Leadership Lessons from Lance Armstrong

Executive coaching sometimes covers the bases on helping leaders be the best at what they do. Sometimes, being the best means eating crow when something is your fault. An executive coach will help reunify the office or business so life can go on post-mistake.

While there are crisis intervention public relations folks who deal with the public during an emergency (i.e. a CEO was caught stealing) that’s not what we mean.  This type of executive coaching is designed for executives to be a better leader on a day to day basis.

There is no better person, perhaps, to prove our point on a very large scale than Lance Armstrong. Based on his recent interview with Oprah, we got so see just how far not coming clean after a huge mistake will get us – he wasn’t winning all those medals thanks to his team uniform designs.

To get started, here’s the best holistic (i.e. on a realistic day-to-day basis) approach to almost any mistake:

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Unplug Your Ears And Listen

There's a wonderful scene in The Odyssey when Odysseus prepares himself to steer his ship and his men past the treacherous Sirens, creatures who sing a seductive song that can lead a person astray. It's a great moment in literature — and an extremely useful image for managers intent on ferreting out the feedback they need for career advancement. To prepare for his challenge, Odysseus orders his crew members to put wax in their ears, but to be able to hear the Sirens' message, he leaves his own ears unplugged. But he asks his men to strap him to the ship's mast to prevent him from recklessly heeding the Sirens' call.

Managers, like Odysseus, need to hear what people have to say — and be able to filter the messages. Those who solicit career feedback are likely to hear many, often conflicting messages and need to be astute in sorting out the most critical input to avoid careening off course. To succeed, as Odysseus did, keep three things in mind.

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Bad Leaders Can Change Their Spots

We have many ways to describe the common belief that a person's behavior is relatively fixed: "A leopard can't change his spots." "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." You could probably add a few more old saws yourself. This view, we've found, seems especially prevalent in relation to senior leaders with noticeable weakness, like an uncontrollable temper or a marked tendency to be rude or unreasonably demanding.

John H. Sununu, former governor or New Hampshire and later White House chief of staff to George H. W. Bush, had a reputation for being extremely unpleasant to work with. This finally prompted him to ask an aide, "Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" After a brief hesitation, the aide replied, "Oh, I'm not sure sir, but I guess it just saves them a lot of time."

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Three Temptations That Destroy Good Leaders

We are subject to a number of temptations, every one of us almost. While there could be a long list of temptations, some of them are so deadly, it can destroy us completely, professionally and personally. I am sure that we can get a few names in our minds instantly on the subject of temptations.

This is a guest post by J. Warner Wallace. Wallace examines these three motives in more detail in his new book, Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels.

I’m a cold-case homicide detective. In the many years that I’ve been doing this job, I’ve come to recognize that every murder is driven by one of three sinister motives. It turns out that these same three motives lie behind very crime of the heart, every bad decision, and even every fatal mistake made by a leader. If you can be honest about what motivates you, there’s a good chance you can avoid the destruction that results from allowing yourself to succumb to one of these malicious motives. When I first launched a church as a bi-vocational leader, I carefully constructed my leadership template to guard myself as best I could:

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5 Ways You're Killing Your Chance At A Promotion

For many of us this has happened at least once in our career - we thought that we are the best and most suited for the upcoming position, a promotion, and that we would be the natural choice. It was a shock for us when someone else, who was not the best and most suited for the position, got promoted. We felt sad, disheartened, disappointed and demotivated, at least for some time. While some of us moved on, some of us chose to move out. The entire episode and experience around that promotion was something that we would never forget. 

There are many reasons individuals may be looking to get promoted: the staleness of their current position, the lure of a flashier title, or potentially just a reward for the infinite amount of hard work they’ve been putting in.

Whatever the reasoning, promotions are never promised. Getting promoted often involves time, effort, energy, and patience. But if you’ve been doing all of the aforementioned and have yet to receive the advancement you’ve been hoping for, it may be time to assess the situation.

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7 Things A Master Sushi Chef can Teach Us About Leadership

Recently I watched a documentary film called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi“ – it was about 85 year-old Jiri Ono, who is considered to be one of the top sushi chefs in the world, attracting a 3 star rating from Michelen in his little 10-seat restaurant tucked inside a subway station in Tokyo.

It was thrilling to watch this man at work, preparing delectable morsels (that look like mini works of art) with 70 years of acquired skill and experience – and a lot of pride.

But as I watched more closely as the film traced the origins of his success and his methods to keep the restaurant at at 3-star level,  there were many valuable leadership lessons revealed that are well worth sharing here (but I would recommend that you rent the film too).   Here are the 7 that resonated the most..

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There's More To Life Than Being Happy..

In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?"

As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Frankl wrote in Man's Search for Meaning, "the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his book, he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. "In both cases," Frankl writes, "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them." For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:

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Is Culture Slowly Killing Your Organisation..

Let’s consider one simple scenario which would occur in any organisation. We have the company handbook, published by the management as a rulebook by which staff are expected to refer and abide. Typically the HR department will produce this document, perhaps in consultation with senior management, certainly seeking senior management sign-off.

Once it’s done it might be posted onto the Intranet and a news item put up with a link to it.

In other organisations the document, often a wordprocessor document or PDF is put into the requisite folder in the ECM system or the file server and an email sent round to everyone with a link to it.

I bet in the majority of organisations the file is still emailed around everyone and new starts get a copy of it emailed to them when they start. Each update of the document requires another mass mailing to all staff. Because its an important document people file it in their email folders. Subsequent updates also get stored and as a result they have lots of copies of older revisions of the same document. The net result is a massive duplication of files.

None of these scenarios are particularly efficient and, frankly, mimic the business processes we would have followed in 1913, not 2013.

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Seven Ways to Ruin Your Professional Reputation

When career consultant Emily Bennington started researching her upcoming book on women’s career success, Who Says It’s A Man’s World: The Girls Guide To Corporate Domination, she came across an interesting theme: If the choice is between being respected and being liked, it’s better to err on the side of respect. “Your reputation is everything,” Jan Fields, a 35-year business veteran and the former president of McDonald’s, told her.

Bennington says corporate reputations are typically formed from a series of successive questions: Who is she? Do I like her? Is she capable? And can she lead a team? “When you have respect, you have the ability to make people galvanize around an idea,” she says.

However, while performance may help drive a positive professional reputation, Bennington says it’s the small day-to-day mistakes that undermine it. She outlines the most common (and gender-neutral) ways people “royally screw up their reputations.”

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10 Things Better Than Money

Money does buy happiness, but happiness also creates wealth.

A recent Gallup poll, quoted in The Atlantic, found that "well-being rises with income at all levels of income, across countries." In other words, as the article's title states, the poll proves that "Yes, Money Does Buy Happiness."

Except that it doesn't prove that at all. What the study actually discovered was a "strong correlation" between each nation's real GDP per capita and the sense of "well-being" among those nation's citizens.

Correlation isn't causation. The data could just as easily be interpreted the other way around: that happiness creates wealth. What's most likely, though, is that happiness and wealth are part of a cycle, each one creating more of the other.

And that's the reason for this post. Assuming you want to create both wealth and happiness for yourself and those around you, you have two approaches: wait until you're wealthy to be happy, or become more happy now and thereby create more wealth.

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10 Leadership Lessons for Gen-Y

Wish I knew then what I know now.

You hear that sort of thing all the time; a lament to the wisdom that seems to come too late in life, or at least later than we'd like it to.

The current generation of up-and-comers certainly has its opportunities and its challenges. Having grown up with high-tech, they're probably best suited to thrive in the brave new connected world. And I happen to think the digital revolution has only just begun.

On the other hand, the world is in the midst of cultural and economic upheaval. Perhaps that's nothing new, but it is challenging, to say the least. There's so much information, so many choices, so much distraction, just those things alone present more complexity than any generation has ever had to deal with.

That said, I have a sneaking suspicion that the wisdom that comes from real-world experience applies to anyone in any generation. At least, that's the theory. Here are 10 lessons I've learned that I suspect will prove useful to the current generation of up-and-coming entrepreneurs and business leaders.

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Why The Big Idea Doesn't Need to Be Big

It's easy to get obsessed with finding The Big Idea. Here's why we need more tweakers and fixer-uppers instead.

Entrepreneurs tend to focus on big, new ideas – they want to build tomorrow's Facebook. But the biggest ideas aren't always the ones that have the most immediate impact on people's lives. For that, entrepreneurs need to focus less on invention and more on innovation and integration.

Invention is the rarest form of creative problem-solving, achieved only with a deep understanding of people and resources. It is exemplified by great minds like the Wright brothers and R. Buckminster Fuller. “Invention demands holding controls, modifying variables, testing, testing, and retesting until you have proved that you've created something that's truly unique and beneficial,” said Josh McManus, chief inventor at the Detroit-based Little Things Labs. He has been a founder, fundraiser, and strategist in the social sector for more than a decade.

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