in a moment, i’ll be setting a re-direct to this old webpress address to the new address.

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Pamela is a charming and insightful leader. She has led an interesting and eclectic career in the Performing Arts, in Education, building her own businesses, and serving as Vice President & COO at Coach U, Inc . From 1996-2006 she helped create and then later led the International Coaching Federation (ICF) – a highly respected standards organization in the professional coaching field, serving over 14,000 members in over 80 countries.

Building the ICF
As one of the founding members and early leaders in the ICF, Pamela has keen insights into the challenges of building an organization from scratch. Her story begins with the motivation the early leaders had for creating the ICF: community and education. She was building a coaching business in the early 1990′s and like many others at that time, discovered that the market did not understand what a professional coach was. Nor was there any consistency in the definition of a professional coach, even among the more prominent schools who specialized in that field. “In order to help create a profession with competency based credentials, behavioral standards, shared best practices and effective self-regulation, I joined a number of prominent founders of coaching schools in a conversation to try to create and promote unity of purpose and process.”

As you can imagine, the challenges in forming the ICF were immense. At that time, if professional coaching was even heard of, it was viewed by most as a frivolous soft skills consultancy or worse, as a kind of charlatan psychotherapy. The challenges faced by Pamela and other early leaders of the ICF included not only the education of a marketplace; it also required the typical herding of cats in a startup and merging many strong egos into a unified vision for the profession. She describes her leadership model as “heart-centered” with her view of the role of leader as “inspiring others to greatness rather than laying down the law by wielding power.” Her approach is similar to the somewhat over-marketed term “servant-leader” so frequently quoted by politicians, pastors, and business leaders these days.

Heart-centered leadership
Pamela’s heart-centered leadership model builds on three pillars, “know thyself, inspire other to greatness, and defend the decisions made by team as if they were your own.” Using that platform, she focused first and foremost on exploring what was common among the founding members of the ICF. She did not sell her own vision to her peer group. In fact, she probably would have failed if she had tried that approach. As she explained, “Some of the first board members of the ICF were well established, internationally renowned experts in professional coaching with strongly held views.”

Instead, Pamela chose to remain open and curious even when the conversation went to places she didn’t agree with. “As a result, I was in a better position to facilitate and co- lead this group of passionate and insightful people.” She goes on to say, “We saw early on that there was already great enthusiasm and passion for the conversation” and she used that enthusiasm as a rallying point to help get the team through the more challenging debates. No matter what obstacles appeared during a specific negotiation, most often Pamela could bring the team back to center with an agreement that the debate itself was productive, no matter how contentious.

What became clear in those early ICF conversations was a shared view on the core competencies of a professional coach, even though there were radically different approaches to training, development, philosophical base, or the coaching process itself. She explains, “This early insight by the team led to a productive conversation about the standards for coaching.” This allowed the team to come to a firm resolution. And that agreement in turn served as the foundation for additional areas of agreement as time went on.

Ownership
In Pamela’s heart-centered leadership model, there is a sense of ownership that is different from other leadership models. If you are selling your vision to a group, you certainly own that vision. But if you are inspiring the team to agree upon a shared vision, if you use your role as leader as foil for the debate, seed of discussion, builder of compromise, then the outcome isn’t yours. It belongs to the team. In order to create confidence among that team; to give them permission to take a strong stance on a risky position, Pam believes, “you need to be willing to be publically responsible for the decision made by the team. You create a space and freedom to fail. Trust is formed by standing up for the decisions made by the team and defending their position as though it were your own.” Of course, it follows that when the outcome is clearly successful, the heart-centered leader must then ensure the team gets credit for that success.

Source of leadership inspiration
This heart-centered leadership model is challenging enough. Using it during the formation of a new organization in an embryonic market filled with misinformation was daunting. Pamela was confident, however, because her style had evolved over a many years and different career phases. Her path in heart-centered leadership began in High School, where she had a drama teacher that called upon her to learn a new character role in only a few days to step in for a student who had abandoned the play. In the skillful hands of that director, Pamela discovered abilities she didn’t have and she watched him also draw performances from actors who had no idea they could act. That inspired her to pursue a career in the Performing Arts and to acquire the skills of a stage director. She says, “I learned that pulling together lights, sound, and whatever talent pool showed up for auditions, then revising the script to accommodate what I had to work with for that production – that process itself was the performance. Great results are self-evident to an audience if the creative process is treated as the reason for the effort.”

Whom do we serve?
Among the many debates by the ICF board members, the debate about the definition of “customer” for the ICF gave rise to a number of operational impacts. They argued:who is our client? Our members? The profession itself? The clients of the coach? What about the training organizations and schools? In the end, it was agreed that the membership of the ICF was the customer. But it was also agreed that no major decisions could be made without considering the impact on the stakeholders who helped make the ICF possible. This was easy to say but hard to implement. For example, the training organizations were often inadvertently left out of decisions and forgotten in important communications regarding changes to the emerging credentialing standards and processes. Though never intentionalt it caused unwanted friction. After years of practice, the ICF now has implemented a thorough decision making and communication protocol to consult with or inform stakeholders as required to ensure a smoother operation.

Having said all that, the ICF had a parallel mission it could not shirk. While the ICF had defined its membership as the customer and organizing principle, the ICF also had to educate the marketplace on professional coaching and what standards clients should seek in a professional coach. As a result, the ICF had to consider the clients of the coach as part of its stakeholder base. By that definition, most of humanity is a stakeholder which made segmentation for messaging a monstrous challenge that the ICF still grapples with today.

Know thyself
One of the operating challenges facing the ICF board in the early days was that the board members were experts in the practice of coaching and their own business, they were not necessarily experts in building a non-profit organization, professional association, or standards body. Pamela recalls, “The professional coaching process can fall short when trying to run a business.” A business management team needs to make decisions, take risks, evaluate performance, set objectives, and manage plans. Coaching can help you do all those things better but a coach doesn’t take those actions for the client. So in the same way that a sales associate promoted to manager suddenly finds himself not quite as competent at leading a team as he was selling the product, the ICF leadership team found its core competencies in coaching not completely sufficient to build and run a coaching federation. “We had hired a management firm and later hired an independent consultant to conduct a business audit of operational and governance processes and to establish benchmarks for performance.” This led to a management overhaul run by operational experts that set the stage for the growth that the ICF has enjoyed ever since.

Handling dissent
In her role as ICF President, Pamela had to travel the world and work with many different people. She learned to enjoy them all “even the grumpy ones because I came to see that their dissent led to insights that would not have come forward without them. The only times I really was irked was dealing with those who were stuck on only one way of looking at possible solutions.” When I asked her how she overcame this, she said “retaining self control. Not jumping into a debate; giving the dissenter and naysayer the opportunity to be fully heard: To fully make their case and to acknowledge their input.” Then she could say “Thank you for making that clear. And in addition to that well explained view, there are perhaps other ways to look at this…” which provided her a free and clear platform to allow someone else to make a case for the plan that caused the dissent in the first place.

Source of Joy
In all her travels to build and promote the ICF globally, Pamela discovered that no matter what country she was in, no matter how different the culture or challenges were the same principals of good business applied. Business is conducted among human beings and the most successful approach is asking “How can I help?” In Korea, significant focus of the ICF was on serving students who came to their first jobs already suffering burn-out after years of intense pressure to compete in school. By contrast in Bogota, significant focus of the ICF was on creating sustainable economic growth among the poor. In each place that ICF members worked, the basic intention was the same – helping other people succeed in their endeavors – and in each place that simple intention came alive in exciting, different activities. This inspired Pamela to work even harder to build the ICF and to share those many different approaches and common insights everywhere she travelled.

A Challenge
There is one insight that came from this conversation with Pamela about leadership that serves as a challenge to all leaders. A heart-centered leadership model requires a simple focus that anyone can apply immediately. Know yourself completely. Know your strengths, weaknesses, aspirations and fears. Inspire others to step up and achieve greatness. And then have the courage to allow others to explore and express their own vision for your organization.

© 2008 BlueSeven Partners, LLC

Listening is not for ears alone. When we apply careful attention to our other sensory organs – our eyes, our nose, our skin, and so on – we develop a perception skill that few even know exists, let alone master. Listening as a practice leads to clearer perception of what is going on with the people on your team and in the organization you are leading. And that leads to competitive advantage.

Most schools don’t teach listening. Most parents don’t either. The closest we get is fun games like Where’s Waldo and I Spy and Memory Match Cards which emphasize keen observation but not listening per se. Very soon after, certainly by the 3rd grade, we move our kids’ efforts toward more serious academic pursuits, usually involving a decade of neurotic preparation for scarce slots among the better universities. In the process, we produce well educated men and women with a need to demonstrate that they are the smartest person in the room. How many times have you come across this person in your career? Are you one of them?

Some kids growing up in this answer-first education system react to the competitive activity by becoming a class clown in an attempt to divert from academic scrutiny or out of scorn for it. No listening there. Those who cannot compete in the speed-answer game or the snarky comment game often end up giving up. For most, daydreaming or socializing comes before listening. Some wash out into academic mediocrity; some pursue other competitive behaviors usually involving much running and a ball on grass, macadam, or hardwood floors. Rarely do any develop listening skills.

I am probably the last person to counsel against competition. I love it, thrive on it, and believe it is the fuel that makes a democracy and socially responsible capitalism possible. What I find sad is that in the midst of all the competitive juices flowing in academic and athletic endeavors, we neglect the most important skill we will ever have – listening carefully. It is the doorway to understanding our world and our place in it, and that in turn is the root source of every great leader’s strength – a clear headed perception of reality.

Listening is rarely if ever taught in schools because we assume listening is automatic in any normal human. Our society acts as though listening is the same as hearing. But listening is a skill, which like any other skill is mastered through practice. You mind is like a puppy and it gets in the way of good listening. So learning to listen meticulously is just like training a puppy. Want to learn how?

Five Steps to Listening Meticulously

1. Breathe. Find a quiet place. Sit still and comfortably with good but relaxed posture. Close your eyes. Breathe as fully and slowly as you can. Settle down.

2. Relax. Now open your eyes and look down toward the ground or to the table in front of you. You want to be awake and present while listening. What do you hear? Can you hear traffic? HVAC air blowing through a register? Birds chirping? People talking nearby? Your heartbeat? A dog barking in the distance? The blood rushing in your ears? A clock ticking? Your breath? Your mind is like a puppy. Let it roam around and listen to everything around you one-by-one, but keep your eyes open.

3. Concentrate. With your eyes still open, now count your breaths from 1 to 10. Every time your mind wanders away from this exercise, just come back to counting your breaths from 1 to 10. You will still be able to hear very well despite counting breaths. Now you are concentrating on one point amidst all the noise around you. Just breathe and count. You are training your mind puppy to sit instead of letting it roam around.

4. Wake up. You may get bored with counting to 10. You might get frustrated that you don’t get past 4 without ending up in a daydream. You might feel antsy. You might realize you are hungry. Whenever you notice that you are not counting anymore, you have a spark of awareness – you just woke up. Use that awareness and just come back to counting each breath from 1 to 10. Practice patience. Practice calm control. Practice staying present. You are training your mind puppy to come back on command, gently.

5. Practice. Do this for at least 5 minutes every day. If you enjoy it, do it for 10 or 15 minutes every day or do it several times a day. After 2 weeks, apply your newly honed concentrated attention on to the person speaking in front of you. If your mind wanders, or starts to get bored, or starts coming up with ideas while that person is speaking, use that same spark of awareness to come back to the person speaking. Come back to their voice, just like you came back to counting breaths from 1 to 10. With practice, you will notice that you aren’t drifting as much.

Leadership is a long term relationship. Listening is essential to building the relationships required and makes you a more effective leader. When a person is heard fully and completely, without interruption, without debate, they are more likely trust you. They are far more likely to be receptive to whatever ideas you would like them to consider – whether it is a request you are making of them or whether it is an opinion you would like to share with them.

It doesn’t take much to practice this. If you start now, in a few weeks you will already be a more skilled listener than the majority of people on the planet. Keep practicing and people will take notice and soon you will be a more effective leader. Are you listening?

© 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

This is a fun yet profound read that you can easily finish on a cross-country flight and that you will probably not forget. It will deeply interest most people faced with challenges in leading a growing organization. The author’s main premise is that the forces of “automation, abundance, and asia” have combined to make speed to market, efficient production, and technical prowess mere table stakes in a global marketplace.  Left brain prowess is not enough – you need to also sharpen your right brain.

He asserts that just as our societies and economies moved from agriculture to industrial to information ages, we are now poised on the next transition – to the conceptual age.  In the past 50 years or so, he explains how our schools and workplaces honed and rewarded those with strong analytic skills and those adept at creating and manipulating functional technologies.  Mr. Pink shows us how these are no longer enough and that there are six “senses” that need to be honed to win in a more complex and global environment: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.  If you doubt this, witness the ridiculous success of the ipod and iphone.  Fortunately, he gives us more than theory; he tells stories about each of these six topics, provides exercises, and suggests additional reading to help us hone them.

Dan Pink is a best-selling author [Free Agent Nation, 2001] and was a chief speechwriter for former vice-president Al Gore.

(c) 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

Talent is necessary for building a winning leadership team, but talent is not sufficient. You can recruit the very best in every functional area of responsibility in your organization, but unless they work well together, you will fail to create sustainable value. And in a competitive environment, you will lose to teams with far less talent if they work well together but you don’t. There is a tongue in cheek axiom that comes as a corollary to this – “I’d rather be lucky than good.” If you believe in blind luck, go with God and stop reading. If you believe we make our own luck, I’d like to share three principles for creating a great leadership team and some practical insights into each: agreement on the mission, clear communication, and balance.

Part I: Agreement on the mission
I have seen many leaders use the Moses Model to building a mission statement. They go off on a retreat or vacation or a hot shower, have an inspired moment there, and then come back to their teams proclaiming the answer. They proceed to sell that mission to their teams – and since they are the boss, declaring their answer with passion and personal force, constructive debate vanishes. This approach is useful for entrepreneurs forming a raw start-up, but once a team is in place to grow an organization, this model fails. Agreement on the mission sold by our would-be Moses usually only lasts until the first rough spot on the way. At the first substantive challenge, doubt overwhelms action and debate about direction overwhelms collaboration among the leadership team – usually as mumblings without the leader present.

There are leaders who declare themselves knowledgeable and self-aware (which is always a tip-off to the wise) who conduct an offsite to create their strategy, mission statement, vision statement, product roadmap – it comes in many flavors! This process ends in the same failure case as the Moses Model because of the Trump Effect. When Mr. Trump speaks, his lieutenants adjust their world view (intentionally or subconsciously) to more closely align with his. Sometimes the Trump Effect is blunt. I’ve seen a well-known CEO publically impugn the intellect and character of an exec who had the audacity to present an idea not in alignment with his own view. But even if the leader is benign and merely declares a firm belief, they suck the creativity right out of the room just by speaking. Inevitably these well meant offsite exercises result in missions accepted by the leadership team rather than embraced by them. And again, at the first sign of trouble, doubt overwhelms action.

Getting a group of human beings with diverse personal and professional needs and wants to agree on a mission is not easy. It requires a Socrates Model: a leader must ask questions, not just in an offsite, but as a course of daily practice with the leadership team. It means listening without debating. In group settings, it means calling directly on those who are silent to express their view. It requires a leader to offer assertions as a foil for debate; to foster a respectful and rational discussion to challenge those assertions. The leader’s role is to seed the discussion, provoke the team to aspire to something more challenging than they would otherwise do on their own, and push the team in to making a conscious choice. And all the while, listening carefully for tone, for ideas, for fears, and assumptions.

A team sometimes needs the leader to decide direction – especially if an ambivalent set of choices are reached. Using a Socrates Model, the leader suspends judgment until the last reasonable moment. After dissenters and creative thinkers have voiced their ideas and heard those of others, if the discussion doesn’t naturally resolve to an agreed upon mission, the team will usually call on the leader to choose. At that point, a leader can impose will and do so effectively. In a Socrates Model, the team is pulling the leader into a choice they can embrace, whereas in a Moses Model or Trump Effect, the leader is pushing his choice upon the team.

It is important to note, that even if everyone says “We are agreed!” there will always be one straggler in the group. They might not voice it, but you can be certain they are still quite unsure of the merit of the mission. Your job as the leader is to flush them out. It’s alright if they voice doubts in a leadership team setting. It is not acceptable if they voice those doubts outside the team.

Andy Grove made popular a process of cutting through this issue: Agree and commit or disagree and commit, but commit you will. I have also used this methodology and watched it used, but you have to be very careful. Some human beings are good at declaring “all for one and one for all” in a group setting, while still harboring what they believe to be a better idea and then complaining about it among those not on the leadership team. Inevitably this behavior will surface and when it does, you need to challenge that person privately about their ability to commit fully to the mission. Assuming they do re-commit, it can only be on the condition that the next time they subvert privately, they forfeit their role on the team.

Regardless of what process you use to come to agreement on a mission, the most important point is forming enough conviction. Your team will need that conviction to face with courage the seemingly insurmountable challenges that are always encountered along the way to achieving any mission worthy of pursuit.

© 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

Each of those activities can develop bonds among individuals in a team. Each activity can foster and help define relationships with better communication. In my experience, however, none of these are sustainable because the lessons learned in the ropes course, or the 2am bar conversation, or personality workshop wasn’t applied in the work environment. For communication improvements in a leadership team to be sustainable, they must be learned and applied in the practice of daily activity.

Almost a decade ago I learned a powerful communication protocol derived from a program by Julio Olalla that dramatically improved the function of my management team and my function among them as the leader. After some years of practice with this, and watching others apply similar approaches, I have distilled a 3-part system that can applied anywhere by anyone. The three components are: request, commitment, and breakdown.

In most cases, communication failure stems from a lack of understanding between two people about a commitment being requested or made. The first element in clear communication is the request. You want something done, you need access to information, you need the use of a resource, etc. So you ask for it. How you ask for it has a direct impact on the likelihood that you will get what you expect. And every request puts in motion a foundation of trust. You must be clear that you are requesting a promise. And you must be sure that they have a detailed understanding about what you want and when you want it. The clear request formula is:

I need (describe the action and deliverable in detail) by (be specific about the date). Can you do that?

Now you listen carefully for the clear commitment formula (next topic) and if you don’t get it, you ask for it. This might sound stilted, but it works because it forces the other person to reflect clearly. And that is the foundation of forming trust. Trust comes from making and relying upon a promise that gets delivered.

The second element in clear communication is the commitment. You have been asked to do something, provide something, deliver something, etc. If you cannot deliver on the request, just saying “no” isn’t enough. Propose an alternative. If you do make a commitment, then you must make a specific commitment about what you will do and when. You must reflect the request details completely in order to create a bond of trust. The clear commitment formula is:

I will (re-state the action and deliverable in your own words) by (date you are willing to commit to).

If the request you get is fuzzy, you have an obligation to make it clear. In the event that you cannot make a specific time commitment to deliver what is being requested, you are obligated to “commit to a commitment” – in other words, state a specific timeframe in which you will be able to make a specific promise to deliver on the request. Again, this might sound stilted, but in my experience, this simple formulaic response forms sustained and growing trust.

Obviously there are more times when the requested action or timeframe is not the same as what can be promised. Negotiation ensues, but it is the obligation of the person making the commitment to commit only to what can be delivered with confidence and to express that level of confidence in precise terms.

The third element in clear communication is the breakdown. A clear request has been made. A negotiated clear commitment has been given. The two people go off and work on other projects, make other requests, promises, and go about their busy schedules. Something unexpected appears and the commitment made is at risk or no longer possible as promised. It is the obligation of the one who made the promise to immediately inform the requestor that the promise is now at risk or no longer tenable. This is declaring a breakdown.

Many people skip this step for fear of being seen as weak or having failed to deliver. It is not the failure to deliver that serves as the breach of trust. It is the failure to declare a breakdown that breaches trust. Some people choose to be heroic and pull out all stops to deliver as promised. This is not sustainable and worse, it misses the opportunity to create a shared understanding of the operating limits in which the team is functioning. Declaring a breakdown takes this form:

I am sorry, but the promise to (detailed request in your own words) by (date you committed to) is now at risk due to (give explanation for what caused the breakdown)

I need your help to resolve this issue. Can we change the request details or timeframe? Can you help me eliminate or mitigate the cause of the breakdown?

If this whole process sounds stilted, please try it for a few weeks. You will see it works, your style will infuse the protocol, and soon it will seem not only normal but necessary.

Any two people in the team who are engaging in this request-promise-breakdown dance serve as a foundation of trust for the rest of the team. Each pair is interwoven in a networked fabric with all the other pairs – and it is from this fabric that the team derives performance. Failure to understand this interdependency is one of the most common sources of friction in leadership teams. All the workshops, ropes courses, and late night beer confessions ring hollow and fade if this dance is not in place.

You as the leader do not have to preach this methodology. You can embody it by making clear requests, making clear commitments, clarifying requests from others, clarifying commitments from others. And best of all, when you declare a breakdown or help someone else do it, you demonstrate the most important source of trust – your action.

(c) 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

A typical leadership team has between 5 and 10 members. Too few, and the power is too weak. Too many and discussion becomes unwieldy. Because the challenges faced by even small organizations today are technically complex and often global, the best leadership teams include a rich diversity of human beings. Diversity means men and women. At least a 70-30 split on gender and if you can get there, then 50-50. Diversity today means having more than two ethnic backgrounds represented. Also important, you will need at least three substantively different sets of professional experience on the team to help avoid re-learning lessons. Finally, diversity means you will need a balance of learning styles to ensure that you don’t have too many left-brains or too many right-brains.

Notice that there isn’t an emphasis on communication style or personality type. Communication style is far less relevant than clear communication. A person can be wonderfully social and diplomatic, but if their requests and commitments are not clear, it won’t matter if you enjoy the conversation. On the subject of personality, I am not a big fan of personality typology (eg, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, etc.) applied to teamwork. First, your personality isn’t something that you can do anything about. Second, it becomes very complex to map your profile against other profiles in a practical way. In my experience, what matters more in balancing a team is how each member prefers to learn. There are two basic learning styles: differentiators (those who naturally jump to analysis) and integrators (those who naturally jump to synthesis).

Differentiators enjoy comparing, planning, and keeping score (such as setting goals, achieving milestones, defeating competitors, setting benchmarks, etc.) They typically like to work on questions that deal with “what’s wrong.” Integrators enjoy exploring, building, and storytelling. They typically like to work on questions that deal with “what’s right.” You need both and they don’t naturally understand each other’s language or motivations and as a result are often suspect of each other’s value. Your job is to help translate from one to the other and to encourage a sincere appreciation of each style.

Notice that there isn’t an emphasis on competency. Getting someone who understands and agrees to the mission and communicates well is of far greater value to the team than someone who is particularly adept at one or more functional areas. You absolutely need talent on your team. But don’t fall in love with talent. Remember that a brilliant executive with clever ideas only gets them done if they work well with the rest of your team. Time and again, I have seen bursts of brilliance from an ego-driven executive that leads to sudden and celebrated gains. The momentary exuberance on the team fades away in a matter of months, not years, and it’s not long before that ego-driven executive is boxed into ineffectiveness or driven out of the organization. If you want to create sustained trust and superior performance, you need to balance gender, ethnicity, professional experience, and above all, learning styles.

Last Word

A mentor early in my career once said: “everything in business eventually comes down to two people coming to agreement” and in 25 years I have not found one example to the contrary. Even in a company of many tens of thousands of employees, every aspect of every decision and project always came down to two people. Sales rep and buyer. Customer service agent and client. Product manager and executive. Engineer and designer. Employee and manager. Entrepreneur and investor. So many combinations and permutations, and throughout all of those pairs of humans, whenever a few of them were in agreement on the mission, were clear in their communication, and respected each other’s value, a foundation of trust ensued and spread to hundreds of others.

It doesn’t take much to build trust and it is remarkably resilient under stress in a complex and changing world. Work hard on this, and you will create a great leadership team.

(c) 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

Storytelling is not a skill everyone is born with. But it’s a skill we can all develop. People on your team want to believe! They want to believe you know where we are going, or you will get us there even if you aren’t sure of the exact path at this moment. People LOVE stories because that is how they reassure themselves in the midst of chaos that what they are working on matters. They want stories about where they are going. They want stories that compares what they are doing with others. And they love to laugh and learn from stories that show where they have been.

Sincerely acknowledging contribution is necessary to sustain motivation during the hard times. It’s not hard to do and doesn’t require a lot of effort or expensive gifts. A thank-you note is enough most of the time. Public recognition of accomplishments, contributions, efforts, and even mere attempts sets the benchmark not only for the people who are performing tasks but also sets the standard for the leaders in your organization.

Negotiation is a practical and essential skill for every leader. Negotiation is often misunderstood to be the domain of clever deal makers. It’s actually really simple. Make very clear requests for a promise. Don’t walk away until you understand exactly what the promise is – what is being done, when, and what the standard of excellence is. And then check up on the status of that promise to see how you can help. It’s that simple. And if you need to make a promise, make damn sure you are clear about what you are going to do, by when, and what the standard of excellence is. Make sure you follow up with your requester on the status of your promise and any help you need to fulfill it. By doing that, you are modeling the behavior you expect.

(C) 2008 Michael Schutzler, all rights reserved.

The second key behavior is making a brazen choice; taking a firm position even in the face of great doubt. We have doubts about the facts, doubts about our abilities, doubts about our teams, and even more doubts than can be listed here. If we doubt deeply enough then we doubt even our doubts, which in turn frees us to take action. This is the boldness that breaks the stalemate of analysis paralysis that often comes from doubt. We take a position because we have listened carefully, we have learned all we can in the time we have, we know the facts we know, we know the limits of those facts, and we choose to act because we can and because we know that not acting is like dying. And in some situations, not acting will in fact lead to death.

Finally, the third behavior is decisive action. After sifting fact from fiction, after taking a position despite the lack of sufficient evidence to fully know a course of action, we act with confidence as though we knew for sure. We declare a course and we exhort others to join. They join because they helped create the vision of where we are going. If we are clever, we have chosen a future bold enough, challenging enough, and far enough in the future to drive our intention, our invention, and aspiration for years. And often in secret we continue to doubt.

Without these three behaviors, leadership fails to inspire, fails to sustain, and fails to achieve.

(C) 2008 Michael Schutzler, all rights reserved.