Clear leadership

Posted on February 6, 2010 by Michael Ray Hopkin

This evening I had the opportunity to listen to a speaker who had just returned from a humanitarian service trip to Haiti. He told amazing stories about the trip, including heart-wrenching accounts of the devastation caused by the recent earthquake. He spoke about the director who organized the trip and what a great job he did in leading the people who went with him. When describing the impact this individual had on the trip, the speaker made the following profound observation:

People will follow clear leadership

What does ‘clear leadership’ mean to you? What benefits have you experienced from clear leadership? Please share your ideas.

Filed under: Leadership, Purpose | Tagged: | 4 Comments »

Hire your replacement

Posted on February 3, 2010 by Michael Ray Hopkin
Leaders at successful companies focus significant time and resources to hire the right people. The money and effort they spend pays big dividends as the company progresses and matures. The companies that excel at hiring the right people seem to take this one step further: at all levels the leaders hire people whom they can groom as their replacements. This may seem at odds with conventional thinking; generally, most people at most companies do not think about what the company will be like when they leave. However, those who really ‘get it’ make hiring better people than themselves a priority.

The importance of focusing on your replacement cannot be overstated. Following are three actions that will help you focus on successfully developing replacements:

  • Hire the right people: When you select candidates to interview look for people who have the skills and the personality to grow into your position. When making hiring decisions, look for and hire individuals who have the potential to do the job better than you can do it.
  • Train them: Hire the right people, then provide the training to accelerate their growth. Spend money on developing skills that will drive the results your company is seeking. Don’t let the cost of training deter you from training your people. Stephen M.R. Covey drives this point home nicely in his book The Speed of Trust:
I’ll never forget what one CEO said about the risk of investing in a focused training initiative for his company. Someone asked him, ‘What if you train everyone and they all leave?’ He responded, ‘What if we don’t train them and they all stay?’
  • Give them opportunities to grow: Once you hire the right people and give them the training they need, provide them with opportunities to learn and grow. Do not hold on to the most important tasks yourself. Give your team members new opportunities even if it means letting go of your pet project.
One of the key side effects of focusing time and effort on your replacement is your own growth. When you help others learn, you learn more. When you help them hone key skills, your skills improve. You cannot help others progress without advancing your own position. The more you increase the value of others the more your value increases.
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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers are most often leaders by nature; however, they most often do not have anyone reporting directly to them. These principles still apply because, as a PM, you are a member of the team and have influence on the people who are hired on to the team. Leaders of product managers do themselves and their company a favor by hiring people who will eventually replace them and be more successful than they have been. It’s all about progression: the more you help others progress, the further you go.

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Book Review: The Right Leader

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Michael Ray Hopkin
“How we go about doing the things we choose to do or are called upon to do is what makes a leader the right leader.” In his book The Right Leader: Selecting Executives Who Fit, author Nat Stoddard (with help from Claire Wyckoff) investigates the complex topic of assuring smooth executive transitions, with their primary focus at the CEO level. When a CEO does not work out for a company — which usually happens within the first 18 months — the primary reason is rarely the individual’s lack of competence; most often the problem is a result of the wrong fit.

The first section of the book focuses on finding executives who “fit” the organization. The author presents a methodology to define, measure and clarify corporate cultures to gain a clear understanding the impact they will have on a new leader’s changes for success or failure. He discusses ways to determine abilities, personality and character and map those to the company’s need and corporate culture. He develops what he calls the “universal character traits of leaders”:

Traits of personal humility: Courage, caring, compassion, respect, acceptance, kindness, optimism, gentleness, teachability and patience. He groups these as ‘private traits’ of leadership.

Traits of professional will: Integrity, persuasion, knowledge, communication, discipline, honesty, self-control, fairness, responsibility and consistency. He dubs these ‘public traits’ of leadership.

Mr. Stoddard shows how leaders not only need to possess these traits, but also keep them in balance.

The author discusses at length the complex selection methods and provides insight into fixing flawed selection processes. He discusses succession planning in detail and provides structure and practice for reducing the risks of leadership failures and ensuring that new executives have the abilities, personalities and energy to match the business needs of the organization.

If you are in the position of vetting candidates for top-level executive positions this book is a must-read. You will gain ideas and insights into finding the right leader for your organization and preparing for the complexities of succession planning. If you are not in this position, you will learn much about what it takes to become the right leader. The book cites many references to the author’s company and consulting services, which at times seems more self-serving than helpful. However, Mr. Stoddard’s experience and frequent metaphors and parables provide readers with much to learn about improving their leadership skills.

A Perl of wisdom: “The ‘right leader’ is always a trusted leader.” Whether you’re a CEO or an intern, you have the opportunity to lead. The efforts you make to become the trusted leader in your organization will pay dividends in the future regardless of the position you hold.

Filed under: Integrity, Knowledge, Leadership, Team Building, Trust | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

A new Leadership Development Carnival

Posted on January 4, 2010 by Michael Ray Hopkin

The Lead on Purpose blog is featured in the January Leadership Development Carnival of Dan McCarthy’s Great Leadership blog.

This first Leadership Development Carnival in 2010 provides links to 50 posts — what Dan calls “the Best of 2009.” The links include posts on topics such as building better leaders, measuring employee engagement and building corporate trust. You’ll find posts from great bloggers such as Art Petty, Wally Bock, Mike Henry and others. The Leadership Development Carnival is a great way improve your leadership development and get to know the bloggers who are making it happen. Take a stroll through the Carnival; you will not regret the time you spend.

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Five myths about leadership

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin
True leadership principles endure the test of time regardless of the economy or world affairs. The more you practice them the more they become part of your life.

One of the best ways to understand principles is to understand their opposites. John Maxwell — author of the book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership — does a masterful job of explaining the leadership principle of influence through the five myths about leadership:

  1. The Management Myth: Management focuses on maintaining systems and processes. Influential leadership is about influencing people to follow.
  2. The Entrepreneur Myth: People may be buying what somebody is selling (or saying), but they are not necessarily buying into his leadership or vision.
  3. The Knowledge Myth: Mental superiority does not necessarily equate to leadership.
  4. The Pioneer Myth: The one in front is not necessarily the leader. The leader is the one with the vision that people want to follow.
  5. The Position Myth: The greatest misunderstanding about leadership is that people think it’s based on position. Maxwell quotes Stanley Huffty, “It’s not the position that makes the leader; it’s the leader that makes the position.”
If you want to increase your influence, understand these five myths and practice their opposites.

Update: A good friend of mine pointed out that the myths I list are actually facts — the myths should be falsehoods. He’s right, I wrote the statements as facts, not myths. Here’s Take 2 on my interpretation of Maxwell’s five myths (written as myths):
  1. Leading and managing are one and the same
  2. All entrepreneurs are leaders
  3. Those people who possess knowledge or intelligence are leaders
  4. Anyone who is out in front of a crowd is a leader
  5. Leadership is based on position
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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers need to understand each of the five myths and practice the opposite behaviors. Perhaps the one that comes most naturally is the management myth: product managers rarely manage the people or processes necessary for their products’ success. To succeed you need to build consensus and exert positive influence on the teams you work with.

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What matters in 2010?

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin

With just a few weeks left in 2009 you have no-doubt spent time thinking about the events of the past year and the growth and changes that have resulted.

What matters in 2010? Seth Godin, marketing guru and thought leader, did a cool project where he brought together more than seventy “big thinkers” to write the ebook What Matters Now. His purpose: “Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around.” Here are a few of the thought-provoking ideas:

“If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.” -Seth Godin

“Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, ‘C’mon. We can do this!’” -Michael Hyatt

“Here’s the final measure of your success as a speaker: did you change something? Are attendees leaving with a new idea, some new inspiration, perhaps a renewed commitment to their work or to the world?” -Mark Hurst

“The road to sustainability goes through a clear-eyed look at unsustainability.” -Alan M. Webber

“After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.” -Daniel H. Pink

“The future belongs to people who can spread ideas.” -Guy Kawasaki (read Guy’s ‘ten things to remember’)

“You can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.” -David Meerman Scott

“You’re probably trying to change things at home or at work. Stop agonizing about what’s not working. Instead, ask yourself, ‘What’s working well, right now, and how can I do more of it?’” -Chip Heath & Dan Heath

“You grow (and thrive!) by doing what excites you and what scares you everyday, not by trying to find your passion.” -Derek Sivers

“Winning businesses have a common trait, an obvious and divisive point of view. Losing businesses also have a common trait, a boring personality alienating no one and thus, sparking passion from no one.” -John Moore

“My eyes have been opened to the value of regularly closing them.” -Arianna Huffington (on the value of sleep)

“The secret learned by technology providers is to spend less time providing services for citizens, and to spend more time providing services to developers…This is the right way to frame the question of ‘Government 2.0.’ How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to provide better services to each other?” -Tim O’Reilly

“Declare war on passivity. Hush the inner voice that insists you’re over the hill, past your prime, unworthy of attaining those dreams. Disbelief is now the enemy, as is the notion of settling. Get hungry — hyena hungry. Get fired up. Find your backbone, and your wings.” -J.C. Hutchins

Seth and his coauthors are trying to get five million downloads of the ebook. Help them out; you will be the beneficiary. Read Seth’s post about the ebook here.

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The price of leadership

Posted on December 10, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin

The topic of whether leaders are born or made comes up often and has created many interesting conversations. In their recent Wall Street Journal article Do You Really Want to be a Leader?, Preston C. Bottger and Jean-Louis Barsoux address the question “are leaders born or are they made?” with the simple statement “the answer is irrelevant.” You will not know whether you have what it takes to be a leader until you try really hard to express it. The real question is: are you willing to invest the effort and make the sacrifices necessary to take on the responsibility of a leadership position?

The authors propose three questions you should ask to assess your own leadership potential:

  • How far do you want to go? To help you measure your inclination and desire to rise to new levels of leadership, look at your immediate boss’s job and ask yourself if you could do it as well or better – answer honestly. Then take it another step; consider the most senior leader in your line of sight – perhaps the chief executive. Get a feel for the time, energy and capabilities required to do those jobs. What would those jobs require of you that you can’t do now or that you don’t enjoy doing? What do you enjoy now but would have to give up? It’s crucial to honestly assess the job you are pursuing and make sure it’s a direction you want to head.
  • What are you willing to invest? There will be pleasures that you must give up. Certainly, there will be implications for your personal life – raising questions not so much about balancing work and family in the short term, but about finding a sustainable mix for the long term.
  • How will you keep it up? If you envision another 10, 20 or even 30 years of leadership work, then you must find effective methods for maintaining your physical, emotional and intellectual well-being. Periodically you must create timeouts to review where you are investing your time and energy, to ensure that you remain capable of generating new behaviors to deal with new challenges.

Whether leadership is something you can learn is not the right question. Whether you want to pay the price to reach the leadership level of your dreams is the real question you need to sort out.

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The Product Management Perspective: Most product managers do not “manage” other people (in the traditional HR sense of the word). However, the need to lead others to help you succeed is absolutely critical. Working with people on other teams, spending time with customers and understanding your markets take a lot of time. This often leaves you doing your “work” at weird hours after your coworkers are long gone. Regardless of the cost, the investment in building relationships is critical to succeeding in your current role and building the foundation on which to grow your career. The crucial question you need to ask yourself: is it worth the cost?

Filed under: Leadership, Purpose, Trust | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

Capturing ideas

Posted on November 26, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin

Ideas are the seeds from which all greatness grows. Every book and every company started from the spark of an idea. Ideas come on their own time and in their own way. Those who understand this principle find a sure path to success.

The key to benefiting from ideas is to capture them. You need to write them down in a place where you can review them and use them when the time is right. In his audio book “Capturing Million Dollar Ideas,” Richard Paul Evans recommends keeping and “idea journal” with you at all times so you can capture ideas as they come. This is important because you can never control or predict when ideas will come. He further discusses five things to know about your ideas:

  1. Your life if the sum of your ideas.
  2. Ideas are like butterflies, they come at any time and they appear unannounced, flittering through your mind as if to find capture. Creating a place to capture the ideas seems to attract them, and in greater number. “A discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind.”
  3. Ideas, no matter how brilliant, have a very short shelf life.
  4. You may not understand how big an idea is until later; some ideas need to age like cheese and wine to come to value. In come cases, you need to grow before you realize just how big a concept is.
  5. Ideas beget other ideas.

Remember, ideas come on their own time. When ideas come to you, write them down.

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The Product Management Perspective: Ideas are the fuel for great products. The difficulty for many product managers is capturing ideas and filtering the potentially great ones from the not so good. That topic deserves its own post (or perhaps its own book). The key point here is that you, as the PM, capture the ideas that come to you regardless of the source. The more ideas you capture the more likely you are to get the perfect new product or feature. Many times ideas will seem silly or absolutely unobtainable; write them down anyway. Over time circumstances change, technology improves and opportunities appear that you do not expect. The more ideas you have captured the better prepared you will be to develop your ideas into the next great product.

Filed under: Knowledge, Learning | Tagged: , , , | 9 Comments »

Battle of the bloggers

Posted on November 16, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin

Tomorrow I have the opportunity to speak at the AIPMM Battle of the Bloggers and tell the people why Lead On Purpose is the top product management blog. Given the level of competition among the participating bloggers and the many other great blogs “out there” it’s a daunting task to say the least. In preparing for my brief (~5 minute) speech I’ve come up with a few reasons why Lead On Purpose is important to the product management community:

  • Promoting leadership in product management: The blog was started with the intent to promote leadership practices that will help product managers work effectively with people: customers, partners and most especially, their co-workers on whom they depend for success.
  • On Purpose: Product managers have to be leaders (in the true sense of the word) because they have the responsibility on their shoulders to get products out the door on time, with high quality and under budget. BUT, they do not manage or have authority over the people they depend on for success. Therefore, they need to be leaders and do it on purpose.
  • Features of the blog: The success of Lead on Purpose comes from its focus on the need for strong leadership principles. The Product Management Perspective applies the leadership principles taught (in a given post) to product management. Guest bloggers have added tremendous value. I continue to learn from books I read and share that knowledge in book reviews. In January I started the PM Pulse, a separate blog where I post interviews with the thought leaders in product management and marketing.
  • Perl of wisdom: The thing that keeps me writing is a love for learning. My favorite quote on leadership is this from Eric Hoffer: “In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.  The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” The effort, time and money we spend on learning and filling our minds with new opportunities will benefit us exponentially.

Blogging can be a lonely proposition; you put yourself “out there” for the world to see and judge, never knowing for sure what people really think. But then you get that comment or link or direct message from a reader who appreciates what you’ve written – then it’s all worth it.

Thank you — readers of Lead On Purpose — you are the reason I write.

Filed under: Leadership, Learning, Product Management / Marketing, Purpose | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Book Review: The Three Laws of Performance

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Michael Ray Hopkin

Three Laws of Performance“One of the flaws of management in this day and age is that we fragment accountabilities and then everyone focuses on their own piece.” In The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan discuss laws that govern individual, group and organizational behavior. They lay out a framework to help leaders at any level envision a positive future filled with success, based on the Three Laws of Performance:

  1. How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. The first law addresses why things occur to people and how taking the time to see things from their perspective changes their behavior. There are two elements: performance and how a situation occurs. “These two are perfectly matched, always, with no exceptions.”
  2. How a situation occurs arises in language. How a situation occurs is inseparable from language. “Language is the means through which your future is already written. It is also the means through which it can be rewritten.”
  3. Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people. Future-based language, also called generative language, has the power to create new futures, to craft vision, and to eliminate the blinders that are preventing people from seeing possibilities. The most powerful language comes through declaration. Whether itʼs about standing for human rights, or putting a man on the moon, or signing the Declaration of Independence, generative (future-based) speaking causes new realities to come into being.

This book is especially pertinent to those seeking to grow their leadership skills and capabilities, but feel they are so far behind that it’s not worth the effort to even try. Zaffron and Logan show you how to change your mindset and use future-based language to become an effective leader.

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The Product Management Perspective: Product managers spend much of their time looking toward the future; they speak “future-based language” when discuss markets and write requirements. I recommend you read this book to learn more about the science of future-based language; it will help you hone your skills as a forward-looking market expert.

Filed under: Leadership | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

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