Essential Leader

Poll Results

The polls mean little to me. It’s always been a bit of a mystery as to how anyone comes up with poll numbers. I mean, I don’t know anyone who has actually been polled for their opinion. And the one time I did actually talk to a pollster, it was so apparent that they were biased, I hung up on them.

My sense of where this election is going comes from the people I see in my neighborhood, the people I talk to in my area, and the students I get in my classroom. It’s not pretty…ladies and gentlemen…it’s not pretty at all. People are frustrated. They are angry. They are frightened about the economy, worried about the Middle East, and rock-solid convinced that anyone inside the capital beltway hasn’t a clue about what really needs to be done about any of it; and seem to be deaf to the voices of their constituents.

 

Biden vs. Palin: Honest Emotion Points to Leadership -- by Karen Kohn Bradley & Karen Studd

I normally try to stay away from political stuff figuring we're just about on information overload with elections looming on the horizen. But this article caught my eye. I'm a big believer in the power of observing the body language of others. 

Don't take this as an endorsement or criticism. It's just food for thought.

       COLLEGE PARK, Md., Oct. 3 (AScribe Newswire) -- The following analysis is by Karen Kohn Bradley, Associate Professor and Certified Movement Analyst at the University of Maryland and Karen Studd, Associate Professor and Certified Movement Analyst at George Mason University.

       - - - -

       Sarah Palin lost the room immediately after Joe Biden got real.

       Until that moment, the debate had been a farrago of swirling facts, shuffling notes, and competing spins, with the occasional Palin wink and smile at the people in TV land. On a movement level, both the vice-presidential candidates showed a sense of urgency, and the increasing speed of their deliveries overcame whatever meaning the sound bites had. About halfway through, all of us, Gwen Ifill included, were headed into a trance, as if we were watching a merry-go-round spin faster and faster, punctuated only by those strange smiles.

       What about those smiles? Not exactly heartfelt or even remotely resembling pleasure, the candidates took turns smiling during the other's answers. Each time, it appeared that a choice had been made: to smile rather than "go negative".

       Palin was narrow in posture and gesture and directed herself to the camera, reaching forward, advancing and committing to a course of action. Biden was a little more open, gathering information and presenting a broader range of options. Both were very good at letting people see these stylistic differences, making the choice much clearer.

       But then, Palin made the wrong choice.

       Once again she spewed her talking points, completely failing to notice that Biden had just produced an extraordinary answer - an answer not about policy, but about himself. Biden made a direct and powerful connection with the American people, the very "Joe Six Pack-soccer mom" voters Palin had been rhetorically and repetitively attempting to own. Palin was incapable of responding to this authentic moment, which was rich with nonverbal information about Joe Biden as a father, a parent, and a public servant. Instead Palin just stood there, looking straight at the camera, with not a moment of concern or compassion in response to what Biden had revealed.

       Why this moment was the critical moment: Movement reveals a great deal about how people make decisions, how they tackle problems, and how they relate to others. Too many "body language" experts focus on a particular gesture or body part. In our movement analysis, we look at the movement "event" as a part of the individual's style. The movement event we saw Thursday night was authentic honest emotion. Joe Biden choked up. And then he pressed on.

       No pitches for sympathy, no lingering in that emotion. He felt it, squelched it, and took it to a universal level, relating his own terrible experience to that of many Americans. At that moment, millions of viewers understood the role of a leader: to take one's own struggles and challenges and to relate wisdom gained to the situations at hand.

       A stunning moment indeed and Sarah Palin missed it.

       - - - -

       Karen Kohn Bradley and Karen Studd are Laban Certified Movement Analysts, who study the nonverbal and movement behaviors of political leaders. Contact information:

       Karen Bradley, 202-669-3927, kbradley@umd.edu

       Karen Studd, 703-786-5271, kstudd@gmu.edu

       David Ottalini, University of Maryland Media Relations, 301-405-4076

Turkish Tea Tale

It happened at a waterfront restaurant at a hotel in the seaside resort of Cesme, Turkey. I sat dumbstruck. My hosts, Zafer Erdogmus and his wife, Nurhan, looked at me as one might look at a two-headed beetle.  

“I’m not aware that there are any states on the five-dollar bill.” I said, responding to his question.

“That!” thundered Zafer, a retired Turkish bank executive, “is what is so frustrating about Americans. You have no idea how much influence you have in other parts of the world and you have very little knowledge of even your own country.” He went on to voice a cliché I’d heard before, “What you do not realize is that America still has so much influence, that when America sneezes, the rest of the world has to reach for a handkerchief.” Zafer, who was observing Ramadan, was getting cranky, I suspected, because he had had no food or water since sunrise. Nurhan, not wanting her American guest to feel uncomfortable, had broken her fast and simply smiled at me over her tea cup. No, Zafer was quite serious.

It wasn’t the question that floored me. “How many U. S. States are on the five-dollar bill?” is something that could win a drink bet in a bar. The answer, by the way, is 27. It was the realization that everywhere I had traveled in this region that was once called Asia Minor, all eyes were on my home country. Nearly every conversation eventually turned to U.S. foreign policy or U.S. economic policy. What did I think about U.S. policy toward the situation in Georgia, U.S. policy toward the Kurdish question or the Armenian genocide question, thoughts on the pipeline so vital to U.S. strategic interests, and, of course, the upcoming U.S. Presidential election? For an international business professor who cautions students traveling abroad to keep politics and religion out of their conversations, it was disconcerting to find that these are the very topics that my Turkish hosts most wanted to talk about.

Once referred to as “the sick man of Europe,” Turkey sees itself as a regional power with widening diplomatic influence on questions of global importance. In both print and broadcast media, it was clear that the governing Justice and Development party—the AKP—had chosen to pursue a path of engagement in foreign policy and economic questions. Almost everyone I spoke to stressed the centrality of Turkey to just about everything of importance to the United States and the world: the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea region. Professor and Doctor Taner Berksoy, Dean of Business Administration at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, put it to me this way. “Turkey’s aim today is to reintegrate with its neighbors. We are no longer an isolated Cold War outpost, but a country with global strategic value.”

As I leaned forward for another sip of the Turkish tea that accompanies every get together, Zafer offered one more suggestion. America, he said, needs to acknowledge its tremendous influence, step up to its responsibilities as a world leader, and engage thoughtfully and openly with its strategic partners.

The Forgotten Plight of the Displaced

In the foreground stands the television news correspondent. He is describing the bombings and devastation being wreaked by Russian troops in a defiant Georgia. Crossing behind him unnoticed is a small group of people clearly fleeing the devastation with possibly everything they own on their backs or in the makeshift bags they are carrying. Where they are going is a mystery.

A known but little-noted result of the conflict in Georgia — and others around the world — is the displacement of people who have absolutely no control of the events going on around them. In Georgia alone, tens of thousands of refugees from the secessionist territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been waiting for more than ten years for a chance to return home. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, as many as 247,000 people are displaced in Georgia as of February 2007. The current situation promises only to worsen an already terrible circumstance.

Indeed, according to a 2007 study published by the IDMC, the number of refugees created as a result of armed conflicts and violence in more than 50 countries is well over 26 million. In nearby Iraq, for example, nearly 3 million people were displaced by rising inter-community violence between February 2006 and March 2008, according to the UN. “If a similar percentage of the U.S. population were displaced," writes the Brookings Institute's Elizabeth Ferris in The Looming Crisis: Displacement and Security in Iraq, "this would represent over 50 million Americans — the equivalent in displacement of those uprooted by 50 Hurricane Katrinas.”

Add these folks to the already staggering number of poor and poverty stricken people throughout the world — a World Bank report states that 2.8 billion of the world’s more than 6 billion people live on less than $2 a day and 1.2 billion on less than $1 a day — and one begins to get a sense of the enormous challenges facing the world’s decision makers.

Key Lessons on a Leadership Journey

Judith Johansen, President of Marylhurst University, recently offered some morsels of wisdom to the students in the BUS 300 (Leading in Dynamic Environments) class. Here is my paraphrasing of her thoughts augmented with a few of my own:

1. Stretch yourself and be prepared for unexpected opportunities to put your new skills to use.

Imagine yourself at the center of a circle. The edge of the circle is the edge of your comfort zone. It is everything that you know and are comfortable dealing with. Once in a while you might encounter an anomaly that hits the edge of your comfort zone, if it’s a little thing you expand to include it.

Now, if it’s a big thing, guess what? You’re going to be very uncomfortable. And what you decide to do about it is going to affect you in a major way. If you decide to avoid dealing with it, your comfort zone stays where it is. If you choose to deal with it, your comfort zone will expand to include it, and viola! You now have an even bigger comfort zone.

Many of the opportunities in Judie’s professional life came from her willingness to stretch beyond her comfort zone. Not only did this increase her personal effectiveness capacity, it also offered her unexpected career rewards. Other people noticed her willingness to “go the extra mile” and came to her with opportunities to move her career in unplanned directions.

2. Know your own leadership style.

From Mahatma Gandhi to Jack Welch, and Martin Luther King to Rudolph Giuliani, there are as many leadership styles as there are leaders. Whether you are managing a team at work, captaining your sports team or leading a major corporation, your leadership style is crucial to your success. Consciously, or subconsciously, you will no doubt have a preferred leadership style, at least some of the time. By understanding this and recognizing that other leadership styles might be more appropriate to a particular situation, you can become a more flexible, better leader.

Judi described herself as a conscious collaborator, seeking to be open and transparent in all her dealings. She reminded the audience that different situations required the leader to be able to exercise a range of leadership styles tailored to the needs of the situation.

3. Learn to recognize that you are not perfect; be humble.

Leaders are authentic. Leaders are not perfect. Leaders sometimes fail. Leaders admit their shortcomings to themselves, they recognize their strengths, and they live as who they are. Leaders have ethics. They have at the center of their beliefs a regard for human worth and dignity. They make decisions based on deeply held values and beliefs but they are not infallible. In fact, at least one former boss said that if you are not making mistakes, you are not making progress.

When Judi became CEO at Bonneville Power Administration, her natural propensity to judge (on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator she is a strong “J” – ENTJ) and take action to remove people she judged to be obstacles was tempered, thankfully so, by “cool down” policies that prohibited an elected official from removing permanent employees for the first six months of her tenure. She later learned that each of her close collaborators had something of value to bring to the table.

4. Keep things in perspective. 

One of the shows my son watches religiously on the Discovery Channel is Meerkat Manor. You may not agree with this assertion, but if you were to watch a meerkat colony, you may have been reminded of the way many organizations work. These wonderfully social animals are constantly aware of their environment, the other members of the colony, and any sign of danger. Their heads dart rapidly from left to right, searching each others’ expressions for fear or reassurance. The scene, although comedic, holds a valuable lesson. The way a leader handles adversity and stress is witnessed by every member of the organization, and the leader’s reaction has a great deal to do with how everyone else handles similar circumstances.

In a previous professional life, Judie had been working on a nationally prominent issue within her company. Under her leadership the company released a national press announcement that something had gone terribly wrong with plans for company growth. That was September 10, 2001. Events the following day forced her and everyone she worked with to realize that maybe they had the wrong perspective on the magnitude of events.

5. Know your personal limits.

According to the Health and Safety Executive, stress is the “adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them.” Pressure in itself is not necessarily bad and many people thrive on it. It is when the demands of the work environment exceed a person’s ability to cope with or control them that stress, results. For many people, managing their own stress is something they find difficult to do. There is an old story about putting a frog in a pan of water and gently heating it. Theoretically, the frog will remain in the water and ultimately be boiled to death. However, put that same frog into hot, but not boiling, water and it will immediately jump out. Whether this, the boiling frog syndrome, is true or not, it illustrates the fact that, for individuals operating in pressurized situations, it is often hard for them to sense the onset of stress until it is too late, because it gradually and imperceptibly accumulates to dangerous levels. Leaders need to be aware of their personal limits and take action to manage the demands made on them, develop time management competence, and learn to delegate. One key is to learn to trust the competence and abilities of the other members of the team. Equally they may be unaware of lifestyle actions that they can take to increase their capacity to tolerate pressure.