About ‘Leadership Weekly Digest’ (LWD): The goal of this weekly newsletter is to highlight quality articles from the past week –in a condensed format– that discuss leadership, with a focus on employee engagement. Much of the content comes from those we follow on Twitter, and members of the Employee Engagement Network.
You can also subscribe to the RSS Feed for LWD.
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen
Many of you will know Christensen as the author of the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma‘ where he provided insight on why disruptive technological change can cause dominant companies to fail, and what to do to avoid it.
In this post, there isn’t really one theme that I want to highlight (the post is about using good management practices in your personal life), but rather a bunch of statements that Christensen makes that I found really valuable. The first has to do with providing advice to experts:
I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove [the Chairman of Intel] what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
The second, has to do with management (and every manager should consider printing this and pasting it to their desk for when inevitable frustrations arise):
Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
The third has to do with his observation of fellow Harvard Business School classmates (including Jeff Skilling of Enron infamy), and their tendency to be ‘successful’ but unhappy:
People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
When people who have a high need for achievement… have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward… In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement.
While there are many other great nuggets in this post, which make reading the whole thing a must, the last I will share is his observations on the definition and value of humility:
One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
LeBron Lends Lesson on Loyalty by Adam Morris
I’m not sure which personnel change has received more coverage, Obama firing McChrystal, or LeBron James leaving Cleveland for Miami. Certainly the situation is very different, in the first case it was the attitude of the subordinate in question, in the latter it seems the ownership may be the ones with the bad attitude.
Morris points out in his article that LeBron is deciding to leave a team that offered him more money ($30M more!), the ability to play in his home town, and a very loyal base of fans, for a chance to play on a team that has a better chance to win a championship. But is that really the reason?
As an organization, you might do everything right but inevitably you will still lose a star employee. Sometimes, it’s out of your control. What you can control is how you handle these situations. There is nothing to be gained by burning a bridge that doesn’t need to be burnt. Who knows, perhaps you and that star employee might want to reunite one day.
That was a lesson that Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, apparently was never taught. Within an hour of LeBron’s announcement, Gilbert posted this scathing Open Letter [available via Morris' post] to Fans on the Cavaliers website. This provides great insight into the type of leadership at the top of the Cavaliers organization and demonstrates why they were unable to earn LeBron’s loyalty. After all, loyalty is a two-way street and it’s similar to respect in that it must be earned, not demanded or assumed [Emphasis Psyche].
Morris does his best to be diplomatic, by suggesting that it was ‘out of Cleveland’s control’, but I think his last comment really nailed truth of the matter, and certainly what leaders can learn from this example!
PDF 
