There are many dimensions of health including: mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, environmental and more. It’s pretty self-evident that the healthier you are, the better you can perform. Performance is foundational to leadership yet health is rarely part of the leadership conversation. If anything, as researcher Brene Brown says, being run down from exhaustion has become a “status symbol.” Although people may admire your tenacity and commitment, being exhausted is not a healthy state and it’s unlikely you are performing optimally.

As Thomas Leonard points out above, very little time is spent by most of us on our own care and well-being. Since it’s January and many of us are thinking about improvements and changes we want to make in our lives. Why not consider how improving your health can improve your leadership?

This week we want to focus on physical health. If your physical health isn’t optimized, your performance isn’t either and your ability to lead is limited by the energy being siphoned to health issues.

So how do you take care of your physical health? What do you do for yourself? What are your practices? Most people think about this and focus on diet and exercise – often beating themselves up for all the things they are still “doing wrong” or “not doing,” or they believe they don’t have time, etc.  The thing is, there are incremental steps you can take to start improving your physical health without taking on a big program. Here are some easy steps you can make today:

1. Get informed. There is a lot of misinformation and confusion out there about what really is healthy. We recommend two solid resources, Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Both of these doctors are highly educated and make clear information widely available. Dr. Weil has a great web site with a searchable database for health issues www.drweil.com He also has two fundamental books that can help you – 8 Weeks to Optimum Health and Eating for Optimum Health. Dr. Oz has a TV show that you can Tivo or DVR if you don’t feel like reading. If you do want to read, he and his partner Dr. Michael Roizen also wrote, “You: The Owner’s Manual” which has lots of great information.
2. Do the basics. An example of “the basics” is that we have all heard you need to drink 6-8 glasses of water per day, (8 ounce glasses that is). Yet how many of us do it? If you can just do this piece, your health will be improved simply because you will be hydrated. Don’t like plain water? Squeeze half a lemon or lime in it. Still not good? A splash of cranberry or pomegranate juice has health benefits and helps with the taste, (provided you are doing just a splash and you are doing real juice, not the high sugar filled kind.) The basics are covered in the works of Dr. Weil and Dr. Oz we mentioned above and being hydrated is one example of improving your health without feeling like you are taking hours out of your day for a huge program.
3. See your doctor. A lot of us skip exams and annual tests we should be doing. Whether it’s a mammogram or a colonoscopy many people are not doing their “regular maintenance.” So if you haven’t seen your doctor or you have been skipping tests, get them done. If you don’t like your current doctor, ask around. Check with a friend or colleague whose health you admire and get a new physician to work with.

Obviously we are not physicians and this blog is not intended to dispense medical advice. We are simply suggesting that health is actually part of the leadership conversation and the healthier you are the better you can lead. So do yourself a favor and care for your health and well-being all 52 weeks of the year!

To move into a New Year powerfully and to create the results you want there are some key steps to take

One way to help yourself succeed is to make your resolutions “public” to others. To put more wind in your sails, promise others that you will deliver! You can ask someone you trust to be a “committed listener.” This involves a commitment from them to listen to you as you talk about the status of your plans, your struggles and your successes. It does not involve them giving advice or telling you what to do next, (unless you make a specific request for it).
Another way to succeed is to hire a coach. Someone who is trained to support people in achieving their dreams and plans.

If you are a bit more experienced at this process, take a step up in rigor and create a set of goals for the different areas of your life. Categories you might include are:
1) Career/Financial
2) Well-Being or Health
3) Relationships
4) Spiritual
5) Personal
6) Wild Card

How bold are you willing to be setting your goals? If you are completely certain you can make the goals are you stretching yourself enough? Focus on designing the most catalytic, highly leveraged action steps you can. By “catalytic” we mean that your actions produce the intended results without your being used up in the process. By “highly leveraged,” we mean you produce very big results with minimal resources.

If you’ve been successful at this level of work and/or are ready to take on your first effort at a Strategic Plan for your company or affiliation, we suggest using what we call our “2130 Partners Hot Wired Strategic Plan.” We call it Hot Wired because it covers many of the levels and topics of an elaborate plan and yet you can produce a decent draft in a couple of hours. The next pass can then be developed to whatever level of detail you wish. The key, however, is to get the initial draft knocked out in as short a time as you can so that you shift your paradigm about goals and actions as you develop the more detailed plans. You can download the worksheet for our 2130 Partners Hot Wired plan by clicking here.

It’s the time of year when many of us conduct annual rituals that may include everything from strategic planning sessions for business to making New Year’s resolutions or setting Bold Goals for 2012 and beyond

On the fun end of the spectrum, we have for many years put flip chart paper all over our walls when we have a New Year’s Eve party with a simple question on each, such as “What did I start and not complete?” or “What did I accomplish that I haven’t been acknowledged for?” or “What did I screw up that I didn’t get caught for?”  Guests write on the charts all evening with colored markers and sometimes get even more creative with a touch of artistic display as well.  On a number of occasions we have taken them all down at midnight and symbolically burned them.

On a business note, we do a similar exercise with our executive clients where we pass out a page with questions for them to fill out that explores accomplishments and failures in their businesses, practice of leadership, and lives. (We have a free download of this exercise sheet at the bottom of this blog post.)  One of my favorites is “What must I communicate to be complete with 2011 and to whom?”

A few of the highlights from these types of executive discussions include discoveries of attachments participants did not realize were holding them back, people around them who they had failed to acknowledge, and places where they were not leading by example.

We also know that for many folks the holidays can include a lot of upset, ranging form anxiety around gift giving and office party attendance to remembrances of lost loved ones or unhappy childhood experiences related to the holidays.  The latter is fertile ground for completion work.

Some of the comments we get about these exercises can be summed up as, “transition/transformation is a lot of work!”  If you are intending to be powerful in 2012, have big goals, and produce great results, we highly recommend you spend the next couple of weeks completing and letting go of 2011, (and earlier if you need to), in order to create fertile ground for your 2012 vision to come alive.

If you would like to try our exercise format we have included it here as a free download.

Wishing you a happy ending to your 2011 and a fabulous 2012!

When we talk about our “comfort zone” what we are talking about is our personal orbit, our range of personal activities. Each of us has a daily routine, a weekly routine and perhaps even a monthly or yearly routine. Generally speaking we are creatures of habit and we develop comfort zones we like, and of course, feel comfortable in.

Often, even when we do try to venture out of it, we are quickly pulled back in to it. There is a dynamic called “homeostasis” which is critical to this. Homeostasis has both psychological and physical implications and what it’s pointing to is the fundamental and biological drive for equilibrium and stability in a system, (and yes, we are including human beings as systems). In effect, homeostasis helps create and regulate our “comfort zones.” This is a very important phenomenon to understand. It works for us in critical ways. For example, it helps keep our body temperatures stable. As we know, we all have a set-point for body temperature that is on average 98.6 degrees. The homeostasis in our bodies helps insure that when our temperature fluctuates, it comes back to this comfortable set point. The downside is that when we challenge ourselves psychologically and emotionally in various ways, there can be a “homeostatic back lash,” and a strong pull to go back to our existing comfort zone until we have solidly established a new set point.

So our comfort zone is somewhat like a thermostat. Unconsciously it has been set at a particular point and when we change it, it takes some time to “heat up or cool down” to the new set point.

An amazing example of this is the research that has been done on lottery winners. It has been found that generally, if someone was poor before winning the lottery, they will end up poor again. If they were middle class, they would ultimately end up middle class again and so on. This is a powerful example of what happens when our set points or comfort zones are radically and unexpectedly challenged and how powerful homeostasis can be.

As we discuss comfort zones, set points, etc. we want to be clear that this is not a piece about people who plod along and move slowly or people who seem risk averse. If you are a fast-paced, “go go go” type of person that is your comfort zone. What if you had to slow down, be more reflective, bring your energy “down and in” instead of being an “up and out” kind of person? What if you had to take on a meditation practice? Would you still be in your comfort zone? What if you are a thrill seeker and look for ways to “push the envelope” all the time? What would happen if you lived a more mundane existence and had to experience the ordinary? Would you still be in your comfort zone?

The thing is, if you want new outcomes, bigger results and to achieve your vision are you ready to expand your comfort zone? Are you ready to alter your personal orbit? Are you fortified and prepared for the inevitable backlash that may come from inside you, but also from those around you who may feel threatened or unnerved by change? If you are part of their system, their orbit, their comfort zone, and you change, what happens to their comfort zone? If you aren’t ready to expand your orbit, how can you expect your colleagues, team, or employees to do it?

In the November/December 2008 issue of Spirituality & Health magazine, Managing Editor Betsy Robinson’s article, “Our Common Language,” offers a very insightful summary of work done by Harvard Business School professor and sociologist Gerald Zaltman, Ph.D. and his team across 12,000 in-depth interviews in more than 30 countries. 

Dr. Zaltman and his son, Lindsay Zaltman, have described their research in their book Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers. While the consequences for marketing are dramatic, today we are more interested in how a working understanding of these metaphors will assist you in your leadership, your skill at conflict resolution, and your understanding of and ability to clear upsets.

According to Robinson, these deep metaphors are unconscious, universal, basic frames or orientations we have to the world around us.  In the language of the work of 2130 we’d call it “the instant, automatic, and largely unexamined context or paradigm in which you live your life.”  The researchers have identified seven main lenses:

1)   Balance – justice, equilibrium, interplay

2)   Transformation – change in state, status, substance, circumstance

3)   Journey – meeting of past, present and future

4)   Container – connotes inclusion or exclusion

5)   Connection – relating to oneself & others

6)   Resource – source of support

7)   Control – sense of mastery, vulnerability, well-being

and four subsidiary ones:

1)   Movement or Motion – related to journey

2)   Force – power that can compel or constrict

3)   Nature – not from humans, growth and evolution

4)   System – gives order

If you’d like a visual experience of these lenses, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2exh6i6T6tg

Two very important dimensions of this work are the emotions and beliefs that we have connected with each of these deep metaphors and the fact that we cannot express ourselves without using the metaphors. Put simply, our conversations are full of phrases, which arise out of these metaphors, and they all have emotional baggage with them. Since we all use the same deep metaphors when relating to the same situations, it is the emotions that we have historically attached to each that yield the connecting or conflict that arises from each conversation.  In our 2130 Partners’ language, this is the “stuff that fills our File Cabinets.”

Your ability to resolve conflicts, dispel upsets, and be an effective, productive leader will all be greatly enhanced by learning about and observing these deep metaphors in the situations you encounter.  Robinson offers several helpful practices and exercises:

1)   Make a list of the emotions and beliefs you have associated with each metaphor.

2)   When you are in the middle of conflict, realize that there are deep metaphors at work and the parties have differing, perhaps extreme, emotions and beliefs associated.  Find a way to appreciate the others’ basis in the conversation.

3)   Find a way to sketch out a shared vision for the parties – what would life be without the conflict?  In 2130 Partners we call this finding a Shared Yonder Star for the conversation and the relationship.  Where will we be when it all turns out? Build a productive conversation from that commonality.

While it may seem difficult or awkward at first, viewing your encounters through the lens of deep metaphors and appreciating the generally unconscious, unexamined and often differing emotions and beliefs associated will almost certainly increase your conversational capacities and your ability to lead effectively.

Here is the opening of the email: “I just got back from The Leaders of Tomorrow conference at St. Gallen in Switzerland. It was a fantastic trip, and I gleaned some great nuggets of business wisdom from the world’s best. One particular session I really enjoyed was presented by McKinsey partner Dominic Barton. As someone who spends much of his time with the CEOs of the world’s leading companies, he shared 5 insights from his experience.”

First, I was fascinated to discover this St. Gallen Summit as I wasn’t aware of it. Second I was really struck at the list of insights coming from McKinsey and recapped by Shama in her email. I found them compelling because in addition to my role as Principal and Co-founder of 2130 Partners I am also a Best Practice Chair at Vistage International. Vistage is the world’s leading CEO membership organization and I have worked with them for more than 16 years. I can say the 5 insights offered by Kinsey below are very consistent with my experience of the CEO population. Here they are with notes from me included.

1) They struggle with loneliness – The higher you get, the harder it is to find the right sources to trust. This is a fundamental reason for the success of Vistage. Having access to a peer group and being able to work issues with people who face the same types of challenges you do every day can be amazingly helpful for a top leader.

2) Lack of time - CEOs continue to balance an overflowing plate and prioritizing becomes key. This is something everyone is facing these days from the top office throughout an organization. We have found that the key issues here are in the “human dimension”- meaning that things often get slowed down between people through miscommunications, misunderstandings and upsets. This is why we developed our Productive Interactions program and why we have developed the concept of Lean Conversations.

3) Appetite for cross-sector knowledge – CEOs and companies across the globe are looking at what they can learn from industries other than their own. Cross-pollination at its best. What can marketers learn from HR? What can IT learn from sales? This is another area we find that communication is critical and is not happening at an optimum level. Often groups, teams, and departments become “silos.” There is usually a lot that can be learned by an organization and its leaders from within, from its own people. The challenge is opening up the flow for that to happen.

4) Understanding transitions – Leaders transition in and out of positions, jobs, and companies. They are consistently looking for help with these transitions. This is where a solid, experienced Executive Coach can really add value. Transitions are often fraught with emotions and complexities. Hiring a partner to help you through is key.

5) The battle for talent – The biggest competitive advantage of any company in the future is going to be people. Often CEOs don’t know the scope of talent available to them within their own company. This is a source of frustration for many. See point number 3 above. It is amazing how much knowledge and information inside a company does not flow. Again, challenges in the “human dimension” often hinder this flow. Fear, politics and other factors can keep key information like “how talented is your talent pool” from being clear to those at the top.

Bottom line, from our perspective at 2130 Partners, for CEOs to manage these top 5 challenges, investigating and investing in the “human dimension,” is the place to work. The greater the skills and capacities CEOs and those on their teams have to effectively and efficiently communicate and create results, the less painful these 5 challenges become.

The United States military has long taught our special ops teams and fighter pilots a thought process called the OODA Loop.  These teams function in relatively small units who have large assignments with very limited time and resources.  They train incessantly and plan their missions in incredible detail.  Yet, no plan survives its collision with reality and conditions in the field often differ from those on the planning table.

Adherence to the original plan would sometimes mean immediate capture or death and certain failure.  Given their commitment, failure is not an option and “all or nothing” is often the choice.  They must be able to make sometimes dramatic adjustments to achieve mission objectives and extract themselves with minimal to no casualties.

The OODA Loop thought process is an excellent antidote to holding onto the way it was supposed to be, the resources they were supposed to have, and the unfairness of the situation.  The acronym simply means:

1) Observe the actual “ground truth” – the way that it is and the way that it isn’t rather than how it was supposed to be. 
2) Orient to the actual situation, the observable roadblocks and potholes, the unknowns, and the resources available.  Consider the options and strategies that are available.
3)  Decide on a path and how long you can go before reorientation is required.
4)  Act on your plan
5)  Immediately start this process over

In Organizational Development circles the Action Research people would be most comfortable with this thought process. 

In your world, how can you apply this simple process to adjust to “the ground truth” you and your organization are facing?  How can this OODA loop concept benefit your leadership development?

One of the responsibilities of many, if not most, of the people in these organizations is to increase certainty or predictability with the intention of increasing quality and on time, on budget, performance.  An unintended consequence of those efforts is to make the organizations resistant to change and seemingly even resistant to the dynamics of the market itself. 

As the rate of change and market disruption accelerates to the pace we see today with the advent of things like social networking and smart phones, this sets up “a destructive clash between whirlwind change and corporate inertia.“ Murray argues that some of the classic failures of once market-leading companies has not been a result of “’bad management,” but because they follow the dictates of ‘good’ management. They listened closely to their customers. They studied market trends. They allocated capital to the innovations that promised the largest returns. And in the process they missed the disruptive innovations…

Murray traces the development of managed corporations back to a 1937 book citing the importance of lowering transaction costs.  We’d like to step even further back for a moment to the very origins of capitalism and organized business. Rodney Stark in his book “The Victory of Reason” provides a very detailed history of the evolution of business, as we know it.  Activity started shifting from barter to cash in the 9^th century and great monastic estates began hiring labor forces to perform complex, well-organized activities.  By the 13^th century, religious and societal issues around profits, property rights, credit, and vending had been resolved. Italian city-states began expanding trade into Europe and the rest of the Mediterranean. 

Banks and management evolved to address the issues first of facilitating transactions over these greater distances and then lowering their cost.  By the 14^th century Italian schools were organized to teach required administration and management skills.  Accounting, compound interest, double entry bookkeeping, and insurance were invented, all to facilitate transactions. As trade expanded to England, a nation of shopkeepers and manufacturing entrepreneurs sprang up and, as they say, “the rest is history.”

Fast forward back to today with this historical perspective and we can see that everything we take for granted as we do business today was originally invented by someone to facilitate trade, which in turn was driven by thousands of entrepreneurs in all regions where they were allowed to operate and were not taxed out of existence. Modern management is just a relatively late development to solve the “recent” problems of large operations scattered over great geographic areas and allow them to continue to facilitate trade and lower its cost. Much of the value of that management has been in gathering, organizing, and dispensing information needed by large numbers of people in far-flung operations to get their work done and make the transactions happen.

Now, with the advent of instant worldwide communication, essentially free information, and the ability of large numbers of people to organize and collaborate without hierarchy, creativity and innovation can move far more rapidly than it can through a traditional organization. Individual entrepreneurs are again empowered, as they were in the middle ages, by these “new fangled inventions,” to start and build businesses. To survive and continue to add value to society, existing firms will be called upon to facilitate their employees ability to think and act like entrepreneurs and to find ways to make their collaborative efforts more valuable than “free” individuals can create through open source collaboration. 

Bottomline: The game is on! Is your company addressing this enormous historical shift that rivals that which happened in the 9^th to 13^th centuries? Are you recognizing this new game? Are you “all in”?

Most of the time when consultants, coaches or other “outside interventions” are tapped by leaders of organizations it’s because there is some type of crisis or turning point.

Underneath it all, particularly within owner-entrepreneur types of environments, there is a very particular bottom line and let’s cut right to it. Owner/entrepreneurs work the way they work because they like it. It’s working for them. What “the pain” is almost always about is that the way they are working, is not creating the results they want and they don’t like it. However, the request is “go fix the other people!” Ultimately, so the owner/entrepreneur can continue with their patterns and approach without having to shift themselves. Sometimes, depending on how urgent the “pain” is, leaders will shift, but inevitably, the minute there is enough breathing room, they snap back to their previous ways. Just as inevitably, the patterns that don’t work for the business, (but work on a personal level for the leader), are back, and soon enough, the “pain” is back.

The most important challenge for leaders when there is business “pain” is to look in the mirror and ask tough questions. Sure, there may be some work that needs to be done with other people, or teams, but leaders set the mood, tone and culture to an enormous extent. So if you are a leader experiencing “business pain,” start with yourself and some fundamental questions:

• Who am I BEING as a leader? Meaning, what are my attitudes, beliefs and patterns of reaction? Am I willing to dig deep and understand my role in what is happening?
• Am I willing to change?
• Am I willing to create a vision for myself about the type of leader I am committed to being and am I willing to create a set of practices to support the fulfillment of that vision?
• Am I willing to find the support I need to make shifts?

Change is possible and change takes work. Whether a leader changes or not, energy is being expended. It takes energy to keep patterns in place when they aren’t working and there is a state of resistance. We call that ‘friction and waste,’ a subject we address in our blog posts on Lean Thinking. It takes energy to make changes. There is a cost either way. The question is – where does a leader “pay up?”

If any of this sounds familiar, consider taking yourself on, not just your teams, processes or organizational structure.

We have a proprietary approach and method we offer for this, and there are many others out there as well. The key is to find the one that resonates for you and get to it!

First, let’s look at what we can learn from Lady Gaga. Given her phenomenal success there are many ways we could analyze her. She and her team have been masters of social media and reinventing how pop music is marketed. She is arguably the number one pop star in the world. Rather than evaluate her business approach we want to focus on how she has truly tapped into a community – her fans that she lovingly refers to as “my little monsters.” She has cast herself as someone who was lonely and felt isolated growing up, but as it turns out, she was just a misunderstood brilliant artist and her fans are too. So “monster” references their “outsider status.” She connects with her fans as also being wonderful outsiders and calls herself “mama monster.” Here is just a sample of the lyrics from her latest hit, “Born This Way”:

“I’m beautiful in my way, ‘cause God makes no mistakes I’m on the right track baby. I was born this way…. Whether life’s disabilities left you outcast, bullied or teased, rejoice and love yourself today because baby you were born this way.”

If Gaga is merely the voice of “disenfranchised youth” and/or the alternative independents, why is she selling tens of millions of records around the world? And she is not the only one. Another example is the pop star known as Pink. She also casts herself as a rebel individual. She has an enormous hit called “Raise Your Glass.” Here are some of the lyrics, “So raise your glass if you are wrong, In all the right ways, All my underdogs, We will never be, never be, anything but loud and nitty gritty dirty little freaks.” This is not some indie artist song. You actually can’t escape it right now. Ads for movies and TV shows are using it constantly. Here are lyrics from another recent big hit of hers, “F***ing Perfect” – “Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood. Miss ‘No way, it’s all good’, it didn’t slow me down. Mistaken, always second guessing, underestimated. Look, I’m still around. Pretty, pretty please, don’t you ever, ever feel like you’re less than f***ing perfect.”

So this is a business blog and you are a business leader. Why should you care about this pop music? Pay attention because this is the current zeitgeist and an access for you to connect. These songs are anthems for 20-somethings and probably 30-somethings and they are pointing to a collective attitude. These artists are not merely reflecting “teenage angst.” There’s a lot more going on here and it impacts you.

Back in the 1950’s, homogeneity was celebrated – “The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit.” The IBM salesman with the dark suit and black horn rimmed glasses, whether he needed them or not – the more similar and “cookie cutter” the better. If you are from the generation that grew up with “Leave it to Beaver,” you may still have fond memories of that reality. The thing is, the pendulum is swinging and it hasn’t maxed out yet. The younger generations are celebrating diversity, self-expression, and being an individual.

What does this mean for leaders managing a multi-generational work force? How productive are these newer workers going to be living in a sea of beige cubes?  How will they handle being expected to fit the mold, conform, and do it your way? The probability is, they won’t, they are not, and you and your organization will be the lesser for it. They are stressed, struggling, and singing Lady Gaga as loud as they can on the way home in their cars at night.

In “The Prophet” by the poet, Kahlil Gibran, the Prophet speaks of children as follows:

“You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”

So, are you willing to take on learning from “the house of tomorrow” in a way that will allow your organization to access all this passion, creativity, and drive? Will you learn to be someone who creates a productive environment for people who are not like you?

If you are closing in on retirement you may feel like, “oh well, this isn’t my issue.” What about your leadership legacy and the long-term outlook for your company? If you are an entrepreneur and you have a family-owned business, how are you connecting with the younger generations of the family and preparing them to take over?

I suggest going back to the Stanley McChrystal talk and really focusing on the relevant aspects of his message. In the meantime, you may also want to download a Lady Gaga album!