, our thirty-item behavioral assessment, over the years. The point of this tool is to help individuals and organizations measure their leadership competencies and act on their discoveries. Looking across how all observers of leaders have filled it out, one descriptor got the absolute lowest rating – and even across the leaders’ own self-assessments it comes out second to lowest. It is this statement: “(He or she) asks for feedback on how his/her actions affect other people’s performance.”

When we related this finding to the director of leadership development for one of the world’s largest technology companies, he admitted the same was true for his organization. The lowest-scoring item on its internal leadership assessment was the one on seeking feedback.

Further validation comes from a recent survey conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman and discussed in a recent HBR blog. Not only did they find that “leaders often don’t feel comfortable offering [constructive criticism].” They also discovered that the individuals who are most uncomfortable giving negative feedback are also significantly less interested than others in receiving it.

Why is this? Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone offer this answer in a recent HBR article. “The [feedback] process strikes at the tension between two core human needs — the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just the way you are. As a result, even a seemingly benign suggestion can leave you feeling angry, anxious, badly treated, or profoundly threatened.” For us, this resonated with something that author Ralph Keyes once wrote about his craft: “As authors discover, all the other anxieties — the many courage points of the writing process — are merely stretching exercises for the big one: feeling exposed (in every sense of the word).” A friend of his, he reports, “compared writing novels to dancing naked on a table.”

What’s true for writers is equally true for leaders. Leaders aren’t eager to feel exposed — exposed as not being perfect, as not knowing everything, as not being as good at leadership as they should be, as not being up to the task. And subordinates are even more reluctant to suggest that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

So what’s a leader to do?

It won’t be enough to increase your receptivity to others’ input. It’s highly unlikely that your direct reports, or peers, are going to knock on your door and say, “I’d like to give you some feedback.” If you want a genuine assessment of how you’re doing, you’re going to have to make the first move and ask for it. That’s what leaders do, by the way: Go first.

That’s exactly the approach taken by a vice president we met at a leading Midwest financial services company. He knew the value of direct personal feedback for his own and others’ growth and development. Yet for his team members, the whole topic of feedback “had a big negative tone to it.” He decided it would help if he reversed the traditional process. “We’re going to do things a little bit different,” he told the group. “Instead of me giving the evaluations, you’re going to start by doing one on me.” After a brief orientation, he left his team to evaluate his performance in private. They were reluctant at first, and the process was initially very challenging. But eventually the team completed it, and then, at the vice president’s request, the team delivered their feedback to him face-to-face.

“The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear,” he told us. But then he added: “And that was really one of the benefits to the group. To take that personal risk — to model for the group that it’s okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback. What I hope the team members would come away with was a sense that it’s okay to be in that environment, that feedback is necessary for growth, and then to see how you accept that feedback and then what you do with it.”

This executive provided the proof of how vulnerability can build trust. Because of his ability to ask others for help, his team gained a newfound respect for the feedback process — and so did he.

Feedback Framed as Learning
Getting valid and useful feedback is essential to learning. And learning is the master skill. Over the years we’ve conducted a series of empirical studies to find out if leaders could be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ. The results of these studies have been most intriguing. First, we find that leadership can be learned in a variety of ways. It can be learned through active experimentation, observation of others, study in the classroom or reading books, or simply reflecting on one’s own and others’ experiences.

What is more important, however, is that regardless of their learning styles, those leaders who engage more frequently in learning activities score higher on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (our evidence-based model of effective leadership) than do those who engage less frequently in learning. The truth is that the best leaders are the best learners.

Feedback is too often viewed through a frame of evaluation and judgment: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Top ten-percent. Bottom quartile. These frames raise resistance. But when you frame feedback as an essential part of learning, it becomes less about your deficiencies and more about your opportunities.

The late John Gardner, leadership scholar and presidential adviser, once remarked, “Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” No one likes to hear the constant screeching of harpies who have only foul things to say. At the same time, no one ever benefits from, or even truly believes, the sycophants whose flattery is obviously aimed at gaining favor.

To stay honest with yourself, you need “loving critics.” These are people who care about you and want you to do well — and because they care about your wellbeing, they are willing to give you the honest feedback you need to become the best leader you can be.

Appoint your own circle of loving critics. Turn to them regularly for an honest and caring assessment of your strengths and what you need to do to get even better. Listen to them with the same care they have for you. And when they give you their feedback, your only job at that moment is to say “Thank you.”

Jim Kouzes

Jim Kouzes is coauthor (with Barry Posner) of the bestselling book The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations. The book is now in its fifth edition with over 2 million copies sold and has been translated into 21 different languages. He is the Executive Fellow of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

Barry Posner

Barry Posner is the Acolti Endowed Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, where he served as dean of the school for twelve years (1997–2009). With Jim Kouzes, he authored the bestselling book The Leadership Challenge. 

To Get Honest Feedback, Leaders Need to Ask

by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner

"The only way to discover your strengths,” wrote Peter Drucker, “is through feedback analysis.” No senior leader would dispute this as a logical matter. But nor do they act on it. Most leaders don’t really want honest feedback, don’t ask for it, and don’t get much of it unless it’s forced on them. At least that’s what we’ve discovered in our research.

We have the benefit of rich data thanks to the more than seventy thousand individuals who have completed the Leadership Practices Inventory, our thirty-item behavioral assessment, over the years. The point of this tool is to help individuals and organizations measure their leadership competencies and act on their discoveries. Looking across how all observers of leaders have filled it out, one descriptor got the absolute lowest rating – and even across the leaders’ own self-assessments it comes out second to lowest. It is this statement: “(He or she) asks for feedback on how his/her actions affect other people’s performance.” 

When we related this finding to the director of leadership development for one of the world’s largest technology companies, he admitted the same was true for his organization. The lowest-scoring item on its internal leadership assessment was the one on seeking feedback.

Further validation comes from a recent survey conducted by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman and discussed in a recent HBR blog. Not only did they find that “leaders often don’t feel comfortable offering [constructive criticism].” They also discovered that the individuals who are most uncomfortable giving negative feedback are also significantly less interested than others in receiving it.

Why is this? Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone offer this answer in a recent HBR article. “The (feedback) process strikes at the tension between two core human needs — the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just the way you are. As a result, even a seemingly benign suggestion can leave you feeling angry, anxious, badly treated, or profoundly threatened.” For us, this resonated with something that author Ralph Keyes once wrote about his craft: “As authors discover, all the other anxieties — the many courage points of the writing process — are merely stretching exercises for the big one: feeling exposed (in every sense of the word).” A friend of his, he reports, “compared writing novels to dancing naked on a table.”

What’s true for writers is equally true for leaders. Leaders aren’t eager to feel exposed — exposed as not being perfect, as not knowing everything, as not being as good at leadership as they should be, as not being up to the task. And subordinates are even more reluctant to suggest that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

So what’s a leader to do?
It won’t be enough to increase your receptivity to others’ input. It’s highly unlikely that your direct reports, or peers, are going to knock on your door and say, “I’d like to give you some feedback.” If you want a genuine assessment of how you’re doing, you’re going to have to make the first move and ask for it. That’s what leaders do, by the way: Go first.

That’s exactly the approach taken by a vice president we met at a leading Midwest financial services company. He knew the value of direct personal feedback for his own and others’ growth and development. Yet for his team members, the whole topic of feedback “had a big negative tone to it.” He decided it would help if he reversed the traditional process. “We’re going to do things a little bit different,” he told the group. “Instead of me giving the evaluations, you’re going to start by doing one on me.” After a brief orientation, he left his team to evaluate his performance in private. They were reluctant at first, and the process was initially very challenging. But eventually the team completed it, and then, at the vice president’s request, the team delivered their feedback to him face-to-face.

“The feedback that I received was kind of hard to hear,” he told us. But then he added: “And that was really one of the benefits to the group. To take that personal risk — to model for the group that it’s okay to place yourself at personal risk and take that honest feedback. What I hope the team members would come away with was a sense that it’s okay to be in that environment, that feedback is necessary for growth, and then to see how you accept that feedback and then what you do with it.”

This executive provided the proof of how vulnerability can build trust. Because of his ability to ask others for help, his team gained a newfound respect for the feedback process — and so did he.

Feedback Framed as Learning
Getting valid and useful feedback is essential to learning. And learning is the master skill. Over the years we’ve conducted a series of empirical studies to find out if leaders could be differentiated by the range and depth of the learning tactics they employ. The results of these studies have been most intriguing. First, we find that leadership can be learned in a variety of ways. It can be learned through active experimentation, observation of others, study in the classroom or reading books, or simply reflecting on one’s own and others’ experiences.

What is more important, however, is that regardless of their learning styles, those leaders who engage more frequently in learning activities score higher on The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (our evidenced-based model of effective leadership) than do those who engage less frequently in learning. The truth is that the best leaders are the best learners.

Feedback is too often viewed through a frame of evaluation and judgment: Good and bad. Right and wrong. Top ten-percent. Bottom quartile. These frames raise resistance. But when you frame feedback as an essential part of learning, it becomes less about your deficiencies and more about your opportunities.

The late John Gardner, leadership scholar and presidential adviser, once remarked, “Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.” No one likes to hear the constant screeching of harpies who have only foul things to say. At the same time, no one ever benefits from, or even truly believes, the sycophants whose flattery is obviously aimed at gaining favor.

To stay honest with yourself, you need “loving critics.” These are people who care about you and want you to do well — and because they care about your wellbeing, they are willing to give you the honest feedback you need to become the best leader you can be.

Appoint your own circle of loving critics. Turn to them regularly for an honest and caring assessment of your strengths and what you need to do to get even better. Listen to them with the same care they have for you. And when they give you their feedback, your only job at that moment is to say “Thank you.”

25 Quotes to Inspire You to Become a Better Leader

Listening

1) "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." - Ernest Hemingway

2) "The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them." - Ralph Nichols

Storytelling
3) "Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today." -Robert McKee

4) "If you tell me, it’s an essay. If you show me, it’s a story." —Barbara Greene

Authenticity
5) "I had no idea that being your authentic self could make me as rich as I've become. If I had, I'd have done it a lot earlier." -Oprah Winfrey

6) "Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart, and feet - thinking, saying, feeling, and doing the same thing - consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust." -Lance Secretan

Transparency
7) "As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth." -John Whittier

8) "There is no persuasiveness more effectual than the transparency of a single heart, of a sincere life." -Joseph Berber Lightfoot
 

Team Playing
9) "Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds." -SEAL Team Saying

10) "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

Responsiveness
11) "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it." -Charles Swindoll

12) '"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." - Bill Gates

Adaptability
13) "When you're finished changing, you're finished." -Ben Franklin

14) "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." –Charles Darwin

Passion
15) "The only way to do great work is to love the work you do." -Steve Jobs

16) "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." -Albert Einstein
 

Surprise and Delight
17) "A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless." -Charles de Gaulle

18) “Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” - Boris Pasternak

Simplicity
19) "Less isn't more; just enough is more." -Milton Glaser

20) “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo daVinci 

Gratefulness
21) "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder." -Gilbert K Chesterton

22) "The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Leadership
23) “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” — Peter F. Drucker

24) "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." —John Quincy Adams

25) "Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." —John F. Kennedy