Leadership Barometer 71 Demonstrate Integrity

November 11, 2020

There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.

There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.

Demonstrate Integrity

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach had a remarkably simple philosophy of doing business. It consisted of three simple little rules: 1) Do Right, 2) Do the best you can, and 3) Treat other people like you would like to be treated.

The basic Do Right Rule means acting with integrity. If doing what is right is such a basic and easy thing, why am I even bothering to write about it?

It’s simple; most leaders have a hard time figuring out what the right thing is. That is a stunning indictment to make, but I really believe it is true on occasion. Reason: in the melee of everyday challenges, it is so easy to make a judgment that seems right under the circumstances, but when extrapolated to its logical conclusion it is really not ethical, or moral, or it is just plain dumb.

Rationalization

For a leader, it is easy to rationalize the particular situation and convince yourself that something marginal is really OK to do “all things considered.” There must be a safeguard for this common problem. There is, and I will reveal it later in this article.

The Problem Escalation

I believe that most of the huge organizational scandals of the past started out as subtle value judgments by leaders in their organizations. There was a decision point where they could have taken path A or path B. While path B was “squeaky clean” in terms of the ethics involved, path A was also perfectly logical and acceptable based on the rules in place at the time and was also somewhat more profitable than Path B.

The problem is that if path A was acceptable today, then A+ would be fine the next day, and A++ the next. Other people would get involved, and the practice would get more embedded into the culture.

Eventually, after a few years, it was clear that rules were being bent all over the place in order for the organization to look good to investors. There was no convenient way to roll back the ethical clock, nor was there any impetus. They seemed to be “getting away with it.”

Ultimately the practice, whether it was Enron’s disappearing assets or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, became too big to hide and things blew up.

My contention is that these people were not intending to do bad things originally, they just got caught up in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance and had no way to quit the abuse. Of course, by that time they really were evil people doing evil things, but I believe it did not start out with those intentions.

At the start I believe these leaders were truly blind to the origin of corruption that brought down their empires and bankrupt thousands of individuals in the process.

The Antidote

How can leaders protect themselves from getting caught up in a web of deception if they were originally blind to the problem? It’s simple; they needed to create a culture of transparency and trust whereby being whistle blower was considered good because it protected the organization from going down the wrong path.

Imagine if the culture in an organization was such that when someone (anyone) in the company was concerned about the ethics of current practice and he or she brought that concern to light, there would have been a reward rather than punishment.

To accomplish this, leaders need to reinforce candor, in every phase of operations. It has to be a recognized policy that seeing something amiss brings with it an obligation to speak up, but that is OK because speaking up will bring rewards.

When leaders at all levels reward the whistle blower, it sets up a culture of high trust because it drives out fear. One of my favorite quotes is, “The absence of fear is the incubator of trust.”

The concept or rewarding candor creates opportunities for leaders to see things that would otherwise be hidden and take corrective action before the tsunami gets started.

It also allows leaders to be fallible human beings and make mistakes without having them become a reason for them to spend the rest of their life in jail.

So here is a good test of your leadership ability. How transparent is your organization? Do you truly reward employees when they bring up things that do not seem right to them, or are they put down and punished?


Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.


Leadership Barometer 65 How People Treat Each Other

September 20, 2020

There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.

There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.

How People Treat Each Other

You can tell the caliber of a leader instantly when you view how people in the organization treat each other. A good leader insists on constructive and helpful behaviors that model high trust and even affection.

Some people believe the word affection is too strong for the working world. I disagree. Groups that work for a great leader learn to really appreciate each other for their good qualities. That does not mean that everyone always gets along with no quarrels; that would be a phony environment.

Just like a family, people will eventually find some things to cause friction, but there is sincere affection behind any tension that shows trough as people work to resolve differences without doing emotional damage.

Good leaders teach their people to, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested, “Disagree Without Being Disagreeable.”

Where leadership is weak, squabbles between people lead to childish behaviors that can cause permanent damage to relationships. It is easy to witness this in most organizations.

As Lou Holtz observed, “you can find a thousand things to not like about somebody but you need to look for the things that you do like, that support the team effort.” In an environment of support and affection it is easy to become a close knit team that is hard to beat.

Good leaders insist that their group generates a set of specific behaviors. It is important to be able to point at these things and call each other when the behaviors are not being modeled. The leader always works to model the behaviors and actually verbalizes them frequently.

It may sound like this, “Thanks for your comment Frank, I appreciate how your words supported Mary’s effort because that is a value and behavior we cherish in our group.

Watch for the signs of a group that, while there are differences, handle those disconnects in a mature and loving way. A group like that is being guided by an excellent leader.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.


Leadership Barometer 19 Generates Passion

October 8, 2019

A really good measure of the skill of leaders is how much passion they are able to generate in the organization.

Generates Passion

A hallmark of great leaders is that they are not only passionate people themselves, but they have an uncanny way of infusing the entire population with that passion.

That ability is a real gift. I believe most leadership skills can be learned, but the ability to spread one’s passion to others is usually an inherited trait.

If there is no seed, you cannot get it from reading textbooks or from going to courses. The good news is that most people do have the seed of potential in their DNA. They just need to hone the skill so it is optimized.

Get a great mentor

So, how does a leader develop this skill? One way is through a great mentor or a role model. If you do not have any charismatic leaders in your organization that can teach this skill, I recommend you go online and look up some of the great people from history or present who are particularly good at this skill.

I think of people like Zig Zigler, Earl Nightingale, Warren Bennis, Napoleon Hill, Lou Holtz, or Vince Lombardi.

There are literally hundreds of great role models, and they all have content on the WEB or in programs that can be purchased. A great source of inspirational tape programs on this topic is the Nightingale Conant Corporation.

You can find enough material to keep you learning about spreading passion for years. I know because I have invested in most of the tapes in their library and listen to them often. I have memorized the key points and seek to apply them whenever I can.

Passion is closely aligned with the sense of ownership. If you can get people to recognize the quality of their life is really more in their own hands than they realize, you are on the right track.

Teach people to reject being victims and to take control of their situation. Once that is accomplished, it is easy to generate passion because passion is all about an intense desire to achieve something because it will improve the quality of one’s life or help other people.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations. He can be reached at bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585-392-7763.


Leadership Barometer 11 Demonstrate Integrity

August 5, 2019

One great measure of the quality of a leader is how much that person demonstrates integrity.

That is an easy thing to say, but it is a bit harder to accomplish. Let’s pick apart the concept of integrity and see if we can find some usable handles.

First of all, integrity is easy to demonstrate when things are going well or according to plan.  It is a simple matter of doing the right thing, and the right thing is obvious.

Integrity is most important when it is difficult to do or the right path is hard to define.  It is in these moments when leaders have the ability to stand tall and radiate their integrity or duck the issue and do what seems expedient at the moment.

I call these times “Leadership moments of truth.”

Demonstrate Integrity

Lou Holtz, the famous football coach had a remarkably simple philosophy of doing business. It consisted of three simple little rules: 1) Do Right, 2) Do the best you can, and 3) Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

The basic Do Right Rule means acting with integrity. If doing what is right is such a basic and easy thing, why am I even bothering to write about it? It’s simple.

Most leaders have a hard time figuring out what the right thing is. That is a stunning indictment to make, but I really believe it is true.

Reason: in the melee of everyday challenges, it is so easy to make a judgment that seems right under the circumstances, but when extrapolated to its logical conclusion it is really not ethical, or moral, or it is just plain dumb.

Leaders tend to rationalize.

I believe that most of the huge organizational scandals of the past started out as subtle value judgments by leaders in their organizations. There was a decision point where they could have taken path A or path B.

While path B was “squeaky clean” in terms of the ethics involved, path A was also perfectly logical and acceptable based on the rules in place at the time and was also somewhat more profitable than Path B.

The problem is that if path A was acceptable today, then A+ would be fine the next day, and A++ the next. Other people would get involved, and the practice would get more embedded into the culture.

Eventually, after a few years, it was clear that rules were being bent all over the place in order for the organization to look good to investors. There was no convenient way to roll back the ethical clock, nor was there any impetus.

Ultimately the practice, whether it was Enron’s disappearing assets or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, became too big to hide and things blew up. My contention is that these people were not intending to do bad things originally, they just got caught up in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance and had no way to quit the abuse.

Of course, by the time things surfaced, they really were evil people doing evil things, but I believe it did not start out with those intentions. At the start I believe these leaders were truly blind to the origin of corruption that brought down their empires and bankrupt thousands of individuals in the process.

How can leaders protect themselves from getting caught up in a web of deception if they were originally blind to the problem? It’s simple, they needed to create a culture of transparency and trust whereby being a whistle blower was considered good.

Imagine if the culture in an organization was such that when someone (anyone) in the company was concerned about the ethics of current practice and he or she brought that concern to light, there would have been a reward rather than punishment.

To accomplish this, leaders need to reinforce candor, in every phase of operations. It has to be a recognized policy that seeing something amiss brings with it an obligation to speak up, but that is OK because speaking up will bring rewards.

If you doubt that whistle blowers are routinely punished, take the time to view this brief video by Bill Lloyd. He blew the whistle at his company and paid a heavy price for it.

Bill said, “Sometimes it’s going to hurt, but it says everything about who you are as a person.”

The concept or rewarding candor creates opportunities for leaders to see things that would otherwise be hidden and take corrective action before the tsunami gets started.

It also allows leaders to be fallible human beings and make mistakes without having them become a reason for them to spend the rest of their life in jail.

So here is a good test of your leadership ability. How transparent is your organization? Do you truly reward employees when they bring up things that do not seem right to them, or are they put down and punished?

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations. He can be reached at bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585-392-7763.


Leadership Barometer 5 How People Treat Each Other

July 2, 2019

Here is another quick measure of the skill of a leader.

How People Treat Each Other

You can tell the caliber of a leader instantly when you view how people in the organization treat each other.

A good leader insists on constructive and helpful behaviors that model high trust and even affection.

Some people believe the word affection is too strong for the working world. I disagree. Groups that work for a great leader learn to really appreciate each other for their good qualities.

Affection does not mean that everyone always gets along with no quarrels; that would be a phony environment.

Just like a family, people will eventually find some things that cause friction, but there is sincere affection behind any tension that shows trough as people work to resolve differences without doing emotional damage.

At home, people can irritate each other while still embracing a mutual love that transcends the petty annoyances. The same concept should apply at work.

Left to their own devices, people working in close proximity to each other have a remarkable ability to drive each other crazy. Great leaders teach their people the skill of disagreeing without being disagreeable. This vital skill is often overlooked in organizations.

Where leadership is weak, squabbles between people lead to childish behaviors that can cause permanent damage to relationships. It is easy to witness this in most organizations.

As Lou Holtz observed, “you can find a thousand things to not like about somebody but you need to look for the things that you do like, that support the team effort.” In an environment of support and affection is is easy to become a close knit team that is hard to beat.

Great leaders insist that their group generates a set of specific behaviors. It is important to be able to point at these things and call each other when the behaviors are not being modeled.

The leader always works to model the behaviors and actually verbalizes them frequently. It may sound like this, “Thanks for your comment Frank, I appreciate how your words supported Mary’s effort because that is a value and behavior we cherish in our group.”

Here is an example of a list of behaviors from a team I managed several decades ago.

Team Behaviors:

  • When in conflict, we will try to see from the other person’s perspective
  • We will not leave our meetings with “silent no’s”
  • We will act like adults
  • We will build an environment of trust

I am not suggesting that other groups adopt this set of behaviors. Rather, I am encouraging leaders to work with their group to identify some key behaviors they intend to follow and will hold each other accountable for following. The team must own the behaviors, and it is a leadership function to ensure that happens.

Watch for the signs of a group that, while there are differences, handle those disconnects in a mature and loving way. A group like that is being guided by an excellent leader.

Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations. He can be reached at bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585-392-7763.


You Can’t Do the Best You Can

May 24, 2014

Lou HoltzLou Holtz, the famous football coach, did a video program in the 1980’s entitled “Do Right.” It is one of the most watched inspirational videos of all time.

In it, Lou suggested three little rules he had for every team he ever coached and also for his family.

1) Do Right,

2) Do the best you can, and

3) Treat others the way you would like to be treated.

Each one of these rules sounds logical, but each one can cause problems if applied literally.

I have challenged #3, the “Golden Rule,” in other articles by pointing out that not everyone would want to be treated the way I want to be treated. That problem has led some people to consider the “Platinum Rule,” which is “treat others the way they would like to be treated.”

The Platinum Rule is more flawed than the Golden Rule, because if we treat others the way they want to be treated, we would go broke giving them things that are not particularly good for them.

Rule 3 really boils down to treating each individual the right way. That also implies not treating everyone the same way, because each person has individual needs.

The #1 rule, “Do right,” seems straight forward until we try to make it operational. There are always conflicting forces in any decision, and it becomes a conundrum to know what the right thing really is.

Often we find that the “right” thing to do in the morning is not the best choice for the afternoon. Doing what is right is always situational, and each person’s analysis of that situation will determine the rightness of any particular action.

Therefore there is no absolute right thing to do in any circumstance.

We have to use our judgment.

The #2 rule, “Do the best you can,” sounds bulletproof until we stop and think about it. I have never done anything to the absolute best of my ability because when I think back, there is always something I could have done to improve my actions.

There is no way for me to be as smart as I am capable of, or as clever, or as sensitive. In any of my actions there is always room for improvement: sometimes quite a bit of room.

Striving to do the best we can is a formula for analysis-paralysis. With only a little more thought, we can always come up with something better to handle any situation. Therefore, if we follow Lou Holtz’s second rule to the maximum, we will spend all of our time planning and no time doing.

I am reminded of Edward Deming’s famous formula “Plan, Do, Check, Act.” By repeating this cycle over and over, organizations can learn from their mistakes and provide continuous improvement that moves in the direction of perfection without actually ever reaching it.

The irony is that many groups have found a way to modify Deming’s formula such that it looks like this: “Plan, Plan, Plan, Do, Hope.”

In order to make the most progress toward the goal of perfection, we actually need to jettison the ideal of reaching perfection and take up the cause of progress. That is how we can optimize our performance over time.

In retrospect, I think that Lou Holtz’s three rules would be more operational if they were stated,

1) Do good work,

2) Do the best you can with the resources available, and

3) Treat all people the right way.

These rules are pragmatic and allow us to be flexible as we seek to make each day better than the one before.


The Strangest Secret

December 7, 2013

RumorIf you are pursuing a worthy goal, you are probably feeling pretty good about yourself, even if you are sometimes exhausted or discouraged along the way.

As Lou Holtz once said “When we feel the best about ourselves is when we went the extra mile, when we lay our head on the pillow late at night worn out and exhausted, but we know we paid the supreme price.” That statement is what effort toward a goal feels like much of the time.

When you reach your goal, after you celebrate, it is important to set a new one fairly soon, so you do not drift.

This rule for living comes from numerous philosophers, including Earl Nightingale, a member of the International Speakers Hall of Fame and the Radio Hall of Fame. Earl produced several books on personal leadership and wrote over 7,000 radio and television commentaries on how we can lead better lives.

His famous program “Lead The Field” is my all time favorite program for inspiration. It is available through The Nightingale Conant Company.

Here is the secret to a long and prosperous life (in every sense). When we are being “successful” is when we are pursuing a worthy goal. Earl discovered this law several decades ago.

His famous “strangest secret” is only six words long….”We become what we think about.” As we put forth extreme effort in pursuit of our goals, that is what gives meaning to life.

When we reach the goal, it is like a signpost along the road that we have arrived at that point in our life. It is right and smart to take a deep breath and celebrate with our loved ones who have supported us in the challenging times.

Take some time to rest and to feel the great peace that comes from achieving your goal. Share the credit, because you did not do it alone.

Now comes the crucial part. Do not let too many days go by before you set your next goal in life. It may be completely different from the one just achieved.

For example, someone who has studied for years to get an advanced degree may set a goal to climb a mountain, or to become an excellent speaker, or an artist.

The point is to not rest on the past achievement of a worthy goal too long. It is the next goal that must be envisioned, because that is how we get the most value from life. Without a worthy goal we quickly lose the real zest of life.

Think of it this way…”The road is better than the inn,” or “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Thornton T. Munger wrote,” There is no road to success but through a clear, strong purpose. Nothing can take its place. A purpose underlies character, culture, position, attainment of every sort.”

Once you have set your goal, it is time to lay out your strategy for achieving it. This strategy is so valuable because it will help you regulate your effort to focus energy on the necessary tasks to attain it and not become distracted with other activities that cause overload.

You know when you are stretched too thin if performance starts to lag. It is really a fascinating area of life. We can always add another activity, but at some point we would be better off taking something off the plate.

If we create a solid strategy for our life, then we will know what things to add and what things to prune. It is a really important concept in living well, and it is one that many people just arrive at by default. The most accomplished people do not leave it to chance, rather they own their destiny.

What you achieve in life is a function of how you run your life. Make sure you have a worthy goal at all times. Celebrate the achieving of one goal by setting a new one.

Combine the goal with a focusing strategy, and you will be amazed at the level of achievement and satisfaction you can pack into your precious years on this planet.