Tue • Apr 21st, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 7
“Greater Than Yourself” by Steve Farber
a best Spring book on leadership
Do you have a leader who encourages you, who sets aside time it to listen to your dreams and helps you develop your skills? And do you give that kind of support to a least one other person?
Those are questions raised in Steve Farber’s new book “Greater Than Yourself,” recommended in the Washington Post as one of the best Spring books on leadership. As the reviewer notes, “the lesson he wants to teach may seem utterly counterintuitive, especially in the hyper-competitive world we live in today.”
The book is a “business parable” in which Farber, President of Extreme Leadership, Inc., comes to believe that helping others succeed, in fact to become greater than yourself, is – as in the subtitle of the book – “The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership.”
In the story he discovers the reward of helping those he calls “GTY projects,” including Tommy Spaulding, CEO of “Up with People,” his personal GTY project. The GTY website includes several brief video conversations with Spaulding discussing how it has worked out for each of them.
In one video interview a GTY leader reflects on the difficulty of doing this - “It’s a natural thing to want to make other people better. But in our society, we have turned it into an unnatural thing. And to try to reverse that, which I think is what the GTY challenge is all about, it takes a lot of work, not just in the person you pick as a GTY, but in yourself.”
Farber makes an impassioned appeal to leaders, indeed all of us, to choose one or more people into whom we pour our time and resources to help them achieve more than we have. He compares this to the efforts of parents to enable their children to surpass their own achievements.
This, he emphasizes, is much more than giving advice or mentoring. It’s more than just helping people, which be believes we can and should do for everyone. Living by the GTY principle requires an extraordinary amount of time and deep commitment.
Farber urges leaders to give a “tithe” of their working time, 4 to 6 hours a week to one or more people who they believe can be more successful than themselves. He describes “GTY projects” as relationships of love and trust.
The Greater Than Yourself framework is this simple three-fold formula:
Expand Yourself
He encourages us to continually build our skills and regularly take inventory of our personal assets and experiences in order to know what we have to give to others.
Give Yourself
He suggests that we “philanthropize” ourselves. Give away our knowledge, connections, experience, insights, confidence, words and gestures of encouragement and be willing to offer tough and honest feedback.
Replicate Yourself
Farber wants to start a movement, urging those who benefit from GTY to take on their own “projects” in a chain reaction of people who give so that others may increase.
He confesses that he struggles with a natural sense of competition and the feeling that he will diminish if he helps others surpass him. The lesson learned is, you gain not lose when you help someone else become greater than yourself.
Mon • Apr 13th, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 0
Most of the successful leaders I know do more than their jobs require of them. Their primary assignments, however important or extensive, are not enough to be satisfying.
This is not about money. They volunteer, or even pay for the privilege of engaging in demanding experiences or assignments in addition to their jobs.
Which reenforces the notion that leadership is not positional. While leaders may have positions, most do not want to be confined by their positions. Leadership is personal, an attribute or even a calling that cannot be confined to a particular context.
In a crowd, some leaders immediately become the center of attention. It’s not that they are extroverts. Sooner or later, wherever they are good leaders will lead.
I’ve been fascinated with President Obama’s appointments to cabinet posts. Several of the them have been brought to their respective departments from the outside with little or no background or experience for their assignments. This was particularly true with the appointment of Leon Penetta as the director of the CIA. In this instance he was selected precisely because he is an outsider who is expected to chart a new direction for America’s most important intelligence agency.
It happens with every administration. Presidents choose leaders who they believe can effectively manage and guide any assignment they are asked to lead.
Patrick Lencioni, author of many leadership books including, the best-selling The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, was a presenter at leadership conference I was directing. Around the lunch table he wanted advice about how he should handle his responsibilities on a committee in his local Catholic parish charged with finding a new parish priest. The bishop and the congregation were at odds over the selection.
I was fascinated, not that a bishop and a congregation might disagree, but that Patrick Lencioni with his very extension enterprise would give so much time to his faith community.
Why would Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle – a huge international, high-tech conglomerate – spend millions and even go to court for the right to own and sponsor the challenger for the America’s Cup sail boat race?
There is something that drives successful leaders like Lencioni and Ellison to take on more than is required of them. It’s true for many leaders whatever their position.
All of which brings me to believe that leaders have an opportunity, if not an obligation to give something back. The vitality of our faith communities, our civic and neighborhood associations, our charities, indeed our entire society depends on leaders who do more than their jobs demand of them.
Wed • Apr 1st, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 4
Flying by instruments takes hours of supervised training. Pilots learn to trust feedback from instruments rather than their own sense of direction, altitude and speed. With no visibility at night or in a cloud it could make the difference between life and death.
Since we can’t trust our sense of speed our vehicles have speedometers. When I was stopped for speeding the officer asked, “Do you know how fast you were going?” before telling me. Most of the time speeding results from not paying attention to the feedback right in front of us.
We’ve become dependent upon GPS to prevent us from getting lost, and all sorts of medical devices – blood pressure cuffs, heart monitors, blood sugar tests, etc., to detect otherwise hidden threats to life. We are surrounded with feedback to help us know what we don’t know.
And yet, when it comes to their careers leaders are sometimes unaware of, or even worse, they deliberately ignore feedback that could mean the difference between failure, just getting along or success.
An extraordinarily successful leader, my friend Richard Schubert, who in his career has been the president of Bethlehem Steel, under-secretary of Labor and president of the American Red Cross and is now the vice-chairman of the Leader to Leader Institute board, recommended to me “Feedback, In Heaping Helpings” an interview with Kevin Sharer, C.E.O. of Amgen. The interview and accompanying brief article in which Sharer explains his “C.E.O. Job Map” is worth reading.
When he started at Amgen, Sharer asked his senior staff these questions.
When asked where he got the idea for these questions he answered, “I’m a very coachable person and I”m sincerely open to and I seek feedback.” He listened deeply, took detailed notes of what he calls, “social data of profound importance.”
The human resources department at Amgen conducts his annual evaluation which is presented to him and the board. He admits that it’s an “uncomfortable process,” since he naturally likes compliments. But every year, he says, “they’ve come up with three or four things that are quite authentic that I ought to do better at.”
And then he added, “So you’ve got to create those kinds of feedback loops.”
If we can’t trust our senses when flying through a cloud or speeding down the road neither can leaders be sure of getting good feedback unless they ask good questions and occasionally use a third party to facilitate a feedback loop to get information that won’t come directly even when they asked for it.