Some Things I Learned at the Academy of Management

Worth mentioning: the title above originally was missing the word, "Some," until I realized that would make for a blog post even more ridiculously long than usual.

The Academy of Management, admittedly grandiosely named, is the world's preeminent association for those interested in management and its study. Although the majority of the organization's membership is academics - professors, deans, students, and the like - a healthy chunk of the membership is made up of actual managers. You know, people who run businesses and have management positions in what we laughingly call "the real world." Go figure.

This weekend the Academy had its annual meeting, (or rather, Meeting, as they frame it) and I had the honor of both attending and presenting my paper on authentic leadership (for a bit of the logic behind the paper I presented, check this old post). Here are a few things I learned this weekend, in bullet-point format as you guys seem to like that format...

Speaking of....

Well, it's good to be back. I don't see why I've been the only one catching hell for not visiting the NeverTown over the last couple of months... where have you been? And more importantly, am I the only one who cleans up around here?? There's dust all over everything! It's kind of cute... a fine layer of NeverDust covers all of the buildings and streets of the NeverTown. I guess I should start cleaning.

The last few months have been ludicrously busy (which has no connection with any rappers - instead, it's the level of 'busy' that comes after 'light busy' and 'ridiculous busy', and leads from there into the plaid zone), with kids, papers, classes, and anniversary preparations. And poop. Lots and lots of poop. But I guess that's tied in with the kids. Seriously, we could solve all of our American energy problems if someone would just invent a line of cars powered by my kids' poop. We could all ride for years oil-free and save the environment... but I hate to think of the smell emerging from the exhaust pipes.

It's 2011: Where's My Flying Car?

I mean, at the very least, there must be a hoverboard or something on the way. Christopher Lloyd taught me that. Where we're going, we don't need roads.

It's a new year, and the kids are sleeping.

Damn, that felt nice and relaxing to type. In fact, I like that feeling so much, I'm going to type it again.

It's a new year, and the kids are sleeping.

Aaaaahhhh....

The Blogs I'll Never Write

• I will probably never blog about Chick-Fil-A again. Honestly, you only got half of the story about Chick-Fil-A a few months back. There's more to the story... a lot more... both in terms of fascinating culture and trade secrets that they were remarkably free with. But due to corporate professionalism and friendly confidentiality, the rest of the story must sadly remain a secret.
• I will never finish that personal entry I started a few weeks ago. I have part of a blog written about some odd changes in my personality that have taken place over the last year or so... confusing changes wherein I no longer see the glass as half-full or half-empty, but instead I wonder what the glass is made of, or what exactly the liquid is, or I just get distracted and wander off to watch the people go by. I find I have absolutely no expectation, for good or ill, regarding major events in my future. I had no idea if my move to Atlanta would be good or bad, and I didn't wonder about it at all. Same for grad school. I don't even have strong expectations of any kind regarding my impending fatherhood. The future is just... open. I've never been like this. Isn't that curious?
  

Does Anybody Know What Leadership Is? Strikes Back

A couple of months ago in these very pages I shared my frustration with our inability to determine what leadership actually is, with the "our" in that sentence being the academic and business body public.  Apparently the question stumped my massive readership, since there were no comments to the post.  I'm still about four weeks away from starting my organizational behavior studies at Georgia Tech, but as I've trained leadership at a few events recently, I've continued to ponder the topic.  And I've been approached with a possible answer to the question of why we don't know what leadership is:  because there is no answer.


I do a workshop in which I ask my audience to tell me which of the five members of the Scooby-Doo gang were the leader of the group: Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, or Scooby himself.  Sometimes a participant raises his or her hand and tells me shyly that there was no one leader; they were all leaders.  Since this doesn't play into the structure of the seminar and the path I want to lead my audience down, I usually raise an eyebrow and give the cocky answer, "You know, we have a word for answers like that back home in Louisiana.  We call them 'cop-outs'." (for more on the Scooby topic, click here)  I believe this statement, that perhaps there is no definition of leadership, is a cop-out.  Let me try to prove it.

CTSO's, Children, and Canned Unicorn Meat

Happy Sunday, faithful readers!

This is the longest I've gone without blogging since I started the blog, for which you have my apologies. The life of a freelance-consultant/father-to-be/guy-who's-packing-up-the-house proves busier than expected.  No deep leadership insights at this time for you... I've made little to no progress on my research over the last week.  Instead, I've been spending my time reading up on organizational behavior research techniques, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of it I'm already at least familiar with.

Instead, I've got new kid pictures, which is quite an accomplishment considering that the light of day has yet to ever touch my babies-to-be.  But before we get to that... a few words on the National Pork Board.

One of my favorite websites is ThinkGeek.com... because, yes, I'm a geek.  Recently they were served a cease-and-desist letter (my favorite kind!) by the good people at the National Pork Board.  Now, normally I'm behind the Pork people no matter what... after all, they're the group that promotes bacon.  But this time... not so much.  Here's a pic of the ThinkGeek product the Pork People were prepared to sue over:

That's right... unicorn meat.

See, every April Fool's Day, ThinkGeek rolls out a bunch of fake advertisements for joke products that don't actually exist, like an E-Z Bake Oven with USB connectivity, or Spazztroids Caffeinated Breakfast Cereal.  This year they went with unicorn meat, calling it "The New White Meat."  The National Pork Board, seeing their trademark of The Other White Meat in jeopardy, immediately moved for legal action to prevent Thinkgeek from selling... canned unicorn meat.

It's a bit of an embarrassing situation for the plaintiffs (you can read all about it here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/blog/2010/06/officially-our-bestever-cease.html), but the moral of the story is this: we should all just lighten up.

Speaking of lightening up, that's exactly the opposite of what Debby is doing right now.  Instead, she continues to grow her baby-filled girth to mammoth new proportions... which, when you're pregnant with twins, is a Very Good Thing. Recently we got new ultrasound pics of both of them, including one 3-D model of Baby A!  Unfortunately, Baby A wasn't too happy with his picture session, as Baby B kept kicking him in the face. Cutest darn thing you ever virtually saw.

Baby A

Baby B

Sadly, there are not yet names beyond the alphabet for the two boys:  Debby steadfastly refuses my suggestion of "Nathaniel" and "SuperFly" despite near unanimous agreement from our friends and family. Heavy sigh.  We're still taking suggestions (and in case you were going there, she's also vetoed Bill and Ted, Bugs and Daffy, and Voltron and Optimus Prime).

Last week I had the honor of training the Louisiana CTSO state officers in Baton Rouge, and I learned quite a few things from them. I'll close with some life lessons from the conference:

• Leadership is best demonstrated not by certain behaviors, not by certain traits, and not by certain appearances... but rather by the ability to actually get amazing things done.
• I heard one of them listening to a Kenny Chesney tune on their iPods... I resisted the urge to throw the offender out of the training!
• Never underestimate FCCLA.  Those girls (and one guy) are tough competitors.
• The Technology Students of America should add acting to their list of exciting new innovations.  I've never seen so many buy so much, when absolutely nothing was for sale!
• Louisiana DECA continues to amaze me with their propensity for an almost frightening degree of intelligence.  If you haven't heard about these guys yet, you will.  A simply amazing team.
• I'm very disappointed that FBLA, of which I am a former national president, was only able to send less than half of their officer team. Where's the love? But despite that... that was a heck of a balloon tower, wasn't it?
• And, okay, sure, FFA didn't win the CTSO Cup.  But FFA is and always will be My People: in the words of my old National Vice-President, they'll rock your momma's booty somethin' awful.

And speaking of mommas, I saw mine last week for the first time in years. She looked very awkward at the chance meeting and made an excuse to leave as quickly as she could, before I had a chance to strike up any kind of conversation.  She didn't seem to want to talk to me, but despite that, I learned that I apparently have a little half-brother now. Who knew?

Seriously, Does Anybody Know What Leadership Is???

Okay, I'm honestly amazed at this point.

For years, one of the main points of many of my seminars has been that most people in the business world don't understand leadership, to the point where we don't even know what it is. We don't know what leadership is. We can't define it.  You ask one executive, you'll get a completely different and often contradictory answer than you'd get from another executive.  My point has been that if we don't have agreement on what leadership is, we can't lead effectively.  I was so passionate about this that I even wrote a book about it (which can be found at several finer online retailers now!).

In the book, I took my own stab at the definition of leadership, borrowing heavily from leadership consultant Dick Knox:  Leadership is the art of motivating and inspiring a team to accomplish the goals of the organization. (and if you'd like a more detailed discussion on this, click here for the chapter from my book).  I like this definition and I think it covers it as adequately as a one-sentence definition can... or maybe I don't. I've always had a nagging feeling that I was missing something... and I looked forward to one day finding out what it was.

When I made the decision to pursue my doctorate, teach, and research Organizational Behavior at Georgia Tech (one helluva school), I thought this would be my opportunity to finally discover that missing piece of the leadership puzzle.  I thought that by having the chance to read and research from some of the world's most preeminent management minds, I'd finally find this elusive consensus on what leadership is and what it isn't.  I eagerly dug into my first research project... and discovered that these top professors aren't really sure what leadership is.

Can you imagine my disappointment?

I've learned that even the academic community is a bit mystified by the art of leadership.  A 2001 study on the core of team leadership, in a publication called Leadership Quarterly, admitted "we know surprisingly
little about how leaders create and manage effective teams."  A major 2004 book on leadership practices from the academic world laments that "Such questions as how or why leaders affect outcomes remain largely uncharted and poorly understood." In my own research, as I've reported earlier in this space, I'm examining the relationship between self-monitoring activity and leadership effectiveness.  Even in this limited area, I'm finding a clear difference on how different professors view the root of leadership. In this particular argument, one expert believes that leadership is all about building and maintaining relationships with team members, while a different but no less learned expert maintains that leadership is all about creating results.

And I wonder... how can I answer the question of whether high or low self-monitors are better leaders, if there's little agreement on what leadership actually constitutes?  Is it leader emergence (getting promoted?) or leader effectiveness (getting things done?)?  Is it relationships or results? Is it communication or detail?  Is it all of these, or none of these?

I'm also reminded of a surprisingly popular management seminar I do called "The Leadership Secrets of Scooby-Doo."  In this seminar, I have the participants (often high school or university students) come up with a list of things that make someone a leader, and I emphasize to them that I seek quantity rather than quality.  The results are amazing... I have people tell me with perfectly straight faces that leaders must be "attractive", "smart", "good drivers", "popular", "tall", "fashionable", and other things that have little or nothing to do with leadership.  The funny thing about the seminar is that the people who announce that these things have nothing to do with leadership, are the same people who first suggested them as leadership traits. The moral of the story: we have a better idea, deep down, of what leadership really is than we often exhibit. We know that we're fooled by 'false leadership indicators', and we allow ourselves to go along with it... presumably because that's what society, television, and movies have taught us to do.

In other words, if we see four people and a dog walking along, part of us will automatically assume that the one walking in front must be the leader, especially if that individual is tall and attractive.  Another, usually sublimated part of us, will know that this assumption is entirely bunk.

In examining some of the recent leadership on research from academia, I'm running into a similar problem. In efforts to show what leadership is, learned individuals point to popularity, likability, creativity, career success and promotability, technical skill, and other traits that are not directly linked to leadership.  Just because you're better with computers obviously doesn't make you a better leader.  Just because you're more creative, does that mean it's easier for you to motivate and inspire a group?  Do the most popular people really make the best leaders?

And I think back to an argument I had last year with a leadership consultant about Tyra Banks.  He said she was a leader; I called the statement ridiculous and asked him to back it up.  He said she was popular, that a lot of people liked her, that she was famous, that she had influenced many people to buy certain products or watch certain television programs.  I asked him what exactly any of that had to do with organizational leadership... who had she led?  Had she actually accomplished anything by leading a team, or had a Hollywood image and impression management team following a precision-crafted marketing plan brought about those results?  Does that make every Hollywood and music star, from Steve Urkel to Spongebob Squarepants to Kenny Chesney to Cameron Diaz, a leader?  Does that make any sense?  He wasn't able to answer that question.

This was a gentleman I respect a great deal, a smart guy whose full-time job is coaching and consulting leadership. What does this say to me?

Seriously, does anybody know what leadership is?

I think it's about time somebody figured this out. I don't know if I'm worthy of the challenge, but I intend to give it a try.

Does intellect stifle creativity?

One of the absolute, hands-down, best seminars I do is also one of the few I didn't come up with myself. Instead, I learned it seventeen years ago from a chief executive at the Coca-Cola Company. Just in case anybody reading this blog ever ends up in this seminar, I won't offer too many sundry details on it. But at its core, this is a workshop that examines and measures creativity in individuals and small groups. Although this is not the session's only point, the session is outstanding at showing not only how individuals and groups think creatively, but also when they don't.  It showcases the way many creative individuals don't put forth new ideas for fear of rejection, and how so many groups avoid and ignore creative ideas, even when they're the right ones.

Like I said, it's a great workshop. I wish I could take credit for it.


I led this seminar twice today for two groups of high-school students; one, an advanced group studying Java programming (yes, a high-school group studying advanced logic and programming concepts!), and the other, a slightly more basic group from a class on Microsoft Office. (in case you're wondering, neither group seemed to be big fans of Kenny Chesney)

Guess which group did better and proved to be more creative: the advanced group, or the basic group?

Before you answer that, consider that over the past seventeen years I've done this particular seminar with eight-year-old elementary students. I've done it with junior high school kids. I've done it with high school groups. I've done it with university groups. I've done it with groups of teachers. I've done it with Masters students. I've done it with executives. I've done it with millionaires. And once, I did it at a retirement community in a rather beautiful part of Oklahoma.

Guess which age-group came across as the most creative.

Hands-down, my reigning champions have been the elementary students. They didn't have any trouble with the exercise at all, using an astonishing amount of creativity to solve my presented problem almost immediately. In fact, they thought it was overly simple, and seemed surprised when I told them about how much trouble other groups had with it.

On the other hand, my all-time losers have been... the millionaires.  They exhibited a startling lack of ability to think of a process or problem outside of their established comfort zones. They imagined and assumed rules where there were none, limited their behavior based on those nonexistent rules, attempted to repeat the exact same process ad nauseum continually hoping for better results, and failed the activity utterly.

The difference between these two groups, I believe, is in how they see the world. The executives saw rules everywhere and conformance as a necessity, as well as a need for decorum and a minimization of failure potential. The eight-year-old's acknowledged no rules, assumed none, and probably wouldn't have cared even if there were any.  The older, successful mind did not want to risk failure or embarrassment by trying something startlingly different from what had gone before, while the fresh young mind relished the opportunity to do something strange and new. The young students didn't mind trying something different, even if they might fail and be embarrassed by it. The successful executives didn't see any need to do anything other than what they'd always done, even if what they'd always done obviously wasn't working.  Hmmm... there's a business lesson there, I think.

I presented the seminar today to two groups: a basic class, and an advanced class. And the basic class was more creative.

This got me thinking: can intellect be a barrier to creative thought? Are the smarter among us so caught up in our own intelligence and ideas that we may forget to come up with new ideas?  Like the executives, were the more advanced students hindered by an over-reliance on experience and logic, and an unwillingness to explore the unknown and attempt something untried? Or am I missing the point entirely?

I'm going to have to think on this some more.