Leadership and Teams

I have recently noticed a large amount of business leadership training happening all over.  This seems to be a theme. The question I have is how does someone who is looking to better themselves, especially at the junior manager level, find a good course or program to attend?  Can anyone give me suggestions?  Thanks Ken

It is amazing how fast time goes by when you fill your day with several several very different things to do.  It is one thing to be busy with a specific task but quite different when your tasks are associated with quite divergent topics.  With a full time job that is short of workers, a part time job includes this and another blog, an old house that needs some work, kids that are away at school, etc it is no wonder I can keep focused long enough to accomplish anything.  This in itself is a potential leadership issue that I might address sometime.

I am always looking for new ideas about leadership and teams of any kind.  If any one wants to add to this blog, by all means please respond and add something.  I especially would like to see questions.  I would be happy to research them or provide my own opinion.  Speaking of opinions, I always find alternate opinions fascinating.  Like most people I value divergent ideas and unlike several talk show hosts, I will not cut it off unless it is abusive, nasty or the like.  That of course is my call as the administrator and owner of this blog. 

Lately I have been looking at a lot of the tools for staying connected that are available on the internet.  Several of them seem to be specifically designed for leaders of remote teams.  WIKIs; Blogs; Twitter; facebook; LinkedIn; Google docs; webinar, video and teleconferencing sites; Skype and other VOIP sites are just a few of the tools that are available for free or nearly free.  The leader today has to take it upon him or herself to make this stuff work but it is all there.  In fact a book by Seth Gobin called Tribes describes this kind of leadership and I highly recommend reading it.  Work with your IT guys if your company blocks some of these sites as social networking.  Talk to the policy makers and show them how it can save time and money to have access to these sites.

One example that I am trying to get going is using a WIKI site like PBwiki.com to allow an EMS service stay connected.  While not suffereing from geographical dispersion the 45 or so people in the organization are seldom on at the same time.  typically there are three teams of three on at the same time in different parts of the city.  But they need to communicate as committees to get things done.  Using a Wiki as well as there phone would allow them to share files, make changes to the files and the committee chair would be able to see what each member was trying to say and make the final changes.  Every one gets there input in and no one has to come in on their off days to attend a meeting that really was not needed.

Like wise training of the team can be accomplished without a lot of work to get together.  In the above mentioned EMS service I am one of the helicopter pilots.  The FAA regulations tell us that the pilots have restrictions on how long we can work in one day.  This limits us from meeting regularly.  As pilots we work a seven day shift and then only 2 of the four pilots are on each shift.  To make it more difficult to meet, those two pilots are on opposite twelve hour shifts.  When one comes on duty the other goes off.  This part of the EMS team then does most everything through email and notes, reading files, and word of mouth.  Could we do better with a wiki or maybe something like google docs?  Possibly.  It will be interesting to see what we can do to make it easier to communicate.  If you are interested in remote team communications and how personalities play into this a book called “The I in Team” by Susan K. Gerke and Linda V. Berens might be worth checking out.  What do you Think?  Thanks for reading.  Ken

• A few years ago I was given the opportunity to do something that was pretty amazing. I was asked to “re-invent” the way we trained our Army Reserve commanders through the development of a new and more interactive Pre-command course. This course was taken by all Army Reserve leaders who had been selected to take command of battalion and brigade level units across the country and the world. The man with the vision to undertake such a job was the (then) Chief of the Army Reserve, LTG Helmly. When I finally got a chance to listen to him talk to the commanders one day I really like what he had to say and I especially liked the fact that he was not repeating what I had heard Army leaders say so many times. Below you will find a few of the quotes from his philosophy on leadership that I was fortunate to get in a Power Point presentation. My comments are on the right as a set of corollaries for business. Tell me what you think. I have more of these from other generals so let me know if you want to see more like this.   Ken

Quotes from LTG Helmly come from a presentation he gave to US Army Reserve senior leaders on leadership.  May 2005

Recently I had the chance to attend a workshop in Chicago that took a look at individuals through the lens of the 8 Jungian Functions and how they relate to Personality Type Dynamics. To find your own type you can take a personality type tool like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® or the MBTI®. Here is the webpage you can go to in order to read this blog. http://functionsarchetypes.blogspot.com

Why is this significant to this Blog. Simply, because understanding one self is one of the most important aspects of improving your leadership skills. Trying to follow advice about what works for them can not guarantee success for you. So attending this workshop was a chance for me to look further into who I am and how I can best use my skills to help others.

This concept is the basis for Leader-Team Dynamics LLC. Helping individuals on a team get to know themselves first then to move on to understanding how they relate to the rest of the team.

Ken Cerney

What an interesting experience.  While not specifically into the whole conference atmosphere, I was intrigued enough to go to the latest edition of the Association of Psychological Type (APT) International conference in Baltimore.  Having never been there before and never been around that many practitioners of psychological type I was amazed at how many different ways people are trying to use psychological type.  That in itself was a strong indication that there are entirely to many that are not using it correctly.  Let me explain.
While attending at least 3 different leadership courses during my career in the Army, I was given the MBTI® or Myers Briggs Type Indicator® instrument to assess my personality type.  In all cases I came out nearly the same, and in all cases the only thing I remember is that I was a somewhat extraverted Introvert with confusion on some of the other choices.  I also remember being told that my type was rare in the Army and so I was different than the average officer.  What I discovered later while attending a qualifying course to become a facilitator myself is that I was probably given such an incomplete interpretation of the results very little self-selection, that more harm was being done than good.  I also got a terrible impression of what the MBTI can do for a leader. 
So how are they not using the instrument correctly – simple, many practitioners are not providing any idea of how to apply this knowledge.  And that is a terrible injustice to those leaders that could really use some assistance in working, talking and developing their subordinates.  I hope to come back and talk some more on the subject of applying psychological type theory to teams. 
Ken

Training mentors is not an easy task if the one being trained to be a mentor does not take it serious.  I Think this is the really the heart of being a mentor.  Their has to be a desire to see someone succeed.  Whether that is the success of your own subordinate, or the success of someone else, the desire to assist the less experienced person succeed has to be a genuine desire.  I was personnally mentored on more than one occasion.  Sometimes it was worthwhile sometimes it was an attempt to make me a clone of the mentor.  That then is the next key to being a mentor.  A desire to see a less experienced individual succeed in their own way.  What should be important to the mentor is the outcome not necessarily the technique.  Don’t get me wrong, teaching a technique may be the most important part of the mentor/mentee relationship but if your technique is not going to work for the person you are mentoring, than be ready and willing to help the mentee adjust to their own style.  This is where knowledge of personality styles and types can come in handy.  But more on personality in another post.  A mentor that is not willing to allow the mentee to try different things is not helping the situation.  They might as well be in a static classroom environment then.  The Mentor/mentee relationship will not last long this way. 

I read an interesting article today about why organizations fail in training leaders to be good mentors.  I bring this up because having recently retired from the Army, I saw the Army’s attempt to use mentorship as a fix for leadership training and coaching. 

To me the three concepts of Mentoring, Training and Coaching are all integral but distinct aspects of growing effective leaders.  Training tends to be easy, you send leaders to schools, conduct training events and otherwise provide some means to give them new information for them to assimilate and hopefully use in the future.  Coaching is long term.  Spending time talking to and directing them in the assimilation of the training they had earlier.  This is usually scheduled and can be somewhat formal.  If done by someone outside the organization it is often ongoing while the leader is conducting regular business.  Business then stops for awhile to assess how effective the leader was during that period.  Mentoring is by it’s nature considerably harder to grasp and yet in it’s purest form the easiest of the three aspects to do. 

There are many trying to formalize the concept of mentoring since it hsa been established that mentorship can pay huge dividends when done right.  The problem is that mentorship should never be formalized.  There has to be by-in from both parties and I would go so far as to say it has to be somewhat spontaneous.  The best mentors are those in which neither the mentor nor the mentee can pin point the exact time of the mentoring relationship.  The best mentors take an interest in a subordinate and that interest becomes a passion to see that subordinate succeed. 

Can we train mentors then?  Yes.  I will be back to talk about that soon.  Ken

Many of today’s business men and women travel the world. Effective communications is more important now than ever before. What Communications problems have you had in the past that required extra effort on your part to overcome? What was the outcome?

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