Author Archives: Mary Ellen Sailer

The Ethics Check

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Given what is going on in politics, on (and off) Wall Street, and certainly at a once-revered college campus, I thought right now was a good time to pull out the Ethics Check. When Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Ethical Management in 1988, they eloquently stated that “the most difficult aspect of being ethical is doing what is right, not deciding what is right.”

Their model incorporates three questions:

  1. Is it legal?
    Will I be violating either civil law or company policy?
  2. Is it balanced?
    Is it fair to all concerned in the short-term as well as the long-term?
    Does it promote win-win relationships?
  3. How will I feel about myself?
    Will it make me proud?   Would I feel good if my decision was published in the newspaper? Would I feel good if my family knew about it?

Easy steps to follow, right? Unfortunately, I have observed that a preoccupation on a short-term “solution” is regularly what drives a leader’s decision. IF the issue is “tricky,” legal considerations might also be applied, for self-protection, of course. But sadly, a thorough consideration of the ethical behavior necessary from the responsible leader is often truncated from the decision process.

Ken and his co-authors are renowned for taking difficult topics and simplifying them. However “simple” the Ethics Check may seem, each of the three steps outlined above is necessary to follow. There are no short cuts in ethical behavior!

Make a PACT

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Remember the One Minute Manager? Well, as his reputation grew for being so effective, so did the demands on his time. He was beset with requests for more speaking, for more leading, for more dinner appearances. Between his relentless travel schedule and the growth of his company, he found that his waist was growing, too. Success was really taking a toll on his health and sense of well being!  How’s that for irony?

Twenty five years ago Ken and Margie Blanchard, along with DW Edington, helped the One Minute Manager “get fit” in a publication now entitled “The One Minute Manager Balances Work and Life.” Certainly the book is filled with great suggestions for assessing and improving physical health and fitness.  But the authors go beyond the physical, and have tucked into the book a real coaching gem:  the PACT model.

When feeling out of balance, it is helpful to evaluate what is really important. When you re-commit yourself to what really matters, you can return to equilibrium more efficiently. That was what the One Minute Manager needed…not “just” to lose weight, nor to learn to endure more stress. He needed to see what would be BEST for him, and to keep those factors in mind and in practice.

What constitutes “best?” Well, after assessing the responses from 300 interviewees regarding the factors which contribute to a “best time in life” experience, Margie Blanchard noted four themes: Perspective, Autonomy, Connectedness, and Tone. In an acronym: PACT.

  • Perspective helps you appreciate what’s important and what’s not important in your life. Your perspective is informed by your mission, or purpose, or vision—can you name yours? What is your sense of spirituality? What do you stand for?
  • Autonomy helps you determine how much control you have in your life. Are you exercising your choices and options? Are you honing your skills? Is your schedule running you, or have you a sense of “time mastery?” What is your identity, apart from your titles at work or in your family?
  • Connectedness helps you determine where your support reserves are. Do you have quality relationships? Do you engage in activities with like-minded folks? Do you have friends in your workplace? In your neighborhood?
  • Tone is about your physical health. One dozen questions are listed in the book, including: Are you within 5 pounds of your ideal weight? Do you get 6 to 8 hours of sleep each night? Engage in aerobic and strength-training exercises? Drink fewer than 7 alcoholic drinks per week? Do you eat breakfast?

As you consider the PACT model to support your best, begin with tone, because it is the easiest of the four to assess, quantify, and then measure your changes in behavior.  Additionally, you can attend to the other themes as you improve your tone. For example: expand your connectedness by joining a weight loss group. Increase your sense of autonomy by choosing to get up early 3x a week and run. And when you arise, quietly welcome the day so as to expand your perspective.

The benefit of the structure of the PACT model is that it helps individuals get through hard times, and enjoy good times, with greater ease.  Is it time to understand and practice your PACT?

Order is the beginning of beauty

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Transitions, transitions. I love summertime, and today is a beautiful “first day of summer” here in North America. However, saying hello to summer means saying goodbye to school schedules. I’m sure my teenager doesn’t find it difficult, but this working parent does! That which is predictable from September until June will end this week. Starting next week, we’ll have unscheduled time, sport camps, vacations and projects, big and small. The rhythm of activity will differ from week to week, and from day to day.

As luxurious as all the summer plans appear, I admit I feel distress. After a good deal of thought, I realize that it is the “gear change” that has me caught up—how apt! Shifting from one mode to the other, the literal and figurative shift, is what can seize me. This is despite that fact that I succeed in the school schedule of our family life, and I succeed in the summer schedule, too. It is saying goodbye to one, and hello to the other, that is the challenge.

I don’t think I’m alone.

Therefore, I offer you the wise words of my favorite High School teacher, Mr. Carlton McCauley. Mr. McCauley loved teaching, loved his students, loved his wife, loved his life. He challenged and supported us in class and out of the classroom, too. I benefited from his friendship for decades after high school, and still miss him, years after his death. Fortunately, his avuncular wisdom continues in a “Mr. Mac” soundtrack in my head. One of his favorite sayings was “Order is the beginning of beauty. Let us begin with ourselves.” I “heard” that aphorism as I tried to understand the distress I was sensing as the public school year ends.

What order can I enact that will allow for a satisfying summer? What do I need to schedule? What do I need regarding my son’s sport activities, be it equipment or transportation? What household chores can be given to my collegian now that she’s home on break? What summer fun can I be sure we have to look forward to? How will I shift the order of my work day to accommodate pleasant summer activities? What else can I shift into a more pleasing order?

Although Mr. McCauley was an English teacher, you’ll note that I’m not pulling out Invictus with Henley’s full throttle “I am the captain of my soul” declaration. This is quieter. The power of Mac’s “order is the beginning of beauty” mandate is that it is two-fold: “let us begin with ourselves.” Summer will not run rough shot over this working mom, her focus begins with herself. Knowing that I am putting things in order to maximize the enjoyment of summertime is responsible behavior, and it feels good. I won’t become derailed in this shift, and neither will the family.

How does “order is the beginning of beauty, let us begin with ourselves” resonate in you?

All Is Well

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     One and a half years ago, I was completing a coaching engagement with a dynamic leader. As with all my “wrap sessions,” I asked the leader to reflect on her learnings and to tell me what she will commit to for her future actions. Her eloquent response sent me on a quest which I only completed this weekend.
     Concurrent with her professional goals of successfully developing her work team and attaining all project deliverables, she spoke about a personal goal: resuming singing. She’d stopped singing after coming to the US from India. I had suggested that if she allowed room for her gift, she would notice and benefit from the gifts of others. At our final call, she said that was so true: she had found a teacher of traditional Indian music, and was radiant because she’d found her voice again. And, because of this, she saw with greater clarity the gifts of communication the members of her team possessed. She instilled an expectation that they all “catch people doing things right,” and it accelerated the development of high-performance qualities within the team.
     She then told me how transformational this “coach approach” is, and insisted that I see the movie The Three Idiots. She told me that the movie was set in an elite engineering college, rife with competition and anxiety, bred into the students by their parents since birth. However, the protagonist, Rancho, was impervious to the stress suffered by his peers. Instead of chasing something as elusive as success, Rancho LOVED learning. He had a mantra, “all is well,” which he explained kept him calm and focused in the present. He challenged his classmates that they were all too worried about the future, and their fears of failure were robbing them of the joy of the present.
     My client told me she kept thinking about what she learned from coaching while she watched the movie. Rather than chasing success, Rancho would tell his friends “pursue excellence, and success will follow.” Through coaching, my client knows this to be true.
     Well, I’ve been searching for this movie since that final conversation. I fell over myself when I found it Saturday on the rack at my DVD store (yes, I still go to a DVD store!). It was everything my client told me…and more. Find the flick, carve out at least three hours (Bollywood doesn’t produce short movies) and prepare to laugh, cry, sigh, sing, dance and think.
     As the three idiots sing: “Aal izz well!”

The Big Picture

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Yesterday, as I was rummaging for my stash of gift wrap, I found my vision board. It was in the back of a spare closet buried behind coats, folding chairs, and some rather dusty hand weights. Needless to say, when I created it last fall at a coach retreat, this is not at all what I had intended. I had intended for it to be a visual representation of my personal direction and goals for 2011. It was where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to behave, so I had put a lot of thought and effort into carefully selecting the right images, words, and yes, even colors. I had intended to frame it and hang it above my desk so I could look at it every day, and at the very least, attempt to stay on track with that vision of my future self. And, yet, here it sat overlooked in the closet under the stairs, no thanks in part to the general business of life.

Vision is important. For as much as leadership is about influence, it is also about pointing the way towards what you are trying to build and why that matters. It’s all too easy when people are immersed in the practical day-to-day tasks of long work days and big workloads, of just going through the motions without connecting their actions to the bigger picture, of how what they are doing actually has meaning. Vision is the narrative that protects against the daily challenges and obstacles that will naturally occur along the way. What story are your people telling themselves? How well have you articulated the future you want their help in building? Are you just being tactical or inspirational in your leadership?

I am delighted I rediscovered my vision board. Because, now that I feel like I am getting back on track with where I had wanted to be, I am optimistic and energized.

(Author: Andrea Greenwell…posting assistance provided by MESailer)

The Importance of Being Earnest

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Oscar Wilde and his wit aside, I have always loved the word earnest, and I bestow the word on another when it is, well, earnestly earned!
One who is serious in intention, purpose or effort, showing depth and sincerity of feeling is good company indeed. Consider an earnest friend, or an earnest family member. Thoughts of their actions and attributes evoke strong, positive emotions. Their steadfastness, their sincerity, and their depth all are enduring and valued characteristics.
How about at work? Would you be categorized as an earnest leader? Are you intentional and purposeful? By sharing your depth and conveying your sincerity, you will purposefully engender the followership of you, the earnest leader.
One of the best ways you can reveal your “leadership earnestness” is by creating and sharing your Leadership Point of View (LPOV). An LPOV teaches people what you expect from yourself and from them, so that, together, you can succeed. Working with a Coach to reflect on, craft, and then share your Leadership Point of View will help you to …
• Be more authentic, more fully yourself as a leader
• Show up as who you are, not as who you think you should be as a leader
• Become more intentional in your leadership
• Become more congruent in your leadership
• Inspire others to think about their values and their Leadership Point of View

Why bother? Because in addition to revealing your earnestness, the action of sharing your LPOV transforms individuals, teams and organizations! To earnestly reveal your LPOV is to communicate with people’s hearts. Once you have won their hearts …
Your team will follow you. People will be committed to achieving what is important to you and your organization.
They will listen to you. People will remember what you say when you talk to them.
They will have faith in you. People will trust you and be quicker to act on your requests.
They will give you their best. People will strive to be extraordinary.
They will stay. People will commit to staying and growing with you.
I concur with Oscar Wilde: the importance of being earnest is significant for all!

Weather, or not…

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What a winter! Here in Massachusetts, where this blogger resides, we have been pummeled with snowstorm upon snowstorm. In just the month of January, my area has received 47 inches of snow. And across the country, we have good company—from the 28 inches of Christmas Snow in New Jersey, to the 2 foot blizzard presently raging from Oklahoma to Chicago—good folks are digging out again and again.
As I gather up the canisters to fill with sand from my local DPW, I think of reserves. It’s a necessity in New England Winters—to have reserves of heating oil, of cord wood, and of blankets. Enough gas for the snow blower. To have snow shovels on hand. To have enough buckets of sand and salt to spread on the driveway and walkways, after the snow has been removed.
For many coaching clients, a coach’s introduction of the concept of “having reserves” can come as a surprise. Sure, they understand that having gas will keep a car going…but what are the unique needs required of an individual to keep going? What is enough sleep, food, exercise? What is enough connection, what is enough solitude? What is enough fun? What is enough work?
The ability to know what is enough is the critical first step to creating MORE than enough, to creating reserves. So, first things first: what do you require to be at your best? Work with your coach to get it fully met. Then, double it. Finally, you’ll understand the concept of having reserves for yourself, not just for enduring the wintery weather.

Behaving

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A few years ago, I heard an executive vice president from a highly respected international corporation speak about leadership. He told us that the biggest responsibility of a leader is “to behave.” I loved hearing that! It transported me back more than two decades, to when as a senior in my capstone course on community service, my favorite professor admonished us to remember that we are “public people” and therefore we must behave.
What’s the deal with behaving? Why would both a professor of social services as well as a renowned business leader find it important enough to highlight behaving to their audiences? With the exception of this blogger, these men are worlds apart in influence and experience. Still, each seized upon behaving as an important leadership concept.
Behavior is what another observes. All my life, I have heard that it really doesn’t matter what you say, it is what you do that people remember. From the old fashioned needlepoint sampler: Actions speak louder than words, to the present day jargon around walk your talk, behavior has always been what has mattered! Even so, I don’t think these two men were simply talking about how to appear.  It would be simplistic (and wrong) to say: “don’t be seen doing something bad.”
For me, the message each imparted was deeper. Whether dealing with hundreds of thousands of employees, or a caseload of social services clientele, each man was speaking about the leader in leadership. Their shared message was about leadership integrity. Life, frankly, is much easier when one “behaves” on purpose and in congruence with one’s values.
So, I ask you:
• Do you behave in the ways you choose?
• Have you ever behaved in ways that surprise you?
• What is the cost?
• What are you willing to do to address this?

Questions, Questions!

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In a coaching conversation this week, I asked a client to describe her effectiveness on her team, now that a month has passed since she’s taken a new position in her company.  (One of the responsibilities of a coach is to ask questions which elicit the wisdom of the person being coached.) 

She shared how she’s choosing to behave in ways that build trust in the group, and how her actions underscore her intention to be supportive and leaderly.   Hearing herself speak about the importance of “trust” and “support” in response to my question, my client had a big “a-ha” regarding the impact of the questioning technique employed by her boss in her old work group.

 She recounted how her former supervisor would direct team members to research and present on an issue for a team meeting.   After hours of preparation, the team member would distribute a report in advance of the meeting.   Upon completion of the presentation, rather than moving to discussion or decision, the boss would invariably ask:   “have you thought of analyzing the data in __x__ manner?” and send the presenter off…only to repeat the process again at the next meeting.  My client knew full well that the boss simply hadn’t READ the report.  Her boss was trying to appear clever.  However, the impact of his “clever” questioning was that it eroded trust.  Team members felt unsupported because they were  going in circles with aimless work.   Far from being clever, that boss’s behavior caused him to lose a valuable team member—my client!

So, rather than leaving your job—or being left—to get a new perspective, I’ve got some questions:

  • What is the true purpose behind the questions YOU ask? 
  • Are your questions helping to clarify? 
  • Are you questioning just for the sake of questioning?
  • Do your questions increase understanding, or do they make others feel manipulated?
  • What other questions do you need to ask yourself?

Showing Up

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An essential skill of a coach is to “show up and be present.” I love that compound sentence: Show up AND be present. It perfectly describes job one of a coach.
Certainly, to show up and to be present both matter beyond coaching!
What’s the deal with showing up? For me, it’s about being where I’m needed. It’s about moving beyond my own realm and joining the other where he or she is. It’s about honoring my commitments. It’s also about understanding that the other person may NOT be able to show up, but I still can. “Count-on-able” isn’t a word, but is an apt description about someone who will show up.
Who can you count on to show up in your life? What is the impact on you?
For whom do you show up? How does it matter? To them? To you?
Is there a person you now realize needs you to show up? How will your showing up shift events?