Boost Your Leadership, Communication and Performance

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Receive a weekly boost to your leadership, public speaking, communication with ”Peter’s Power-Ups” Weekly Videos.

The videos just started being broadcast – once per week, for up to 50 weeks. The series include:

  • Gifted Leadership Series I – Bring Out Your Talents and Gifts as a Leader, and the gifts and talents of your followers, and
  • Authentic Speaking Series I – Connect, Influence and Persuade people with genuine and powerful public speaking and communication principles.

Each series is around 75 cents per day (less if you can claim for tax). You won’t even have to miss out on a Coke or Coffee each day for that amount. Even one idea that you receive from these videos will be worth much more than the 80% of painful learning and development you tolerate elsewhere. But I’ll provide you with many hundreds of ideas and principles that you can apply to help you grow as a professional, as a communicator, as a leader and as a person.

Visit http://www.lamplighter.com.au/viewStory/Video+Seminars for further information and to subscribe.

Thank you to those of you already subscribing. I welcome your comments and requests any time.

To any North American subscribers: Don’t worry, my accent is perfectly understandable – probably more than Hugh Jackman, and you watch him all the time :)

Cheers!

Peter McLean

80% of Learning & Development is Useless

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80% of Learning & Development is useless. That is because the vast majority of it does not teach principles, but instead teaches facts (or factoids), is irrelevant to needs and does not take advantage of the individual’s existing gifts, talents, skills and interests.

Running a one-day intensive workshop on public speaking and communication this past week for a Health Department, one of the doctors commented to me that the exploration of his passions and purpose was one of the key – and most interesting and beneficial – aspects of the workshop. Indeed it is: if you do not understand and work with your personal motivations and mission, then you cannot develop your message and your leadership and you are wasting an awful lot of time.

Most L&D departments, HR functions, learning programs, certifications and educational institutions entirely miss this point. While it is relatively easy for a program to target workplace needs, targeting individual needs is more difficult and requires greater discretionary effort.

Additionally, most of this learning runs people through “certifications” or qualifications, 75% of which they either never remember or for which, practically, they would use resources to refer to when they require said information on the job.

I heard a highly qualified professional once proclaiming how they had used Wikipedia as their preferred research tool to answer certification questions, because the questions were so obtuse that the facts would never be used except under extremely rare situations that would require highly specialised expertise. Wiki was the quickest source to get their answers for the purpose of assessment, but they wouldn’t have used it in the field.

I have heard of plenty of people completing their MBAs in the same way and others saying how they approached their undergraduate degrees the same way: just do what was necessary to get a grade, not to learn or develop.

Years ago I completed a certification in workplace training and assessment, because I had to. I completed it within 48 hours, online. The assessor was flabbergasted, because he had never seen those kind of results and the depth of responses and evidence. It usually took people months to complete. That’s partially because 99% of it was old to me. I found one little rubric in all of their materials that I thought was neat. I also had a question about an exercise referred to in their course materials: the assessor couldn’t answer my question, as he didn’t know what the materials were talking about and had never noticed that to which I was referring. I passed.

I always look to principles; which is why my professors always loved me in under and post-graduate work and is why I achieve great results with coaching clients, in learning & development, in my speaking and in my consulting.

What do you find most valuable in your own learning and development? And what learning has been most valuable to you personally and professionally?

Nasty Neologisms

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I had the misfortune of hearing a radio newsreader butcher the English language with something borrowed either from politics, medicine or, worse, economics.

Apparently, lower interest rates will have a “stimulatory” effect on the economy.

The person who invented that word should be interred in an Orwellian hell, as justly condemned in Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language”. He decried the abasement of the language through pointless neologisms intended to elevate meaning (and the speaker) through pretentiousness. Or should that be   ‘Pretentiosity’?

Learn the language, please.

 

Buswell’s Benders

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My daughters came back late from school with their mother and were laughing in disbelief at a radio interview.

The interviewer was speaking with our state treasurer (Mr. Buswell) and asking why utilities prices had gone up by a minimum of 4 percent, when the government had promised that they would be held “at or near the inflation rate”, which has been at most 2.75% by any measure.

“That’s hardly at inflation rate, is it?” asked the interviewer.

“Well, that’s your opinion,” said the treasurer.

Every time the interviewer brought up the facts, the treasurer would just reply with some variation of “that’s your opinion” and state why they had to increase prices, instead of acknowledging that 4, 6 or more percent is indeed far more than 2.75.

My 2 older girls are very smart, but are still only 8 and 10. They were incredulous that the man couldn’t admit the truth and give a straight answer.

If they can see how preposterous his responses were, why cannot he and his advisors? And why would he think any adult of reason would not be able to?

The Best Pies You’ll Eat – Treechange in Toodyay

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My family and I enjoyed some pies on Friday at a bakery in the small town of Toodyay, around an hour’s drive East of Perth. My wife exclaimed that hers was the best store-bought pie she has ever had and that it beat all of the “award winning” pies she’d ever eaten, hands down.

Owners Marc and Linda moved from the west coast to Toodyay about 15 months ago. Marc has returned to the baking game after about 10 years break. It was a total treechange – on faith that they would do well with the new store they had bought. Linda admitted she hadn’t even been to Toodyay before buying the store.

Marc and Linda at Toodyay BakeryThey recently won first place for their pasties at a major competition. Marc said they had not entered the competition the way some others had: they just took items off their shelf for the competition and submitted them. They still hit the top 5 for their pies and 1st place for their pasties. Other entrants in these competitions often create special goods that do not reflect what one buys in the store (that is, what you buy in the store is nowhere near is good.) I can attest that Toodyay Bakery’s goods are the real deal – filled to the brim and delectable.

They’re great folks to talk with, whose shop was busy with locals coming to talk while they picked up the goods. Marc and Linda made the switch to Toodyay based on their desire for a lifestyle change and for the opportunity to set up the bakery and bring up their kids in the local environment. They are loving the change.

They are refurbishing the second storey with a full dining area – it was being completed as we spoke. There is a beautiful 2nd storey verandah view of the town and the surrounding hillsides. And, by the way, they have full upper storey wheelchair access via elevator.

This is the kind of place that ends up becoming a reputed way station for travellers. I’d happily make the drive just for the pies. It deserves to be madly successful.

Passion, Talent and Service go a long way. They’ve got it.

Now is the time to travel to Toodyay if you live in the State or are just visiting. In winter, the grass is green and the river flows. There are great picnic areas, excellent food, nearby attractions and scenery, including some hairy hillside bends if you want to go off the beaten track.

Head over to Marc and Linda’s Toodyay Bakery. It’s on the left on the main street (Stirling Terrace) immediately before the pub and the Visitor’s Centre, before you exit east over the bridge out of town. If you hit the roadhouse, you’ve gone too far. (Them’s good country directions.)

Enjoy the pies and the treechange!

Toodyay Bakery

Failure and Innovation

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A colleague has said to me a few times that she believes that “failure” should be removed from the lexicon. People too often fear to act for fear of failure.

For the same reason, people and organisations often suppress innovation – it is too risky and by that they mean that they may fail. But instead of shouting out, “failure is not an option”, these organisations should instead be saying, “failure is part of the innovation and refinement process.”

No one builds resilience or success without some form of failure. It was Thomas Edison who famously said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” That’s the light bulb moment, folks. You can’t find the perfect solution until you’ve tried a whole host of others. Because you can be guaranteed that either it won’t work perfectly right the first time, or that people won’t want it.

Our dog, Edison, takes after his namesake in this way – he endlessly tries to get out of his pen when he’s in trouble and doesn’t stop trying to get into the house until either he is admitted or is put in his kennel for being a bother. He doesn’t regard this as failure, but as another opportunity to just try again.

What most don’t know is that Edison (the inventor, not my dog) was also endlessly inventive in business. He was always seeking ways to expand his products and their mass production and appeal. Edison wasn’t a fool, however. He didn’t try to reinvent every wheel – that’s needless failure. He also relied on partners who were able to fund and drive his inventiveness. This is where a body of knowledge, resource, partner, advisor or role model can provide insight and advice to help make endeavours more successful and lessen failure rates.

More than one immensely successful individual has tried, failed and tried again before “making it to the top.” This is entirely necessary to trust their capacity for inventiveness and resilience. It is also entirely necessary when innovating new solutions. If it hasn’t been tried, failed and then refined, then it hasn’t been tried.

To mitigate against this tendency to fear innovation for fear of failure, undertake this one exercise:

  • Determine the potential value of the innovation against the risk.

If you do this objectively, you will be able to make the case for persisting in the face of “failure.”

I’ll write more in future posts about how you can objectively weigh the merits and risks of potential innovations. For now, it’s important to consider: leaders are not perfect, nor is their history perfect. Innovators are people who have learned to be comfortable with failure, because they know that it teaches them how not to achieve something important.

How Leaders Can Develop Ideas

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In many leadership discussions, one of the key ingredients for leadership is usually absent. Leaders must have ideas. Popular leadership ‘styles’, ‘personalities’, etc. etc. all make the mistake of separating out this important quality. Someone is an “innovator” and another person is a “motivator” or some such silly, arbitrary distinction.

You know what it’s like when you have a leader without ideas: lacklustre direction, no crisis management, consultation (and all decisions) by committee, bureaucratic processes, all delegation with all the reward going to the top. Real leaders have ideas.

Montgomery, Patton, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Churchill, you name them … wartime leaders all drove strategy because they had the grand ideas and knew how to make them happen. Likewise, innovators like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (in his heyday), John Dell and drivers like Jack Welch all had an abundance of ideas. Modern medical leaders like Christiaan Barnard, Fiona Wood or Jonas Salk all not only pioneered techniques, but passionately built a fraternity of peers willing to advance their fields.

I was often frustrated in various organisations, where I and others around me had ideas which would be taken over by the hierarchy, who then usually managed to butcher the ideas and/or their application. When, instead, I was supported in my initiatives and invited to lead them, the results were inordinately better and created groups of individuals willing to contribute to the ideas’ success. Likewise, when in leadership, I have always been creative and then brought up others to deliver, but I also learned that if someone in my ranks came up with good ideas that it was best to support them in delivering them.

When I was undertaking my graduate work in Canada, I spent some time investigating creativity and its assessment, development and application in both cognitive and educational contexts. There are only a few academics and researchers around the world who have conducted thorough studies of creativity. E.P. Torrance is one, and a host of his students and mentees, which included Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (he of “Flow” fame). Torrance, who was immensely creative and worked hard to develop creativity in children, also said that creativity was the “black hole” of academia, because becoming expert in it or studying it intensively did nothing for one’s career. (Robert Sternberg has also done some work in this area, although it really is not as substantive as his work in general and structural intelligence, nor is it as profoundly useful. He has edited the Handbook of Creativity, which is the standard reference, however.)

I can tell you about one of the most interesting tests for creativity some time – I came up with it when first clarifying my own thinking before conducting research and finding my test had been formally replicated and extrapolated in previous work. It’s hilarious.

How do you create new ideas for your workplace, business or industry, however? It’s not really necessary to attend multiple “creative forces” workshops – they may well stimulate some creativity, but the best way to innovate for your needs is to apply creativity to your context.

In my coaching work, here’s one of the tips that I give to clients:

  • Spend time analysing both the socio-economic and technological environment for clues to pressing problems and future trends.

This provides the “context” for developing and brainstorming solutions that will combine current problems with emerging trends.

I have developed a guided process that I can take people through that helps people develop multiple creative solutions and to innovate new services, technologies or products. Proper examination of the environment surrounding you is critical to that process and it’s amazing what you can devise.

So try this in the coming week: when confronted with a problem to which there is no apparent solution, take a step back. Think about what’s happening in the environment around you. What trends do you see occurring? Now, analyse the problem in that light and identify what specific outcome you want to achieve. Now, start brainstorming some possible solutions.

See how creative you are and what innovations you might devise.

Creativity and Innovation are learned. They are not innate. They should be taught and promoted across an organisation. But remember, a leader must have ideas or she is second rate.

Let me know if you come up with anything – we’ll split any proceeds 50/50!!

Our Legacies – The ANZAC Story

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Like many war veterans from World War I and II, my grandfather never spoke about his wartime experiences, not even with my father. I guess he would have been considered a “war hero” because he had been awarded medals for bravery, but he hid those medals and in typical Australian style would simply say that he spent wartime “hiding under a truck” or some other self-deprecating remark.

Tomorrow is the celebration of ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand – the commemoration of our wartime defeat on the shores of Gallipoli in 1915. But for the nigh on one hundred years since, it has been a reminder to Aussies and Kiwis of the bravery of those young men – and young women who aided or supported them – in fighting for a cause. Not to glorify war. Not to glorify defeat. To glorify the dedication and idealism of the young.

In the Australian mythos, one often hears public voices, media and politicians speaking of “mateship” and ANZACs being used as a political football, talking about giving people a “fair go”. They speak of this being the spirit of ANZAC and that it should drive us.

I rather think they have it entirely wrong.

The ANZAC spirit was one of self-sacrifice. Of heading into battle and rescuing a friend, storming a beach or a barricade, not because one was “brave”, but because it was the thing to do in order to fight for the cause. You just did it. And you took care of your “mates”, not by hiding the truth or “levelling the playing field”, but by fighting for what you considered right and by giving up your own privileges in order to protect them for others.

Self-sacrifice. It has a ring to it rarely heard today, but when one sees it…

Were they foolish? Perhaps. Wise? Probably not. Admirable? The fact that Turkey honours our fallen dead, their erstwhile enemies, on its shores every year is testament to the admiration that they held for these “diggers”. We remember the “diggers” who since have fought throughout Australia and New Zealand’s histories. The fact that they came home, not bragging about war, but detesting it, is also testament to their spirit.

I think of that sacrificial spirit when I think of my grandfather, Ken McLean. He wasn’t a swaggering hero. He had his fair share of faults. My Dad and Mum put him up in our home for a long while in his last years. He was old and brought with him oxygen tanks to cope with the emphysema contracted through a hard life. But he always had encouraging words for us. “You do what you want to in life. Don’t let anyone stop you.”

He had given something precious in the war – partly his innocence, perhaps even part of his sanity, for it was horrifying. But he and others like him gave something even more valuable, for which history – and we – remember them: his life in service.

“Lest We Forget”

The Power of Fear

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“Fear is the mind-killer” – from the Bene Gesserit litany against fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune

A wonderful friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was worried about what would happen. The uncertainty, the impact on her family, how it would affect her extended family and friends were all on her mind – not a raging fear, but an apprehension about the future. If it had been her on her own, she might have decided against surgery and treatment. After a lifetime of service to others, she was concerned that she should not be a burden on others. But her family and friends prevailed on her and, bravely, despite her fears, she went to see the surgeons to get advice on treatment and then on to chemotherapy.

Bombs hit Boston runners, engaged in a peaceful global event. Children and adults are dead or maimed. Scores, if not hundreds, of volunteers ran to help those in need, giving spectators and runners warmth, clothing and comfort. Runners who were there (like Australia’s own Olympic runner and now coach, Robert de Castella) say, “Don’t let it stop you from running in big events.”

A fertilizer plant in Waco, Texas explodes. Possibly scores of people are killed. Houses have been flattened. There is damage for miles around. Texas Department of Public Safety officers head in to the toxic cloud blanketing the area to evacuate people and keep them safe.

A friend of ours is writing a novel about a fictional firestorm in my part of the world – a “Perfect Storm” of bushfires engulfing bushland, towns, lives and the metropolitan area right where I live. It’s based on his extensive knowledge of risks and technologies (as he works in government geographical services) that converge in the natural world to create tremendous real-life risk.

We can spend our lives living in fear of what could go wrong, never step out of our bubble and still come to grief.

Fear is a very powerful emotion. It can paralyse us or motivate us. I was reminded in an A&E production about 19th Century American industrialists and financiers, that one can fear losing everything and decide not to proceed, or one can overcome that fear and use it to feed determination to achieve something that benefits millions.

Leaders don’t deny fear. They overcome its power and forge on despite that fear. They see where fear can direct them away from something dangerous and they can see where fear is misdirecting away from something courageous. They find the sources, the help and the resources that will help them overcome it – and then they help their followers overcome it through encouragement, through their presence alongside, through prudent management of risk, through foresight and through sheer perseverance in the face of paralysis.

Take the treatment, put on the mask, clear away the dangers, let the fear of foolishness direct you away from unnecessary risk and towards wise action, help those in need and put one foot in front of the other on a path towards safety and success.

Don’t pretend there is no fear (there is only one way to perfectly eliminate fears). Most of us have to soldier on despite our fears. Don’t let fear kill your mind, your heart and your lives, but let your purpose, your passion and your conviction overcome it.

 

Boston Bombs

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Any reasonable person should condemn today’s bombing attacks on the Boston Marathon.

This was a peaceful athletic event, with people drawn from all around the world celebrating human achievement, stamina and persistence. Families cheering on the marathon runners would not have anticipated that their day would be shattered by these shrapnel hurling weapons. They would not have anticipated that their children would have been killed or critically injured, as a number have. Scores more adults have been severely and horribly injured in these blasts.

These kinds of horrific events happen the world over every day. Today, 50 people were killed and hundreds more injured in bombing attacks around Iraq. Innocents suffer through drone attacks North of Pakistan. Still others suffer in many parts of the world, through war and terror. And, of course, Kim Jong-un rattles his sabres and threatens far worse through nuclear attack. The facts of these other tragedies does not justify this very public attack, deliberately designed to damage and destroy spectators.

Thankfully, other bombs remain unexploded and hopefully any remaining devices will be found and disposed of safely.

One of the heartening things one sees in this kind of event is the number of people who have rushed to help victims, rather than rushing away. Apparently many marathon runners have kept on running from the racecourse to instead run to the local hospital in order to donate blood.

Our hearts should go out to all of the victims of these ongoing tragedies. I hope that those children and adults struggling for survival in Boston hospitals will be able to recover and heal under the skill of local medical teams. My prayers go out for the consolation of the parents and families who have lost their loved ones or have been injured.

And to my American friends and readers who may be reading this, I hope and pray that you are all well.