ASK THE EXPERT: Leadership Essentials 

BONNIE GORBATY- Founder & President of Inner Resources

Bonnie Gorbaty founded her company, Inner Resources, in 1980 with a mission to assist in the growth and success of businesses of all sizes. One of her key areas of focus in achieving this is on the role of the leader in the organization. With over thirty years of consulting experience, Ms. Gorbaty’s expertise aids in bringing about organizational growth by designing, customizing and implementing appropriate processes and programs that effectively execute business strategies.

Hill & Partners asked Bonnie to share with us some of her insight on leadership and what it takes to fit the role:

1)   In your own words, how would you define a great leader?  A great leader is someone who is able to attract, inspire and engage others in doing things that otherwise they would not be doing.

2)   What advice do you have for best inspiring or motivating followers?  Leaders who are able to clearly articulate and enthusiastically relay their visions of new possibilities offer that initial inspiration and motivation to engage followers.  Then followers make the choice to follow that leader and their vision.  From there, the leader/follower relationship develops where each offers what they are willing to do for the other.

3)   What are the top three things you would recommend a leader always keep in mind when aiming to make an impact? Top 3 things:  Simply to Communicate, Communicate and then Communicate again.  While there are a number of things that leaders do to communicate well, there is nothing more important in leading others than to keep them connected to you.  Then, it is perhaps the next top three things, being true to what you say through your actions, your decisions and your commitments.

4)   What do you see as common errors in people that try to fulfill a leadership role? Confusing leading with what we do when we manage.  Leading is dealing with the unknown possibilities while managing is handling the known realities.  The mindset, motivations and intentions are very different as are the outcomes.  Managers succeed by creating specific outcomes in certain, repeatable ways.  Leaders succeed by moving others along with them toward new realities that may or may not come to fruition.

5)   What would you say to the argument that “leadership is natural-born skill, you either have it or you don’t”? Leadership is natural up to a point.  We decide to lead and, once we do, we embark on a journey of developing what we call our “skills of character” through our self-awareness and self-trust in becoming the leader only we can be.  Each person needs to define who they are as a leader in order to be truly authentic and creative in leadership.  This is what attracts the right followers to you.

ASK THE EXPERT: Strategic Leadership

BONNIE GORBATY- Founder & President of Inner Resources

[SAME INTRO & PHOTO AS PART I]

Hill & Partners asked Bonnie to lend her expertise about the essential role of strategy in when it comes to leadership:

1)   Creating impact often times requires a strategic plan. What advice would you give for the beginning stages of creating a strategy?

Strategy is first and foremost a leadership challenge.  When we embark upon a Strategic Plan, we are choosing to explore how we can be most effective and pursue those initiatives and changes that will enable us to succeed.  At the beginning of any strategic process, it is important to help others understand that this is all about being honest in our assessments of who we are and can be.  Then we must be willing to think out of the box in finding the new, better or different ways to pursue our strategy and making the commitments to change as needed.

2)   What role would you say workplace culture has in creating and maintaining a high-functioning business strategy? Workplace culture is ultimately the competitive edge to beat.  That is because it is the hardest part of a company’s successful and sustainable existence.  Culture, when developed in a conscious way, becomes the most important ingredient in implementing a strategy and consistently delivering desired market performance and customer service.

3)   If a leader finds the followers are losing interest, motivation, or direction in the process, how would you advise to get them back on track? What keeps the leader/follower relationship on track is a steadfast commitment to why we exist and what we are here to accomplish together.  That translates into a specific roadmap that includes:  1) A Mission and set of Core Values that reflect our higher purpose and how we need to show up to manifest it; 2) A clearly defined Vision that sets a target of what we want to accomplish and; 3) the Performance Goals & Metrics that put us on the right track to make it all happen.  To keep followers invested, leaders must continually remind them of these key areas of focus.

4)   What advice do you give for best presenting a strategic vision to one’s followers? You are always presenting and even promoting your strategic vision to your followers starting at the beginning of your Strategic Planning cycle when you give an overview and update of your vision then through the quarterly reviews for accountability that recognizes what is happening in moving us closer to the vision.  In between, we look for those opportunities to share the customer successes (ideally through the customer’s own voice) that clearly demonstrate the vision is real.

5)   Sometimes things do not go according to plan. What advice would you give someone in a leadership role for troubleshooting or attacking unforeseen challenges? Leadership is all about attacking the unforeseen challenges much like sales is dealing with the objections.  Knowing this from the beginning, you expect it and are ready for it at any time.

When leaders take the time to share such stories, they are able to create more personal, trusting, and committed relationships with their followers. So let’s look at why it matters to know your story and how can you share it so as to engage the hearts and minds of your followers.

As children, we learn about life and how things happen through stories like Winnie the Pooh. As we grow up, we read the narratives of history and mythology as a means of digesting the increasing complexity of life and the impact of our decisions. As young adults, we draw upon the stories of others as a guide for what is possible in our work, our relationships, and our selves.

There is every reason to believe that the power of story to inform, inspire, and motivate is just as viable in our adult life, if not more so. As leaders, we are tasked with tackling new, different, and even seemingly impossible scenarios. You don’t need a leader if you’re doing what you already know how to do.

Leaders need a way to engage others at a more primal level. To allay followers’ natural discomfort with change and awaken their unproven potential, leaders must get beyond the mental boundaries of resistance and move into the heart space, where the possibility of emotional engagement lies.

Dave, the leader I have been discussing in prior posts, is an object lesson in why the leader’s story is a secret ingredient to creating great followers. Like many others, Dave had a natural inclination as a leader to tell it like it is—to get right to the point. He didn’t mince words about the company’s successes or failures, nor did he miss an opportunity to thank people for their hard work or ask them to put in more effort.

But Dave had a recurring complaint about his people: they just didn’t seem to care as much as he did about the business. No matter what incentives he offered to get them to go the extra mile, no matter how generous the rewards he handed out when they hit a goal, he never felt that people were engaged beyond just getting the job done and getting out by 5:00 p.m. Dave himself was a model of hard-working, open-to-learning, always-going-for-excellence behavior. He truly believed that his company could be the best in the industry, but he needed his colleagues to feel the same.

Dave worked with a mentor who suggested tapping into the power of his story to more deeply engage his followers. The story would help Dave’s people understand who he was, and how his life experiences animated his vision for the company and his expectations of his colleagues.

Dave decided to use his next quarterly staff meeting to share his story. Here’s what he said:

"I usually start off by giving you an update on our performance last quarter, what we learned and where our focus will be for the upcoming quarter. But I want to start off at a different place today, because I want us to go forward in a different way together.

As all of you know, I am deeply committed to being the best company in our industry. And I happen to think we are doing a lot of the right things to get us there, but I also believe there is more we can all get from our time here together. It’s more of an attitude about why we choose to be here—what we are doing that really matters to the world we serve and how we can each use this experience to become our best.

So let me share a little about why this is so important to me. I was raised in a hard-working immigrant family that looked out for each other. We didn’t have a lot, but we expected a lot of ourselves and from each other. Each generation found that the best way to succeed in life was to do something on its own. So we started businesses or took over as others died or moved on to other things.

I lost my Dad to heart disease when I was twelve, so as the oldest child of three, I took it upon myself to care for my mother and siblings. My uncle gave me a job in his car repair shop that he had co-owned with my Dad. I never worked so hard and had so much expected of me. But I learned what I was capable of doing and accomplishing with my life.

This business offers us all an opportunity to find out what we are capable of doing with our lives. The challenges are there, and our vision is clear. But it’s all about us: I envision an organization of like-minded people who want to be here for something more than the financial reward. I want people to be here because they can learn to become their best selves and help each other along the way. I invite you to join me in working together to become the best company in the industry by becoming the best people we can be."

The Action Plan

• What are the life experiences that you bring to your leading?

• How can you weave your life story into your expectations of where you want your organization to go?

• How will you know that you are truly engaging your followers?

Unlike others in an organization, leaders must take not only an internal, operations point of view, they must also keep their eyes focused externally. As we’ll see, this internal/external focus lies at the heart of effective strategy formulation.

In my work with leaders over the past 20 years, I’ve found that when it comes to formulating and then executing on a strategy, great leaders do three things particularly well:

1. They create the space in their heads for the new thinking that’s required of strategic planning. This makes room for a new strategic plan to evolve.

2. They make the connections with the right people, not only to further evolve the strategic plan, but also to set the stage for execution.

3. They mold their plan into a vision—a story—and then they share the story in a way that captures the hearts and minds of the entire organization.

Let’s look at each of these functions in turn. There are so many ways that leaders clear space in their heads and allow their thinking to be informed and inspired. Which approach leaders choose has a lot to do with how their psychic energy flows, starting with how they get informed about the world at large.

In previous posts, I’ve described the difference between leaders who are predominantly informed from the outside world (extraversion) and those who look to their own inner world (introversion). The outside world has many ways to inform leaders: networking, outside advisors and mentors, and published news in any medium. The inner world tends to rely more on one’s own reflections, writing, philosophical readings, and meditation practices. Regardless of one’s preference for extraversion or introversion, leaders typically find that they need the ability to look both outward and inward.

We learn about the world in proportion to the number of sources open to us. John Chambers, longtime CEO of Cisco, has talked about how important it was to read publications outside the technology space. He would read magazines that focused on industries and businesses completely unrelated to his world in order to get fresh and different insights about bringing value and service to customers. In other words, leaders must not only create the mental space for new thinking, they also need to expose that space to ideas that lie outside their comfort zone. And the result of this creating the space function is an outline of the leader’s strategic thinking; sometimes it’s written down, sometimes it’s just in the leader’s head.

The making the connections function involves testing the reality of the new thinking. This is where the pedal hits the metal. Being tested by a few trusted followers who themselves find ways to stay open to the new thinking—this is the crucial inflection point that every vision must pass through if it is to become a reality.

How you choose to make these connections is often a reflection of the source of your psychic energy (extraversion or introversion). However you make the connection, it’s important to seek out people you trust and people who will challenge your thinking.

One of the young leaders I work with, who had launched a very successful technology consulting practice, found that success depended on scaling the operation. He hired some “older folks” with experience in growing a company to a very large size. Though their thinking was quite different from his, their perspective was invaluable.

Excellence in the sharing the story function is often what separates the best leaders from those who are merely average. Organizations need to be sold on why the new direction makes sense for the company; individuals in the company also need to be convinced that the new direction will be a boon for their jobs and careers.

The story that you create is like a thread that weaves through all aspects of the execution process, from start to finish. It’s important because it’s what people fall back on when they think “Why am I doing this?” Even though you may have spent days, weeks, or even months crafting the vision, remember that your people will be hearing it for the first time. So in telling the story, tell it in a compelling manner—and tell it frequently.

The Action Plan:

• What do you do to create space in your mind to think about the future of your business and your life of leading?

• What characterizes the relationship you have with the key people you choose to rely on in bringing your ideas forward?

• Think of a story that once moved you and compare it to how that message might have been communicated if it hadn’t been in the form of a story.

Focusing on things that are not done well can often teach us faster and better about what people really need from leaders than focusing on things done well. With that in mind, here are some quotes from the people on my call:

• “I guess one of the things you can learn about leadership is whether you have leaders in your firm or not. I am concluding that we don’t have any leaders.”

• “What I have noticed as well is that those in leadership roles seem to be very fearful of what has been going on during these hard economic times. So, there hasn’t been much communication about anything. We don’t know who else will be let go or what accounts have sliced their budget. So, it has led everyone to look out for themselves.”

• “I would add to that by saying it has destroyed the collaborative nature of our work and our company. No one is really reaching out to help anyone else. So, the morale has really gotten bad and there is a lack of creativity and opportunistic thinking going on that could potentially get us out of this bleak situation.”

Everyone agreed that over the last four years, there has been a huge need for leadership—and also a huge lack of it. Leaders need to manage fear—their own and also their employees’ fears. Leaders also need to communicate the hard decisions and explain the unpleasant realities so that the people get a sense of what is really happening. The lack of communication around important information leaves a gap that employees will fill one way or another; what they often do is blow things out of proportion, making the reality worse than it is or has to be.

What also becomes apparent when times are tough is that the people need to be trusted that they, too, can do some of the thinking that goes into figuring out more creative ways of handling the tough realities.

The absence of this kind of trust—and the work of rebuilding it—figured prominently in many of the stories that were shared on my recent call, as the following quote from one of the participants attests:

• “We were experiencing some major problems with one of our accounts. It all stemmed from the lack of teamwork and the lack of trust among team members that resulted from people not supporting each other and things falling through the cracks. No one in leadership or management was stepping up to the plate to address these concerns, so I decided to say something to the owner of my company. Instead of being part of the problem, I wanted to see if I could be part of the solution. He thanked me for bringing it to his attention and I suggested some initiatives that could begin to pull the people together. We are now slowly getting back on track and I wish I had said something sooner. I always look to others for leadership when I need to look more to myself.”

A number of these young leaders are beginning to see that leadership can happen in many ways and by anyone who sees what the people need. If they are willing and able to step up and fill the gap, they find that the people can be very responsive. Here’s how one of them put it:

• “I was surprised to find that as I reached out to others and began to ask questions and listen to what was going on for them, they began to offer their ideas and help in addressing the issues we were all dealing with. Even my boss began to turn to me to ask for some help, which helped me build my confidence that what I was doing was good for the firm.”

No one wishes for a downturn, but the current economic climate is highlighting the need for and tasks of leadership in the minds of the young people I spoke with on my call—and many more like them. They see that they do have the qualities to lead others and that there are many different opportunities right in front of them to step up and fill the gap that only leadership can provide.

Tough times help us realize this opportunity like no other.