How we write about leadership in the modern era

Posted on November 7, 2010 by Ken Carroll

Memo to self: Five things you must do when writing about leadership in the age of social media. (This is, erm, a parody.)

In reverse order of importance, here they are:

 #5. Use quotations up the wazoo. Big sweeping, philosophical quotations can be tweeted very conveniently and are hard to refute. Leaders really need these quotations and can hardly survive without ‘em. And besides, you never have to explain: By the time they read your quote or try to pronounce the source (‘Thucydides’) it’ll be time for the next one. Be sure to keep doing this non-stop, or everything will fail. But if we all just keep tweeting philosophy, the meaning of life will eventually work itself out. Make open demands for re-tweets.

#4. Make your observations as facile as possible. This really helps the leadership cause. Generic platitudes are best of all: “Great leaders are great listeners.” (That’s always a good one. People love it.) The there’s “Establish a crystal clear vision for your organization.” (A timeless classic.) But don’t forget, “Be a master of personal productivity.” (Beast!) Leaders are dying to know facts like these — over and over again. They can’t get enough of them.

#3. Cover the entire sweep of the subject in your book/post/tweet, and in a non-specific way. Never narrow stuff down. Follow a short paragraph about ‘vision’, with one about ‘character’, and the next about ‘dealing with failure’ (or something like that). Juxtapose wildly and make everything interchangeable. Take a list from one book, mix and match it with another, and call it wisdom. Feel free. It won’t make an iota of a difference

#2. Employ lists, lists, and more lists. Lists are great. You can never have enough lists. Lists inspire. Keep lists of the lists. If there’s one thing the internet needs is lists. How many lists are there on the internet anyway? The average joe can retain circa 15,000 lists in his head at any one time, so load ‘em up.

#1. Tell people what to do. This is the biggie, the number one guideline. There’s nothing a leader likes better than being told what to do. He loves it. Leave nothing to the imagination. Don’t do irony, and never stump him. Remember that he’s busy transforming visions into reality. Tell-him-what-to-do, for goodness sakes.

Now I understand that this post is way too long and way too in-depth for the modern era, but that’s because I have a lot to learn about leadership.

Ken Carroll

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Has Obama failed the leadership test?

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Ken Carroll

It seems the US election results are partly a referendum on the President. What, from a leadership perspective, did he do wrong? A quote from JK Galbraith may reveal the answer:

“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”

I think it’s true that Obama didn’t confront (or at least, not effectively) the widespread anxieties about the deficit, the bailouts, the job situation, or deep and prolonged uncertainty in the economy. From his first day in office, he chose instead, to make healthcare — long a liberal dream – his priority. Even if you agree that this should have been his priority, the focus may actually have added to the general anxiety as it added to the deficit. Nonetheless, Obama stuck to his guns on it, hoping in vain that the economy would right itself.

The result is that people, rightly or wrongly, see him as somewhat uncaring, aloof, driven by ideology. If Galbraith is right, then the President may even have failed the leadership test.

What do you think?

Steve Tobak at bNet expands on this here.

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When leadership goes horribly wrong

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Ken Carroll

 

John Van Der Kiste’s book on Wilhelm 2nd, Germany’s last emperor, has a wealth of insights into the horrors of bad leadership.

To be fair, Wilhelm never stood a chance. After a breech birth his right arm was crippled and he suffered mild brain damage that left him permanently off-balance. He seems to have had a horrendous childhood — strict education, loveless relationships, cold/distant parents, deep insecurities, and, oh yes, his family was afflicted with mental illness.

What could go wrong? Well, megalomania for a start. He had an immense drive to prove himself, but was profoundly lacking in self-awareness or good judgment. As soon as he became emperor he wasted no time in dismantling 30 years of peace and stability by kicking Bismarck out of office. In the early 1900s he launched an arms race and sought Germany’s ‘place in the sun’ – a German empire. I think you, erm, know where this all led to.

Leadership lessons

Wilhelm is obviously an extreme case, but a couple of things strike me. One is how leadership, including bad  leadership, can define the culture that surrounds it. Wilhelm was able to practically define the culture of his day. His menacing, reckless ambition, his insecurities, his old style militarism, and his spiked helmets, are the clichés of the time, but they reveal how he managed to infuse an entire culture with his own pathologies. For good or for bad, business leaders also inject personal traits into their corporate cultures. In some cases, the leader is the culture, with all that that entails.

And this translates into policy. Everyone around Wilhelm (all of Europe, in fact) was menaced by his uncertainty and lack of apparent direction. No-one, including himself, knew what he really wanted, or where he was really going. That uncertainty was a direct contributor to the unspeakable horrors that began in 1914, when a whole continent of dim-witted leaders marched the world into Armageddon. When you take the reins  of responsibility you have to know where you’re going

The conception of leadership that Wilhelm and his generation embraced contributed to a large extent, to how they behaved — they were absurdly grandiose and warlike – but would they have understood our modern conception of leadership if someone had explained it to them?

Ken Carroll

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We need original voices on leadership

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Ken Carroll

There’s some pretty bad writing on leadership out there. From books to social media there’s also a lot of the same people re-hashing self-referential, bland ideas. With a few notable exceptions, there’s a sad lack of originality in what people say or how they say it and a need for some input from outside the discipline itself. 

 In fact, biz lit never has been a great source of insight into  leadership, to my mind. I’ve always found history, mythology, psychology, and philosophy, far more fruitful. One example is the biography of Kaiser Wilhelm 2nd that I’m reading at the moment. It offers deep insights into what you might call ‘anti-leadership’, not least because the consequences of his disastrous failures come home to you in a deeply emotional way. I’ll finish the book today and report on it.

 In the meantime, who are the most original writers/bloggers on leadership, the notable exceptions? Instead of pointing out a long list of the bad ones, who are the good ones? The fresh or creative voices? I’d like to hear fom you.

OK. Just as I’m about to post I see Wally Bock’s latest and guess what? He’s talking about Shakespeare.

Ken Carroll

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Leadership, zombies, and self-direction

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Ken Carroll

Imagine it’s 50,000 years ago and we’re wandering around on the savannah, in a group of, say, 130 or so. Someone has to choose a direction, but we’re scared, vulnerable, unruly. The journey to find/distribute resources never ends. Nor does the confusion. But somehow we have to communicate, to maintain social cohesion, and manage group decisions. When things go wrong someone has to appeal to a better future, and lead us forward, lest we fall apart and starve. (Many did.)

Our analytic abilities developed out of those challenges, but logic couldn’t predict the future. So, in order to move ourselves and others through adversity, we learned to use inspiration, and the emotions, for example, but most of all, I would argue, meaning. Someone had to find and leverage the meaning and purpose of the whole journey. (It occurs to me also that the story of Moses may go right back to this very ancient past.)

The leadership we need today is the kind that’s concerned with meaning. We’re lost. We’ve ended up with what Umair Haque calls the zombie economy and it’s time to leave that phase behind. The leaders of the biggest players in the 20th century gave us daytime TV, fast food, and sugared water. We may be meeting our basic needs, but we’ve yet to solve the meaning part.

But meaning begins with the individual and finding what I call self-direction. I believe in free will. I believe we are psychologically autonomous individuals with control over, and total responsibility for, ourselves. I believe that by setting our own direction in life we can learn to lead others.

But most of the time we don’t think about our own freedoms and responsibilities. In fact, we’re deeply unaware of them and that’s the big problem. The zombie economy is not a failure of the free market, but a failure of the imagination.

So we need new leaders. Leadership is not an academic creation. It wasn’t architected in a Harvard classroom. It’s inside of you. But there’s no self-direction without self-awareness. Leadership styles are as unique as musical styles. You don’t learn them, you draw them out through self-awareness. There’s always this link between self-awareness and self-direction. That’s what I plan to explore in this blog.

Ken Carroll

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Motivation is not a trap

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Ken Carroll

 Here’s a quote on motivation from John C Maxwell that I think could confuse as much as it illuminates:

“The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.”

Motivation is not always a trap. It’s a fundamental survival mechanism and a driver of human action: We tend to get motivated when we feel we lack something, so lots of things motivate us – hunger, thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, etc. Why would we want to ignore that potential?

Motivation is energy

It’s clear that motivation itself is not action, and that, in the end, it’s action that makes the difference, but motivation leads to action and to purposeful behavior. Here’s why: It’s a type of energy. I don’t mean this in some mystical way. I’m talking about your brain releasing the dopamine or the endorphins that literally and physically energize you. And the mere act of thinking can trigger them. Your thoughts have a powerful effect on how you behave.

And there’s a great deal you can do to increase action by increasing motivation: Discovering what you really want in life, or doing the things that energize you, for example.

In fact, such strategies are essential to what I call ‘self-direction’ – the ability to guide yourself towards the goals that you choose for your life and career. You must constantly leverage the motivation behind these things because it’s too easy to get distracted, even from the things that you know you want or need.

No leadership without motivation

And there’s a leadership corollary. Applying effective motivational strategies to a team is the very basis for leadership. You can’t force people to do great work these days. You can only motivate them (not manipulate them, because they must be willing participants). Imagine applying the ‘forget motivation’ strategy there.

Clearly, there are times when you simply have to hit the treadmill, whether you feel like it or not, but I’ll wager that you will do it more frequently and with more vigor if you know the benefits that it brings to you and if you use them to increase energy and enthusiasm.

If motivation is a trap, then you’re doing it wrong.

Ken Carroll

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Self-direction and intrinsic motivation

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Ken Carroll

After almost 20 years as an entrepreneur I’ve been lucky to get involved in leadership coaching and training recently. One issue of particular interest to me is intrinsic motivation and how we must appeal to it in in order to inspire creativity and performance.

Dan Pink touches on a number of relevant points in the video above. I haven’t yet read the book, but half-way through the video he hits a hugely important point: The power of autonomy and self-direction as motivators. 

In fact, I’ve been thinking obsessively about self-direction for a year and in some recent consulting work I’ve come to believe it is of fundamental significance for management going forward.  Given the age we live in we can no longer manage for compliance. It has to be about finding new ways to tap into intrinsic motivation.

In fact I plan to take the discussion much further and into the realms of leadership. Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing more on this.

Ken Carroll

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Tearing down the classroom walls

Posted on July 26, 2009 by Ken Carroll

 We’ve recently spent some time on a new mobile learning platform, the MLN, or mobile learning network. Pretty soon you will be able to see it. In the meantime, let me, erm, talk about it!

The old problem 

The platform has been designed to work for groups, dedicated cohorts within companies or other organizations, and to solve the biggest problems they face with language instruction: low attendance and the flagging interest that inevitably follows.

The MLN is designed around the possibility that this group may (or may not) wish to convene in a physical classroom as part of the learning mix. Example: a group of colleagues in Beijing who need to work on their business English skills. They meet for a certain amount of classroom instruction, but because of travel and scheduling restrictions, cannot often  make class together. Once people start to miss classes, motivation takes a dive. In fact, by week 6 of the training, attendance typically trails off dramtically and few are getting the benefit of the thing.

We’re talking low impact and poor return on investment in this scenario. It is not uncommon. I would argue that it can even be quite bad for the organization as it sends the message that learning and training are neither effective nor important.

Enter, the mobile solution 

But this could be about to change and it is mobile that could make the difference. Mobile access to the content and the cohort has one major effect: it collapses the classroom walls so that learning/engagement/interaction are no longer confined to any physical space or schedule. You can now have many of the benefits of the classroom without the physical and scheduling barriers. Any cohort of learners with a common goal can build a community of paractice that extends to wherever they happen to be, at whatever time and place they choose to do the learning. If 4 of them are in class with the teacher in Beijing while the rest are in various parts of the county, they are all still connected to the learning events that occur around the publication of the lesson, the dicsussion, etc.

In this regard, the MLN platform also builds around some older features from ChinesePod, most notably the freedom to choose from a large database of learning objects – short audio lessons with exercises and extras on top. One major difference is that the CPod platform is for individual study, while the MLN is for groups, with a teacher to choose the lessons and lead the learning.  This dimension is critical in the context of the organization. It means that learners can work as team towwrds a common goal, while HR managers get an overview of who is learning what and the effort/progress they are making relative to each other.

Anyway, that was my 20 minute essay on collapsing classroom walls through mobile access. I think it offers a  taste of what we’re working on, though I realize I’m just touching the surface.

More on this later.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Mobile learning | 6 Comments

An enduring insight

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Ken Carroll

I think it’s the early career epiphanies that make the greatest impact. Here, I share mine. This post is my contribution to Dave Ferguson’s Work/Learn Carnival.

1989
I’m a fledgling ESL teacher who learned a few languages through immersion and a self-directed approach. But language teaching is dominated by grammar in Europe and behaviorism in the US (the audio-lingual approach). There’s an awful lot of lectures and grammar drills going on. It’s neither fun nor effective.

I read Stephen Krashen and a new world opens up. One idea above all starts to sink in: He notes that most teachers are too concerned with structures and the what of language teaching: What are the structures of the English language? He suggests that the real question is psychological and concerns the how: How can we help induce the process of language acquisition? Suddenly, the world of cognitive psychology becomes relevant to the classroom. We can stop obsessing grammar, and look to a million other sources for creative ideas.

For me, language teaching was liberated from its structural shackles in one act. I was then able to look at it in entirely new ways and from the perspective of different disciplines.  In a sense it was a double-whammy epiphany: 1. Grammar isn’t the key to language teaching; 2. Get eclectic, and seek ideas from any discipline that fires up the creativity. It’s hard to capture how invigorating this was at the time, but this set my teaching practices and career on a new course.

2009
It was the insight that keeps on giving and it still affects my work. True, these days things are more complicated. There’s way more research and diversity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). In fact, the only thing the theories seem to have in common these days is the fact that no-one really agrees on much. Muriel Saville-Troike describes (2005) how SLA theory struggles to integrate linguistics, psychology, and sociology, like so many blind men touching the elephant. Some touch SLA at the tail, others grab its trunk. Each views SLA through his own framework, methods, and procedures. Linguists see grammar, competence, lexis, etc, while the psychologists look to cognitive, affective, and other processes, and so on. Meanwhile, the web has forced me personally to look at social theory to understand the online relationships that are emerging.

All of these things can feed into how language teachers go about our work. If we’re looking for grand-unification, the cross-discipline approach frustrates, but if we’re looking for inspiration, it invigorates. My advice to any learning professional is to make sure you get ideas that, on the face of it, are from outside your own discipline. They could be the source of enduring insight.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Learning | 9 Comments

New Year Blogging Resolution

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Ken Carroll

Must write shorter posts.

Ken

Posted in Uncategorized | 27 Comments