Leadership: You Don't Have to Just Wing It!

In my previous articles, I’ve been discussing how leaders can take the “book smarts” they acquire in the classroom and turn them into “street smarts” – that is, convert learned skills into applied skills. By such strategies as stealth learning (learning while doing other things), unlearning of old habits, targeted practice, and visualization, they can integrate new ways of leading and interacting into their daily behavior.  And – returning now to “Route 66” (see my previous article) – they can also use another mechanism, one that we can derive by analogy from the world of flight instruction.

First, a pop quiz: How do pilots best learn to fly?  Is it better for them to (A) Take classes in flying, or (B) Jump into a plane and learn from their mistakes?

Few people, I think, would select Option B – because the (literal) impact of making mistakes far outweighs the hands-on experience they would acquire.

But other people might also point out the downside of Option A, observing that you wouldn’t want to get into a plane with a pilot fresh out of the classroom with no hands-on experience at all.

But, aha, you would then say – I’m setting up a false dichotomy. The real answer (you would continue) is (A) and (B), since a pilot requires both book learning and practical experience to pilot a plane successfully.

Well, you’re way ahead of me – except for the fact that we’re all leaving out a third option that fits between A and B (call it Option A.5): A flight simulator.

A simulator is a necessary transitional step between the ground and the air. In a simulator, a student pilot can take his book learning and practice applying it to real-life situations in a safe environment. To mix metaphors, we can say that a simulator provides an alternative to the “sink or swim” approach, as a way to bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Yet let’s consider now the way we commonly train leaders. Don’t we often just:

Use only Option B – i.e., don’t provide them any training and leave them to try to learn leadership through (often painful) experience?

OR:

Use both Option A and Option B – i.e., send them to class and then throw them into the leadership arena, expecting them to immediately apply their classroom learning to in-the-moment situations?

But if we don't just rely on Option A and B for pilots, why do we rely on only those two options when we're training leaders?  Why can’t we also use an Option A.5 to help leaders apply their newly learned skills to unexpected situations in a safe environment?

Well, in fact there is an Option A.5 for leaders: Improvisation workshops.

You can think of improvisation workshops as a “flight simulator” for new leaders. Through learning and practicing the basic skills of improv – collaborating with others, listening, being flexible, acting supportively, maintaining a positive attitude, and (yes) having fun – leaders can discover how to translate their classroom learnings about leadership to actual concrete behaviors. (And I would note that these “translations” between improv concepts and leadership behaviors comprise the major focus of The Daily Improviser blog.)

After teaching the improv behaviors, improv workshops can (like flight simulators) be structured to confront participants with “curveball situations” that they’re likely to face in their daily environment. As in a flight simulator, participants can then test out their new behaviors on these lifelike situations in a safe environment, where the potential damage resulting from using less-than-optimal behaviors is held to a minimum. And while they’re trying on new ways of acting, they can make note of their reflexive responses that serve to block the behavioral changes they’re trying to implement – another good opportunity to bring their natural style into awareness so they can see what kinds of behaviors they need to “unlearn.”

Improv workshops can thus play a role along with other transitional methods (such as mentors, coaches, and action learning projects) to keep new leaders from having to merely wing it when they emerge into the glare of the organizational spotlight after they leave their formal training.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

The other day, while improvisationally surfing through my local cable channels via remote, I ran across a classic tv drama from the 60s called Route 66. The show – inspired no doubt by the Jack Kerouac novel On the Road – involved two young drifters named Todd and Buz who tooled aimlessly across the USA in their Chevrolet (Corvette, that is).

In their inevitable satire (titled Route 67), Mad magazine riffed on one of the show’s improbabilities by having Buz look at a map and ask “Hey, Todd, how do we get back to Route 67 from here?”- to which Todd replied “What difference does it make? We haven’t been near Route 67 in weeks!”

(This is, I admit, a re-creation of the dialogue from my memory, but hopefully you get the point.)

Well, I suppose Mad would have a field day with The Daily Improviser blog as well. Aside from the fact that it isn’t a “daily” blog (intentionally so – the “daily” part modifies “improviser,” not “blog”), many of my articles can seem to cruise as far away from The Daily Improviser’s titular mainline as Todd and Buz's Corvette.

But actually the detours aren’t really so far afield. As I’ve said before, improv is all about making connections – especially between concepts and topics that at first blush might be wholly incompatible. And just as a long-form improv performance can take a while to tie together all of its many threads, ultimately all of the topical routes through which I meander in The Daily Improviser encounter some common milestones along the way.

Since “getting there is half the fun,” I’m still building these common improvisation-based leadership concepts as I journey along, and I’ll make a rest stop soon to pull together some of the common concepts I’ve gathered. Next time, though, I actually will return to my own Route 66 and show some direct connections between improvisation and a topic I’ve been building in my recent articles: How leaders learn to lead.

Visualizing Success: The Daily Improviser Learns to Lead

In my previous two articles, I’ve described strategies that leaders can adopt to transfer their classroom learning to reflexive application of that learning to live situations. Last time I described the stealth learning strategy (“learning while doing other things”) put forth by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in their book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. In this article, I’ll describe a couple of additional strategies.

Goleman et al. mention another strategy that once again takes a page from the champion athlete’s playbook: The use of visualization.

As Matthew Syed describes in his book Bounce, top-level athletes are masters of manipulating their beliefs to envision the inevitability of success in critical situations. Similarly, Goleman et al. cite studies that demonstrate the power of mental rehearsal in helping Olympic athletes prepare for key events. They go on to say:

“Leadership success depends on your ability to clearly picture yourself achieving your ideal state, and then maintaining that focus…. If you first visualize some likely situations at work or at home, you’ll feel less awkward when you actually put the new skills into practice.”

Using visualization has some definite advantages for the developing leader:

• It can be done anywhere, anytime;

• It provides a safe way to experiment with new behaviors before actually trying to apply them in live situations;

• It reinforces a positive, motivating approach to development by encouraging the leader to develop a vivid picture of what success will look like.

Next time I’ll cover one more recommended strategy the Daily Improviser leader can use to transfer his “book learning” to a live environment – a strategy that relates directly to the application of improvisational skills to the practice of leadership.

Oops! I Think I Learned Something

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon

I concluded last time by observing that, in order to change a long-held habit of behavior, the Daily Improviser leader first needs to unlearn the old habit before the new habit can take root. Once he has jolted himself out of his former reflexive behaviors, the leader can then start to implement strategies to put new ways of acting into effect.

Leaders often mistakenly think that they can learn the new behaviors by merely attending training and developing a general awareness of how they might need to change. However, as Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee observe in their book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence:

“A teacher can’t instruct your brain circuits that carry old habits of leadership to relearn new habits. What’s needed is practice: The more often a behavioral sequence repeats, the stronger the underlying brain circuits become. People literally rewire their brains.”

Clearly, developing a more emotionally intelligent approach to leading requires consistent, targeted on-the-job application of the new skills. Yet, in the rush of time during the typical workday, a leader commonly finds herself backsliding in her commitment to changing her behaviors. It’s easier just to do it the old way.

To overcome this tendency, a leader might consider some strategies that Goleman et al. recommend. First, they suggest that leaders use a “stealth learning” approach, i.e., experimenting with the new behaviors in naturally occurring situations both on and off the job. “The trick,” they say, “is to learn while doing other things.”

By way of example, the authors describe a study of IT leaders. As is common for people in these roles, the leaders had first gained career success through their proficiency at solving problems in relative isolation, but then needed to learn interaction skills to become more effective in their leadership roles. To do this, they engaged in such learning strategies as:

• Taking leadership roles in volunteer organizations;

• Planning conferences for professional associations;

• Practicing team building in settings such as community or church organizations.

Goleman et al. cite one IT leader who developed stronger emotional intelligence skills through his service on a church group:

“My church group easily lent itself to people expressing feelings and opinions. Where, as an engineer, I usually felt the need to always have a logical flow, in the group I became more accepting of less structure. Over time, that acceptance worked its way into how I acted as a leader – less concerned with flow and content and more attuned to group process.”

Almost by definition, stealth learning lets the leader develop mastery of new behaviors below the level of conscious awarness. To paraphrase John Lennon, skills are happening while the leader is busy doing other things.

(I'll continue next time with some additional strategies for making the leap from novice to master.)

If You Want to Learn Something, Forget What You Know

The title of this article sounds like something that Yogi Berra might have said but didn't. And I think the slanted Yogi-like logic captures a basic truth regarding what it takes to learn about improvisation - and leadership.

In my previous article, I described Gary Klein’s research into the way that people make seemingly intuitive decisions – not by means of magic or ESP but by rapid (and largely unconscious) processing of various signals that point the way to the best course of action.

The signals and the processing can be incorporated into training materials to instruct novice practitioners. But how does a person proceed from conscious (and often tentative) processing of these signals to the type of instant intuitive calculation we saw in Gary Klein’s fire chief?

Well, in the words of the New York City jazz musician who was asked by a tourist how to get to Carnegie Hall: “Practice, man, practice.”

As simple as that sounds, though, many recent leadership experts have broken down the “practice” advice into more specific strategies.

First, to be most effective, practice needs to be more than just general immersion in the domain in which the person wants to gain skills. As Matthew Syed points out in his book Bounce, championship athletes don’t merely play lots of rounds of golf or engage in lengthy shoot-around sessions on the basketball court in hopes of improving their overall game. Instead, they first pinpoint the specific skills requiring development and then relentlessly target their practice sessions toward repeating and honing those skills.

A person wanting to develop intuitive command of leadership skills can take a page from the championship athlete’s playbook. As Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee write in their book Primal Leadership:

“It’s possible to improve if you do three things: Bring bad habits into awareness, consciously practice a better way, and rehearse new behavior at every opportunity until it becomes automatic – that is, until mastery has occurred at the level of implicit learning.”

Leaders thus need to focus on identifying specific behaviors that require enhancement, by such means as competency models and self-reflection. Once the few high-impact areas of development opportunities are identified, the person can then create strategies (e.g., special projects, mentoring, job enrichment) to get targeted practice and feedback on their progress.

But as the quote from Goleman et al. above makes clear, before they can start focusing on the new ways of acting, leaders must often first unlearn bad habits that may have become embedded in their natural behavior. Goleman et al. go on to say:

“This suggests a learning strategy that at first focuses a bit more on overcoming the impulsive leadership habits you are trying to undo – before giving full attention to the new habits with which you want to replace the old.”

There is a direct connection here to the development of performance-improvising skills, since much of the trick of learning improvisation involves overcoming inhibitions and internal constraints that get in the way of one’s natural improvisational abilities. As Keith Sawyer’s research so vividly demonstrates, children are natural improvisers – but as they get older, their native creativity and flexibility often become casualties of their socialization into the adult world. Improv workshop games can act as a spark to jar them out of their self-censoring habits.

In the context of leadership development, “unlearning” can start with 360 feedback that serves to jolt the leader into awareness of how he is being perceived – followed by reflection, training, and coaching that guide the leader to acknowledge the drawbacks of his bad habits. At that point, the stage is set for new habits to begin settling into place – through practice, man, practice!

(I'll wrap up next time with some further thoughts about strategies to help engrain new leadership behaviors "in the bones.")

Why We Can't - and Shouldn't - Turn Off the Mind

“There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Stephen Stills

Awhile back I was conducting a leadership class in which I showed a video of a school principal who was a pioneer in the area of early education intervention for at-risk children. The video depicted a day in the life of the principal (whom I’ll call Kate) as she interacted with different groups – students, parents, administrators, corporate executives – and attempted to influence their participation in and funding of early education programs.

At the conclusion of the video, I asked my standard debriefing question: “What factors do you think governed Kate’s influencing approach to each of these different groups?”

By asking the question, I intended (and expected) the class participants to point out Kate’s use of certain approaches (rewards, sanctions, personal charisma) to influence students’ behavior, and her use of other approaches (her expertise in the field, her track record of success) to sway her corporate audiences.

I primarily wanted the class to acknowledge a key aspect of leadership: The ability to adapt one’s style to motivate different people based on a reading of the audience and the situation.

So I was intrigued when one of the participants gave me a somewhat unexpected response: “I don’t think she consciously considered any factors. I think she just acted intuitively.”

The response provided me a golden opportunity to refer to a situation described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. In Blink, Gladwell cites the work of a researcher named Gary Klein (whose company happens to be located two miles from my house – a connection I can’t resist offering up here, for what it’s worth). Klein’s company conducts detailed research into the ways that people make decisions – especially split-second ones in emergency situations.

Gladwell describes one of Klein’s research subjects, a fire department commander who once responded to a house fire that seemed to resist all of his squad’s efforts to extinguish it. As he and his squad stood in the living room trying to figure out their next move, the commander suddenly got a sense that something was just “not right” about the situation. He immediately ordered everyone out of the house – just before the living room floor collapsed into the basement.

Klein interviewed the commander about the factors that led to his decision to vacate and discovered:

“He didn’t know why he had ordered everyone out. He believed it was ESP. He was serious. He thought he had ESP, and he felt that because of that ESP, he’d been protected throughout his career.”

Most people would have chalked this up to “intuitive” decision-making born of years of experience. But not Klein, whose entire research is based on delving into how the mind arrives at such decisions, especially in the heat of the moment. As he pressed the commander to describe exactly what cues caught his attention as he moved through the house, Klein pieced together the thought processes that led to his urgent command to vacate. As Gladwell relates it:

“The fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time, though, the lieutenant made none of those connections consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious.” [emphasis added]

Similarly, in the situation of Kate, the school principal: She may not have been consciously aware of the signs she was picking up from her audience that governed her influencing behavior. However, under the surface, her mental computer was rapidly processing the cues and guiding her in-the-moment choices of behavior. (In this sense, she was very much operating in the same manner as a performance improviser – but more on that in a later article.)

Certainly, neither Kate nor the fire commander came into this world with their intuitive capabilities fully formed. Like anyone else, they first had to consciously learn the rudiments of effective action and proceed from a state of “conscious competence” to one of “unconscious competence.”

The good news, then, in these two examples – the fire commander and Kate – is that intuitive action can be taught, as long as we can isolate the inputs and processes that lead one to act effectively. Gary Klein is living proof that we can in fact identify the underlying dynamics of improvisational action in emergency situations. Similarly, through the creation of competency models and other behavioral descriptions, we can identify (and teach) what the best leaders do when they’re acting “in the heat of the moment.”

Of course, teaching intuitive action requires much more than just isolating key factors and presenting them on a Powerpoint slide. In my next article, I’ll describe strategies that can be employed to ingrain effective leadership behaviors (as my improv colleague Gary Schwartz says) “in the bones.”

You Don't Have to Be Creative to Lead Creatively

I recently read an online article by Bryn Meredith of Bluepoint Leadership Development titled Leadership Characteristics: A Shift in Requirements? In the article, Meredith touches on an important point about Creative Leadership that I dealt with in one of my earlier articles in the Daily Improviser.


Meredith first cites the research by James Kouzes & Barry Posner (The Leadership Challenge). Over a 20-year period starting in the late 80s, Kouzes and Posner asked thousands of people to name the four most admired qualities of leaders. More than half of the respondents to their survey mentioned the following qualities in their Top 7: Honest, Forward-Looking, Competent, and Inspiring.

Meredith contrasts this Most Admired list with more recent research conducted by IBM in which respondents were asked to list the three most important leadership characteristics needed in the new economic environment. One characteristic was Integrity – similar to the “Honest” characteristic found by Kouzes and Posner. The other two – Global Thinking and Creativity – reflected new imperatives for businesses in the fierce new world of global competition. As Meredith notes:

"Creativity and global thinking represent a significant shift in the way we see the needs of effective leadership today. In fact, creativity didn’t even feature as one of the top 20 most desired characteristics in the Kouzes and Posner data, and yet in the IBM study, creativity received 60% of the votes as the most important characteristic leaders need to have today."

So what does “Creative Leadership” mean? Do leaders need to be fluent out-of-the-box thinkers, grand visionaries, boardroom improvisers? Not at all, says Meredith:

"It is not a case of leaders being more creative themselves. It is more a need for them to recognize how to create a culture of innovation within their teams whereby creativity is encouraged to thrive and grow into real time ideas that can be put into practice."

This immediately reminded me of my article about that notable Daily Improviser, the comedian Jack Benny. As I pointed out, Benny’s creative gift was not so much his skill as a natural funnyman as it was his ability to attract, nurture, and retain a team of talented writers who could play to his own strengths as a master of timing and characterization. As I mentioned in my earlier article:

"Like Jack Benny, you don’t have to be a quick-witted, off-the-cuff 'performer' in order to be a Daily Improviser. You just need the improv attitudes – listen, appreciate others’ strengths, support your team, have fun – and let your team explore and flex their way to success for everyone!"

Casting Our Light on the Positive

I’ll continue with some observations from the book Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: Ingenious Tales of Words and Their Origins by Michael Quinion. As I noted last time, Quinion in his Introduction echoes some themes I’ve been developing in The Daily Improviser blog.

In my previous article, I cited Quinion’s assessment of why erroneous explanations of word origins tend to stick in people’s minds. As he says, “We’re suckers for a really good story” – i.e., our interest is naturally drawn to piquant tales of how a certain turn of phrase came to be, regardless of the accuracy of the account. The entertainment value of such stories thus tends to overshadow the more mundane (but correct) explanations for the phrase’s evolution.

But Quinion also cites a further reason for why inaccuracy trumps accuracy in the world of etymology:

“Back in Elizabethan times, an early economist called Sir Thomas Gresham promulgated the rule that ‘bad money drives out good’ – that good-quality coins mixed with debased ones will be hoarded or exported, leaving only the rubbish in circulation. It’s much the same with etymology, alas. Only an etymologist could or would be expected to take the time to exhaustively research the history and evidence behind such stories, and in these days of electronic communications an entertaining but false word history will race twice round the world before the etymologist has had time to put fingers to keyboard.”

Quinion’s observation sounds remarkably similar to the point made by Chip and Dan Heath (in their book Made to Stick) about the mechanics behind the persistence of Urban Legends in the public consciousness. Citing the elements that make Urban Legends “sticky” – details, cited (and uncorroborated) authorities, the wildfire effect of the Internet – the Heaths conclude: “Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world.”

The examples cited by Quinion and the Heaths represent another example of a general maxim I cited earlier: Bad is often stronger than good. This of course is not a value judgment but an acknowledgment of the relative strength and impact of (say) bad news vs. good news. (Another example I’ve cited: Barbara Fredrickson’s 3 to 1 Positivity Ratio concept, which holds that we need to actively cultivate 3 positive emotions to overcome a single negative emotion.)

I think that each of these diverse examples reminds us of the importance of being mindful of the positive aspects of our lives – and the need to be continually vigilant in the face of the natural power of the negative.

What's in a Word?

Last week I picked up an interesting-sounding title – Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds, by Michael Quinion - from the $2 rack of my favorite store, Half Price Books. Being a fan of etymology (i.e., word origins) and finding myself in the market for a quick read over the holidays, the purchase was a no-brainer.
Imagine my pleasant surprise, then, to find within the first four pages of the book some unlikely echoes of a few of the concepts I’ve been developing in the Daily Improviser blog.

On page 2, Quinion observes that there are few fields of study as open to oft-repeated misinformation as etymology. Everyone knows the acronymic origin of words like COP (“Constable on Patrol”) and TIP (“To Insure Promptness”), right? (Well, OK, I admit I’m using those words in place of other more scatological “acronyms” that have gained a wide circulation, accompanied by a knowing nudge-nudge-wink-wink.) But as Quinion notes, almost none of these reputed acronyms actually represents the origin of the words in question (the term “acronym” itself dates only from World War I).

Yet in the popular mind, such dubious stories as to word origins continue to be spread via a process Quinion refers to as “etymythology.” Why is this?

First, as Quinion explains:

"We’re suckers for a really good story. It’s one way we make sense of the world around us and so turn the unfamiliar … into the known and the comfortable. So it’s important that we have stories that explain things, but it’s much less important that the stories we tell are verifiably true. [Such stories] must reassure and convince, but above all they must interest and entertain. Stories that are boring, mundane, or inconclusive will not survive. Unfortunately, real word histories are often all of these things."

I believe that Quinion is touching on a topic I’ve addressed here before several times: We humans are greatly susceptible to shorthand constructs that explain the world around us. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, we couldn’t exist without a certain layer of abstraction through which we view and make sense of the world.

This “Layer of Abstraction” can take the form of useful shorthand – for example, describing an unfamiliar concept such as a “pomelo” in terms of a familiar concept such as a “grapefruit,” even though technically the two are not at all the same. However, the Layer can also be seductively misleading, a substitute for engaging in critical thinking. In the case of word origins, our willingness to accept and pass along a good story on shaky evidence can be relatively benign in its impact. However, when we use such one-sided thinking (as represented by the Confirmation Bias) to justify making invidious judgments, it can lead to the worst forms of discrimination and injustice.

(I'll continue with more from Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds next time.)

Anchors Aweigh!

I have written quite a bit in The Daily Improviser blog about the “Nothing Between” concept, i.e., the state in which there is “nothing between” a person and his environment, thus permitting the person to have a direct experience of reality. I have noted that many people seem to regard the performance improviser’s art as the quintessential Nothing Between state, a series of spontaneous fillings-in on a totally blank slate.

As I’ve mentioned in many of my articles, however, I wonder if anyone – the performance improviser or the Daily Improviser – really ever experiences the Nothing Between state, or even should aspire to that state as the ideal way to interact with his environment.

I recently ran across another source of support for this skepticism about Nothing Between. In his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb cites a study in which subjects were asked to spin a “wheel of fortune” that pointed to a wholly random number, and then were asked to estimate the number of countries in Africa. As Taleb recounts: “Those who had a low number on the wheel estimated a low number of African nations; those with a high number produced a higher estimate.” Taleb goes on to note:

“A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number [even when you know it is random], then you ‘anchor’ on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum.”

Taleb relates the anchoring mechanism to the advent of spreadsheet software – specifically, to the way in which we rely on Excel to extend projections ad infinitum into the future with a single click of a mouse.

“Once on a page or on a computer screen, or, worse, in a PowerPoint presentation, the projection takes on a life of its own, losing its vagueness and abstraction and becoming what philosophers call reified, invested with concreteness.”

As Taleb notes, our desire to reduce our anxiety over uncertainty can lead to an overreliance on the first or most concrete data we can find. But even though Taleb seems to be taking us to task for blinding ourselves to “real reality” via these mental mechanisms, in fact he recognizes that it couldn’t be any other way:

“We use reference points in our heads, say sales projections, and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is needed to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in the absolute. We cannot work without a point of reference.” [Emphasis added]

Taleb’s discussion of these mental phenomena – anchoring and reification – reminds me of the Five White Things activity in the book Made to Stick. There, Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the different level of mental calisthenics required to think of “five white things” vs. thinking of “five white things in your refrigerator.” The latter is generally an easier task because it provides a frame for our thinking, rather than a boundaryless (and thus paralyzing) blank slate on which nearly infinite choices could be written.

Anchoring, reification, framing … each of these mechanisms is in fact a “Thing Between” us and our environment. And as Steven Pinker so eloquently demonstrates in his seminal work The Blank Slate, these Things Between are an inherent part of the human condition. Rather than trying to deny them or will ourselves to push past them (say observers such as Taleb, Pinker, and the Heaths), we would do better to acknowledge and even embrace these mechanisms. At the least (as Taleb says), our understanding of our own thought structures should make us aware of the limits of our own reasoning and logic capabilities. At the most (as the Heaths say), knowing about the effect of framing can help us place useful boundaries on our thinking, thereby preventing analysis paralysis and facilitating communication of new concepts.