Strange things happen when you look at leadership through the lens of music. Basic assumptions flip over and stay like that forever after. You untie knots that you took for granted. Like the idea that a leader is the most important person of a team.

Ask Google

When you lead a team – big or small – you feel responsible for the outcomes and sure as hell you want those outcomes to be successful by all possible measures. Maybe you got elected into this position, maybe you fought your way up or you started from scratch and built your own team step by step. It doesn’t matter, because sooner or later you will be looking for tips and tricks to increase your performance as a leader. How To’s, Cookbooks, do’s and don’ts, MBA courses and leadership master classes.

Have a look at Google as you type the word ‘leadership’ and the system returns the most popular searches that people have done before you. Turns out that you are not the only one eager to find out HOW to lead.

Unfortunately all these sources turn out to be a disappointment when I look at the return on knowledge I have gotten out of them:

- An increased sense of control that turns out to be an illusion

- A clever and witty language to explain and hide my faults

- A whole range of case studies to prove the leadership models IN HINDSIGHT

Duh. Not really getting any closer to the secret of leadership.

Surf TED Talks

Guess I’d better listen to some music or watch some TED video’s instead. And that’s what I did. (Note: If you don’t know the TED talks, this is a good time to dive in) As a starter, have a look at the below talk of Itay Talgam on leadership of the great conductors and prepare for some flipping insights on leadership.

Not About You

Talgam hits the nail on the head when he talks about the small gesture of the conductor. He continues: ‘And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. Noise becomes music. And this is fantastic. And it’s so tempting to think that it’s all about me.’

He then analyzes different leadership styles and immediately you can see the difference between a Muti style (talented, clear, controlling and commanding), a Strauss style (pure execution), a von Karajan style (…), a Kleiber style (creating the conditions for people to co-create) and finally a Bernstein style (doing without doing).

Leadership Redefined

This video definitely flipped my beliefs on the job of a leader and made it less tangible and controllable at the same time. Turns out that it’s all about enabling instead of controlling.

And if that is so we desparately need an alternative to the long checklists and cookbooks on leadership. To begin I propose a two step remedy:

Step 1: There is nothing to fix and it’s OK to be happy. So leave Mr. Grumpy home.

Step 2: Your leadership is about enabling other people’s stories to be heard at the same time. So: be the space instead of the hero. Create the conditions instead of controlling the outcome. As Talgam states: ‘You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. You have the story of the audience as a community. You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. And then you have other stories, unseen. People who build this wonderful concert hall. People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. And all those stories are being heard at the same time. This is the true experience of a live concert.‘

The Moral

Once you replace controlling the outcome by creating the conditions you will be amazed by the power and the passion that you light up in people. The only thing you need to do is ask yourself the question: “who am I being that their eyes aren’t shining?” as the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of your leadership.

So who are you being and what has to become of your job as a leader? You are the holder of a space that enables things that are fare greater than you. Trying to control the outcomes will only reduce the performance (and make you more tired).

Instead your real power lies in the being moved and passionate about the scores of your organization and this determines the strength of the space you create for your people. Passion, not power. In the below video Bernstein explains his passion through the expressivity of music and the ability of people to respond to that.

As a finishing note, Bernstein says: ‘It is metaphor that most produces knowledge.‘ He talks about music as a sense-making language, a compelling story that communicates things that are beyond your reach.

No place for Ego there. That may be exactly why we get more ‘how to lead‘ cues from observing conductors and indulging in their music than from any other book or professor.

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Related articles:
- Music and Leadership (part 2) – January 18th, 2010
- Music and Leadership – July 20th, 2008
- Music and Management Consulting – September 27th, 2008

“Communication is not the message sent, but the message received.” You knew that. Because like me, you are smart. Like me, you may have used it to outsmart other people when it comes to criticizing their message. But can you make a better message?

Ehhhmmmm… while the statement “It’s not what you say – it’s what they hear, stupid!” is a direct way to demonstrate the flaws of a communication, coming up with a better alternative requires different ammunition. And that’s exactly the word to cover this article. Did you know that military operations and military field manuals can help us a great deal in achieving better communication?

Uncle Sam

In their 2007 bestseller Made To Stick the Heath brothers (Chip and Dan) are setting a new standard for SUCCESful communication. The SUCCESs acronym is a communication stickiness checklist and stands for: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion, Story. For the first part of the checklist – Simple – they draw heavily on the US Army Combat Maneuver Training Center in order to get to the core of the idea.

Like no other, the US Army knows that the distance between the intent and the operation should be kept as short and as straight as possible. Else they risk inadequate mission accomplishment. The way they do it is through Commander’s Intent.

The commander’s intent describes the desired end state. It is a concise expression of the purpose of the operation and must be understood two echelons below the issuing commander. . . It is the single unifying focus for all subordinate elements. It is not a summary of the concept of the operation. Its purpose is to focus subordinates on the desired end state. Its utility is to focus subordinates on what has to be accomplished in order to achieve success, even when the plan and concept of operations no longer apply, and to discipline their efforts toward that end.

What’s in it for you: Focus

I never thought that Uncle Sam would be of any help for explaining things to my grandmother – which is my ultimate bottom line. Commander’s Intent helps you to achieve focus, because when all plans fail you better not freeze and grind to a halt. In case you’re not convinced, consider the quote of Mike Tyson below:

CI is the military version of “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Urging their leaders not to make the battlefield planning too complicated because in the heat of battle, innumerable variables will dictate the proper course of action.

The CI technique

The US Army teaches their leaders in all echelons the following technique:

=> Complete the following sentences:

1.)  If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ________________________.
2.) The single, most-important thing that we must do tomorrow is _____________________.

=> By answering these questions, you have basically written your intent.

=> Remember, your intent statement provides a framework for the operation. It does not tell your soldiers what to do. It does give them the overall picture of what you say the company needs to accomplish to be successful.

=> By making your intent a clear, concise, and focused statement, you greatly increase the chances that your soldiers will continue the mission, even when the operation doesn’t go as planned.

Your Mission Statement

Here is a great video by Dan Heath explaining why the US Army had better invaded our business schools and most of the corporate off-site strategy workshops. In this video he explains how to write a mission statement that doesn’t suck. The moral of his story for corporate mission statements:

1. Use concrete language

2. Talk about the WHY

My Granny flies Southwest

Southwest Airlines is a company that discovered the secret behind a Commander’s Intent to get to the core of their success, as their CEO Herb Kelleher asserts:

“I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”

In short: next time I outwit my colleagues by telling them: ‘If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, forget it’ – I can rely on Uncle Sam to complete the action.

I always associated SMART goals with positive things, such as sound corporate governance. Never in my life I would have thought that SMART would be threat to the people I work with. But things have changed and they continue to change.

When my team has to reach a certain goal, I chunk that goal into manageable parts and plans. Next, individuals commit to the plan. Eventually – if I want them to perform well against the plan – I assign them SMART goals.

SMART is one of those management acronyms that are taken for granted by everyone. It stands for:
S   – Specific, meaning: unambiguous, clear goals
M   – Measurable, meaning: ’if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’
A   – Attainable, meaning: a little stretch is OK
R   – Relevant, meaning: ’important to me’
T   – Traceable by setting a journey of interim goals

Table Soccer

That is what managers and consultants learn at business schools and it is what I have been proclaiming ever since graduating. No need to shoot holes in a concept that works, is there? Everyone understands it, shepherds love it and sheep flock eagerly on SMART meadows.

Hmmm… and that’s exactly where the problem is: rather than fueling or accelerating their performance, SMART goals are numbing very bit of initiative and creativity out of people. Rather than empowering people, with SMART goals I am putting a fence around them. I’m domesticating them with function descriptions and herding them within the fences of the status quo. As you can guess: that fence an illusion of security that makes people stop thinking.

A few weeks ago Jef Staes told me that it is better to start looking at SMART goals as the worst symptom of atrophy. Once you consistently need SMART goals for your organization to perform this means that your people have lost all of their self-propelling capacity. People have become sheep and the organization has lost all of its agility. You are playing table soccer with your people.

Houston

Why are SMART top-down controlled organizations with diligent employees in trouble? They’ve worked splendid in an environment where the amount of information was fixed. The manager receives the information, interprets and processes it and then hands out the instructions. In fact, this has been the secret of growth in our economy over the past decades.

But now a shift is happening: the amount of information is overwhelming and most people, teams and companies are paralyzed by the flood of information. Information has become the new element. We are overwhelmed by something we can’t get enough of. The result for SMART corporate decision-making is painstaking: as a central commander you need to process even more information faster. No matter how hard you try, you will always be too late in this new information-driven economy.

Go Dumb or stay Numb?

If you are a leader, the key to staying on top is to stop trying to stay on top. That’s right, the advice for decision makers is to get dumber by empowering their people. That way they stop being the single information processing bottleneck. By the way, isn’t it a coincidence that the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle?

Getting dumber will reduce the bottleneck in two ways:

1. Distributing the intelligence across their organization; turning the sheep into passionate knowledge hunters. And it’s still Ok to stay on top of decision-making. But continuing to be the single information-processing hub is paralyzing your organization.

2. Redefining intelligence. In reality intelligence is the social skill to work together in a network of experts. Joseph Chilton Pearce defines intelligence as the ability to interact. Knowledge is a social thing. Take the people away and you end up on ground zero.

The New SMART

In the old days looking forward was a good way to plan ahead. There was no ambiguous fog of information. Now the challenge is to look through the information clutter, visualizing a goal that is not yet visible. Some call it intuition, others call it gut-feeling. I call it the single most needed competence of today’s leaders: the skill to get out of their minds and into their senses.

For employees the transformation from a sheep to knowledge hunters will come as an electro-shock. After all, empowerment means taking responsibility above and beyond any fence that has been set up by them or their boss.

There are no fences. And soccer is no longer a table game.

How can we un-learn management science and get back to the common-sense of teamwork? Switch-off all the rules, check-lists and scorecards we have been spoon-fed in our management education? A scenario for disaster you may think? Quite the opposite as I witnessed yesterday.

Dull libraries on leadership, knowledge management and communication came to action right in front of me.  It all happened as the musicians performed their scores at the rehearsal of the prestigious B’rock ensemble.

So…?

In this rehearsal B’rock gathered for the forthcoming ‘Adieu to the pleasures’ performance. Nothing spectacular about this rehearsal you may think, except from a management point-of-view.

As a management consultant I spend most of my time between shopfloor, project cockpit and boardroom. When you travel that path long enough you will find that management speak and lengthy checklists melt down to their essence.  For example: ‘always remember the 3 C’s: communication, communication, communication‘. Damned if you do – damned if you don’t.

I was curious to find out how the musicians were going to pull it off, given their limited time, budget and different nationalities involved (sounds like a real project, doesn’t it?). Almost immediately I was struck by their effortless communication. So I took my camera and captured what the 3 C’s look like from a B’rock perspective. Have a look…

1. Tuning

This is the first part of any teamwork of musicians – be it a rehearsal or a real concert. They tune their instruments and make sure everyone is on the same wavelength BEFORE they start playing. Have a look at the video below. These musicians are saying: hey this is my bottom line – what is yours?

In management speak: they are setting up a service level agreement (SLA). And they do it BEFORE they start to play. There is a lesson in there: an SLA is negotiated upfront to create a common understanding about services, priorities and responsibilities.

Tuning is not a quick-fix for a troubled relationship in the middle of the play: the relationship is tuned upfront. And yes: that makes an awkward and unusual sound.

2. Feedback

Once the instruments are tuned, the ensemble is ready to kick off. For the first time they play the scores that each musician has carefully prepared at home. For the first time they hear how they sound within the group. Have a look at the fragment below to see how that works.

You will note that the ‘project leader’ behind the harpsichord defines the context and shapes the meaning of the piece they are performing (at 00′:30"). Although every musician knows the scores and plays outstanding as an individual, they now feed-back to one another how they can make teamwork happen (as of 01′:30"). Note that during the break one of the musicians revealed to me that the most important instrument during a rehearsal is actually a musician’s pencil!

There you are: outstanding performers rely on each other in order to adapt their scores for the benefit of team performance. In this setting it would be absurd if they didn’t. Yet, where I come from I see most of the good performers touting their horn so loud that the team performance suffers.

The musician later added: ‘you feel when it’s your turn to say something‘. And that’s exactly what it felt like: this was no feedback as we know it; what I witnessed was feed-forward. Not as a task or an obligation, but rather as a game bringing the performance forward.

3. Performing

This is when the communication rubber meets the road. After individual preparation, tuning of the instruments and adapting the scores for team performance it is time to give it a go. I invite you to look at the below fragment twice: once with the sound on and once with the sound off.

There are two things that you can see clearer when the sound is off. First, the musicians don’t stop communicating when they perform. Continuously they look up from their scores to exchange cues. Second, as a result of this exchange you can actually see the resonance among the musicians.

Although they are all playing their individual score you can see that they are in resonance. One of the musicians saw this resonance as a growing process as he reported: ‘during the intense days of rehearsing you kind of grow into the performance’.

The Moral

Preparation, tuning, adaptation and continuous exchange of cues results in good performance. The moral of this story isn’t hard to fetch – but it may be hard to swallow for those of us who have their MBA education tattooed all over. This rehearsal reframes the question: why does management education exist? None of these musicians has ever studied, examined or attended a course in communication, teamwork or feedback.

Think of what we said last week about barefoot running: your company is not broken by default – just like your feet are just fine the way they are. Once you go barefoot your body automatically adjusts. Effortless.  In terms of management education B’rock musicians go barefoot. And they go a long way.

By the way …

This goes without saying that B’rock is a project-based organization (in management speak): the performance at hand determines the staffing, their level of commitment and … their leadership style.

In case you wonder how I got into that setting in the first place… well … together with B’rock and other top-notch musical ensembles we are discovering Arts-based Learning. I’m quite proud to be scouting learning methods and workshop possibilities in this exclusive and (until now) closed setting. A bizar experience … that’s why the initiative is called BizzArts.

Below you can see B’rock performing Vivaldi ‘for real’.

No doubt about it: Belgian finest Baroque can only be performed when excellence & passion are mixed with barefoot empowerment. And now you have a witness.
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Related articles:
- Music and Leadership – July 20th, 2008
- Music and Management Consulting – September 27th, 2008

About a month ago I attended the 20-minute presentation of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte at TEDx Brussels. In case his name doesn’t ring a bell: Negroponte is the face of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Their mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education.

Yep – these people are on a mission.

Children as Agents of Change

During his 20 minute talk Negroponte explained the basic idea behind the project: development through primary education. The fundament is the inspiring and radical idea to “leverage children” and the way we think about them: no longer as recipients of information, but as agents of change. According to Negroponte they had no other choice: “When you are faced with illiteracy numbers such as Afghanistan, where 75% of the girls don’t go to school, building more schools will not close that gap.”

Just imagine the resistance and laughs Negroponte must have gotten when he first started talking about this project. For example, even now people resist the idea of dropping laptops in desolate areas where people hardly know what a laptop is. “You know what?” Negroponte continued, “You can! Just a few days after we have dropped these OLPC’s we saw connections taking place and activity on those laptops and networks.”

So they decided to change the way they look at children. And when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. To their surprise, looking at children as agents of change has led them to unexpected results: teachers coming back out of retirement and children teaching their parents!

By the way: as you are reading this each kid in Uruguay has an OLPC. Duh… think about that – there might be a lesson in there about belief and commitment.

What’s to Learn for us?

It makes me wonder: if dropping laptops in desolate areas of developing countries can make them leapfrog literacy, couldn’t connecting each employee on Twitter have us leapfrog economic growth?

You may say this is a stupid idea.

You may say it’s impossible.

I say it might just work.

I say it costs you nothing.

I say if employees are your most valuable asset, maybe it’s time to tap into their potential.

I say what do you really mean when you talk about Human Capital Management or Talent Management? Do you mean carrot-and-stick, or do you mean passion-and-growth?

I say it’s time we start looking at employees as agents of change instead of recipients of information.

I say what have you got to lose?

I say it’s a project with a name: OTPE: ‘One Twitter account Per Employee.’

Let’s open up a little in 2010 – shall we?

Bonus for the heart: below is the A to Z of OLPC, I must have played it about a million times: it touches the heart.

A few weeks ago a friend told me that the only thing he can do as a parent is to stand behind his kids – both hands open – saying: ‘I will cath you if you fall". He continued: "For example: a three year old carrying a big bottle from the kitchen to the dinner table is a breathtaking sight for most parents. We are tempted to say ‘careful’, ‘don’t let it fall’, ‘hold it with both hands’, etc. Now, if the bottle arrives at the dinner table unharmed, is that THANKS TO our verbal support or is it NOTWITHSTANDING our comment?". 

How would our children grow and learn if we would be more at ease with the circumstances they are in? Whenever we comment / advise / suggest our children with all of our hearts, our support and the lessons learned from our own from bruises and breakdowns; aren’t we just pushing them into learned helplessness?

In my opinion, this is the very point where the skill of education stops and the art of parenting starts. Like a balancing act, both empowerment and protection are necessary for a healthy development.

As the above drawing indicates, the development of children (and grown-ups) needs a perfect mix of nudging and nurturing; a balance between empowerment and protection. It is exactly at that same point where the skill of management stops and the art of leadership starts.

To your opinion, where is the best place to learn that art? At Harvard or at home?

Related articles:
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 6) – September 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 5) – May 24th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 4) – March 1st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 3) – February 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 2) – February 16th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 1) – February 9th, 2009

In the below video you can see Dr. Wayne Dyer as he makes a distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Imagine the following scene:

You are in your house. You’ve got your care keys in your hand. The lights go out because of a power failure. You can’t see a thing. You stumble around in your living room and you drop your keys.

You look around for a moment and you realize that you are never going to find them in the dark. But you look outside and you notice that the streetlights are on. So you say to yourself: "Hmmm … I’m not going to sit around here in the dark and grope around looking for my keys when there’s a light on outside. I’m going to go out here – under the street light – and I’m going to look for my keys."

So you are outside, groping around and looking for your keys until your neighbor comes along. He asks:
- "What happened mate?"
- "I dropped my keys"
- "I’ll help you look for them!"

Now the two of you are looking for your car keys. Finally your neighbor says:
- "Excuse me, but where exactly did you drop your keys?"
- "Well… um …I dropped them in the house"
- "You dropped your keys in the house and you are looking for them here? This doesn’t make any sense!"
- "Well, it doesn’t make any sense to grope around in the dark when there’s light out here!"

Isn’t that exactly what we do when we have a difficult problem or a struggle that is located inside and we are looking for the solution outside of ourselves? Expecting somebody else to change or something outside of you to get better in order for you to make your life work, is something you have to take a hard look at. You are the one with the difficulties.

This reminds me of another quote by Bob Procter:
"You are the only problem you will ever have and you are the only solution."

I have used the evenings of the month of August to pull together this draft of a business fable. In fact, this fable is my way of coping with the ambiguity of workplace dynamics and games people play.

It helps me to make sense of pressure, tension, stress, indifference and breakup.

Is there another way of going about with pressure and tension?

In my world there is.

In this adventure three fish discover that there is always a choice.

Click on the image to download the document. If that doesn’t work you can always copy-paste this link into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.reply-mc.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/the-pond.pdf

And please please please let me know your feedback, as I intend to complete this fable by integrating all the afterthoughts into the line of the story.

Happy reading!

Since the beginning of this month school has started. For many families this indicates a moment in time where habits need to be switched and children need to make a step into a next level of development, be it in reading, writing, independent tooth brushing, cleaning up the toys, etc.

A thing that works pretty well with children is the use of a simple scorecard (mostly a board with all the days of the week, some targets and banners to be attached for every succesful achievement). All of a sudden agreements, targets and progress become visual and this seems to be very motivating. However, the thing that really makes this board succesful is the discussion prior to setting up the board: this is where buy-in happens!

For instance, some questions that are commonly covered in those conversations:
- When do we get a medal for an achievement (i.e.:‘What exactly does good performance look like?‘)
- What happens when we fail to meet the target (i.e.: ‘What does failure look like?‘)
- WIIFM: What’s In It For Me when I meet all targets?
- etc.

That’s how we get to SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Tracable. Although you can find this acronym in any MBA course, the added value of parenting is the insight that CONVERSATION and DIALOGUE is the one and only way to make smart goals. The below drawing outlines what this results into for a work setting:

Next to that, there are actually 3 kinds of KPI’s that work pretty well with kids – provided that they are SMART:
- Do new things. These KPI’s will measure new things that were not in place before;
- Do things better. Basically, these KPI’s come down to putting new tagets on existing measures;
- Stop doing things. These KPI’s measure the fading away of bad habits.

There is no reason what-so-ever to assume that a KPI at work should be more complicated than setting KPI’s with kids. It’s all about making agreements and working out the measurements TOGETHER. Forcing a balanced scorecard upon people and making people adhere to KPI’s that they didn’t buy into – or even understand – is an absolute recipe for disaster.

For people to be motivated, you will need to set goals that have been agreed upon with all parties involved. Finally – once you’ve got it all together – what’s even more important is to set positive targets instead of negative ones. For instance, you may be targeting a less than 2 per cent mistakes on deliveries or a 98 per cent of success-ful deliveries. They both measure and target exactly the same, but which one will motivate people most to perform?

Related articles:
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 5) – May 24th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 4) – March 1st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 3) – February 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 2) – February 16th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 1) – February 9th, 2009

In the below video we see Pat Zigarmi underscoring why involvement of your target audience is the single factor determining the success of your organizational change endeavor. She makes her point incredibly well by stating: "People who plan the battle rarely battle the plan."

People don’t resist change, they resist being controlled. And if we are smart enough to involve people in every step of the project lifecycle, they will be the best drivers of change we could possibly hope for.

In her research she distinguishes 6 primary concerns for change:

1. Information concerns. People respond when they know what you know, see what you see, understand what you understand.

2. Personal concerns: what’s in it for me? Will I win or lose? Will I look good? Is this a picture of the future I can succeed in?

3. Implementation concerns: where can I get help?

4. Impact concerns: will the change make any difference?

5. Collaboration: how do we get everyone involved?

6. Refinement and improvement concerns

Finally she also challenges us to redefine how we look at "concerns": they are not negative, they are just unanswered questions!

Related articles:
- Know-Feel-Do = Bottom Line of Communication – December 28th, 2008
- Music and Leadership – July 20th, 2008
- It’s About Involvement, Stupid! – June 1st, 2007