collaboration – Page 16

Who Are Your Peeroes?

Like many people here in the U.S. and around the world who watched yesterday’s Super Bowl, I was blown away by New England’s comeback victory. Down 28-3 in the second half (28-16 with only 6-minutes left to play), the Patriots scored the next 31 points for a 34-28 overtime win. While the accolades being thrown at Tom Brady are well deserved, make no mistake, it was a team effort. Just look at all the players on offense and defense who made big plays down the stretch.

Despite the odds, the team continued to believe in each other. And without that collective belief, a comeback would have been impossible. Who you surround yourself with matters for sure. Now having grown up in the Boston area, I was most certainly rooting for the Pats, but I also know what experiencing a tough loss as a fan is all about. So I appreciate the class with which the Atlanta Falcons team handled such a devastating setback. It says just as much about their organization as it does New England’s.

I hope the players on both teams see each other as “peeroes” in the same way Teresa Eyet described the people in her life in a 2016 blog post. In her post, she wrote:

Over and over throughout my life, I heard the recommendation to surround yourself with people who challenge you, who lift you up, who are living the life you want to lead, and are making changes in the world you want to see. It wasn’t until recently that I realized I needed to pay some real attention to who I was spending my time with. I guess I was ready to finally see/feel how different I felt when I was around people with grateful hearts, with vision, and those who approached life with their glasses half full. These are people who build up my energy and my confidence, and I refer to them as my “Peeroes.”

I invite you to read about her peeroes. Then, reflect on the people in your life. I believe that if you enlist their support, they can help you accomplish anything and pretty much survive everything. I hope the Patriots, the Falcons, and all of us for that matter, recognize the special people we surround ourselves with for the super-peeroes they are. None of us does it alone. Not even Tom Brady.

JJ Ramberg: Year of the Peer Podcast – The Intersection of Business and Journalism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:58 — 32.1MB)

JJ Ramberg is the host of MSNBC’s “Your Business.” Now in its 11th year, it’s the only television show dedicated to issues affecting small business owners. She is coauthor of It’s Your Business: 183 Essential Tips that Will Transform Your Small Business, and a business owner in her own right, as a cofounder, with her brother Ken, of Goodshop.com. Before joining MSNBC, Ramberg was a reporter at CNN, where she covered a wide range of topics, ranging from breaking news to profiles of the country’s top business leaders. Ramberg is a graduate of Duke University and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Next week’s guest will be Jim Kouzes, leadership expert, best-selling author, and former CEO!

Lead As Part of the Group, Not Apart From It!

This is Part III of a (somewhat accidental) series involving why peer groups work, how they work (the conditions necessary for their success), and at least one perspective about how they could be led – that would be this post!

In Part I, I offered an illustration of a reinforcing loop involving a process of learning, sharing, applying and achieving to show why peer groups work so well, not only when it comes to embedding what we learn, but also with giving us the courage to implement new strategies and actually benefit from them. Part II simply suggested that this process doesn’t happen unless you have the right people in the room, a safe/confidential environment, a process for interacting that brings value, a culture of peer-to-peer accountability, and good servant leadership.

In the book, The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership, Growth & Success, we don’t take a position on whether a group should be led by a professional facilitator, a member on a rotating basis, or anything that may fall in between. What we do suggest is that no matter who is in charge, the responsibilities are the same: to be sure the conditions or factors outlined in Part II are present, and that the group leader should maximize all the assets in the room to drive the reinforcing loop we described. The high performing groups we studied have this in common.

If you think of it visually, we didn’t see an all powerful leader who stands apart from the group, engaging in dyads with the members, each looking to the leader for guidance and support. Instead, we pictured a more participatory environment with the leader as a part of the group, using a triad model we picked up from a terrific book called Tribal Leadership and through conversations with one of its coauthors, Dave Logan.

With each entity accepting their role as “having the back” of the relationship and being accountable to one another, it allows everyone to extract the most value possible from the experience and ultimately serve everyone’s purpose for being there.

This “series” may have been a happy accident, but I hope it was an informative one. Please share your thoughts and experiences on any aspect of this in the comments section. Thank you!

Time To Start Listening

Whether you attended the inauguration on Friday or the women’s marches on Saturday, millions of people in Washington, DC, and in cities across the world, understood that their voices are louder and have more impact when they ring together.

Now it’s time to start listening. It just may be tougher than it sounds.

According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, people are “four times more likely to ignore information that supports a position they don’t believe in.” Meaning, if you watch MSNBC, you don’t watch Fox News, and if you’re a Republican and you have a friend who’s a Democrat (unlikely as that may be today), you can’t even talk politics without it devolving into a screaming match.

I declared 2017 as the Year of the Peer prior to election day because, regardless of the outcome of the presidential contest/reality TV show, we were destined to be a more divided nation. It was also apparent that trust in our institutions was clearly suffering. Here’s how I described the situation in October, 2016:

“Regardless of whether you’re a Trump or Clinton supporter, the tenor of the campaign itself has sunk to new depths. Yet when it’s all over, we’ll be reading about the importance of healing and uniting the country. Ironically, the same media that fueled the fire and aggravated the wounds will start handing out medical supplies.

“The problem is this: The deeper the wound, the longer it takes to heal — the more likely it will leave a scar. The lower we go, the tougher it is to climb out of the hole. The harder is it to trust one another again. The tougher it is to make the transition from fighting against each other to fighting for one another. Regardless of who prevails in the election, we may be headed for one of the toughest recovery periods since the Civil War.”

As for the decline in institutional trust, it’s now been documented. As we look again to the Edelman Trust Barometer, institutional trust — including government, media, business, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — has plummeted.

Let’s look at government and media specifically. If you want to put government gridlock in historical perspective, consider that in 1948, Harry Truman campaigned against what he called the “Do Nothing (80th) Congress,” which passed 906 pieces of public legislation. The 112th, 113th and 114th Congress combined (our last three) passed 908 public laws. It’s no wonder the 2016 electorate looked outside the establishment to Trump and Sanders.”

Our political leaders, however, are not entirely to blame here. The media have turned politics into a blood sport. Attempts at collaboration and compromise breed serious casualties. It’s all about winners and losers, as someone is always vilified as having “sold out” or having “caved to the other side.” Conflict spikes ratings and readership, but it creates an impossible climate for our elected officials — it’s the kind of climate change we don’t talk about often enough.

I’m not knocking conflict. It can be a healthy byproduct of open, honest dialogue. I just think it may be time to get back to boxing and leave the bare-knuckle fights back in the steel cage. As long as everything remains a zero-sum game and those who collaborate to reach sensible compromise continue to be marginalized by the media (and the public), trust in institutions will continue to suffer.

The flash of good news from Edelman is that we trust one another (people like me) as much as we do academic and technical experts. Sounds to me a like a good place to start.

The Year of the Peer is directed at leaders who are challenged with preparing themselves and their many stakeholders for a future most of us can barely imagine. As citizens, I hope we channel all the energy and good intentions we saw over the past few days and aim it toward moving our society forward by listening for understanding, seeing the very best in each other, and finding areas of agreement to establish a foundation for doing good.

Together, we can accomplish anything. We just have to start listening.

*Image: Dreamstime.com

How Peer Groups For Business Leaders Work

Last week, I offered a framework, or a reinforcing loop if you will, that illustrated why peer groups for business leaders are so effective. This week, I’d like to share the five factors, or five conditions, that are necessary for a group to drive that reinforcing loop. Turns out, you can’t just throw a bunch of people in a room, cross your fingers, and trust that group members will spontaneously engage in the process of learning, sharing, applying and achieving. Because of this, we need to look at the five essential conditions that create the ideal environment for success. They involve:

Select the right peers/have all the right people in the room. Whether you want to lead a company or run a marathon, it’s essential that you involve people who want to do that (or have done that), and who are committed to helping each other achieve their individual goals within a particular domain, whether it’s business, running, etc.
Create a safe/confidential environment. Business leaders need to trust that they are in a safe place. This involves working with peers who treat each other respectfully and their being assured that what happens in the room stays in the room. It’s a place for learning rather than judging, and where confidentiality is sacrosanct. In this environment, group members can let their guards down and have real conversations. How many opportunities do you have to do that?
Foster valuable interaction. While creating emotional safety is necessary, it’s not enough. Intellectually, group members must believe they are engaging in a structured process that helps them solves problems and evaluate opportunities alike. They tend to get to the heart of the matter, instead of wasting time dealing with symptoms and other extraneous issues, and they do so in a way that produces actionable outcomes.
Be accountable. This involves creating a culture of accountability, where group members hold one another accountable for doing what they say they will do (DWTSTWD) to achieve their goals. This accountability doesn’t come from a place of calling people out; it comes from a place of members believing in each other and truly caring about their respective success.
Utilize a smart guide. Leadership, servant leadership specifically, drives higher group performance. Whether the group leader is a professional facilitator or a member leading the group on a rotating basis, the responsibilities are essentially the same. Smart guides need to be stewards of conditions 1-4, and like any great coach, maximize the assets in the room and help the group realize its full potential.

The conditions for group success described here are covered in detail in The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership, Growth & Success – Part II, The Five Factors for Peer Advantage. Turns out, each of these five conditions are evident (in a slightly different form) in high-performing organizational teams as well. As a CEO or business owner, one of the many ROIs you get when you join a group is that you can take what you learn from working with your peers and bring that peer-to-peer experience back into your organization. It’s what Kouzes and Posner call, “modeling the way!” The Year of the Peer is the perfect time to find a group that’s right for you and give it a try.

Next week, I’ll look at the role of the smart guide in greater detail and share what we learned about leading high performing peer groups and great teams.

Why Peer Groups for Business Leaders Work

One of my all-time favorite poems is all ignorance toboggans into know by e.e. cummings. In it, he warns us of the dangers of doing what I’m about to do now – offer a simple, singular answer to a complex question. He would most definitely accuse me of striving to achieve ignorance today, with the understanding that I will slide back into knowledge tomorrow (or the day after). To that I’ll plead guilty, and since today is today, and because we all like to boil things down to concepts that are easy for us to grasp, let me take you down the mountain.

In my view, the reinforcing loop depicted above is a big reason that peer groups for business leaders work so well. I’ll start with this comparison: think about any book club worth its salt. Each member reads the book and brings his/her unique perspective on the content to the group. After an hour or two, there isn’t one member who doesn’t understand the narrative and its context more deeply and more broadly than before the conversation began. By examining the book through everyone’s mental models, we become exposed to ideas and perspectives we would never have considered on our own.

We learn best when we learn together. Business leaders who share concepts and ideas with one another also help generate deeper understanding. Better yet, they give each other the courage to act – to actually apply what they learn. It’s one thing to become enamored with an idea, it’s quite another to implement it. Once they try it, and as they work to perfect the new initiative, they begin to achieve the positive results they imagined. The group celebrates member wins together, which only inspires everyone to learn more and continue the cycle.

I’m sure there are a number of you who will help me climb back up the slope to knowledge again by sharing your perspective on what you believe to be the secret to the success of peer groups for business leaders. Since it’s likely there is no one dynamic that deserves 100% of the credit, I hope you will. Where I believe we can agree is that business leaders can help each other in ways they won’t find anywhere else.

Now that I’ve offered my thoughts on why these groups work so well, next week, I’ll take another trip down the mountain and share the how – the 5 conditions necessary for making this reinforcing loop come to life.

Start the Year of the Peer With a Promise & 3 Words

Happy New Year and welcome to the Year of the Peer! This is the year , starting today, when we’re going to challenge ourselves to listen more than we talk, read more than we write, learn rather than judge, and operate from a spirit of generosity and sharing that will enrich our own lives as well as the lives of those closest to us. Let’s make it a year where dialogue trumps debate, where compromise is not regarded as a four-letter word, and where we think abundance rather than scarcity. The world only operates as a zero-sum game if we allow it. Let’s not.

It’s a year for meeting new people, distancing ourselves from the individuals in our lives who drag us down, re-kindling old relationships that have atrophied over time, and advancing our engagement with peers who support us and can help us be our very best selves.

Forget about new year’s resolutions. What are your goals for 2017? What promises are you prepared to make to yourself during the coming year? And more importantly, who are the people in your life who will help you keep those promises? The promise I’m making to myself is to complete by dissertation during 2017. Anyone who is willing to share their wisdom, encouragement, and experience in this area will be greeted with open arms! (Thank you in advance!)

If you’re looking for another device to help you get started, Chris Brogan has been advocating identifying 3 words to live by for a given year, since 2006. I’m going to borrow my three words from the book we released earlier this year titled The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives Leadership, Growth & Success. (A handy Year of the Peer manual by the way if you haven’t read it). My three words are network, optimize, and accelerate. In a nutshell, it means I’m going to be more selective and purposeful about the people who surround me in my life; I will pursue perfection in the pursuit of excellence more often, and I will seek out relationships with more people who have completely different backgrounds from my own in an effort to expand my world view.

What promise(s) are you prepared to make to yourself in 2017? What three words will guide you? How will you contribute to making the Year of the Peer the best year ever? Share your thoughts and insights on your favorite social media platforms using the hashtag #yearofthepeer. Let the games begin!

*Don’t forget to join me and my producer Randy Cantrell, starting January 12th for the first of 50 weekly podcasts dedicated to the Year of the Peer! My first guest will be Altimeter Group CEO and best-selling author Charlene Li.

Image: loyaltytruth.com

The Case For Adopting #yearofthepeer in 2017

In 2017, I’m convinced that, together, we will inspire a positive change in the way we engage one another in business and in life. If you contribute to the Year of the Peer in just one small way, you’ll see how effective the power of peers, the power of “us”, can truly be.

The good news is that contributing is easy: 1) Be on the lookout for positive stories and examples of the amazing peer-to-peer interactions that are happening all around us each and every day – in our schools, businesses, communities, social media, peer advisory groups, etc. They are not getting the attention they deserve, so let’s shine a brighter light on them. 2) Take the lessons from those examples and bring them into your own life and to those closest to you. 3) When you encounter something worth telling the world about, or you have a story of your own that could inspire someone else, see to it that it’s captured for all of us on your favorite social media platform using (hashtag) #yearofthepeer.

As I write this, the voice of Ryan Foland is ringing in my head, asking me to answer the question, “What problem are we trying to solve for?” It’s a fair question, and I hope my response creates a sense of urgency as to why it matters so much, especially now.

What problem are we trying to solve for?

We’re coming off the most divisive presidential election in modern U.S. history. As a society, we’ve come to debate more than dialogue, talk more than listen, and judge rather than learn. Trust in our institutions is low and the political climate for compromise has never been more toxic. It’s classic boiling frog syndrome. It’s become a big problem and we’re paying a high price.

Consider this sobering example, the 1948 “Do Nothing (80th) Congress,” as labeled by Harry Truman, passed more public laws (906) than the 112th, 113th and current 114th Congress combined (as of October 2016). Apparently, it’s become more acceptable for our respective representatives to be intractable and come home empty-handed, than to accomplish something that would actually benefit the American people.

That said, blaming our political leaders is not a solution, nor is it entirely their fault. It’s bigger than that. Collaboration and compromise breed casualties across all sectors – winners and losers, leaders who “caved to the other side.” As long as everything remains a zero-sum game and those who collaborate to reach sensible compromise continue to be marginalized by the media (and the public, by the way), we’ll all be the biggest loser.

Neither collaboration nor compromise are four-letter words. This is where CEOs have an opportunity to lead by example. Consider that in 2013, a study conducted at Stanford Graduate School of Business concluded that nearly two-thirds of CEOs don’t receive outside leadership advice. Seeking the help and assistance of others is a sign of strength, not weakness, no matter what position you hold in an organization.

Together, we have the power to send a message to every sector of our society that it’s time for a change, because somehow, somewhere along the line, we stopped listening to what our elementary school teachers taught us all those years ago: We’re simply not working and playing well with others nearly as well as we could. This is the problem we’re trying to solve for, and if we don’t start now, it’s only going to get worse to our detriment.

A Positive Example of What’s Possible

The biggest lesson I’ve learned from two decades of watching the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team and studying their program (4 consecutive national championships and currently riding an 84-game winning streak) is that being a good teammate is more important than the individual stats or accomplishments of any one player. That’s why in 2015, Nate Silver dubbed it the most dominant basketball program on the planet. We need to borrow a page from UConn’s playbook. What if all of us just committed ourselves to being better teammates?

What’s Next…

In addition to speaking and writing, let me talk about another small contribution to the larger cause. For 50 weeks during 2017, I’ll bring some of the best minds in the world together to share their insights, stories, and recommendations about how we can work together more effectively – how to seek common ground and see one another for our gifts rather than our differences. Guests appearing on my podcast: Year of the Peer with Leo Bottary during Q1 will include Altimeter Group CEO, Charlene Li; Forbes publisher and global futurist, Rich Karlgaard; Founder and Executive Director of the Business Owners Council, Lewis Schiff; Host of MSNBC’s Your Business, JJ Ramberg; Inspirational speaker, Rahfeal Gordon; global start-up evangelist, Vitaly Golomb; and best-selling coauthor of more than 30 leadership books, including The Leadership Challenge, Jim Kouzes, among others.

My hope is that you’ll subscribe to the free podcast and invite your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Of course the podcast is just one small part of a larger movement. If you see this opportunity before us in 2017 as I do, I also invite you to read these two blog posts to get you ready for the Year of the Peer and, in turn, for you to share your ideas and stories with all of us during the coming 12 months.

http://leobottary.com/2016/11/26/10-11-ways-to-prepare-for-the-year-of-the-peer/

http://leobottary.com/2016/12/06/12-must-reads-for-the-year-of-the-peer/

This fast changing, complex world is going to ask more of us than ever before. We’ll have to rely on one another to meet the challenges of a future most of us can barely imagine. Going it alone isn’t going to cut it. Who you surround yourself with matters. Remember to use (hashtag) #yearofthepeer, share this post with your friends and colleagues, and join us on January 12th for our first podcast with guest Charlene Li! Thanks for reading!

Add “Person of the Year” to Your Resume

It was Christmas ten years ago that YOU were named TIME’s Person of the Year! My guess is that most of you never noted it on your resume or added it to your LinkedIn profile. I’m just wondering, “Why not?”

For all these years, you probably believed that “you” wasn’t specific to you; it was more of an “us” thing. You may have thought that because you didn’t earn this distinction entirely on your own, including it among your list of honors and awards would have been considered a stretch, so to speak. That’s understandable. So let me invite you to think of it this way instead: No other human who has ever been named TIME’s Person of the Year did it entirely on their own either. (Check out the list). They had help – lots of it. Here are a few excerpts from Lev Grossman’s 2006 piece, You — Yes, You — Are TIME’s Person of the Year, just to put what you did in perspective:

“The ‘Great Man’ theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year. To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006…

“But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

I encourage you to read the entire article, but here was the kicker for me:

“But that’s what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There’s no road map for how an organism that’s not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.”

Fast-forward a decade. In my first Year of the Peer podcast, to be released January 12th, Charlene Li suggests that despite the fact that we have more ways of connecting with one another than ever, real conversation has given way to the Bully Pulpit. I agree with her assessment. There’s too much talking, not enough listening, and not nearly enough dialogue. If that’s the case, we’re not maximizing our potential as a society when it comes to building international understanding – citizen to citizen, person to person. We’re just not.

I don’t think we’re failing at what Grossman described as a “massive social experiment,” but I do believe we’ve gotten sidetracked. My hope is that if, together, we embrace the Year of the Peer – or at least the sentiment behind it – that we can realize our global collaborative potential. With any luck, we’ll be named TIME’s Person of the Year for a second time. And when that happens, whether it’s 2017 or 2018, you can add another Person of the Year honor to your resume!

Why You Should Engage Peers Who Are Different From You

If you asked someone to define the word peer, or to describe a peer, he/she might respond by saying, “Someone like me.” While that’s partly true, it doesn’t mean you can’t have peers who are very different from you as well. When you think of the word peer in this way, you can start to consider the implicit value of peer diversity.

The very notion of peer diversity may feel like a contradiction, but by broadening your definition of peer, it allows you to consider the value of engaging people from different backgrounds and various walks of life. When I interviewed iHeartMedia Chairman & CEO, Bob Pittman for The Power of Peers, he told me:

“I go to Burning Man every year. I go there because it’s the most radical departure from the life that I lead in business that I could imagine. It’s great for me because, for a week, I’m seeing the world completely differently. I like to travel to exotic places and countries. I like to go to Bhutan, where they have “Gross National Happiness” instead of gross national product, and spend a week there just to sort of sense, okay, how can I change my perspective? I think everyone in this company is looking to my leadership to be open-minded. They’re looking to me to find a new path, to help find the pivots, to help find the transformations. Anything that can guide me on that is the most important thing.”

Peer diversity is not an oxymoron. As you prepare for the new year (the Year of the Peer, if you will), think about spending time with people outside your social circle or vertical industry sector. Step out of your comfort zone. Hang out with people whose experiences and backgrounds are different from your own and who likely know things you don’t. When they espouse an opinion that’s different from yours, rather jump to making a judgment about it (as many of us often do), ask questions in the hope you can discover where they are coming from and how they formed their opinion – even if you ultimately don’t agree with it. This is how we learn and how we keep that open mind Bob Pittman talked about.

Consider this quote from Seth Godin: “A fundamentalist considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. A curious person explores first and then considers whether they want to accept the ramifications.”

As you prepare for the upcoming year, rather than make a lofty new year’s resolution, make yourself a promise instead: engage more people unlike yourself and stay curious.

Image: Burning Man, 2013