Scheduling is every boss’ responsibility.

Good scheduling means your people can count on having a life outside work.

If projects stack up, or have deadlines like these, you need to figure out what’s going on.

Don’t look to your team for a solution.

In most cases, look in the mirror to solve the problem.

Image credit: Dan4th Nicholas

Are you familiar with the term ‘robber baron’?

“Robber baron” is a derogatory metaphor of social criticism originally applied to certain late 19th-century American businessmen who were accused of using unscrupulous methods to get rich, or expand their wealth.

It’s a great description of many, not all, of the tech titans you hear/read about daily.

The most familiar names are Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, and Jeff Bezos, but there are many others, as well as all the aspirational robber baron founders looking for their own brass ring.

Today’s barons build their empires on your metaphorical back, i.e., your personal data, but the result is the same.

What drives them? Money? Power?

Why can’t they see what they are doing? How can they not?

What are their values? Where are their ethics?

I found the answer in a working paper published by Harvard’s Working Knowledge in 2007 and authored by four professors from various universities.

“The current effort to curb unethical behavior “ignores the innate tendency for the individual to engage in self-deception” (p. 224), an error which substantially negates any systematic efforts at the organization level.

This paper was intended to bring the psychological processes of the individual decision-maker to the forefront by examining the self-deception that is inherent in the beliefs about one’s own (un)ethical behavior. Individuals deceive themselves that they are ethical people and the continuation of this belief allows for the perpetuity of unethical behavior. We hope that by examining the interplay of the want/should selves through a temporal lens, we shed light on these false beliefs and break their defeating cycle.”

Self-deception.

That helps explain all the men who, after being called out for their words and actions, claim they didn’t do anything wrong.

While the research provides a reason, it certainly doesn’t alter the negative results of the behavior.

Reasons don’t excuse the behavior.

Nor does it offer a way to change it.

Image credit: Wikipedia

(click to enlarge)

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Bias is in our heads. Bias is in our MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Bias totally permeates us and the rest of society.

It’s embedded in our schools, our religions and all forms of AI.

Experts, educators, gurus, and pundits analyze it, write about it, consult about it, and coach on it.

And often contradict each other.

If bias is this pervasive, the experts so ineffectual and management so ambivalent, what can one person do on their own?

You can access your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where bias lives.

No one else can, only you.

That means you can change your MAP.

No one else can, only you.

One bias at a time.

Image credit: School of Thought

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

In a world of Facebook/Twitter/WhatsApp/constant notifications/etc. knowing yourself is not high on people’s priority list. Partly, because it requires introspection sans distractions and partly because it is hard work and often uncomfortable. That said, it also provides the highest ROI of any action you may take.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do you equate leadership to influence?

Does being labeled an “influencer” by LinkedIn or other social media make you a leader?

Not really.

True leadership is internal.

It’s a function of your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

It starts by knowing both yourself and your MAP.

Knowing yourself refers to knowing what you’ve done.

Knowing your MAP means knowing why you did it.

Knowing both allows you to accurately evaluate where you are and where you’re going.

That knowledge is the rudder with which you can chart and achieve any course you choose.

Image credit: Jevgenijs Slihto

How does one really change for the better, since it seems so much easier to change for the worse?

One takes time to know thyself.

The proverb has been around for eons. It started with the ancient Egyptians, who inscribed it in the Luxor Temple (“Man, know thyself, and you are going to know the gods”), continued with Socrates and Plato, and on down the centuries.

The oldest philosophical wisdom in the world has one piece of advice for us: know yourself. And there is a good reason why that is.

Without knowing ourselves, it’s almost impossible to find a healthy way to interact with the world around us. Without taking time to figure it out, we don’t have a foundation to built the rest of our lives on.

Interest in knowing oneself has decreased as the number of distractions have increased.

Why?

Because it’s often uncomfortable, requiring us to face stuff in our beliefs and our MAP that we would rather avoid or just plain ignore.

Worse, getting to know yourself requires time spent alone and in silence — anathema to the modern world.

Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do.

You aren’t born knowing yourself, nor can you learn about yourself from others.

However, spending the time and effort required, and enduring the sometimes extreme discomfort, to develop and use this skill provides the highest ROI of any effort at self-improvement in both the short and long-term.

Read the article.

Learn the skill.

Apply it.

You’ll never regret it.

Image credit: Zaneology

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

The words and images people share through social media have enormous spin.

This is especially true in the startup world where image is everything and perception is key to the next round of funding or investment.

The purpose is to tell the world how world-changing the tech, amazing the team, great the opportunity and how perfectly they are executing.

In other words, they are ‘crushing their goals’, ‘wowing the world’ and ‘killing it’.

Not only that, they are doing it with nary a bump or pothole along the way.

(If you believe that I have a great deal on a lovely orange bridge that would look great in your backyard after you IPO.)

Lee Hower, Co-founder & Partner of NextView Ventures and former entrepreneur at LinkedIn and PayPal, wrote a very needed commentary regarding the hyperbole that irrigates the startup ecosystem.

As he says, “not everybody is killing it and certainly not all the time.”

If anything, the constant social media barrage claiming to be ‘killing it’ is increasing denial, making it harder to admit the challenges, let alone actual problems, and further limiting entrepreneurs ability to talk about it.

Two years ago I wrote about the high incidence of depression and suicide among entrepreneurs and it hasn’t improved.

Entrepreneurs who go public do so after the fact offering useful insights on how they overcame. While this is valuable, it can make it even more difficult for those in the throes, with no one to talk to.

Entrepreneurship is a double-edged sword; while it can be enormously rewarding, it can also destroy and even kill you — or all of the above.

There are two important take-aways in all this.

1. Don’t believe everything you see/hear about how others are doing.
2. Never forget that your pursuits won’t thrive unless you survive.

Ttake care of yourself.

Image credit: HikingArtist

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

I’m not a fan of the leadership industry; I think it has corrupted the whole notion of leadership. Anybody/everybody can be leaders at a given moment. Life changes and Jim Stroup, who wrote Managing Leadership, one of the best blogs on that subject stopped writing a couple of years ago. But all his wonderful posts are at the link and he also wrote an excellent book on the subject.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

During a conversation about positional leadership Richard Barrett said, “Reminds me of a Seinfeld joke. He pointed to professional sports teams and asked about team loyalty. The players change, the coaches change, and sometimes even the stadium changes. So, the people are really loyal to the logos on the team uniforms, just a pile of laundry. Maybe positional leadership is just laundry leadership?”

I like that—laundry leadership. Great term.

So what’s available instead of laundry leadership, especially these days when so much of the laundry is dirty?

Why not organizational leadership? Leadership that percolates from every nook and cranny of the enterprise driving innovation and productivity far beyond the norm.

Following this to its natural conclusion makes leadership a corporate asset and one that needs to be managed for it to have the highest possible impact.

Jim Stroup, whose blog I love, is a major proponent of this idea and defines and explains it in his book Managing Leadership: Toward a New and Usable Understanding of What Leadership Really Is And How To Manage It.

Of all the leadership books, Managing Leadership is the first book I’ve seen that breaks with the accepted idea of the larger-than-life leader whose visions people embrace and follow almost blindly.

Stroup says today’s corporations are far too complex for one person to know everything; that, given a chance, leadership will come naturally and unstoppably from all parts and levels of the organization making it a characteristic of the organization, rather than one person’s crown.

Sadly, fear makes the idea that leadership comes from all people at all levels and should be managed to make the most of it anathema to many senior managers; they consider leadership a perk of seniority and prefer squashing it when the source doesn’t occupy the ‘correct’ position.

I highly recommend Jim’s book. Even if the management above you doesn’t embrace this paradigm, you can within your own group. Encourage your people to take the initiative, guide them as needed, then get out of the way and watch them fly.

Do you equate leadership to influence?

Does being labeled an “influencer” by LinkedIn or other social media make you a leader?

Not really.

True leadership is internal.

It’s a function of your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).  

It starts by knowing both yourself and your MAP.

Knowing yourself refers to knowing what you’ve done.

Knowing your MAP means knowing why you did it.

Knowing both allows you to accurately evaluate where you are and where you’re going.

That knowledge is the rudder with which you can chart and achieve any course you choose.

Image credit: Jevgenijs Slihto

Good stuff comes and bad stuff happens; people come and go—and die; great bosses join—and leave; companies start, grow, get acquired, shrink, layoff and file bankruptcy.

It’s called life; and no matter what you do, it rolls on inexorably

You can influence it, but you can’t control it.

The only thing you can control in life is yourself and your MAP.

We all have a tendency to forget this.

For better or for worse, you are the only thing you will always have; the only thing you can truly count on, so why not appreciate yourself? Value the best and improve the rest.

There is only one you and you get to live only one life, so focus your time and energy on changing/adjusting/enhancing what you do control and let the rest go.

Image credit: Celestine Chua

Several years ago I wrote a post that basically said leadership was about coping; I also said,

“…leading yourself is the most important leadership job you will ever have, because if you can’t lead yourself you will never have the opportunity to lead others.”

There is much to learn and many ways to learn it. One of the best samplers I know it the monthly Leadership Development Carnival.

This month it’s hosted by Shawn Murphy and his team over at Switch and Shift; the theme is
Motivational and Inspiring Leadership.
You can find it right here.; dig in.

Flickr image credit: Brian Shamblen