Month: April 2010

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Why All This Talk About Leadership?

I’m a Leadership Coach and something of a community activist. I coach people who want to live a good life while making a difference. That’s what I want for myself. That’s what I want for you. Work Hard. Do Good. Have Fun Doing It.

You found this blog. So, I’m willing to bet that you are striving to do ever more good through your work, whether in the private, public or nonprofit arena. Or perhaps you are interested in leadership because you serve your community in a volunteer role as a board member or elected official.

Our discussions will help you at home, too. Imagine being able to really lead as you interact with loved ones to build the family and the friendships that you desire.

What drives your interest in leadership?

I’m interested in leadership that brings people together to change something miserable, or create something wonderful.

As a coach, I engage with dedicated, talented people who have one simple question about leadership: How can I do it better? I’m guessing you’ve asked that question yourself. Whatever your place on the organizational chart, wherever you fall on the scale of experience, expertise or authority, you want to improve your leadership so that you can achieve an even greater impact than you already do.

What does leadership feel like?

A coaching client is leading her company through a massive transformation. Yesterday she told me that although they’d faced some significant hurdles in the last few days things were still moving forward. “I have had some moments where I have felt daunted,” she said, “but right now I am feeling optimistic.”

Real leadership is about getting comfortable with the see-saw between “daunted” and “optimistic.” Our hope is that this blog will support you when you are up, when you’re down, and in between. Thanks to my co-host, Steve Wolinski, for kicking things off. I’m glad the conversation has begun! Please join us.

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Effective training in a classroom setting

A-trainer-with-a-female-student-in-a-classroom

We as trainers have a responsibility to both the organizations we are working for and to the clients we are training to be effective and interesting. I realize that the topic for tonight was suppose to be on task analysis and andragogy, but I was in a classroom setting recently and the trainers simply were not effective. There were several reasons for this, so I want to stress the importance of classroom training that will work and that will not.

There are several items that make a classroom setting effective:

  • Relevance to the problem or situation at hand
  • Gearing your training to the population you are training (even though the 25th quartile holds true – we have to adjust for the 75th quartile also)
  • Gearing our training sessions to the adult learner
  • Group work
  • Activities
  • Making sure we are not lecturing for hours on end, but instead letting our clients come up ideas and solutions — if they need guidance, then let’s guide them
  • Avoiding lecturing as if the clients are children
  • Challenging our clients
  • Asking our clients questions and then listening to their answers
  • Being enthusiastic and asking the client what they feel the problem(s) and solution(s) might be
  • Allowing for short breaks and not saving all the Q&A for the end — instead, mixing it up

What we don’t want to do is pedagogical training; we want our clients to be self-directed and independent thinkers — participation is key to good classroom training. Our training needs to be effective and interesting.

Remember that after we leave, the clients should feel that they have had a hand in the training and were helped by their own participation. We don’t want them falling asleep because the training was boring, irrelevant or tedious. They should walk away with new knowledge, of course (or why train?), but we have to keep it interesting and smart.

Ideas, comments and guest writers are strongly encouraged.

Happy Training!

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For more resources about training, see the Training library.

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Structure is irrelevant

An enterprise trying to map out its structure

Not all social enterprises look alike. While many people immediately think of nonprofits (or nongovernmental organizations, NGOs), in practice any type of business can be a social enterprise. As long as you “harness the power of the marketplace to solve critical social or environmental problem,” which to me means you sell stuff to customers as you pursue your larger social purpose, you’re in.

Regardless of whether you’re set up as a nonprofit, a for-profit, a hybrid like the new L3C in the US, or just an individual with an idea to change the world, funded — at least in part — by selling products or services, you’re a member of this special club.

Social enterprise is not just about finding the right business-like strategies, which, if applied correctly, will help create social impact. It’s also a movement, of tens of thousands of people and organizations around the world working on their own and working together to change the world, combining the best of the commercial and non-commercial sectors.

What makes this a movement is the shared vision for social change — how the world will be better if we succeed at our work; and the business models — how that work gets paid for, at least a big share of it, from entrepreneurial strategies.

Now, speaking of share, there’s no formula on what percentage of your income needs to be “earned” (as opposed to granted or donated) to be a social enterprise. But I tend to think the earned portion needs to be at least 25% to make some claim to the “enterprise” portion of the term. And while profitability is a good thing, and for for-profit social enterprises ultimately an essential thing, it’s not a requirement to qualify as a social enterprise.

So, for example, if you have a sustainable business model that relies on half of its revenue from earned income, and half from grants, I call that a successful social enterprise.

So regardless of your organization’s legal structure, or lack thereof, join us to talk about not just why we do this work, but how. It’s the how that will be the primary focus of this blog, but we won’t shy away from the why as well.

What are the challenges you’re facing with your social enterprise work?

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Measure Twice, Cut Once

Businessman looking out through his office window

Successful entrepreneurs tend to be frugal. They have to be. They know that money and time is scarce. Too many things to do, too little time. So they focus, prioritize, cut to the bone, do what only needs to be done to get from point A to point E (skipping point B, C and D if possible). If you ask them how much planning they do, they’ll tell you they don’t have much time for that. But probe a bit deeper, as I have in hundreds of discussions with small business owners and entrepreneurial nonprofit leaders across the country (and some overseas), and you’ll find that generally they’re pretty good planners, even if they roll their eyes when you use that word.

Unlike the Hollywood version, most real life entrepreneurs do not carelessly take risks in hopes of making it big. Instead, before they dive into something, they often gather information from customers, competitors, colleagues, sales people, suppliers, industry sources, wherever they can get it – then add their own knowledge and intuition into the mix. From that effort the idea for their new business or new product or new market emerges. Why don’t they “just do it” the Nike way? Because they know it’s almost always cheaper to get it right the first time. They know to “measure twice, cut once.” That’s what business planning is all about. Sure, some things you can’t measure; but for everything else, there’s business planning.

As we continue with this blog, we’ll discuss specific strategies for measuring, once, twice, but not three times, by doing “just enough” business planning. Then just do it.

How do you do your business planning? Where do you need help?

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For more resources, see our Library topic Business Planning.

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Ethics at a cross roads

A path branching into two paths

What makes the field of business ethics so interesting and so challenging is that as a term, and as a concept,“business ethics” means so many different things to so many different constituencies.

However, many of these constituencies often don’t communicate well together. The academic side of business ethics is often not seen as a resource for the practitioners. Within companies, business ethics is more often seen as a branch of compliance and legal than it is a partner of organizational behavior. Everyone wants everyone do “the right thing” yet we are often at a loss to define what exactly that right thing to do is.

Another dimension is that the perception of business ethics in the US is different than the assumptions of ethics in many other countries.

How do we make sense of all of these varied elements?

One place to start is by looking at the definitions of “business ethics.”

Ethics is often defined as “that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.” (dictionary.com)

However, the origin of the word “ethics” comes from the Greek word, “ethos,” which we define as “the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period.” (dictionary.com).

In the business context it isn’t always helpful to see “ethics” as synonymous with “morality” or “goodness.” Instead, business ethics is more instructive if we look at it as a means to an ends: “the values relating to human conduct.”

In today’s business world, we are interested in understanding why people do what they do. Why do people do good things and why do seemingly good people do bad things.

From my 15 years of experience in helping companies address ethics issues, I see ethics as a function of behavior. Borrowing from the social psychologists, I see ethical behavior as a function of both the person and their environment.

When we look at the person, we look at how does that individual define what is the “right thing” to do. There is not a universal definition and I am hoping to encourage a dialog as to what in fact is the right thing to do and is it objective or conditional upon the circumstances?

The second determinant of ethical behavior is the environment that influences and shapes our perceptions. We will be actively discussing how the environment shapes behavior.

Our goal is to help practitioners be better equipped to create the kinds of cultures they want and need inside their organizations. Where should an organization be focusing its resources and attention in its attempts to influence employee behavior? On the person by reminding them of their ethical and legal obligations, or on the environment which shapes behavior of “ethical” and “unethical” people alike.

I am encouraging the readers and guest writers in this blog to open the dialog and be active participants in this exciting process.