Leadership Sculptor

Many thanks to Kati Järvinen, a colleague in the Enneagram in Business network, for bringing Stefan Sagmeister’s TED talk to my attention.

In it, he describes how he made a conscious decision to take a one-year sabbatical every seven years and the impact of this decision. Conceptually, he took five years out of the retirement phase of his life and interspersed them through the career portion. The effect on his creativity has been enormous, as he illustrates through the talk. The seven years following his first sabbatical was fuelled by ideas that sprang from the year off.

I’ve experimented with shorter breaks and found them beneficial, both to me (I recharge my ideas bank) and to my customers (who benefit from these). Sagmeister’s talk has set me wondering, what would it be like to take a longer break … would the benefit be even greater?

Make sure to watch the entire film, the final sequence is a peach.

Ginger Lapid-Bogda recently launched The Enneagram in Business portal. The learning portal is part of this great resource, with great contributors such as Jerry Wagner (describing the Types or Styles in detail) and Bea Chestnut (on the Sub-types). There’s also an “Ask the Coach” feature, where a coach of each Type answers the same question about coaching, to give a flavor of the different possible perspectives. Ginger asked me to be the Type 9 – or Peacemaker – representative on this panel.

The first question is: What is the most common coaching challenge for clients of your style, how is it related to their Enneagram style, and what coaching advice would you give to coaches who coach them?

My answer: Answering a question as galactic as this rates among the top challenges for people of Style Nine! Many Nines delay coaching until a problem has grown into the North Face of the Eiger. This is an example of our tendency to minimize problems and delay dealing with them. At the same time, deep down inside, the problem feels huge and laming. This combination relates to our Enneagram style, where we are asleep to our own needs and thus find it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.

This can make coaching a Nine a real challenge if the coach relies on the Nine for data – therefore, it’s important to collect it also from their supervisor, colleagues, and coworkers. Once you’ve noticed this pattern, do your best not to be mesmerized by our ability to spin stories about anything and everything. Stay focused on the issue, nudge us gently back to topic, as often as it takes. (Patience is not only a virtue, it’s also a useful tool when coaching Nines.) And help us identify some small first step that we can take. Once in motion, we can make surprisingly rapid progress. To paraphrase Lao Tse: A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first, small step.

If you’d like to see the other eight answers, head over to the Enneagram Learning Portal. If you’d like to share your answer to the question, please leave a comment or trackback.

Nobody’s perfect, not even the company that runs with the motto “don’t be evil”. Google wrote me a letter, dated October 7, that gives me, a user of google maps,  a €50 voucher to advertize using Google AdWords. So far, so generous. The voucher is valid until 31 October … and only arrived this afternoon, a day before expiration.

No matter how you slice it, not a great marketing campaign.

They tell me I only need three minutes to get going. If a decent adline only took three minutes to write, then we’d only need about 4.7 copywriters world-wide to meet all needs.

If they’re trying to push me to sign up quickly, they need to learn some more about how different people tick. I’d be happy to introduce them to the Enneagram. If they were truly interested in my custom, they might even have invested the much less than three minutes to find out who lives at my address.

The letter and voucher provide a wonderful example of how you can push the buttons of someone with my personality structure, the Peacemaker in the Enneagram: leave my name off the letter (being overlooked), put me under pressure for a quick decision (hello, Mr Passive Aggressive!)

It gives me pause for thought about how I market my services to clients. Do I take care to get their name right? Do I give them time to take decisions? Am I respectful about their time?

What have you learned from marketing that rubbed you up the wrong way?

David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, addressed the German Project Management Forum in Berlin yesterday via satellite. I was busy translating for colleagues who couldn’t keep up with his (for non-native speakers) slightly too fast delivery. I’d no time to take notes, so this is just a a rough summary. The speech was his analysis of how he managed the Obama campaign in  2008, what worked and what worked less well. He did a nice job of indicating how the principles that worked in his political context could also transfer to other project contexts, such as the business world.

The keys to success outlined in the talk were:

• a definition of success. Presidential math is simple: you need 270 electoral votes; however, figuring out from which states those votes will come is not so easy. They had a clear idea on this. And also a clear idea about why Barack Obama was running for president.
• a clear strategy for achieving that success. This contrasted with both he Clinton and McCain campaigns, where strategy changed frequently. This led to confusion in the campaign and reduced effectiveness.
• making sure that all staff and volunteers understood the goal and the strategy, so that they didn’t get thrown by media turbulence. He was worried that he was sending too much information to the volunteers via mail; it turned out they wanted more. In the presidential phase of the campaign, they sent about four mails a day, on average.
• flexibility in local implementation (Colorado is not the same as Florida).
• clear metrics and targets for people and giving them the necessary authority to reach their targets.  People regularly received clear feedback, the discussion being based on the targets and support to get back on track, if people weren’t reaching their targets; a readiness to replace people, if they showed no improvement after being supported.
• Listening to your people, not just talking to them. They can deliver great ideas, you just need to listen.
• They also decided it was vital to have a high-quality web presence. It wasn’t enough that the site be better than those of the other candidates; they wanted to be able to stand comparison with google, amazon, cnn or yahoo. The site was the hub of the campaign and allowed the staff and volunteers to coordinate local activities on a stae and community level.
• A consistent message across all platforms. People pick up their information in fractured ways these days; just accept it and make sure you send the same message on all channels at the same time. People will piece it together and it gets across.

He also spoke openly about some of their mistakes, e.g. the mishandling of the Ohio and Texas primaries. If they’d picked up wither one, they’d have been able to close out the primary season much earlier. They also spent too little time on internal communication in the early stages of the campaign. They realized the importance of this and corrected this problem later on. David stressed the importance of not getting sucked into devoting all your energies on reaching the goal: it’s important to make sure you reserve time in your schedule for  communicating with staff – keeping them up-to-date with your thinking and listening to their ideas. Indeed, almost all the improvements to the campaign came from listening.

During the question and answer session, the value of the campaign web site to the presidency became clear: the President can get his message out to 13 million people by email; something he does on a regular basis. David also said the decisive moment in the campaign was when Obama spoke to 200,000 people in Berlin. Although this was mocked by the US media at the time, it delivered a string message to potential voters that the US had a politician who could reach out to the world and repair America’s standing in the international community.

The part I found most fascinating was his body language and gestures during the speech: blend out the skin color, and it was really as if  President Obama himself was delivering it!

I came across an online Enneagram test today; it pegged me correctly as a 9w8. Looking around the site, I noticed a Famous Leader test, which comes in different sizes. When I took the nine question version of the test, my style came out to be Albert Einstein.

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

With a Ph.D. in maths, the comparison made me chuckle. There is a more detailed version of the test, with 18 questions. Curious, I took this version.

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Okay, now I’m like Abe Lincoln. However, we’re not done. What about the 27 question version of the test?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

And the full monty … all 45 questions?

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The author of the test put it up with a caveat. So, the results are to be anjoyed with a pinch of salt. In Enneagram terms, my leadership style has shifted from Five (Einstein) to Nine (Lincoln) to Seven (Kennedy) to One (Gandhi). Just as well Types Six or Eight didn’t show in my results. Take the test and you’ll see why.

A blog post I wrote about six months ago, called A Basic Equation of Leadership, still attracts lots of traffic; it’s easily my most-read posting here. So, in the coming weeks I’ll be expanding on the ideas in the original post, which was a tad cryptic, with a series of entries. If you have questions or related topics you’d like me to address in the series, please either leave a comment or email me directly. Many thanks in advance!

The current issue of Fortune contains mini-interviews with 22 well-known people from business and politics, including the usual suspects, e.g. Bill Gates (together with his father) and Warren Buffet. The interview with Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, caught my eye, since he describes how  John Doerr recommended a coach to him in 2001. Schmidt was openly sceptical, then tried it out, and found huge benefit in have a fresh pair of challenging eyes helping him to solve problems. It helped him to get the necessary distance from business problems, to rise above it.

The best advice I ever got? When I was starting out in my first management position, my parents just reminded me not to do anything that would make it hard for me to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. Timeless and priceless.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

The New York Times, Sunday Edition,  has been running a series The Corner Office over the past several weeks. In each, a senior manager is interviewed abou their take on leadership. Today’s interview, with Eduardo Castro-Wright, In a Word, He wants Simplicity points to the known short-comings in many MBA trainings: people skills. He makes the point that business schools are strong on finance, strategy and other such topics, but do little to prepare leaders of people for the sorts of conversations that take up most of their working day: How to talk to someone you’re firing; how to handle an employee who may need time off because of a sick child; how to respond when someone’s performance is being impacted due to divorce pressures.

The sad thing is, such skills are learnable, just not via case studies or power point. It involves being willing to take a look at yourself, to experience how you come across to others and learn how to modify your way of connecting accordingly. By the by, this also helps you to build credibility with your staff, which — as Castro-Wright points out — is key to modern leadership.

However, power point and case studies are easier to teach.

It’s been a hectic few weeks, probably interesting to reflect on from a project management perspective, but that’s not where my thoughts are today. After the thriller with the paperwork (I nearly lost my “J” thanks to a mix-up in the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs), and whether my father would escape from the clutches of the Irish health system in time: the family has arrived and today at 2pm Nora and I marry in the Theater in Baden-Baden.

All is peaceful this morning, inside and out. I took time to enjoy the sunrise. I can pause, while writing this, and listen to the birds twittering outside the window. I finished my speech about an hour ago, having started 30 minutes earlier. (I guess that says something about my personality Type.)

One question that’s gone through my mind (others have posed it): why marry? The answer lies in the work of St. John of the Cross, as I’ve learned it through the Enneagram. To get to the kernel of something unanswerable, we need to strip away all the wrong answers: Nada! Nada !Nada! — Not that! Not that! Not that!And from my Tai Chi teacher, Fernando Chedel: to find the right movement, try out all the wrong ones first. What’s left, fits.  So, it’s not about pregnancy, tax, excuse for a party … I could list all the nada anwsers I’ve found, but I’ll spare you the hundreds.

So, what’s left? Spirituality occurs in relationship, ours is deep, and we want to share that with you. Or as Rocky Balboa put it when asked what he saw in Adrian, his long-time partner (he only marries her in Part 2):

I dunno. She got gaps. I got gaps. Together we fill gaps.

Nora has also written an entry for today (in English), which I’ve promised only to read after the ceremony.

Now it’s time to polish my shoes. I’ll be back online on the 18th of May.

Nice interview with Richard Andersen, CEO of Delta Airlines, in today’s NY Times, “He wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects” . He talks about the importance of communication skills and the dangers of Powerpoint –people get used to talking in bullets and begin to lose the ability to formulate complete sentences.

Another interesting snippet is about hiring: when hiring at management or executive level, he tends to ask people to talk about the last three or four books they’ve read, what they learned from them and what motivated the choice of book.