A nice article in the Corner Office column of the NY Times in which G.J. Hart, the CEO of California Pizza Kitchen, describes his six steps of leadership (plus one): 1) Be the very best you can be; 2) dream big; 3) lead with your heart; 4) trust the people you lead; 5) do the [...]
The San Francisco Giants’ surprising World Series victory in October led to mass celebration and ticker-tape parades in the City by the Bay. It also produced the usual theorizing about how a team could go from being down 0-3 in the National League Championship Series to sweeping the favored Detroit Tigers to win the Fall Classic. And the success of the Giants caused many to ask if their “secret formula” could be learned by teams in the corporate world. There were the usual clichés about the power of teamwork, players peaking at the right time, plain dumb luck and, of course, divine intervention. But none of these explanations really gets at how the Giants were able to overcome the longest of odds to become the World Series champs. One particularly common conversation has brought up the mythology that winning teams win by having players who have no egos. In fact, the noted business guru Jim Collins argues that the best leaders are “egoless,” that they are humble, unselfish and have little ambition. We’re here to tell you that is simply not true.
Admittedly, a humorous take.
I've have found it to be so. Here's an interesting take on goal setting:
My work in the business world, that has included helping companies survive crises of all sorts, has revealed eight dimensions that distinguish those who respond well to a crisis from those who don’t. Your ability to reject the crisis mentality and cultivate an opportunity psychology depends on your developing these essential capabilities. Emotions. Emotions are the most primitive and visceral part of human functioning, emanating from the lower brain long before the higher-order cerebral cortex ever began to assert itself into our lives. Making the transition from the crisis instinct to an opportunity psychology begins with emotions. In other words, when faced with fear, frustration, anger, or despair, you have to keep from being overwhelmed by these negative emotions before you can do anything positive. Easier said than done, of course. Do you feel threatened or challenged by the crisis? Are you stressed or calm? And do you feel like a victim or a master in the face of the crisis? Mindset. Once you have your emotions under control, your mindset is the next step in changing a crisis mentality into an opportunity psychology. Unfortunately, a crisis, and activation of the primitive brain, tends to turn a mindset immediately and powerfully negative, which can then create a destructive self-fulfilling torrent. Do you interpret the situation as a crisis or an opportunity? Are you despairing or do you have hope? Is your thinking rigid or agile?
Research has shown that deceiving yourself, what is called "positive illusion" in psych-speak, can actually increase confidence, influence over others, and performance. Of course, self-deception that is too disconnected from reality will not work so well. But telling yourself that you are just a bit better than you actually are can go a long way. [...]
If the stock market was a person—gosh, if corporations can have the same rights as people, why can’t the stock market have thoughts and feelings?— he could be diagnosed with a wide range of psychiatric disorders (I don’t mean to be sexist, but the majority of people in the stock market are male and, if [...]
Our primitive brains, which have yet to catch up with the challenges of business life in the 21st century, will likely cause you to feel four emotions when faced with a crisis in your work, what I call the caveman crisis chain: fear, frustration, anger, and despair. As I noted in the last issue of Prime Business Alert!, which emotions you experience and the intensity with which you feel them depend on a variety of factors including your innate temperament, your past experiences with emotions in general and crises in particular, the degree to which the crisis threatens you directly, the resources you have available to respond to the crisis, and amount of control you have over the crisis. The caveman crisis chain is all-encompassing, so that it impacts us physically, psychologically, and cognitively. And one thing is certain: this reaction can’t be stopped; 300 million years of instinct can’t be readily undone. Rather the best you can hope for is to understand your temperament and develop tools that will prevent caveman crisis chain from gaining control of you during a time of crisis when a calm heart and a cool head are necessary for your survival. Your goal is to limit the intensity and duration of this reaction when faced with a crisis, so that your more highly evolved capabilities, namely, those associated with your cerebral cortex, can assert themselves and guide you toward a solution to the crisis at hand.
Research has shown that when we experience a crisis, we regress back to our primitive ancestors; we go caveman! We fall back on most deeply ingrained instincts and habits that have served us well for eons by ensuring our survival, namely, by triggering the “fight-or-flight” response. This primal reaction produces intense physiological changes that increase our strength, heighten our senses, and bolster our endurance, all in the name of enabling us to fight more ferociously or run faster and longer. When confronted by a saber-toothed tiger or a rival tribesman, our ancestors had two basic options and we instinctively chose the one that we believed would maximize our chances of survival. Unfortunately, this ancient reaction that worked hundreds of thousands of years ago in the face of a crisis, won’t work with the crises that we experience in the business world in the 21st century. For example, if you have a conflict with a co-worker, hitting or running from them is not likely a winning strategy that will effectively resolve it. To the contrary, such a response will probably decrease your chances of survival in that jungle known as corporate life. Yet these primitive drives propel us to fall back on the instincts and habits of our forbearers. In fact, is there any more important situation when you need to have all of your most highly evolved capabilities running on all cylinders than during crises in today’s business world? That’s when you have to respond in ways that go against millions of years of instincts. In a crisis, you need to be at our most evolved best, using your all of the extensive powers that your cerebral cortex can offer you. You must stay calm and rational. You need to be able to think methodically, flexibly, and creatively to discover solutions where the old rules and practices often won’t work. You must reason and problem solve. You need to think through options and make effective decisions.
Emotions lie at the heart of how you respond to crises. They are the starting point for all of the reactions that we have toward a crisis. They are also be the first obstacle to establishing a positive response to a crisis. That is why it is essential to understand the role that emotions play in how we react with the goal being to gain control of and use our emotions in constructive ways when confronted by crises. Emotions when confronted with a crisis are the initial reaction from the fight-or-flight response which has been wired into us since we first became homo sapiens (and, in fact, long before we began to walk upright). These feelings have served as the first alert and first responder to people and situations that humans perceived as being a threat to their survival. These emotions were experienced by our ancestors, as they are by us now, as a wake-up call that danger lurks close by. We experience crisis emotions in ways that guarantee that we pay attention to them and heed their warning. Crisis emotions are immediate. Any delays in recognizing or acting on these feelings could have meant certain death for our ancestors. Crisis emotions are visceral, meaning we feel them in every cell of our physical being. They are overwhelming because our bodies want to ensure that our minds don’t miss or confuse the messages they are sending us. And crisis emotions are always negative. Why, you ask? Think of it this way. Positive emotions aren’t in a hurry; there is no need to feel joy or love or pride immediately. But there is a definite urgency to negative emotions; they are communicating to us that we are in danger and we need to know now. If we don’t get negative emotions fast, we’re dead (or so some primitive part of the brain believes)! How you respond emotionally to a crisis starts with how you look at it. I have found that a simple distinction lies at the heart of whether you react positively or negatively: Do you perceive the crisis as a threat or a challenge? Whether you view crises as a threat or a challenge sets into motion a diametrically opposed cascade of emotions, thoughts, and behavior that result in either a constructive or harmful response to crises.