Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life

Stew Friedman: Total Leadership is about the whole person, total, and it's about leadership, which I take to mean creating sustainable change, mobilizing people towards a valued goal, something that's good for you and good for them. There are many executives and managers, who are not good leaders, and there are many great leaders who are not executives or managers, so leadership and a position in a hierarchy, to me those are not the same, and leadership is something that you can learn and get better at, at any point in your life or career. And indeed, it's something that in order to be good, you have to keep getting better, through practice and coaching. Just like a sport or a musical instrument, it's a performing art, and in order to get better, you have to practice, get feedback, learn from other people, steal ideas from your competition, and continue to focus on how to improve. That's the wonderful thing about leadership; it's something you can never be too good at.

Rachel Salaman: But this book is aimed at people who, at some point, will want to be leaders.

Stew Friedman: Well, will want to have increasing responsibility in their work lives as executives or as managers or supervisors. So yes, the effect of practice of the very simple principles in this book and in this program, which are also illustrated throughout the book as well as on our website, totalleadership.org will result in your being more effective in your work performance and thereby increase the likelihood that you'll continue to advance in your career. And it will also result in improved performance in the other parts of your life, and that's what makes this a distinctive approach. It's not just about improving your business performance by leading more effectively at work, it's about improving performance at work and at home, and in the community, however you define that, and for your private self, the domain as I call it, of mind, body and spirit.

Rachel Salaman: How difficult is it for people to integrate those four domains, especially nowadays?

Stew Friedman: It's hard, but it's a lot easier than most people think, and this book is a method for how to pursue what I call the 'four way win', and that is improve performance in each of the four domains by integrating them more intelligently.

What I find is that most people think about work and the rest of life as a balancing act, and that's the wrong metaphor, in my opinion. It's better to think instead of the four domains as a, kind of, a jazz quartet where you have the drums and you have the bass and you have a rhythm instrument, like a piano or a guitar, and then you have a melody by horn or voice, and the idea behind the jazz quartet is you have a basic structure or theme, but then you improvise around that theme. Sometimes you only hear the horn. Sometimes you only hear the drums, but in all the efforts of the four pieces coming together, what you're trying to do is not so much create balance as a harmony or music.

When you imagine the world as a trade-off among the different pieces, well then that's what you are going to have. When instead you imagine the possibility of mutual enrichment among the different domains, well then the likelihood of your actually being able to pursue those through leadership skill and action is much greater, and that's what I have observed and that's what I've written about in this book and in research on the impact of the Total Leadership Program, that people do indeed improve their performance in the different domains and feel better about how things are going in the different domains as well.

Rachel Salaman: So why did you write this book? It's based on your work you do at the Wharton School, why did you decide to put it in a book?

Stew Friedman: When I first created this program with a group of amazing colleagues at the Ford Motor Company in the late 90s where I was the Director of the Leadership Development Center for a few years, I had, prior to that, ten, 12 years prior to that, started doing work in the area of work life integration. That was instigated by the arrival of my first child, where things really changed for me and I started to recast my own, sort of, career aspirations to focus more on what I was going to do to make the world a safe one for my child to grow up in. So he and his brother and sister, they're grown up now, but I'm still dedicated to the notion of through my work doing whatever I can to make the world a better one for children to grow up in.

So that was the initial impetus, but my other line of enquiry and work and research and practice was in talent management systems and succession planning and how companies prepare and select people for top positions; that's what my dissertation research was on 25 years ago. I studied Fortune 500 companies in detail – 235 of them, how do they grow their talent, and what impact does that have on their performance as a company? So I, kind of, combined those two areas, leadership development with work life integration, to create this book, which is about improving your leadership capacity by integrating the different domains of your life, and, conversely, integrating the different domains of your life by improving your leadership capacity. So it's really the merging of these two fields that I think makes this distinctive approach, and today, in 2008, it seems to resonate deeply because the issues of work life integration and the demand for increasing leadership capacity, both are much greater than when I started out 20 years ago.

Rachel Salaman: Well you've seen some very impressive results. Some of the managers who've gone through your program have made millions of dollars of cost savings just by following your advice. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Stew Friedman: The purpose again of this program, is not work life balance or even work life integration, which is a better term, but improved performance in all the different domains, including, and especially, work. So, the results that we see are the outcome of participants doing three main things under the categories that I call 'be real', 'be whole' and 'be innovative'.

So to be real is to clarify what matters most to you as a person, as an emerging leader, at whatever stage of life or career you're at. And there's a series of exercises that helps you to do that that you then can share with other people, which makes the whole experience a lot richer and more meaningful.

The second piece to be whole is to integrate the different pieces in ways that really respect that there are these four different domains, and that they are mutually affecting each other. So you identify who are the most important people, the so-called key stakeholders; that's what I call them, in each of the different domains: work, home and community and for yourself, what are your performance expectations of each other? And you sketch those out and how well you're doing in meeting those expectations? And then you have conversations with those people where you discover that, if you like, most of the thousands of people I've coached through this process, what other people expect of you is actually a little bit different and indeed a little bit less than what you thought they expected of you. That's true in many, many – most cases. All these insights based on reflecting out what matters most to you, and then thinking about and then verifying what it is that the people around you need from you and how the different pieces affect one another. How your performance as a father affects your performance as a manager, as a citizen, as a friend, as a member of a church community, your emotional and physical health, how do all those pieces affect each other? And you start to think about those.

Having thought first about what matters most to you, all of that then leads you to ideas for experiments, the third piece, the fun part, which is be innovative, creating new ways of getting things done. So what participants do, when they get to that third piece, is they create game plans and then scorecards, very simple, for changes that are designed to improve performance in a demonstrable way in each of the four domains. And what I've discovered is that virtually anybody can do this. And for some people, if you have a high degree of responsibility, for lots of resources in people, those changes can really add up to a lot of money, or improved customer satisfaction, or employee morale, some soft measures like that, but in addition to that, cost savings, some people will eliminate work that doesn't need to get done, or they'll eliminate or reduce travel that doesn't need to happen, for example, or they'll find other ways of simplifying work processes to, again, reduce cost, or come up with new ideas for new products or new ways of delivering services that increase revenue. So there are many, many such examples.

While at the same time, people also identify and then assess impact in their family lives, their relationships with their spouses and children and extended family, for example, or with their communities, with friends, neighbors, with religious groups, etc, the quality of their impact in those different domains. And then perhaps most powerfully, people assess changes in their own personal lives, how they feel about their lives, their physical health and weight, for example, that's a very common focus is improved physical health and weight loss, but it's not just like you are undertaking an exercise program so that you look better in a bathing suit, it is to make yourself more effective in your work role in a demonstrable way from your boss's point of view, as well as for your family and your community. So all the changes that people try out over a month or two, small changes that are within their control, and that's why this is customizable and actionable for virtually anyone at any career stage, and we've done this with teenagers, as well as retirees and with people in virtually every industry you can imagine. It's entirely customizable because all the assessments that I just described, they happen in your life and you do the work of identifying what matters most to you, who matters most to you, what do they care about, discovering that and then creating experiments, small steps in a direction that you choose that you can control.

At the end of that month or two of experimentation, you reflect on what it is that you've done, what has worked, what results you've seen, and, most importantly, what you've learned about creating sustainable change. Sustainable because other people want you to succeed as much as, if not more than you do and that's the big takeaway for most people. While the experiments are wonderful when they work, and they don't always, the most important outcome is an increased confidence and competence in initiating innovations that are in your interests as well as in the interests of the people around you and, of course, that is what leadership is all about.

Rachel Salaman: Do you see different levels of success from the people you've put through this?

Stew Friedman: The critical success factor is a willingness to undergo the various exercises that I describe and illustrate in the book. So there are all kinds of very real examples for each of the different steps along the path, and we also have other examples at our website, including a video of alumni of the program speaking about what they did, what they took away, what was difficult about it, what was fun about it, what was fruitful about it. So you can see those videos at our website as well, and to answer your question, I think the critical success factor is again a willingness to continue to, you know, move along the path, and to do so with other people.

So I am hearing from people all over the world, from Korea to Israel to South Africa to Romania to Alaska, where people are reading this book with other people, and that's the critical success factor I would say above all, is to open up this process to others you trust, because when you do so peer to peer, or friend to friend, or with anyone who you trust, what you gain is increased support, of course, and ideas, but, even more importantly, accountability pressure. You're semi-public about what you're undertaking and that makes it much more likely that what you would like to do is something you actually do.

Rachel Salaman: If we could talk now about those three areas you talked about, the authenticity, the integrity and the innovation, can you give us an example of how someone would go about assessing and then improving their authenticity?

Stew Friedman: So authenticity, integrity, creativity, those are the three main, sort of, attributes of leadership that we focus on. Authenticity is about being real, clarifying what matters most to you, so the things that I ask you to do and that I illustrate in the first part of the book on being real are the following: you would describe briefly the three or four critical episodes of your own life that have shaped you, that have determined to date what makes you distinctive in terms of what you care about, what you believe in. And Rachel, every single person I've ever met has those stories, and they're all different as...

Rachel Salaman: And can they go back to childhood?

Stew Friedman: Yes, they usually do. So it's whatever critical events have shaped you and again, every human being has a story and that's something you have to tap into to be effective as a leader because that's you. And the more you can first grasp that that is your story, and then articulate it in a way that is meaningful to you and to the people around you by practicing that, and it doesn't come naturally to most people, you are enhancing your authenticity because it's more likely that you can be the author of your future story, so that's one exercise.

Another is to envision the future, so you look back and then you look forward. So I will ask you to write a short one page or less on the impact you're having on the world 15 years hence. Now for many people, that's quite daunting. "I can't even think of next week, let alone 15 years from now," some people will say, but this isn't a contract that you're writing with yourself or with anyone else, it's an act of imagination, which is fruitful to the extent that it helps you to – in a different framework – see what matters to you today, because what you hope for in the future is a great indicator of what matters most to you right now. So you look back, you look forward and those two things help you very much to identify and articulate what matters most to you now, and to be able to speak about that to other people. And again, sharing this with a couple of other people, helping them to do the same, which I describe how to do that, how to cultivate your own coaching network in the appendix to the book, and it's really easy and it makes it a lot more fun, so that's an important way of accelerating the learning.

Another exercise in enhancing authenticity is to examine, and this only takes a couple of minutes, what's important to you. If you take 100 points and allocate them according to what's important along those four domains of work, home, community and self, how would you do that? And then look at the focus of your attention in a typical week. Take those same 100 points and allocate them, according to where you focus your attention. Compare those. Are they aligned? Are they not? What does that tell you? In addition, very briefly again, how are things going in each domain? Are you satisfied? On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you in each domain and overall? And then if I were to ask the most important people in each of those domains how you are doing according to their performance standards, what would they say? This doesn't have to take very long at all, but it then is followed by a couple of questions that once again, ask you to think about what's most important, what are you actually doing, and what does that tell you about what you might try to gain greater alignment or harmony among the different elements, and what would it take to do that? So from the very beginning, you are identifying what matters most, enhancing your authenticity, but you're also generating ideas for action.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose there's no right or wrong answer if someone finds out through these exercises that actually work is the most important thing to them [laughs] and they don't care about their community. Would that be something that they should feel okay about pursuing?

Stew Friedman: I scold you and send you to good citizens' school. No, I'm kidding. That's a great point that you make Rachel, because what I have been very clear about throughout this book and throughout my work throughout my entire career, is that whatever your values are, they're values, you know, there are laws and there are higher moral codes that are important to be mindful of as a human being, but in terms of your particular mix of what matters most to you, there really is no imperative, and that's one of the main reasons why this approach is successful. I'm not telling you how to live your life, no-one is, what I'm helping you to do with this process is for you to identify how you want to live, and what that means for your work, as well as the other parts.

Rachel Salaman: Well if we can move on now to integrity, the second piece of the pie, can you define what you mean by integrity in this context?

Stew Friedman: Yes, and I use a, kind of, particular definition of integrity that's not normal in the sense of candor or forthrightness or those kinds of things, although those are clearly important. By integrity, I have a very, kind of, particular usage that's related to the root of the word, which is integral, one, whole. So by integrity, I mean the pieces fitting together as an integral whole, which means that these four domains somehow have coherence as one, and the way that comes to life in the book and in the program is in the following way: you identify who the most important people are in the different domains and what their expectations are of you and what you expect of them. You think about how those performance expectations affect each other, positively and negatively, again, looking for new ideas for small changes you can make that would affect greater integrity or integration, and then you talk to those people to verify and perhaps negotiate those expectations, all of which again, prepares you to do experiments to pursue four way wins, but integrity here means that the pieces fit together as one, and that's one of the primary aspirations of this approach, although nobody ever quite achieves that.

Rachel Salaman: Well obviously communication is a very important part of that and you devote a whole chapter to it in your book.

Stew Friedman: Right.

Rachel Salaman: What are the main tips you would give people to make that work?

Stew Friedman: Well in the chapter on 'Preparing for and Conducting Stakeholder Dialogs', this many people have said that chapter alone is worth the price of the book, although I think there's a lot more to it, but that's critically important, although the most difficult for most. Because what you're doing here, in a short space of time is, having conversations with your inner circle, the most important people to you, about your shared future and how to improve it.

One thing that comes out of this that I would encourage all listeners is simply identifying and then telling those people that they are indeed important to you, in whatever language works for you. There's no right way in terms of how you say these things, and you have to find ways that work, and this is part of a leadership skill, connecting with people who matter most. Just telling them that they're important takes you a step further, if you like, most people, than you've been in connecting with those most important people. They will feel honored, they'll feel flattered, they'll feel good about you, and, of course, that's what you want. As a leader in all the parts of your life, you want people to trust you and to feel good about you and you do that by simply telling people that they're important, but that's just the beginning.

More importantly, is laying out for them, "Here's what I thought about in terms of what I think it is you expect of me; is this accurate?" And so then you listen, and this is, I think, the most critical tip I could offer, relentless curiosity about what they care about is what you want to express through continued enquiry without defensiveness and this is a hard thing to do and it's an art form that requires discipline and practice, but it's something that everybody can do and can do better. I am still learning this and I've been at it forever. By being open and curious and in a, kind of, discovery mode, where your goal is knowledge not debate or revenge, you're simply wanting to learn, you will learn new things about what the most important people in your world expect of you. That will happen, and that's really powerful knowledge because then you can act in a slightly different way to make it more likely that the people around you will indeed want to support you as you create changes that are good not just for you, but for them as well, thereby making those changes a lot more sustainable.

Rachel Salaman: So you've talked a lot so far about the importance of creativity and innovation as the final parts of this three part program. What examples can you share with us to show how that can work?

Stew Friedman: There are nine different kinds of experiments that my research team and I discovered, pouring over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories of the experiments that early practitioners in the art of total leadership had done, and so we offer these nine different kinds with examples and also with specific suggestions for how to measure the impact of these different experiments as a way to help you think of examples that you can try that fit with your situation. So all these examples are different because they're customized to your situation, but they range from activities that help you to track progress in particular areas or to simply write about it like in a blog, for example, or a journal, so tracking and reflecting, that's one kind of experiment, to appreciating and caring is a kind of experiment where you would do things that are typically unusual for you to do in bringing the different parts of your life together perhaps at some, sort of, community service activity that you do with friends and family and work colleagues.

Another kind of experiment is to restore and rejuvenate, so this is a very popular kind of experiment where you would do such things as exercise or meditation. I did this with a group of professional athletes, this program last year, at the Wharton School, American football players, and quite a few of them undertook meditation as their experiment. Now let's see, how would meditation improve performance of a professional athlete at work, at home and in the community, as well as for themselves? Think about that. So that's another kind of experiment, but restoring and rejuvenating, that might involve doing something different for your holiday or vacation time, or yoga. Again, these are very common, exercise, nutrition with the intent to make things better in all four domains.

Another kind of experiment would be to focus and concentrate. So, for example, some people will – many people are having difficulties managing the boundaries among the different parts of their lives, where they feel intruded upon by their cell phones or their BlackBerrys or their other digital tools. This is a huge issue. In fact, aside from the economic crush that we're all suffering under, the number one issue I hear as I talk to literally thousands of people, especially these last few months, following the publication of the book, is, "How do I get out of the torrent of information that comes at me 24/7, 365?" So managing those boundaries is a, kind of, experiment where, for example, someone might try for a month or so to shut off their BlackBerry between the hours of 6pm and 9pm a couple of nights a week, with the intention again of improving performance in all the different domains. So you say to your boss, "I'd like to try an experiment, where I think, according to your evaluation of my performance, I will improve over the next month if I am not available by BlackBerry between the hours of 6 and 9pm on Tuesday and Thursday. Is that something that you're willing to try, dear boss?" And if your boss is a rational person, which hopefully he or she is, they will embrace that experiment because the result is going to make things better for them.

Now, how would it be that you'd be more effective if you were not available during certain hours? Well you'd likely be more focused, less stressed, and more productive during the hours when indeed you are available, because you're able to take care of the other things that matter to you, and that's what people need, is the ability to pay attention to the different parts of their lives when they demand it. Now, of course, you have to come up with ideas for innovation that really are going to be seen by others as successful; that's the creative challenge here.

Rachel Salaman: And presumably, if you've done the authenticity and integrity exercises properly, you will be able to come up with those ideas.

Stew Friedman: Precisely. That's the whole point of doing those first sets of exercises is to make you a more intelligent experimenter. Many people, when they encounter these ideas, they say, "Oh great, let's get started on the experiments right away" and I try to caution them that, "You can do that, but your chances of success are greater if you lay some of this groundwork first."

Rachel Salaman: Stew Friedman, thank you very much for joining us today.

Stew Friedman: Rachel thanks so much for having me and again, if your listeners want to learn more, reading the book is a great idea, but you can also come visit us at www.totalleadership.org.

Rachel Salaman: Stew Friedman talking to me in London. I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.