You may be thinking that this is a trick question and perhaps you are right.  For some time now, I have been using the family system as a micro version of what happens in larger organizational systems.   So what better way than to look at the parental role as leader and how it plays out in gender differences?*

I begin with the story of my two parents.  The year is 1944, Bletchley Park, England.  My mother at 25 was less than half the age I am now.  She was a Flight Sergeant in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and newly wed to my father, a civilian and to her surprise almost 5 years her junior.  My mother had planned on making a career in the Air Force after the war but instead was decommissioned and by the early 50′s was raising a family as a stay-at-home Mum.  She always volunteered outside the home; often with women identified organizations such as Girl Guides, Planned Parenthood and the Elizabeth Fry Society.  In her fifties, she went back to school to become first a Real Estate Agent and then a Medical Secretary.  My father’s career took off after the war.  He went back to school, became an Electrical Engineer and immigrated to Canada with his wife and two small children.  He worked his way up Ma Bell and retired as a senior manager with over 600 people reporting to him.  He took pride in the nickname they had for him: “Hill the Mover: Hire, Fire, Transfer or Retire.” (I am not quite so sure it was meant as a compliment.)

So who was the better leader in my family configuration?

The Christian perspective is that the husband is the head (aka leader) of the household.  This has led to many debates as to the meaning and I am sure the same can be said in other religious practices.  Personally, I think this quote from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” exemplifies how most women feel:

Toula Portokalos: Ma, Dad is so stubborn. What he says goes. “Ah, the man is the head of the house!”
Maria Portokalos: Let me tell you something, Toula. The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.

My mother certainly believed this to be true.  So who is the better leader?

My premise is that neither and not for reasons that you might suspect.  I do think that all the roles and responsibilities of “leadership” can not be successfully handled by one person alone.  It is too large a burden to carry. For this reason, I am a great promoter of “collaborative leadership”.

Like many parents, my father and mother were excellent managers but not leaders in the modern sense. This is a sincere compliment.  They knew how to plan, organize, staff , direct and control. As I work with senior and new leaders, I am discovering that the art of management is becoming a lost skill.  We are trying to develop leaders without first ensuring that the foundation of management is there.

Most families have the potential for being a great leadership model but many fall short.  Each member does not have an equal voice. There is no mutually developed aligned vision.  Engagement of all the family members is often lacking.  Power . . . trust . . . the list could go on.

Ask yourself these questions in the context of leadership and see if they fall into the “traditional” gender role of male or female.

• Who pushed you to take risks?
• Who expressed emotions best?
• Who was the most accepting of your differences?
• Who encouraged you in your dreams?
• Who trusted you, your choices and your decisions?
• Who was the most compassionate?
• Who asked you for your opinion?
• Who was the strictest or had the most “rules”?
• Who challenged you to think bigger?
• Who made you feel safe?
• Who really managed the money?

Now, in hindsight, I am much more inclined to not only forgive but forget my parent’s shortcomings.  I see them for what we all are: human and flawed.  My Dad could be a bully and my Mum a martyr. That said, they were excellent role models.  And in the last few years, they stepped down as the leaders of our family and turned the responsibility over to my brother and me.  I only hope that I will have honoured that trust.  I also have my own blended family and it is pretty obvious to me . . . I am a good manager (gender be damned) but I have a lot to learn about the practice of shared leadership.  I am working on it!

* I have a confession to make.  I am much more inclined to support demographics as an influencer of style before gender or generational differences.  But that, perhaps, is another post.

Image via Wikipedia

For the past few years, I tend to skim the headlines online every few days.  I usually feel rushed and unfocused.  However, for the past three weeks, I have had the greatest luxury (privilege?) to be able to sit down in the morning and read two newspapers from the previous day. My partner has been bringing them home from work for me.  With most people coming back to work in a few days and my own demands, I am not sure that this opportunity will last.

I had forgotten how satisfying and peaceful it is to actually experience holding a paper and slowly reading or reviewing each article.  The eyes travel over the page differently than on a computer screen.  You can actually take it all in – even while skimming parts of the page. (I don’t care how big the screen is or if you use an  iPad the qualities are not the same.)  The movement from page to page when continuing an article has its own sensation.  My attention is there in the moment and present.  It is the experience as much as the information that is of importance.  It doesn’t feel like another task to mark of my “to do” list.  On the contrary it is rejuvenating.

This activity has a number of benefits which all relate to balance:

• It sets the stage for the day ahead by forcing me to slow down and breathe.
• It clears my mind and at the same time stimulates my thinking.
• I have convinced it changes the way my brain waves are snapping . . .  less alpha, more beta and the right amount of theta?
• Finally, it keeps me current in the world of what is really going on.

What are you doing to start the day refreshed and grounded?

Here is a short related video of a presentation that I attended this summer at the Lift10 Conference in Geneva:

Have you noticed that each week I post a new quote?  You can find it in the upper right hand column.  I also record the old quotes under the “Quote” tab above if you are interested.

I am also looking for short quotes related to the theme of this blog.  Please feel free to add them below.

The first follower is an underestimated leader.

To be a leader – you may have to be the first follower. The populous believes that you can’t be a leader without having followers.  I hate this premise – even if I don’t have a good argument to dismiss it. While watching people trying to figure out how to get home in spite of all the airplanes not flying due to volcanic ash, it was clear there was no leader of the pack. Nor was it any individual frenzy.  Everyone took personal responsibility for his or her actions and shared the knowledge that they discovered.  It made me wonder – if there is a shared vision, is leadership needed?

My answer is: Yes.  But perhaps not the traditional kind of leader from the front.  I have always liked this quote from Lao-tsu:

“To lead people, walk beside them … As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’”

The following short video by Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. He uses a very popular YouTube video which is under three minutes. Sure a leader needs to stand out and be fearless.  But it is first follower  who if treated like an equal will show others how to follow.

I have come to the conclusion that the follower is the leader.  This shouldn’t surprise me.  I have always believed that nothing is really diametrically opposed to another.  Everything is connected and once reframed is often the flip side to the same coin.  Thus the leader becomes an equal follower and the follower becomes the leader.

This is the fourth in a five part series based on some reflection time I had while “stranded” in Prague due to the volcanic ash. The others to date can be found here:

1. Rethinking Collaboration
2. Rethinking Engagement
3. Rethinking The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I was very fortunate to be be able to attend the Lift10 Conference for the past three days.   Lift is a series of events built around a community of pioneers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social implications of new technologies. Each conference is a chance to turn innovation into opportunities by anticipating the major shifts ahead, and meet the people who drive them.

It was extremely eclectic in topic choices and workshops.  What was exciting for me was not to listen to subjects that were new to me but the content was very often from a completely different perspective.  I pride myself on having diverse interests and seek out a broad range of topics.  Somehow, I have missed something.  I would never have know anything about this conference, if a friend hadn’t told me about it. Jennifer has been an interpreter for them and recommended that I attend.  Funny, but Jennifer is so unconnected in the digital sense; nor does she really know what I “do for a living”.  But she knew enough about my interests to share this with me.

I mention this because I challenge you to your assumptions about where and how you gain your knowledge and perspective on things.  Are you limiting yourself without realizing it – as I was?  Twitter has the potential of tapping into a broad scope of interests but I noticed that despite a large number that I follow, I was really not paying attention to the fringes. I would be very interested in hearing your strategies on this question:

How are you learning from the fringes?

I felt that this was the most “accessible” video from the conference for those not there and who may not be as excited as I am about technology innovation.  It is the presentation by Jamais Cascio, Institute For The Future: Wired for Anticipation:

The future is a process not a destination.

The future is not something that happens to us.  The future is something we that we create; with our every choice and with every act and including the choice not to act.

What happens when the objective is clear but the resources and time frames keep shifting?  That is exactly what many of us experienced when we ended up in one location and due to the volcanic ash hovering over most of Europe, we could not travel home or to our next meeting.

The news kept reporting how calm everyone was.  I know this to be true.  When I first arrived at the airport early Thursday morning – it was so eerie how quiet it was.  Everyone stood at the departure sign expecting the canceled signs to change.  Most us viewed it as an opportunity to extend our trip or add a few days on as vacation.  Throughout the weekend everyone was amiable, friendly and helpful.  No one complained to the service people who worked overtime to try and sort things out.   We were very collaborative — or where we?  I think that we were definitely co-operative.  I have never seen such civilized line stretching for hours to try to get a train reservation.

Here are some of the behaviours I observed, that indicated to me we were operating in a collaborative manner:

• while we may not have had an inter-related goal we shared the same objective – getting home
• even though we were competing for scare resources we shared ideas, information and support
• we were inquisitive about what was happening around us and the impact it was having on others
• we didn’t have one plan – we experimented with different strategies and reinvented approaches (see video below)
• surprisingly, we didn’t “hang out” socially – we met one another, discussed ideas and moved on

Here is my rethinking on why this phenomenon occurred that made it quite different from most crisis.

• it was beyond anyone’s control and affected everyone
• there was no information hidden; what was know was shared – nobody really knew what would unfold
• there was an uncertainty around time but not really about outcome – we never gave up; we remained hopeful; we all knew that eventually we would get home
• while for some it was a real hardship for many it was an inconvenience – serious perhaps, but not the end of the world

The New Addition for Collaboration

I have decided that there one new thing that I hadn’t considered when it comes to a collaborative environment – not engagement or alignment (we are all in this together); not communication (sharing of all information); not  vision (something bigger than all of us) but simply HOPE – a faith and a belief that it will work out in the end.

As a leader, how do you create hope?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is really an amazing and short video on the critical essence of collaboration. It is a MUST view.  It showed up in in box a few days ago but I wold like to give credit to Dave Zinger and his Employee Engagement  Network for posting it first!
Tom Wujec explains with great humour, the need for prototypes and facilitation skills in collaboration.

Being in Prague and unable to get home for four days provided me with two wonderful opportunities:

1. a chance to visit the city and take an unexpected mini vacation
2. time to reflect on life, business, priorities and blessings

I plan to write about some of my observations over the next couple of weeks. Some of the topics will be:

• rethinking teams
• rethinking engagement
• rethinking collaboration
• rethinking leadership

Today, I want to share with you what I discovered about what is important in my life and how this relates to leadership.  We espouse our values in empty words quite often but it takes an unexpected event like the volcano eruption and subsequent cancellation of all air traffic in Europe to help us verify those words with our hearts.

In 2005, I left my old world behind to move to Europe and become part of a new family with two step sons. I knew exactly what I was taking on and how difficult is would be.  Since then I like to tell three “stories”.  They are personal and in many ways leadership stories as well.  Stories help shape our reality for good and for bad.  Mine are all true, and I think they serve me well.

The first is that after 50 years of being number one in my life (despite two other serious relationships), I instantly became number 4 and that I didn’t like it. I liked being number 1. Who wouldn’t? This story usually gets a laugh and while I say it with a tone of “annoyance”, I also realize the gravity of what that really means.  We do what must be done even if it might not be how we anticipated things to play out in our lives. This is not a compromise. It is love.

This is usually followed up by my second story . . . I finally had a purpose in life that was far greater than me.  It is both a responsibility and a privilege to raise two boys who are the future.  This is not a choice. It is love.

My third story is, that while I am completely and totally spoiled, my new role is the hardest and most challenging thing I have ever done.  It is the most important and I often feel quite incompetent.  I have also never been as happy.  How do I know this to be true?  Since July of last year, I complete a log almost every day so I can track it.  Hormones aside, the graph below may not look like I am that positive but it needs a little explaining.

The serious drop in the middle of the graph represents the passing of my mother and another drop recently when it marked the six month point of her death.  The high points all represent time spend with my family on holidays or coming home to them from my travels.  I complain a lot about running a household and not being appreciated. (Yes, I know how childish that sounds.)  Consistent with the research, it is my relationships with my partner and family that make me the happiest. This is not about life being easy but it is simple. It is love.

Related to my stories here are my leadership questions for you:

1. What stories do you tell yourself and do they serve you?
2. Is your purpose big enough to make it really worthwhile for you and those that follow you?
3. Who is it all about – you or those around you?
4. What is it in leadership that makes you the happiest?
5. Do you lead because you want to or because it is the right thing to do?

I would love to hear one of your stories.

This will be posted over Easter when I am off with the family on a journey to visit some German Castles and Legoland. It seems right to take a little time to pontificate on how my life has changed.  A small story of how I have chosen to remain a work in progress and reassemble the pieces of myself.  Too bad it is not as easy as Play-mobile or Lego.

When I was in my 30′s I use to say that I was in training to be eccentric.  I felt that any eccentricity before the age of 60 was merely being “flaky”.  When I was in my early 50′s I met the love of my life and ended up changing everything and “inheriting” two young stepsons.  You can not be eccentric and in healthy intimate relationships with others.    Think of individuals that you feel epitomize eccentricity and I will show you an individual who is likely living alone.  I know.  I was one of these people.  I spent most of my adult life independently without responsibilities to anyone but myself. I was number 1. Now I am number 4 and let me tell you it is sometimes a hard pill to swallow.

I don’t want to be eccentric anymore. So instead, now I am claiming to be eclectic.  Has a nice ring to it.  I think one of the great dangers of “trying” to be eclectic is that you do fall in to the traps of being eccentric and then it is a slippery slope towards either unbridled optimism or  critical cynicism.  Unfortunately, I have a tendency to lean towards the latter.

@GrantGriffiths recently wrote this wonderful piece:  Is Your Blog a Big Whiny Baby? It  made me think that I didn’t want to in any way seem self righteous or above it all.  Often I do see the world a little as-crewed.  Maybe it is dyslexic or maybe I am warped but I have such hope for the world. However, most people don’t always see this in me. I also know that my views often come across as harsh and critical.  I am seen as impatient and my family sometimes thinks that I might rain on their parade.  I like to think that I am being realistic and practical.

In popular usage, eccentricity refers to unusual or odd behavior on the part of an individual.  It could be construed as a personality that is bizarre: conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual.  But there is another far more powerful meaning: out of center or having an axis or point of support that is not centrally placed. Off center means that being eccentric can show up in different extremes.  The word extreme is a clue. Here are some questions to help you decided your own eccentricity.

Eccentricity Quiz

1. Would you consider yourself grounded and anchored?
2. Are you so flexible that you don’t stand for anything?
3. Do you feel balanced?  (Side note – it is my balance that shows up problematic on my Wii Fitness.)
4. Do people find you unpredictable or predictable in your unpredictability?
5. Seriously, do you care what people think about you?
6. Do you like to be convoluted?
7. Do you have more ideas than you know what to do with them?
8. Do your clothes never match on the outside but your underwear and shocks do?
9. Do you like to be a “devil’s advocate” in debates?
10. Do others think you are rude but you think you are refreshingly blunt?

Scoring

Give yourself a point for each question that you answered yes except for questions 1, 3 and 5.  Give yourself  a point for question 1, 3 and 5, if you answered  no. If you have a score of 6 or more,  you may be eccentric. (By the way, these questions and the scoring is totally off the top of my head and is meant for amusement purposes only.)

I find it extremely interesting as I work with the Tilt 360 Leadership Types Model to discover my natural strengths and how the consequences of overusing them.  On the six polarities, I stand out on Solution.  This polarity is the balancing of perspective with creativity.  What does that mean in simpler terms?  When I use those character strengths well, I show up as both an Objective Leader and an Innovative Leader.  When I overdo it – I am both The Skeptic (Cynic) and The Eccentric.

Having connections with others and my own family I now know what I did not before: Being cynical and eccentric is a way to escape from the world; remaining disconnected and isolated. Engaging in the world and with others I have the potential of identifying the wisdom in all of us.  I remain a work in progress having discovered late in life the futility of eccentricity.

“Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It’s unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don’t have to try.” (Peggy Noonan)

Gretchen Rubin says something similar towards the end of this wonderful interview. The Happiness Project, is a memoir of the year Gretchen Rubin spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy–from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah.  Check out her blog. It is full of great hints and ideas.

“There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.” (Jim Rohn)

This is an unbelievably profound statement and each time I ponder it, I am amazed at all the beauty and art that is created as a result of these three simple facts.  Now it is true that we have splintered and sliced and diced colors, digits and notes but it leads me to truly accept that there is “nothing new under the sun”.  I have never been “accused” of being particularly artistic but I do know that art can be found in many forms.  And there are infinite possibilities.  As leaders, we should not think of 3 colors, 10 digits and 7 notes as limiting.

I had the wonderful fortune of spending a couple of days working with my friend and colleague, Pam Boney, CEO of Tilt Inc.  We got to spend the day together in Milan before I took the train back in the evening to Geneva the Saturday before last.  When we came up from the Metro at the Duomo Station, I heard this terrible noise.  On the surface, one might be inclined to think that this was unorganized chaos and confusion . . . not to mention that terrible noise.  It was loud and crowded and I wanted to avoid the source as much as possible.  So I kept to my far right up the other side of the stairs.  It wasn’t until we came back to the Metro that I realized what I almost missed.

As these boys played, I realized that to them this was not a racket and it was far more organized than I first realized.  Here are the lessons that I might have missed had I not taken the time to stop, observe and reconsider what was really going on.

Leadership Lessons from Milan

• there is nothing to fear but fear itself
• many things are not what they appear to be on the surface
• just like chaos theory – - – there is a pattern if you take the time to look
• and if you take the time to look – - – you will find a smile somewhere
• you have to keep your ears and eyes open to the possibilities
• play is necessary for the creative spirit
• what you see as unproductive may not be shared by others (beauty is in the eye or ear of the beholder)
• what you lest expect will be the thing you remember the most

Welcome to my very first Flip Cam Video.  I experimented a couple of years ago but the quality was pretty bad.  This is an unedited version that is under 2 minutes.

Most of us wouldn’t describe ourselves as having a closed mind but unfortunately every day we display the characteristics of one.  It is easier than we may care to admit how often we:

• Operate on habits without thinking (Often this is a good thing!)
• Not question the assumptions we have made about a situation or person
• See differences instead of seeking common ground
• Let our own egos or agendas get in the way
• ______________________ (Put your own here.)

How would you answer, “What is the opposite of a closed mind?”,