The disasters in Afghanistan and Hawaii have something in common that you need to know

The disasters in Afghanistan and Hawaii have something in common that you need to know

General Douglas MacArthur explained that nearly every military disaster can be summed up in two words: Too late. 

As I write this, the Hawaiian wildfire’s confirmed death toll is 111 and may rise to over 1,000. Faulty, spark-emitting powerlines likely caused the blaze, in which strong winds fanned into an inferno that swept across the Maui town of Lahaina.

According to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, Hawaiian Electric officials have known for at least four years that the power lines needed repair but invested a paltry $245,000 in preventative measures. The company waited until last year to request the State’s approval to increase fees to pay for badly needed maintenance – Hawaiian officials have yet to act on the request.

The State government, meanwhile, reportedly knew about the heightened wildfire risk for years but provided no resources or plan for preventing or responding to one.

The tragedy unfolded slowly, then all at once, to borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities

The same was true for the Afghanistan disaster. U.S. and Afghan officials had well over a year to plan for the withdrawal of American forces, but both parties seemed to bury their hands in the sand that the United States would reconsider. 

The intelligence community reportedly warned that tens of thousands of Afghans would seek evacuation, but there was little planning or preparation for such a massive endeavour. The military planned to withdraw, aiming for the lowest possible risk to its forces. The State Department seemed to dither and then abruptly evacuate the U.S. Embassy one night. Panic and tragedy ensued.

Both heartbreaking episodes show that preventive action is always cheaper than corrective and remedial actions, and leaders ignore them at peril.

Most business and other failures occur slowly and then all at once.

Inadequate leadership, decision-making biases, deficient cultures, and unrealistic strategies accumulate rocks in your company’s rucksack. The weight hinders progress and innovation, drains your resources, and increases fatigue and stress. The burden seems manageable until you plunge into a crisis, and it’s too late.

The best companies invest in preventive actions, particularly in their leadership and culture. Joyful employees create cheerful workplaces and happy customers who bring in more business. The virtuous cycle keeps unnecessary weight from your rucksack and buoys you in difficult times. 

Are you ready to invest in your leaders and culture? Let’s discuss two of my programs: Becoming a WHY? Leader® and Building an Inspiring Culture®.

An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.   

Are you a veteran looking to build a career as a consultant or advisor? The next 9-week program of Expert Consulting Mastery begins on October 11, 2023. Register for my August 29, 2023 webinar to learn more.

Becoming a Better Consultant – What You Need to Know

Becoming a Better Consultant  – What You Need to Know

If you are a military veteran who wants to build a meaningful, joyful, and profitable consulting business, then I have something you might be interested in to take your career to the next level.

You’ve already had a military career full of extraordinary experiences, superb exemplars, and exceptional education and training.

You’ve coached, taught, and mentored your subordinates, and got good at telling your bosses things they needed to hear. You tell the truth with simplicity and compassion to get things done.

You have everything it takes to start, build and grow a thriving coaching or consulting business.

You probably value autonomy and want to govern your personal and professional priorities.

A solo or boutique coaching or consulting business is the perfect way to do this if you’re willing to bet on yourself.

Of course, as we both know, there’s a difference between taking a calculated risk versus gambling on the unknown.

Simply hanging out your shingle and hoping for business is a gamble. You might be a good consultant, but you need a game plan that makes you good at being a good consultant.

You turn a gamble into a manageable risk by doing these three things:

  1. Having a step-by-step process you can follow that leads to success,
  2. A guide to help you implement the process in ways that work for you,
  3. A peer group that cheers you on, shares ideas, and helps you stay accountable.

Join me in Expert Consulting Mastery and eliminate the gamble on your future success. You get a simple, repeatable process, implementation support and an accountability group. Let me tell you more.

Expert Consulting Mastery program is a 9-week program starting on October 11th, 2023 that will give you the process, guidance, and support to accelerate your business and create durable success.

100 percent of the people who have previously participated in this program and who’ve implemented each step of the program have been successful. Most find the program pays for itself in the first few weeks.

Each week you will watch videos (totalling about 30 minutes) and complete an assignment. You will meet with your group and me via Zoom to discuss your progress, answer any questions, and give you action steps that get results.

By the end of the program, you will have everything you need to move your consulting business from striving to thriving.

If some part of the process is not working for you, here’s my guarantee and promise: I’ll work with you until it does – at no additional charge.

I’m very selective about who joins the program which is why admission is by-application-only.

If this program resonates with you and you’d like to know more, schedule a call with me, and let’s talk.

We’ll discuss your business and see if Expert Consulting Mastery is right for you. I’ll give you action steps to move your business forward, whether or not you decide to take the next step.

3 questions the best leaders use to make tough decisions

3 questions the best leaders use to make tough decisions

Leaders reach out to experts and specialists when they face challenging situations. You need generalists, too, so you ask the right questions and avoid the ten words that lead to bad choices: 

Follow the Data! Obey the SCIENCE! Listen to the Experts! 

Data is not wisdom, and data-driven decision-making can leave companies worse off. Here’s how.

The best leaders listen to people who know what they are talking about and make decisions that best serve the company.

That seems simple enough, but implementation can be challenging. 

Experts provide valuable insight on specific topics, but narrow perspectives create myopic advice.   

Take COVID, for example. Medical experts provided data that projected death tolls and made recommendations like lockdowns to stop the spread of the virus.

Partisans egged on leaders with the ten words. Over time their associated advice led to higher death tolls, substantial economic dislocation, greater social polarization, damaged mental health, and massive learning loss.

The problem was not the data or advice, necessarily, but the question. Asking experts “How to stop the spread” created answers different than the more holistic “How to best support my constituents during this pandemic?” The latter question required leaders to determine the best balance between reducing the virus’s threat and promoting the general welfare.

The experts, of course, could not answer the latter question because they lacked the perspective. Leaders who unquestioningly obeyed the experts had demonstrably worse outcomes that those who took the broader perspective. 

I was asked recently to provide a testimony to Congress on the Afghanistan debacle. One House Member was trying to make a point that President Biden ignored the advice of the generals and asked me what I thought of that.

Thank goodness Abraham Lincoln didn’t listen to General McClellan, I replied, and noted that FDR disregarded General Marshall’s advice on how to take the fight to the Nazis in 1942, and Truman disagreed with General MacArthur’s advice to use atomic bombs on Chinese cities. 

My view on Afghanistan was that leaving was the right thing to do, but the timing and execution were badly botched.

Leaders should avoid the other extreme of trying to do the experts’ jobs for them. Lyndon Johnson’s efforts to select bombing targets in Vietnam is a classic example of getting trapped in the weeds and ignoring the bigger picture.

Leaders should listen to trusted experts, but make decisions based on advancing the common good.

Instead of asking narrow questions about how to optimize a particular silo or function, the best leaders keep their focus wider.

“What must be true for this option to work?” is a great way to uncover assumptions. You can then determine the indicators of validity and orient your data analysis accordingly.

“What’s the best way to advance our organization’s common good in this situation?” keeps your the focus on the blogger picture.

“What information do I need to make this decision?” helps you avoid wag-the-dog problems with siloed data.

You’ll benefit from trusted advisors who are generalists because their perspectives are broader and they’ll help you orient on the big picture. 

P.S. Do your employees have the psychological confidence to bring you bad news, identify problems, take risks, and offer new ideas? Email me if you’d like to discuss psychological confidence and ways to improve it. 

Fixing Bad Breath Leadership

Fixing Bad Breath Leadership

Bad leadership is like bad breath – everyone except you knows you’ve got it.

I give a lot of leadership seminars. During the top takeaways discussions, someone invariably says, “This seminar was a reminder of things I learned about good leadership …” 

The problem is that the person needs to practice better leadership. They know what good leaders should do but aren’t implementing the behaviors. 

It’s the bad breath problem. You know you should have non-repulsive breath, but you don’t. That’s called unconscious incompetence.

You might have the finest ideas, but no one’s listening because they can’t get past your breath (metaphorically).

Leadership off-sites and workshops help the open-minded move toward conscious incompetence. You recognize that your behaviors impede rather than inspire people to contribute their best to your organization’s success.

It’s like putting your hand in front of your mouth for the first time.

Oh my … it’s no wonder these behaviors aren’t working.

Leadership training, if done well, helps you build conscious competence. You know better behaviors, and you consciously work to put them into practice.

The shortfall with conscious competence is that you spend so much energy concentrating on the behaviors that you can lose sight of your objectives.

It’s like the batter who concentrates so hard on every element of their swing – stand in this way, keep your hands here, put your elbow this high, etc. – that you miss the pitch or mess up your swing. You have too many details running through your head while you try to do your job.

You’ve spent some much time worrying about your breath that you stumble over the message.

You must move to unconscious competence, where the behaviors become second nature. In the military, we call it muscle memory. You’ve developed good habits that bring out the best in people, and those behaviors are now so ingrained that you don’t have to think about them.

The unconscious competence stage comes about through practice, feedback, and accountability. You practice the behaviors so they work for you and your employees and get the outcomes you desire. The fastest way to achieve success is with the right coaching.

Here’s a process you can follow to build successful leadership habits.

  1. Knowledge transfer through leadership books, seminars, talks, and candid assessments, helps you become conscious of incompetencies. 
  2. Immersion in successful habits at off-sites and programs builds conscious competence.
  3. Implementation and accountability with the right coaching help you develop unconscious competence.

You unconsciously practice becoming an ever-better leader so your employees can focus on your goals.

Are you ready to take your organization to new heights? I can help you develop unconscious leadership competence throughout your organization. Schedule a call or send me an email to get started.

What CEOs are getting wrong about office work

CEOs are struggling with their return-to-office policies. Employees “who are least engaged,” WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani told The Wall Street Journal, “are very comfortable working from home.”

Cathy Merrill, the chief executive of Washingtonian Media, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning employees about the risks of not returning to the office. “The hardest people to let go are the ones you know.” Her employees staged a work stoppage.

A friend who works in the high-tech industry stated that their company will use a 75-25 rule: employees need to spend 75 percent of their time in the office and work from anywhere for the remainder.

Leaders can do better than use proximity to make judgments about value, issue veiled threats, and devise arbitrary rules that will waste time and energy in monitoring.

Here’s a more productive way.

Plenty of jobs are done mostly in isolation, such as research-oriented work. Other jobs, like manufacturing, need to be performed in person.

Companies also have roles in which employees perform recurring tasks: assembly-line work, IT monitoring, coordinating activities, etc. You also have roles to handle non-recurring requirements, including innovation, crisis management, and product development.

When you put these variables together in a double-axis chart, you get a better way to organize your return-to-office requirements.

Recurring work employees working in isolation are prime candidates for very liberal work-from-home arrangements. Contract attorneys, paralegals, insurance adjusters, and accountants are potential examples.

Non-recurring work that employees can perform in isolation should have permissive arrangements, too, but less so than the former because the free exchange of ideas improves quality and reduces the risk of science projects taking on their own lives. Many individual contributor roles fit this situation.

By contrast, non-recurring roles requiring substantial collaboration should be performed more at the office than elsewhere. A program manager, for example, should be primarily on-site but can work remotely as needed.

Recurring roles requiring collaboration, like being on a production line, often require the highest in-office frequency.

You can explain the why behind a commonsense method like this, and you’ll boost productivity, retain your top talent, and make intelligent choices about office space.

Is it time to build a new strategy? My 5-D Strategy Process® is simple, thorough, helps you gain buy-in, and costs a fraction of what you pay fancy firms. 

Say no to massive, expensive documents that nobody reads and are impossible to implement. Schedule a call with Chris Kolenda to get started. 

Create best value experiences: offer employees an EVP

Is your company trapped in the doom loop of high turnover, poor execution, and poor customer experience? 

This loop leads to your customers seeking alternatives, which means declining sales, lower profits, and a higher risk of bankruptcy.

Organizations typically take their employees for granted, failing to invest in their well-being and future growth because they don’t see the payoff. A recent Harvard Business Review article shows the impact of this short-sighted approach. 

People who feel unfulfilled and taken for granted tend to be on the lookout for a better fit. That means they are paying less attention to your company’s well-being because they are preoccupied with their own. It’s no wonder 69 percent of Americans report being unengaged at work. 

People feeling undervalued jump ship. Losing people you’ve trained reduces productivity and heightens the likelihood of poor execution. 

Poor execution damages your customers’ experiences, leading to more problems you need to fix. Unsatisfied customers will vote with their feet for a competitor.

Now you’re paying penalties on two levels. 

First, losing existing customers undermines your business and makes you invest more heavily in attracting new customers (keeping existing customers tends to be cheaper than finding new ones).

Second, you get consumed in damage control. Instead of focusing on strategy, innovation, and growth (why you get paid X), you are cleaning up problems that a junior employee (who you pay Y) should have prevented in the first place.

X minus Y is your opportunity cost. If your salary is $250/hour and your employee’s is $50, your damage control costs you $200/hour. 

[NOTE: Micromanaging has the same math.]

An employee value proposition (EVP) helps you reverse the spiral because your employees see how you are investing in them as people. A good EVP includes tangible and intangible benefits, both short and long-term.

Many organizations focus on short-term tangible benefits, such as pay, and neglect the other three areas that emphasize purpose, belonging, and growth opportunities. Beyond a certain threshold, these factors are more prominent in stay-or-go decisions than pay.

Creating an EVP for your employees is an important forcing function that gets you to provide compelling, intangible benefits that will attract and retain the right people.

If this blog resonates with you and you are wondering about the next steps, Schedule a Call with Chris Kolenda. 

Do you have 360 awareness?

360 external awareness occurs when you know what people think and feel about you and their workplace. The key stakeholders include your bosses, peers, and the employees you lead. The latter is the trickiest, and Northwestern University football coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired for neglecting this responsibility.

I remember watching Pat Fitzgerald play football at Northwestern in the mid-1990s and cheered him on as he became the head coach who turned around a lacklustre program.

The allegations of serial hazing on the team are disheartening. The stories of cruelty and mistreatment keep materializing.

Fitzgerald should be fired as the head coach, whether he knew about the hazing and condoned it or did not know such activities were happening on his watch. 

Leaders must discover what’s happening in their organizations, particularly regarding their most vulnerable employees. 

Knowing what your bosses and peers think about you and your organization is normally straightforward. 

Figuring out what your employees think and feel about your workplace is trickier. 

A camouflage net obscures your view from above. You only see what you want to see, the bits that emerge into plain sight, and what people are willing to reveal to you. The net conceals everything else.

The best leaders develop ways to get underneath the net to see things as they are, identify problems, spot talent, and gain fresh ideas.

Here are some ways I help leaders do that.

  1. Feedback loops. Use a combination of short questionnaires, focus groups, and individual interviews to get ground truth. Identify the issues you want to address, tell your employees, follow through, and follow up.
  2. Trusted Advisers challenge your assumptions and help you see what’s hidden in plain sight. Your biases do not inhibit them, so they’ll notice and report issues and opportunities as they find them. 
  3. Off-sites get people out of their comfort zones and open minds to new ideas. These adventures increase trust, strengthen relationships, and improve communication. People report problems and offer fresh ideas when they trust the people around them. Taking people to powerful places like national parks and historic venues creates experiences that last a lifetime and pay massive dividends for your organization.

It’s too bad Pat Fitzgerald did not find ways to peer underneath the camouflage net to see things as they are. 

He’s not alone, of course. Many good people have fallen from grace because they fooled themselves into thinking they could see everything from up high.  

Would an adventure off-site improve trust in your organization? View our programs and schedule a call with Chris to see if it could be a good fit. 

What Civil War hero Joshua Chamberlain tells us about Buy-in

Buy-in occurs when your employees provide voluntary support. 

A significant leadership challenge is gaining buy-in for a new initiative or one people previously opposed. 

Buy-in explains the vital difference between high and low-performing organizations.

Without buy-in, leaders must focus on compliance, dispute resolution, and corrective action, which robs them of time and energy for strategy and growth. This disengagement tax is a hidden cost that drains revenue and undermines your business. 

With buy-in, people do the right things in the right ways voluntarily, which frees leaders to focus on the future. 

Joshua Chamberlain’s ability to gain buy-in saved the Union’s Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, marking the beginning of the Confederacy’s end.

Two days before the battle, Chamberlain was ordered to guard 120 prisoners accused of desertion. They hailed from the 2nd Maine regiment. The accused believed they had signed two-year enlistments like others in the regiment, instead of three years, and wanted to return home with their comrades.

Chamberlain was given the authority to shoot them if necessary. He’d never be able to return home if he did. Guarding them would reduce his fighting force.

Chamberlain thought differently about the situation: what if they agreed to fight in our ranks for this massive battle?

Chamberlain’s regiment was down to about 250 soldiers. Adding 120 veteran fighters would strengthen his unit significantly.

Chamberlain focused on the three elements of buy-in: clarity on the mission and expectations for the upcoming battle, appeal to their self-interests of dignity, care, honor, and possibility of parole, and providing confidence in the way forward. 

117 of the 120 deserters agreed to pick up their rifles and make the intrepid stand at Little Round Top. Without them, the 20th Maine would have been overrun, opening the entire flank of the Union army.

People buy in when they are clear about the expectations, believe they will be better off by adopting them, and are confident that the initiative or game plan will work.

People might be clear about an expectation and believe it may help them be better off, but won’t buy in without confidence that it will work. Mask fatigue during COVID is a recent example. Companies might believe that a new communications platform will help them be better off, but they won’t adopt it if they lack confidence in the technology or customer service.

By contrast, people can have clarity about a new idea and confidence it will work but won’t buy in if they believe they’ll be worse off. COVID vaccine resistance is a typical example. In your company, people who believe they are on the losing end will resist change. I find this to be the most common buy-in problem. The leaders are convinced everyone’s better off, but employees often find the talking points unconvincing. CNN’s recent employee revolt shows the perils of making changes that people believe leave them worse off.

Finally, employees can believe a particular change makes them better off and have confidence it will work, but will only buy-in for the common good if they are clear about the rationale and the details. Poor clarity results in silos or fiefdoms, where people adopt something good for them but detrimental to the company overall. 

COVID protocols again offer a clear example of confusion, as medical expertise grew politicized and people believed only those who fit their pre-conceived beliefs. A client had challenges getting reports on time because employees did not understand the rationale. Once they gained clarity on that and how lateness was screwing other people, the reports arrived on time, regularly.  

What are your biggest buy-in successes and challenges? 

With so many businesses using flexible work locations, bringing people together for a substantive event that boosts cohesion and strengthens your foundation for growth is more important than ever. 

A company off-site at a historical venue or national park allows you to create an experience that pays dividends for decades. 

Let’s discuss some ideas if you want to do something special for your company.

schedule a call with chris

Cognitive Diversity: What the best leaders look for in an alter-ego

Cognitive diversity occurs when you bring people together who have complementary natural strengths, a.k.a. Superpowers. For most organizations, ideas – details are the vital complement.

The ideas people tend to be the big picture strategic thinkers, the innovators, and status quo disruptors. 

Some, like Steve Jobs, are hedgehogs: they have a big idea that will change the world. They are the Mavericks in our PROM archetypes®.

Others, like Elon Musk, are foxes: they bring existing ideas and technologies together into new combinations (Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter). These are your Pioneers.

They rarely succeed without support from the executors who can implement their ideas. These are Operators, who nail the details, and Reconcilers who build and maintain consensus.

Google is a classic example. Visionaries Larry Page (Maverick) and Sergei Brin (Pioneer) excited people with their new search engine but they could not run a sustainable business. When the funders threatened to pull out, Google hired Eric Schmidt (Reconciler) and Jon Rosenberg (Operator). The cognitive diversity propelled Google’s success.

Apple succeeded because Steve Jobs had Tim Cook (Operator), Mark Zuckerberg began succeeding at Facebook (now Meta) after Sheryl Sandberg (Operator) came on board. Tesla struggled until Musk hired Zach Kirkhorn (Reconciler).       

The visionaries get into trouble when they lose their alter-ego. Zuckerberg has not replaced Sheryl Sandberg, dividing her role among various executives, which waters-down the vision-execution interplay. Meta is struggling. 

The reverse is also true: people naturally inclined toward the details need the ideas people to push the envelope and avoid complacency. Tim Cook’s innovative subordinates keep Apple thriving. Eisenhower (Reconciler) needed Montgomery (Maverick) and Patton (Pioneer) to win the war in North Africa and Europe. Lincoln (Reconciler) needed Seward (Pionerr) and Grant (Maverick) to win the Civil War.

Finding the right alter-ego can be challenging. People tend to seek out others who think and act similarly, which is known as affinity bias. You get the comfort of surrounding yourself with people exactly like you, but you don’t grow, you develop blind spots, and you’re at high risk of making bad decisions as you inhale your own fumes.

To help you identify your natural strengths and determine your best alter egos, I developed the simple PROM archetypes® quiz.  

Cognitive diversity is vital to selecting the right alter-egos. You also need someone who wants what’s best for the organization and is willing to tell you the truth. 

Combine those three qualities and you have a powerful senior leadership team that will propel your business to new heights.

Take the PROM archetypes® quiz and then send Chris an email to discuss your results!

How the best leaders avoid being Prigozhined

How the best leaders avoid being Prigozhined

Frustrated by the Ukraine war, the Russian military’s incompetence, and reported efforts to dismantle his Wagner mercenary group, warlord Yevgeney Prigozhin took over the Rostov-on-Don military headquarters and sent columns of loyalists toward Moscow in what appeared to be a coup to overthrow Vladimir Putin or capture senior military officials. After a day of drama, Prigozhin stood down and accepted exile in Belarus, where he’ll need food tasters and to avoid tall buildings with open windows.

In business, many leaders fear being Prigozhined – having a subordinate stage a coup that takes your job and sends you packing.

To prevent being ousted, fearful leaders surround themselves with weaklings and sycophants, pit subordinates against each other to create rivalries (they can’t band against you if they are fighting each other), and eliminate anyone who might one day become a threat.

It’s the weak leader playbook. Kiss up and kick down, promote pathetic lickspittles, and transfer, fire, or throw anyone who makes a mistake or might outshine you under the bus. They hide this behavior well, so it’s hard for leaders to recognize a Putin subordinate.

There’s one tell-tale sign that helps you cut through the smokescreen. Strong, confident leaders develop their subordinates. Weak ones don’t.

Weak leaders fear strong subordinates and strong subordinates cannot stand weak leaders. Knowing this prompts weak leaders to surround themselves with weaker people and to keep them down by never developing them.

Strong, confident leaders, on the other hand, surround themselves with strong, confident people and develop them. They see their direct reports as part of their legacies and want them to grow and succeed.

Former GE boss Jack Welch gets a fair share of criticism, but one thing he did well was develop a cadre of subordinate leaders who soared to new heights in GE or elsewhere. The best NFL coaches do the same, and the talent they’ve developed uplifts the entire sport.

These strong, confident leaders provide their subordinates with three growth ingredients: development, coaching, and experience.

Leader Growth Model

Development and coaching without experience create ivory tower solutions that don’t work in the real world.

Coaching and experience without development produce a hamster wheel effect, where you aren’t stretching people’s imaginations.

Development and experience without coaching lead to poor implementation and time wasted in trial and error.

Combining all three builds people’s capacity and shortens their paths to success; they gain confidence through challenging experiences that position them for increased responsibilities. 

Do you have Putins living in fear of being Prigozhined? The quickest way to tell is by looking at their professional development programs. They won’t have them. 

They’ll complain about lack of time, insufficient resources, too much on the plate, and “I’m training them on the job,” blah, blah, blah. Frankly, you are better off without them.

Your strongest subordinate leaders, on the other hand, will have robust professional growth programs. They are the ones to promote to more senior positions because they will help your company soar to new heights.

Do you need help with leadership, culture or strategy? Schedule a Call with Chris Kolenda here or view the list of programs offered by Strategic Leadership Academy here.