Seize control: why “No” is the key leadership tool you need
If you’ve been following along, you know we’ve shared two key mantras for leaders managing through the change of the past 18 months: Put on your oxygen mask first. Focus on your most important relationships.
There is a third silver lining that our senior leader clients have told us they want to bring forward as they begin to see the light at the end of the Zoom tunnel.
Ruthlessly prioritize your time and the time of your team. Call it effectiveness, call it efficiency, call it productivity – it’s all about getting stuff done, but making sure it’s the right stuff. The wild early days of the pandemic forced many leaders to get ultra-focused on the most important things to get them through the crisis. As pressures ease, it has become easier to get distracted and go back to the days of trying to do it all. But now is not the time to return to those bad habits. Now is the time to focus, prioritize, and draw some boundaries.
According to Gallup’s latest State of the American Workplace report, only a third of employees are engaged at work. At the other end, 16% of employees are actively disengaged, and the remaining 51% of employees are not engaged — they’re just there. Even worse? 65 percent of managers – the ones most likely to influence employee engagement – are disengaged. So why does any of that matter? Because engagement is directly related to productivity. From your seat in the C-Suite, this ought to be pretty scary.
The tailwinds of the pandemic, against the backdrop of a slowly rebounding economy and questions about return to work strategies, create a tough environment to try and get the most effectiveness out of your team. So how do you keep fatigued leaders focused and productive while the new normal shakes out?
- Get clear about priorities. Pick a small number of the most critical activities that have a strong line of sight to the organization’s strategy. Build clear agreements within your team and with other teams on the top priorities and on who ultimately serves as the decision maker. Repeat these priorities until you are blue in the face so there is no confusion.
- Provide air cover: Help clear the way and minimize distractions so your team can focus on the work at hand. Establish a set of criteria or questions you can ask to map new ideas and requests back to the core priorities – if the work doesn’t support the broader agreed-upon themes – it doesn’t happen. Empower your team to say no.
- Create white space: It’s impossible to build, modify, or execute on a plan when there is no room for preparation or reflection. Scenario planning and innovative thinking require white space. It's hard to come up with new ideas or see different angles when you're under fire, feeling the pressure. Your leaders need quiet time and reflection to settle their brains and open up to other possibilities.
Get clear about priorities
We are working with a C-suite team right now that has been plagued by what you might call “squirrel chasing.” For about a year, they have repeated a cycle of spending a great deal of time building strategies and plans, only to change them in the days and weeks after finalizing those plans. Deeper down in the organization, this “swirl” is causing less than optimal execution and the loss of key talent.
The antidote is simple. It starts with creating a team purpose and set of operating principles that define how the team will work together. Commit to agreements about how decisions will get made, how work will get discussed, what expectations exist for interpersonal dynamics. If you’re worrying about the ability of the team to have candor, to collaborate effectively, or drive toward a common goal – it’s really difficult to get aligned on a set of priorities. We’ve all been part of teams where those agreements aren’t explicitly laid out and best case scenario, it leads to incorrect assumptions and process breakdowns. Worst case scenario, it leads to dysfunctional team dynamics that derail the work altogether. Once you have this alignment, turn your attention to a short list of business priorities – and stick to it.
Consider using the Eisenhower Matrix if your leaders are struggling to prioritize or fall subject to squirrel chasing. Gather your team around a virtual whiteboard and follow this process:
- Step 1: List the major activities that need to be completed by your team
- Step 2: Score these on importance or impact (from 0 for no importance to 10 for maximum importance) and on urgency and time sensitivity (0 to 10)
- Step 3: Plot the activities on the matrix, based on your scores:
- High Importance/Low Urgency (Decide)
- High Importance/High Urgency (Do!)
- Low Importance/Low Urgency (Delete)
- Low Importance/High Urgency (Delegate)
- Step 4: Prioritize appropriately and encourage your leaders to delegate or eliminate low-importance activities. If they forget, get out the matrix and remind them.
Provide air cover
Once you have a clear sense of strategic priorities and the team is aligned on the go-forward plan, what could go wrong? A ton.
There’s any number of roadblocks that could derail your team’s productivity – time, money, people, emotions - for starters.
If your team is worried about missteps or failing, if they don’t have the resources they need to execute, if they have to expend time and energy justifying the strategy to stakeholders – well, they aren’t going to get it done, at least not with a sense of efficiency and productivity. Enter YOU. The idea of air cover is to offer your team some level of protection or advocacy that allows them to stay heads down, take necessary risks, say no to others, and occasionally – test and fail in order to succeed. So what does that look like?
- Remember you’re not the pilot. You’re not there to intercede and tell them how to do it differently. You’re there to knock down barriers that might get in their way. Air cover is support, not control.
- Give them a clear runway. Eliminate other projects on their plate. Cut back on meetings you’ve asked them to attend. Explain to other team members why and how they are involved. Clearly convey your support of and trust in your leaders. Reduce the queries that come their way by anticipating and preempting them. And support them when they say no to others in the organization.
- Know enough to be helpful. Don’t get into the weeds or micromanage the project in case you need to step in. Rather, set up a system in which updates can be shared and red flags can be raised early enough for you to react and give guidance.
- Get clear on the team’s expectations of you. When they do raise that red flag, make sure you understand what kind of air cover they need. Should you run interference with senior stakeholders? Do you need to help solicit additional funding or resources? Or do you just need to be aware what the potential outcomes can be so you can help defend?
Create white space
At the beginning of the pandemic, we jumped into the virtual environment with gusto, socializing and meeting online in an effort to maintain a sense of connection and productivity. That has largely proved to be unsustainable and in many cases has created a counterproductive schedule that allows for very little reflection, planning, and prep time. And though it may feel counterintuitive, if we don’t slow down and reflect, we really can’t move forward.
How do you help your leaders with this?
- Model it: We can hardly tell our teams about the importance of white space if we’re running from one thing to the next. Rather than have standing meetings, set up set “office hours” to check in with team members. Shift weekly 1:1s to biweekly. Use Microsoft’s ‘Focus Plan’ option to hold empty slots in your calendar. In other words, demonstrate the importance of rebalancing and then give your leaders permission to do the same.
- Shorten your meetings: No one needs 60-minute meetings. What we all need is efficient, well-run, intentional meetings which can often happen in a fraction of an hour. Ask your team to create meeting agendas and share materials in advance. Use the time to discuss key points in an open dialogue rather than waste it in “presentation” mode. You’ll save some time on the back end.
- Change up your routine: How much of our grind is tied to a daily routine of log in, check emails, respond to emails, and so on? Perhaps we need to shake it up. Try starting with reflection time (ignore the inbox!) rather than trying to do it at the end of the day when you’re tired. Better yet, change your environment. Relocate to a different spot that might add inspiration – an outdoor coffee shop, a park bench, even a different room in your house!
We know we’re living in different times even since we started this blog series six months ago. We’ve talked about the importance of maintaining balance and leveraging connections to manage through the constant change. What we underestimated is just how much that “change” continues to be a part of the permanent landscape. But we also know that as senior executives, you have to keep driving your business forward – asking your teams to step up, be productive, drive for results.
And it’s possible to do both. Lead with empathy. Help draw work-life boundaries. Encourage relationship building. Break down barriers. Set clear goals.
In other words, use the silver linings we’ve gleaned from the past 18 months to define a completely new leadership model that works for you, your team, and your business. Embrace the new normal – it’s here to stay.
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Last night I started reading a book by Irvin Yalom, a psychiatrist who has written several novels that I’ve loved. But right now I’m reading something different—a book of short lessons he’s learned from many years of working with patients.
Early in his career, Yalom was inspired by something he read. The gist of it was that all people have a natural tendency to want to grow and become fulfilled—just an acorn will grow up to become an oak—as long as there are no obstacles in the way. So the job of the psychotherapist was to eliminate the obstacles to growth.
This was a eureka moment for Yalom. At the time, he was treating a young widow. Suffering through grief for a long while, she wanted help because she had a “failed heart”—an inability ever to love again.
Yalom had felt overwhelmed. How could he possibly change someone’s inability to love? But now he looked at it differently. He could dedicate himself to identifying and eliminating the obstacles that kept her from loving.
So they worked on that—her feelings of disloyalty to her late husband, her sense that she was somehow responsible for his death, and the fear of loss that falling in love again would mean. Eventually they eliminated all of the obstacles. Then her natural ability to love—and grow—returned. She remarried.
Reading this story made me think of the responsibility of leaders toward the people they need to develop—and for the growth and learning that leaders themselves require to be the best that they can be.
Many leadership development challenges seem overwhelming—even impossible. The leaders that we coach usually have a list of areas where they want to get better, but how? How do you “build better relationships with your peers and direct reports”? How are you supposed to “get out of the weeds and demonstrate enterprise-wide thinking” or “build executive presence”? All of these goals are as abstract as they are huge.
So the best approach is to not focus on the huge and fuzzy goal. What we try to do is to break these goals down into concrete actions through working on real-time business problems. To put it simply, though, we do just as Yalom does: We identify the obstacles and work toward knocking them off, one at a time.
Leadership development is not usually a quick fix. You’re not going to develop executive presence through a half-day workshop or a one-time meeting. If you’re interested in meaningful, lasting growth—whether for yourself or for those who work for you—it’s a commitment.
But don’t ever forget that we’re all capable of growth throughout life and our careers. The trick is to find the right coach or mentor who will guide you through that obstacle course.
In my work as an executive coach, I meet at least once a month with each of my coaching clients.
I often talk to them on the phone and exchange emails with them as we work on their real-time business challenges. So, what happens in those conversations? Recurring themes start to come up. I find that many leaders have a “talk track” of words and phrases that they use all the time—without always being aware of the impact. For better or worse, this talk track ends up becoming part of their executive presence and their brand as a leader.
One of my clients had a talk track for many years that led to a reputation for negativity. In one meeting alone, I noticed that he had described about ten different work experiences as “nightmares.” Strong word! So we talked about this talk track. And the next time I heard him lapse into that way of talking, I decided to delve into it. “What I just heard from you was an example of that ‘talk track’ we’ve talked about,” I said. “So let’s talk about this. You say it was a ‘nightmare.’ Okay—why do you call it a nightmare?”
The upshot was that he had made a sales presentation but didn’t get the deal. I said, “Let’s use accurate language to describe the situation.” Was it a nightmare? No. Maybe it was a disappointment. Maybe he could have said, “Unfortunately, we didn’t get the deal” or “They decided to go with another vendor” and state why, objectively. My goal was to get him to stop “catastrophizing” when something didn’t work out.
This leader didn’t want to be defined by that negative “talk track” anymore. So I told him that the only way to do that is to turn up the volume on a very different talk track—one that captures the brand and presence that you want to project.
I’ve had clients who always talked about how difficult or challenging or complex things seemed to them. You’ve probably had a boss or colleague with any number of talk-track themes:
- “I’m so exhausted/overwhelmed/unhappy/unappreciated….”
- “Everyone here is useless/stupid/incompetent….”
- “It’s such a difficult environment/project/client/travel schedule…”
- “That will never work/We won’t get that deal/It’s a dumb idea/What were they thinking?”
Often people aren’t even aware of how much they harp on a conversational theme and how negatively this lack of executive presence is affecting their professional brand. So what can you do to make sure your talk track is working for you and not against you as a leader? Take these four steps:
1. Identify your talk-track themes.
What are the words and phrases that you find yourself constantly using in conversations at work? Write down the things you seem to say almost every day—or think about what themes come up all the time for you in conversation at work or elsewhere.
2. Consider the impact of your talk track.
As a leader, your words carry more weight than others. You’re setting the tone for your team or division or organization. Whether that tone is absurdly optimistic, cynical, critical, upbeat, energized, or overly emotional, it’s going to be the model for others. Make sure that your talk track is consistent with the values and behaviors you want to drive.
3. Challenge the reality of your talk track.
How accurate is your talk track? Do you have a natural tendency to see the part of the glass that’s empty? How do you respond to setbacks? Do you gloss over the pain? Do you make a mountain out of a molehill? It’s crucial for leaders to be balanced, objective, and real about what’s happening. Your language choices need to reflect that.
4. Consider what you could say differently.
It’s easy to lapse into your talk track. When you catch yourself saying the same old things, try to catch yourself as if an alarm was going off. Can you find another way to say it—something that’s consistent with the brand and presence you want to project.
Don’t get me wrong. Leaders do need to be “real” about challenges and setbacks, and a somber tone may be appropriate and even helpful at times. The goal is to become more aware of your talk track and what it’s doing for you and others. As a leader, people take their cues from you. Before you know it, your talk track can dominate or drive the culture.
Changing your talk track is a challenge. Our ways of talking and viewing the world are pretty ingrained through several decades of life experiences. But change is also very possible. Pump up the volume on a more positive talk track for the holidays, and your presence will be viewed as a gift.
A while back, I heard an anecdote on the radio about cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and it really struck me. Surprisingly, Ma said that once of his biggest inspirations was chef, author, and television personality Julia Child.
Huh?! Well, it turns out that thinking about Julia Child helped him get in the right mindset before a performance. He would think about watching her on television, making a roast chicken that looked beautiful—only to have it fall off the plate and onto the floor. Did she flip out? No, she never stopped smiling. She just acknowledged what happened and went on with the show.
Reflecting on this, Ma realized that the best mindset he could have as a performer was to ensure that his audience was having a good experience—rather than worrying about being perfect. Speaking to the St. Louis Post Dispatch last October, he said, “The idea of performing is hosting. It’s like you’re giving a party. You invite people to come to a place and enjoy something special; basically, they’re subject to whatever you dish out. You want them to have a great time, they want to have a great time, and what are you doing to facilitate that?”
In a Malcolm Gladwell article that I read years ago, Yo-Yo Ma also admitted that he used to strive for perfection in performance. When he was 17, he practiced a Brahms sonata for a year with technical perfection in mind. So what happened when he did that? “In the middle of the performance I thought, I’m bored. It would have been nothing for me to get up from the stage and walk away. That’s when I decided I would always opt for expression over perfection.
”There is a valuable lesson here for executive presentations. In my experience, many leaders worry too much about precision when they present. Aiming for total accuracy, it’s easy to end up with text-heavy PowerPoint slides—and far too many of them. And once you have a ton of bullets on a slide, you usually feel compelled to read them all. At best, slides still tend to distract the audience’s energy away from you—and the presentation is really all about you, not your visuals.
Think about it: What would you rather be able to say at the end of your presentation?
- I covered every point perfectly and spoke without a single stumble.
- I connected deeply with the audience, and I could sense that they were completely engaged with my presentation.
It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? If you’re able to really connect with your audience’s questions, concerns, and needs, they won’t even notice if the imperfections that jump out to you as the expert.
Of course, there’s a catch here. Connection trumps precision… but the more you master your topic through preparation and practice, the more you’re freed up to focus on connecting with the audience. When you don’t have to work to remember your key points and transitions, you can concentrate more on your eye contact, gestures, and reading the room.
So give some thought to drawing some inspiration from Julia Child, just as Yo-Yo Ma does as a concert performer. When you’re giving a speech, you’re the host, and your job is to set the tone and make sure that everyone has a good experience.
That’s a recipe for a successful presentation.
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This article was originally publish on Rotman Management
IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.
The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.
In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.
You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
Learn more about business simulations
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.