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Dramatize Your Ideas!

I don’t think I’ll ever forget one particular college history class. As a business major, I wasn’t extremely invested and the class took place right after lunch. I remember one student team was scheduled to give a presentation on Ancient Roman civilization. Just as I was about to zone out, the back door burst open and a student with a plastic helmet, a sword and a cape came tearing through the classroom. Hot on his heals came another student in a lion outfit. The lion made a diving tackle right in the narrow aisle between our desks, but the gladiator fought him off, stabbed him and then chased him back into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

Now I was wide awake and ready to learn about Ancient Rome.

This story illustrates the effects drama can have on our words. Oftentimes, it’s not what we say, but how we say it that makes a difference. Here’s why:

Drama Masks

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It Doesn’t Matter How Much You Care

When I first began studying leadership years ago, I’d find myself in conversations when someone would invariably share a leadership challenge with me. Sometimes, I’d even know how to solve it. I’d usually reference a book or an idea I had recently studied. Sometimes in my enthusiasm, I’d even go out and purchase the resource for them. Unfortunately, when I followed up a few weeks later to find out what had happened, they had rarely bothered to look at what I had provided them.

Several years later, I got a lead role on a consulting assignment to develop a plan to significantly improve an organization’s corporate culture. In fact, I was told this was my chance to “really shape the project.” I spent the next few months analyzing employee survey data, referencing strategic plans and carefully crafting a solution. Finally I got to present my plan to a senior client in a boardroom meeting and was thrilled when he accepted it. Now it was time to get to work. But much to my chagrin, a bigger problem soon emerged: no one wanted to take responsibility for seeing the plan through.

These experiences confirmed for me a simple but poignant lesson: you can’t want something for other people more than they want it for themselves. It doesn’t matter how much you care if they don’t.

Caring Hands

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What the Communist Party Got Right About Leadership

Today’s post was co-written with Brooke Steinke, a student in the Organizational & Management Communication class at CollegePlus. It was great working with you this semester, Brooke!

Three months ago, if someone had asked me what I could learn from the Communist Party, I would have jokingly replied, “How not to run a government.”

However, since then, I read Douglas Hyde’s book, Dedication and Leadership. Hyde was a news editor of the Communist newspaper London Daily Worker and outspoken Party member during and after WWII – in Great Britain no less. Finally coming to the realization that the Communist philosophy is intrinsically flawed, Hyde resigned from the Party but argued that the Communist leadership methods are, in many cases, extremely effective and worth emulating. “Never in man’s history has a small group of people set out to win the world and achieved more in less time,” he wrote. In his book, Hyde demonstrated that the techniques Communism used to create leaders and spread its influence are not “Communist” techniques at all. They are, in fact, very effective and powerful strategies anyone can use to instill dedication and leadership in others.

Communism

Here are a few of the strategies that Douglas Hyde revealed from the Communist Party:

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Leadership Profile: Carolyn Jessop

Carolyn Jessop2On April 21, 2003, Carolyn Jessop finally followed through on a plot more daring than any you or I have likely faced. Under the cover of darkness in the middle of the night she herded her 8 children past several “sister wives” and into a van where they narrowly escaped the quasi-totalitarianism of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (a polygamist group renounced by the Mormon Church) and her life as one of several abused wives to one of the group’s highest leaders.

Five short years later, she was called on by authorities as an expert in the initial custody process following the raid of the YFZ Ranch in Texas, which was being run by her ex-husband. The raid proved pivotal in landing the extremist sect’s leader Warren Jeffs in prison with a life sentence on multiple child sexual assault convictions.

I read Jessop’s New York Times bestseller Escape after it had just been released in 2007 as I was training for an overseas deployment to Iraq with the U.S. Army. I’m not sure what prompted me to read her story – or how I even heard about it – but I immediately thought she deserved to win some kind of Outstanding Person of the Year award and wished I could tell her as much. Jessop doesn’t lead a nation, a sports club or a Fortune 500 company, but she embodies some of the most important leadership attributes you or I could ever hope to learn.

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Which Stage of Competence Are You?

Everybody wants competence. We want it for ourselves. We expect it from others in our organizations. We demand it from the people and organizations we purchase from. But how do we figure out if we’ve got it? How well do we develop it in others? Where do we even start?

Contemplative GorillaBack in the 1970s, Gordon Training International developed a learning model called “The Four Stages of Competence,” which has also been linked to Abraham Maslow’s work. There’s something helpful about breaking an idea or a challenge down into smaller parts, and competence is no different. If we can understand which stage both we and our followers are in, we’ll be much more useful. Here are the Four Stages of Competence:

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Capture Any Audience Using the “Magic Formula”

I was standing in front of a roomful of corporate employees about to launch into my training session. I knew the course content had the potential to make a strong impact in their communication and relationships and I had some specific learning goals for the group. But I resisted the urge to dive straight in. Instead, I shared a brief but vivid story about a time the principles I was about to teach had produced an incredibly positive result for me. Only then did I transition to the learning objectives and the course content. Just before I finished, I referenced my story once again and encouraged them to use the new principles we had learned and highlighted an obvious way it would benefit them.

verbal communication

I learned the “Magic Formula” from Dale Carnegie. It involves three parts: an incident, an action and a benefit. Whether your presentation is two minutes long or an hour, the Magic Formula provides a reliable structure and clarifies the action we encourage the audience to take. Here’s how it works.

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How to Measure Learning Programs Using the Kirkpatrick Evaluation Model

All of a sudden you get put in charge of building a new training course for your organization. It could be leadership training, professional training or technical training. Doesn’t matter. So you do the hard work of analyzing the learning needs, developing objectives, designing content, coordinating the event and finally delivering the course. Mission accomplished! That is, until management asks for the evaluation results to find out what difference the course made. Now you’re just insulted. After all the hard work you put in, management thinks your course may have been a flop? The nerve!

This may be how you feel about evaluation… unless you have a built-in evaluation plan. In that case, you’ll be ready to hand over the results of your training before management even asks for it.

So how do you evaluate learning programs? In this post, I’d like to summarize the Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Learning Evaluation.

Measuring Tape

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Leadership Profile: Cory Cotton

What’s the craziest basketball shot you’ve ever made? Multiply that by 100 and you’ve got Cory Cotton, one of the members of the YouTube sensation Dude Perfect. Perhaps you’ve been mesmerized by their trick basketball shots from airplanes, water towers, football stadiums, trains or cars. Or perhaps you’ve seen their brand featured on ESPN, Yahoo! or various daytime or late night talk shows. The simple truth is that Dude Perfect has inspired millions of people with their crazy shots, enthusiasm, and Go Big philosophy.

Dude Perfect1

But it wasn’t enough to just build a business based off crazy basketball shots. Cory Cotton took things a step further by putting the group’s contagious philosophy on basketball – and life – into a book: Go Big: Make Your Shot Count in the Connected World. In it, Cotton shares not only how the group capitalized on social media to become YouTube’s 3rd largest sports channel, but also how the average person can go big in their own life. Here are a handful of Cotton’s (and Dude Perfect’s) principles for going big:

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3 Simple Ways to Determine Hiring Fit

I remember the first time I asked my supervisors if I could sit in on an interview they had scheduled with an outside candidate. I figured it would be a good learning opportunity as well as a break from crunching financial numbers. (This was during my first job out of college, before I got into leadership consulting). To my surprise, both supervisors looked at me like I had just told them aliens had arrived on our planet and wanted to tour our facilities. I went back to my desk trying to figure out what was so absurd about my request.

Sitting in on an interview might have been awkward for that role, but since then I’ve participated in many job interviews, observed the process and helped identify skills needed for future job roles. Talent acquisition can get complicated sometimes, but I constantly find myself referring back to three simple questions my friend Brad once shared with me about how to determine if a candidate is a good fit for the team. I’d like to share them with you.

Job Candidates

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The 5 SOF Truths of Leadership

When I joined the military in my early twenties, I wasn’t quite sure what “Special Operations Forces” (SOF) meant, but it didn’t take long for my new community to educate me. Some of our hardcore “green beret” colleagues operated as independent four man teams conducting unconventional warfare operations. My role in Civil Affairs had more to do with liaising with and advising local civilian leadership in foreign areas. I also didn’t get far into my initial training before I started hearing about the five “SOF Truths.” No matter what else we were training on, we always came back to them.

I immediately believed the five SOF Truths could hold up as a leadership doctrine for just about any organization, military or not. Below is my slightly amended version.

Special Forces Jumping from Plane