Most of you know that I write a feature every Thursday called Leadership’s Future; it’s the outgrowth of articles written by CandidProf, who guested regularly last year, and is written around education, kids, parents and Millennials.

The trouble is that I find far more articles than I can write about, so today I’m giving you links to the best of them. I hope you take the small amount of time necessary to click through and read them, because they are important to y/our future.

First is a question that has been asked for decades and still has no real agreement. Do advanced degrees in education make for a better teacher or just a higher paycheck? But below the surface of this question lurks a larger problem—what happens when the schools conferring the degree has a second rate, or worse, program?

Next is an article about “effortful control” in toddlers and the value of guilt, or what the kids call “a sinking feeling in the tummy,” with a link to the actual study. The researcher also spells out the substantial difference between guilt, doing something bad, and shame, being a bad person—guilt is productive, shame is destructive.

Third is Boston Public Schools has reinstituted their Parent Academy after killing it earlier this year in the midst of budget cuts. Call it a parent engagement project and they are sweeping the country. The one in Boston cost between $50-100K, a cheap price for getting parents actively and positively involved in their kids education.

Last is an update on an article that CandidProf wrote last year regarding the dismal graduation statistics resulting from tying funding to college recruiting. Now the results are starting to show. “The United States does a good job enrolling teenagers in college, but only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree.” Only Italy has a worse record; pretty sad. Be sure to read the comments for a number of interesting views.

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The silly blow-up over President Obama’s back-to-school speech drove home once again how I am that won’t be around when the current crop of kids take the reins of political, social and business so-called leadership roles.

I am continually amazed and revolted as I watch so-called conservatives of all stripes work to be sure their children are exposed to nothing that conflicts with whatever ideology they are steeping them in.

I say ‘conservatives’ because so-called liberals seem more flexible within their stands. (Please note that I said ‘flexible, not changeable.)

What exactly was in this speech, that some kids weren’t allowed to hear? Here are some excerpts that I found especially uplifting to hear—and if you think I cherry-picked the contents you can read it in its entirety and decide for yourself.

• But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world — and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.

• You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.

• What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

• We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that — if you quit on school — you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

• But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.

• [After describing specific kids’ situations] But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

• I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. Chances are you’re not going to be any of those things. The truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject that you study. You won’t click with every teacher that you have. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

• I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and that then allows you to learn something new.

• So today, I want to ask all of you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?

The text of the speech was released early in response to fear-mongering, but some schools still didn’t broadcast it and some parents still prevented their kids from watching.

Why? Because he encouraged them to take responsibility for themselves? Because he said that our country’s future depends on them? Because he was raised by a single mom? Because he told them that success was a function of very hard work?

Or is it the closed-minded attitude of the ideologue represented by 15-year-old Andrew Quick, near Orlando, Fla., who said “he considered the speech to be a potentially disruptive interruption of his school day, so decided not to watch it. “I’m a Republican,” he said, “and I really don’t like Obama all that much.”

I translate that to mean ‘I don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t think as I think and agree with me’, an attitude that doesn’t bode well for our country’s future.

Exactly what in this speech was of such concern to the conservative agenda that their kids should not hear it?

Perhaps the problem is the message that, in the end, they are each responsible for what they become—not their parents or teachers or politicians and certainly not God—just them.

That they will be what they choose to be and whether that choice is active or passive; it’s their choice as thinking individuals—assuming they choose to think and not just blindly follow a given ideology.

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Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.

One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.

The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)

Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what he did.) as opposed to the felony created by lying.

Ensign is prominent member of the Promise Keepers leadership, which lists seven basic tenets, the third being, “A Promise Keeper is committed to practicing spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity” and the fourth, “A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and Biblical values.”

Ensign violated both and compounded the violations by having his parents pay off his mistress.

These don’t count, since Promise Keepers isn’t a legal entity and, obviously, lying to your followers and constituency isn’t illegal—just unethical and immoral.

What kids will absorb is that there are no real repercussions; Ensign still holds his Congressional seat, will probably win reelection, hasn’t changed his role in Promise Keepers, and is still cheered when he gives a speech. And if reporters dare to raise additional questions, his response is “I’ve said everything I was going to say about that.”

We may ring our hands and lament the lack of accountability of society in general and the Millennials in particular, but we don’t have to look very far to find the cause.

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What’s going on? This post is a call for your thoughts.

I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.

18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.

More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.

Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.

On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.

I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.

And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.

“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”

Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.

You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?

How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?

What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?

I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!

An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.

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Last week I wrote that it seemed that change was in the wind for education and parental attitudes that have produced millions of poorly educated and entitled young people.

But it looks as if parents are still in the forefront of teaching their kids that there is no accountability and no consequences for actions such as cheating.

At Ohio’s Centerburg High, in the heartland of our country where, we are constantly told, ethics are at their highest, “so many of the senior class either cheated on final exams or knew about the cheating but failed to report it that district officials cancelled graduation.”

“Centerburg High, with about 400 students, is one of the state’s top schools, with an “excellent” academic rating last year, according to the state Department of Education. “Last year, the school had a 99% graduation rate, compared to a statewide rate of 87%.”

The cheating was the result of a senior hacking into a teacher’s computer, stealing the tests and distributing them to the entire class.

“Superintendent Dorothy Holden said the district had to take a stand and let students know that cheating can’t be tolerated… “We’re not going to put that type of honor out there knowing that many of you are walking through there and you cheated, you lied, you denied.”

According to Holden, “Some students admit they cheated; others said they knew of the cheating but didn’t participate; and others said they had the tests but didn’t use them. One student who used the test still failed.”

Three cheers for Dorothy Holden.

Of course, things didn’t end there.

“Some parents angry about the cancellation are organizing an unofficial graduation ceremony.”

Three thousand boos for those parents whose time would be better spent teaching their little darlings that lying and cheating aren’t nice.

Politicians and the media are rabid about the problems with school administrators and teachers and the public wrings its collective hands at the dismal state of US education.

But rarely do I read stories condemning the actions of parents for their active role in producing kids who can’t spell accountability and see nothing wrong with lying and cheating.

And before you say I’m being too hard on them remember that the parents are your colleagues and these are the kids you’ll be hiring—your workers, doctors, lawyers—and who, eventually, will lead our country, industry and social organizations.

Do you really think they’ll do things differently then?

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Today is National Honesty Day. Look it up and you’ll find lot of talk about being honest today.

You’d think people could manage one honest day a year, but it’s doubtful they actually will.

These days honesty seems to be more a matter of convenience, i.e., telling the truth when it doesn’t get in the way to whatever the agenda is, or bending the truth to further whatever—and it gets more acceptable every day.

In schools, honesty is considered quaint.

And it’s a global problem, “A 2006 study of cheating among US graduates, published in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56% of all MBA students cheated regularly – more than in any other discipline.”

Carolyn Y. Woo, Dean of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business says, “I believe that our current crisis is caused by a failure of values fuelled by perverse incentives, which trumped sound judgment and overwhelmed regulatory enforcements.”

At all ages and all levels it seems to boil down to ‘dishonesty pays’.

Of course, I could be out of touch and cheating has been exempted from dishonesty and moved to a category all its own, but I think I would have read about that. But even if it has there’s plenty of other dishonesty going around these days.

Back to today’s holiday.

Even if every person on the planet was totally honest today it wouldn’t solve anything.

We don’t need one day of honesty and 364 days of the other stuff, so here’s my idea.

Let’s cancel National Honesty Day and starting in 2010 celebrate National Dishonesty Day instead.

That way, we can all be honest 364 days of the year and lie, cheat and steal to our hearts content every April 30.

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There are many lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis, but one of the most important is that we the people should stop following and start leading ourselves.

In other words, we each need to take responsibility for our own actions and think critically about the words and actions of those in positional leadership roles.

In business, we need to rid ourselves of the idea that positional leaders don’t need management skills or that managers don’t lead.

Jim Stroup points out in numerous posts that “No one has proven that leadership is different from management, much less that it is a characteristic inherent in individuals independently of the context in which those individuals operate, one that they carry with them from one organization to another and which they then instill into groups otherwise bereft of it.”

We need to stop defining leaders based on their vision and skill at influencing people to follow them.

A comment left on a Washington Post column by Steve Pearlstein regarding the leadership failure that led to the current economic crisis neatly sums up the problem with that definition.

“What a great summary of the economic problem. However this was not a lack of leadership. Defining leadership as influencing people to move in a specific direction, the financial and economic elite successfully led the country into the economic disaster. The problem was a lack of management that failed to identify the signs of the pending disaster.”

Mike Chitty’s team approach is an unlikely solution since you can’t mandate that whichever [leader or manager] is superior will listen to or act on the ideas of the subordinate, while making them equals is rarely successful.

We need to lead ourselves and stop waiting for someone else to show us how, tell us why or lead our actions. 99% of us know what’s good—not just for ourselves, but for the world.

We especially need to stop

• putting ideology ahead of success;
• avoiding accountability by citing all those whose lead we followed;
• excusing our own unethical behavior on the basis that others do the same thing; or
• believing that [whatever] is OK, because our religion forgives our actions.

Everyone cleaning up their own back yard will alleviate a large part of the problem, and then we can work together for the good of everyone, not just “people like us.”

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The media and most people are all enraged because many of the bailed-out companies owe taxes, but I don’t see the big deal.

“Nearly two-thirds of U.S. companies and 68% of foreign corporations do not pay federal income taxes…The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined samples of corporate tax returns filed between 1998 and 2005…an annual average of 1.3 million U.S. companies and 39,000 foreign companies doing business in the United States paid no income taxes – despite having a combined $2.5 trillion in revenue. The study showed that 28% of foreign companies and 25% of U.S. corporations with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in sales paid no federal income taxes in 2005. Those companies totaled a combined $372 billion in sales for the largest foreign companies and $1.1 trillion in revenue for the biggest U.S. companies.”

This isn’t new; I remember hearing about it decades ago, so why freak out now?

The thing that really gets me is that AIG is suing the US government, which essentially owns it.

“A.I.G. sued the government last month in a bid to force it to return the payments, which stemmed in large part from its use of aggressive tax deals, some involving entities controlled by the company’s financial products unit in the Cayman Islands, Ireland, the Dutch Antilles and other offshore havens.”

And even in this day and age $306 million is (or should be) more than small change.

Does this qualify as irony, stupidity or just good, old-fashioned insanity?

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The foremost thought to hold in you mind when creating a positive and powerful review culture is that it’s similar to Chinese cooking—most of the time is spent in preparation, whereas the food cooks quickly.

(Note: terminology can be confusing; ‘goal’ and ‘objective’ are interchangeable as are ‘appraisal’ and ‘review’.)

Here are the underlying steps that you need to learn, practice and absorb into your MAP.

Annual reviews alone don’t work even when that’s all your company requires.

To succeed people need semiformal feedback each quarter along with constant, informal daily input and coaching focused on helping them achieve the goals set forth in the previous annual review. (More on goals later.)

Reviews are the same as every other management task—they require good planning, open communications and accountability on both sides.

The first step to painless reviews is to commit to doing

• one HR-blessed annual review, with full paperwork, during the last two weeks of December;
• four quarterly reviews within the first week of each quarter; and
• constant, informal, ‘how am I doing’ feedback all year long.

Remember that

• any time you set a goal it needs a delivery date to be real; and
• never make commitments you either can’t or aren’t planning to fulfill.

First tell your people what to expect, then post your commitment on the department intranet and tell every person you hire how it works—and follow-through.

When you commit publicly you make yourself accountable.

Good reviews aren’t about filling out a lot of paperwork, whether by hand or computer. Yes, you need to follow company guidelines and use company approved forms, but as stated at the beginning, those are the mechanics.

The secret of a positive review culture is defining exactly what you want a person to accomplish during the year, discussing the goals and refining them together, in other words, the heart is the interaction between you and each person on your team, because one size does not fit all.

The result is that your people not only know exactly what their goals are, but they own them.

Setting Goals

• The basic rule is to never set more than three to five major goals in a year and the exact number depends on their size and complexity.

• Annual review goals should be high level, complex, and take 12 months to accomplish. They can include hard skills, such as technical certification, and soft skills, such as improving presentation skills.

• All goals should be quantified. “Be more willing to share” is a self defeating goal because it offers no way for the person or you to measure improvement; it becomes totally subjective, a matter of opinion and a source of contention at next year’s review. Instead the goal might be “Increase time spent sharing knowledge 10%” and agree on what the baseline is currently.

• Work together during the discussions to break down large/complex annual goals into smaller, more manageable goals that can be achieved each quarter and still more bit-sized pieces for each month, week and even day.

The cool thing is that achieving a constant stream of smaller goals keeps people motivated and prevents the large goals from overwhelming them.

And before you start complaining about the time involved, perhaps you should go back and read your job description or, better yet, go back a little further and think about all the lousy reviews you’ve had along the way, either because they didn’t happen or because they were all form and no substance.

Then think about, hopefully, the manager(s) who saw the value and used reviews to challenge, stretch and juice your growth, so you were ready for a promotion that put you in their shoes.

Then decide which one you want to be for your people.

Be sure to come back next week when I show you a simple, amazing tool that helps identify goals for each of your people and also has some terrific side benefits.

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It seems that more and more people these days confuse accountability and consequences with ultimatums and punishment.

I thought it would be a good idea to sort this out, since the former is a part of a strong, healthy culture, while the latter is a major factor in an abusive one.

Accountability stems from the public nature of an action, whether planned or unplanned, and usually includes an unstated request for support and a greater incentive to follow through because others know (the reason for making it public).

Weight Watchers offers accountability and support through its public nature.

Consequences are the result of an action; they may be good, bad or depend on your view of the situation.

In other words, cause and effect—doing A results in B.

• The consequence of studying hard is a good grade on the test.
• The consequence of writing a check with insufficient funds in your account is having it bounce.
• The consequence of not immediately responding to an email may be neutral for you and frustrating for the sender.

Even if you don’t like the idea of consequences there’s no way to stop them. Everything you do, say, even thing has at least one effect if not more.

Business, obviously, is a hot bed of cause and effect—both little and large and often a domino effect.

The vp of engineering announces that the new product will be ready for the big trade show.

Accountability!

But…

The developer out for a week of jury duty is late finishing her part of the project, which slows the team and the project itself is late. Just-in-time purchasing finds a crucial part that was available at the original deadline is now on back order slowing the project still more; by the time the parts arrive manufacturing is in the middle of a scheduled software upgrade that can’t be interrupted, which forces marketing to use a prototype instead of a production version for a crucial trade show making it more difficult for the sales team to convince customers that the product will ship when they need it.

Consequences!

Everybody knows that actions have consequences and you lose credibility if you claim there are none, but consequences have nothing to do with punishment.

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