Leadership, Power and Empowerment

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What leaders should really be doing if they want to empower people, and five coaching questions that help

Actually, I don’t really believe you can empower anybody else, I think they have to do it for themselves. If you’re lucky as a leader, there are times when you might just be able to create the conditions that make it possible for someone to empower themselves.

I love the quote in the picture above. For me, it says almost everything about how leaders should go about creating those conditions – give away your own power.

I reckon there are two crucial ways that leaders ought to be giving away their power, if they do want others to empower themselves:

  1. Give people “Agency” – that is, the ability to take action or exert power
  2. Give people “Choice of Attention” – that is, the freedom to decide where and how they direct their focus and efforts.

I’ve done plenty of leadership roles myself and I can tell you, when things really matter, when the outcome is an important one or when there are big things at risk, giving away power in those two ways can be absolutely terrifying!

It’s also the only way to absolutely get the best out of others, to stop feeling that you’re the only one who works at 100% and to grow beyond the limits of your own abilities.

If you’re a leader who would like to begin giving away more of your own power, so that you can get the absolute best from the people who work with you, have a ponder on these coaching questions:

  • Where could you give people more Agency and Choice of Attention straight away, without having to really worry too much about it?
  • What would be the benefits to you and your organisation, if the people around you started to be more self-empowered?
  • If you did give away some more of your power and it works, it gets the results you want, how would you feel about that?
  • What’s your greatest fear about giving away your power, about giving people more Agency and more Choice of Attention – what frightens you about that?
  • Thinking about the fears you identified in that previous question, what kind of new, additional or different kind of power do YOU need, so that those fears evaporate or turn out to be groundless?

Exclusive Video: Love to Fail; Hate to Quit, Part 1

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More from my series of exclusive videos for my newsletter subscribers only

Have you failed enough in your marketplace to really earn the success that you and your business deserve?

Snowplough Leadership and Volunteers

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A few ideas to kick around if you lead volunteers, or just want to play with Snowplough Leadership

I’ve recently taken a step-up in an organisation I volunteer with, so that I’m now leading other volunteers and we had a great time at the weekend, introducing some much-needed new people to the programme. It’s also mid-winter here now and is snowing heavily and I’m a little concerned about the journey my first coaching client is making to get here today. What a great time then, to have a brief rethink about one of my favourite leadership concepts – Snowplough Leadership – and how that might relate to leading volunteers.

Snowplough leadership is the simple idea that, as a leader, your main job is to:

  1. Shovel stuff out of the way of your team, so that they can get on and do what they need to do; and
  2. Make sure they’ve got enough grip on the road to move safely and swiftly to where they need to get to.

When it comes to leading volunteers, my experience is that these simple leadership functions become even more important. Time, motivation, skills and experience become even more of a juggling act when you’re working with people who are there entirely because they choose to be. It’s a real gift to receive the effort and attention of people in this way, something I’ve always felt quite humbled by and would always want to be deeply respectful of.

Here’s a few ideas to be kicking around, if you’re in a leadership position involving volunteers, or just want to play with the idea of Snowplough Leadership a bit more. One caveat – even though I’ve done this kind of thing a fair bit myself, and coached others to do so, I notice that I’m a long way from feeling like I know all the answers. So take these more as things to explore, than some kind of definitive guide:

1. Do your volunteers have a clear line-of-sight through to what you need them to be doing? Have you metaphorically cleared enough of the snow (confusion, unfamiliarity, etc) out of the way, so that they can completely ‘see’ the destination?

2. What are you doing to get rid of the obstructions in their way? If your volunteering is anything like mine, you’ll be working with limited resources and very limited time. What do you need to take care of, so that your volunteers can just push on without getting stopped?

3. How slippery is the surface you’re asking them to work on? Are they equipped to move forwards? Can you see which individuals are accelerating too fast, and might come unstuck at the first corner? Which of your volunteers have their wheels spinning and might need a push to get going in the right direction?

4. And how about you? When you’re in a volunteer leadership position, it’s (relatively) easy to ask for help with simple tasks; much less easy to ask for help with things that you don’t know the answer to, that you’re not clear about. It can also be a bit of a thankless job and you may even face some hostility when you get things wrong; issues that people in a ‘normal’ working environment would have been less forthright about. It’s maybe a good idea to ask for help for you personally, whenever you can, as well as for the cause you’re working towards.

5. What else? What else is different about leading volunteers? Is there another important leadership function that this snowplough metaphor doesn’t really capture? In your experience, when does snowplough leadership fail, and why?

Leonardo da Vinci’s Top 7 Tips for (not) Goal-Setting

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Why there’s a 50% chance that setting SMART goals won’t work for you; and what to do about it

As I write this, it’s mid-December and I expect some people are thinking about setting goals, objectives or even resolutions for next year.

What you may not know, is that all of the great advice about setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-targeted) is useless for about half of the population.

It used to be that psychologists would talk about Type A and Type B people.
(Google this if you’d like to know more about how it may not be that well regarded now. And how it actually came from research into heart disease that was funded by tobacco companies!)

But if we put that Type A and Type B research to one side, I think we can say that there are some people who are naturally organised, who like to plan ahead and who tend to think in step-by-step procedures. Doing goal-setting work with these people is almost too easy.

Then there’s the other half of the population, people who tend to think creatively, who like to dip in and out of many projects, and who love doing things their way, even if nobody else does it like that.

If you’re one of the second group, read on…

A couple of years ago there was a great exhibition here in Manchester of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and scientific research. As well it being a great chance to see that work first-hand, the thing that stood out most for me was information about what a terrible completer-finisher Leonardo da Vinci actually was. I forget the total number, but in my notebook I copied down part of the curator’s words:

“Leonardo wrote copious notes and intended to publish several treatises, but, like many of his artistic projects, these were never finished”.

I got to thinking about Leonardo’s approach to productivity and how he might have approached setting some goals for the new year. So, in my best attempt to channel the inner Leonardo, here’s some goal-setting tips for the creative, multi-tasking, individualistic renaissance genius in all of us:

Tip 1: Forget setting SMART goals. Seriously, just forget it
Unless you know that this approach already works for you, or are feeling really, really happy and relieved at the thought of getting all organised and writing numbered lists, with deadlines etc, let it go. If you absolutely can’t let it go (perhaps because you work for a Type A person or have HR people in your company who feel more comfortable with boxes on forms), then I’m afraid you will need to game the system as best you can, but make sure you do the following stuff too, as this is where your strengths really are.

Tip 2: Think vague thoughts, set broad-brush outcomes not specific goals and take time to dream
Do you like to scribble in notebooks (you probably have more than one notebook on the go at once)? Do you think visually (you’ve probably already got into making vision-boards or scrapbooks of things you intend to try doing)? Maybe you’re a talker and like to think out loud? Whatever your method, make sure you set aside time for dreaming (call it “Visioning” if you’re at work, it sounds more official to Type A’s).

Tip 3: Have a Someday-Maybe list/notebook/file
It’s very important to have somewhere to ‘put’ all of your great ideas and stuff that you might work on someday. Not because it’s important that you don’t forget it. After all, ideas come relatively easy for you, like buses, there’ll be another one along in a minute. No, for you, having a Someday-Maybe file is an important way to stop your head exploding with the awesomeness of all your ideas and initiatives.

Tip 4: Do it your way
There really isn’t a right or a wrong way to set goals. They are only a means to an end, a way, for some people, to drive their performance towards something important. What’s important is that you find the way that helps you to achieve what you want to achieve at work.

Here’s one exercise I often use with clients who aren’t sure yet what their way is.
Think about a time at work when everything was going just right for you. When you felt alive and were getting the results you wanted. What was going on around you then? What conditions were important to you for for getting those results? What was in it for you – why was that outcome important to you?

Tip 5: Get used to juggling stuff
You’re probably at your best when you’re like one of those circus plate-spinning acts. You’ve got loads of plates spinning on loads of poles. Some will be teetering and need your input and some will be doing fine. And some will be lurking in a corner, forgotten. As you write your version of your ‘goals’, you will need to learn to recognise when you’re about to set one too many plates spinning.

Tip 6: Love to fail, but hate to quit
If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, you might have already seen that I’m running a series of exclusive video blogs along this theme – that failure is a really important part of progress and is actually the antidote to quitting. I think it’s also an important part of goal-setting for non-linear people. You will need to try more things than you can achieve. You will need to go down some blind alleys. Like Leonardo da Vinci, you will probably have a pile of unfinished projects. When you’re writing down whatever your version of goals for next year might be, make sure they’re listed as things to “Try”, “Experiment with”, Fail at” or “Learn about”.

Tip 7: Take a look at Da Vinci’s own to-do list
Reproduced in a great article here: Leonardo’s to-do list

Note how much of it is listed as “discover…” or “find…”