Doing great work is fundamental to your career success. But it’s not always enough. It is equally important to be on your boss’s radar. Leadership consultants emphasize the importance of finding “champions,” powerful leaders in your company who will speak up on your behalf and recommend you for important projects and promotions. But your boss can’t be your champion if he or she doesn’t know what you are doing.

Here’s the challenge – there are two different kinds of radar. I call them visibility and maintenance. Visibility means giving your boss to have a clear line of sight to your achievements and contributions. Maintenance is about being the center of office drama and conflict. Here’s what the two dimensions look like:

Low visibility/Low maintenance = Invisible. You may be doing good work and you’re not causing problems, but your boss is unlikely to see you as a candidate for special attention.

Low visibility/High maintenance = Pain in the neck. Your boss only hears about you when you are stirring up trouble. This is a fast road to stagnation at best and job loss at worst.

High visibility/High maintenance = Prima donna. You are doing great work and your boss knows it. But you are also the center of drama and conflict in the office. Depending on your boss’s priorities, he may put up with the drama because of the contributions you are making, or he may decide that all the trouble you create isn’t worth it.

High visibility/Low maintenance = Star. This is the magic formula. When your boss sees you coming, she knows it’s going to be good news. You are making her life easier, not more complicated.

Aim for High Visibility/Low Maintenance in your relationship with your boss. Built on the foundation of outstanding work, it’s the springboard to success.

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Do you want to accelerate the development of high-potential leaders in your organization?  The time-tested model is very simple.  Put them into stretch situations where they have to work hard and well to achieve their goals.  And then give them the opportunity to reflect on what they learned.

Most organizations are much better at the first step than the second one.  Business leaders tend to be people of action.  How many companies do you know that operate on the principle of “Ready, Fire, Aim!”  Business leaders tend to barge ahead from one project to the next, without stopping to gather the learnings from what they have done.

This is a big problem for developing excellence in business leadership.  It leads to organizational amnesia and to a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again.  It leads to ignoring or covering up failures, rather than discussing and learning from them.  And it interferes with the learning and growth of the next generation of leaders.

How can business leaders foster reflection as part of their leadership style?

• Set aside time in your schedule to think.  In its glory days, IBM had the slogan “THINK” emblazoned on its walls.
• Schedule post-mortems on projects to discuss what worked and what didn’t work.  Doctors do this about their patients, and it’s a great idea for other settings as well.
• Work with a coach.  Helping executives reflect on themselves and their organizations is a big part of what coaching is about.
• Ask questions of the people you are mentoring that encourage them to reflect on their work.

What do you do to build reflection into your leadership style?

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Cathy and I had been friendly colleagues for about a year when I asked her to do a special favor for me.  I could tell immediately that she was uncomfortable with my request, and over the next few days she was distinctly cooler to me.  I didn’t think my request was out of line, but clearly she did.  What to do next?

Knowing when and how to offer an apology is an essential skill for successful business leadership.  We all make mistakes, inadvertently offend someone, or are intentionally hurtful.  A sincere, artful apology can get a relationship back on track, both personally and professionally.

Here are three traps to watch out for:

1. Apology avoidance.  Some people feel it is demeaning to offer an apology, that it makes them seem weak or subordinate.  Nonsense!  It is unwillingness to offer an appropriate apology that makes you seem insecure – and rude.
2. The fake apology.  The classic example is, “I’m so sorry you feel that way.”  What?!  That’s not an apology, it’s patronizing.  A true apology says, “I was wrong, I am sorry, and I won’t do it again.”  Sometimes you may indeed feel that the other person over-reacted.  In that case, how about saying, “I’m sorry, I was clumsy.  I didn’t mean to offend you, but I did.  I’ll be more thoughtful next time.”
3. The excessive apology.  This is more often a problem for women than for men.  It can involve being overly obsequious, such as “OMG, I can’t believe I said that to you.  I am such an idiot – I am so sorry.  I don’t know how you can ever forgive me …” Or if can mean apologizing too often.  I have found myself apologizing over and over for the same misdeed, which only keeps reminding the other person of my misstep.  Once is usually enough.  Apologize sincerely and then shut up.

When I realized something had gone awry with Cathy, I called her.  I was right – she felt my request was inappropriate.  I apologized and told her it mattered to me to have a good relationship with her.  We are friendly colleagues to this day – and she has done me a lot of favors since then.

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Well-intentioned senior business leaders often shoot themselves in the foot by unwittingly draining the meaning and joy out of the work lives of their employees. This unfortunate process undermines the leaders’ effectiveness and gets in the way of attaining their organizations’ goals. That is the thesis of Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in their article, “How Leaders Kill Meaning at Work,” in the January 2012 McKinsey Quarterly.

Senior business leaders’ primary task, at least as important as developing a guiding strategy, is engaging the passion and energy of the folks in the trenches who are striving to execute that strategy. The single most important driver of engagement is the experience of making progress in meaningful work. Yet senior leaders’ smallest actions can stymie progress because what they say and do is so intensely observed by the people who report to them. Bottom line: “A sense of purpose in the work, and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.

Here are four traps awaiting senior executives:

Mediocrity Signals: A case study – A new top-management team instills fierce pride in its workforce by creating a trumpeted “innovation” mission statement. In practice, however, upper management consistently dictates that cost reduction goals be met before any other priorities are addressed. This over-emphasis on cost cutting causes quality to suffer, while competitors busily introduce new products. Because of this hypocrisy, the firm’s workers feel they are doing mediocre work for a mediocre company and they disengage. Many leave, and within three years the firm is acquired by a smaller rival.

Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder: Earnest senior executives constantly scan the horizon to monitor competitors’ moves, the global economic environment, and their implications for financing and marketing issues. However, too many exhibit a short attention span regarding strategy and tactics. Each quarter, they promote new initiatives that are incompatible with what they asked for three months earlier. Mid-level managers receiving such inconsistent direction not surprisingly report persistent difficulty in maintaining a strong sense of purpose.

Corporate Keystone Kops: Overly complex reporting structures, indecisiveness, and lack of cooperation yield chaos. Senior leaders’ failure to perceive and correct such disorder convinces workers that their efforts to produce high quality results are futile.

Misbegotten “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals”: A popular management theory urges senior leaders to develop a “big, hairy, audacious goal” – a BHAG. However, a BHAG doesn’t motivate anyone when it is overly grandiose, so extreme as to seem unattainable, and so vague as to seem empty. One firm decreed that all projects be “innovative blockbusters,” yielding a minimum annual revenue of $100 million within five years of initiation. This BHAG had little meaning for the firm’s personnel and their daily activities. It did not connect with workers’ desire to provide customers with something worthwhile. Instead, the aggressive revenue target spoke only of the top management’s own circumscribed values.

Here are some ways to avoid the traps:

• Provide employees with a consistent, meaningful strategy so they understand why they are doing what they are doing.

• Remember what it was like when you were working in the trenches. How meaningful was it to commit to something your superiors hadn’t thought through?

• Set up an “early warning system” to alert you when your view from the top doesn’t match the reality on the ground. Regularly gauging the level of coordination and support can prevent disarray that saps meaning from your employees’ inner work lives.

• Motivate your people to greatness by articulating their higher purpose within the organization, and support its achievement by your own consistent daily actions.

Senior leaders who foster workers’ sense of meaning and progress in their daily work will attract and retain a committed workforce in a challenging economic environment. And they might just find greater meaning in their own work as leaders as well.

Please let us know what you think of these ideas. We look forward to dialog with you – and to better times.

Gail Golden

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Are you acting like an “underdog?” Sociologists have identified some self-defeating behavior patterns that are common among people who feel themselves to be in the “out-group.” In a business leadership setting, underdog behaviors are tell-tale signs that a leader is feeling impotent or insignificant. Some typical underdog behaviors are:
• Blaming others when you can’t get the job done
• Building up your self-esteem by belittling others, especially others who belong to the same “out-group”
• Over-identifying with the dominant group and exaggerating its strengths
• Preferring to be the only member of your out-group in a leadership setting; placing barriers in the way of others like you

It is not hard to recognize underdog behaviors in others. Everyone has colleagues who always find excuses instead of holding themselves accountable. We all know women leaders who out-bully the men, or members of ethnic or racial minorities who do nothing to help others climb the ladder.

It is much harder to see these behaviors in ourselves. But if we examine ourselves honestly, when we are in settings where we are outsiders, most of us act like underdogs at least occasionally. These behaviors are understandable, but they really undermine our effectiveness as leaders. They don’t make others respect us; in fact they make us look kind of pathetic.

So what’s the alternative? How about acting like a “topdog?”
• Hold yourself accountable to a standard of excellence
• Build up your self-esteem by doing great things, while acknowledging the greatness of others
• Respect the dominant group while being true to your own identity
• Use your position and influence to provide a hand-up to other deserving members of your group.

What do you think? Let us know.

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