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Interview Questions You Should Never Ask

Posted on April 11, 2011 by in Articles

There are two categories of interview questions that are basically useless.

These questions, while quite popular with many organizations, render little to no valuable information. Instead, they can actually create uncertainly and confusion and taint your candidate evaluations. Finally, they eat up time, something every hiring manager could use more of.

If you currently use any of these questions, or questions like them, eradicate them from your hiring process.

Easily Gamed Questions

There are three interview questions candidates rarely answer candidly:

  • Tell me about yourself.
  • What are your strengths?
  • What are your weaknesses?

It’s not that these are inherently bad questions, but the majority of interviewees are ready for them. They have a pre-planned and rehearsed answer for each. And if you do run into a candidate that stumbles over their response, or acts like you’ve just asked them to do long division in their head, well, they obviously aren’t the high performers you seek anyway.

You need to find out this information, but an interview is not a test of the candidate’s skill in reciting scripted answers; it’s to find out how they will perform when they’re working for you. To further prove this point, think about the answers you usually get when you ask, “What are your weaknesses?” Typically, you hear things like:

  • I work too hard.
  • People tell me I care too much.
  • I’m too much of a team player.
  • I can be a perfectionist.

If someone was actually to respond to this question with a reply such as, “I have a violent temper, and I stalked my last boss,” or, “I hate people, and I can’t stand taking orders,” then perhaps this line of questioning would have value. But how often does that happen?

When Leadership IQ discovered in a groundbreaking study that 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months, we wanted to know why. As we dug deeper, it turns out that 89% of them failed for attitudinal reasons, not for the lack of skills. With skills already being one of the easiest things to test in the interview process, we developed a new resource to teach the concept of “Hiring For Attitude.” Follow this link to learn more about “Hiring for Attitude” and to download the FREE white paper now.

Hypothetical Questions

Questions that ask, “What would you do if,” invoke an answer that reflects an idealized version of who the person thinks they are. And despite what we might like to believe, there’s a huge gap between our hypothetical and real selves.

Most people will say that if they saw a complete stranger being assaulted in a public place, they’d either rush in to help or immediately call the police. But that’s only hypothetical. They might actually freeze with fear, or maybe, in an effort to protect their life, they’d run away from the scene of the crime and then call the police. You just never know until you’re actually in the moment.

There was a news story about a Kansas woman who was stabbed during the robbery of a convenience store. The entire incident was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras. The stabbing was brutal, but that’s not why the story made national headlines. Footage from the surveillance camera showed five patrons stepping over the woman’s prone and bleeding body to exit; not one of them stopped or did anything to help. Only after all the witnesses had left the store did anyone call the police. The woman later died at the hospital.

There were dozens of online comments following the article, many that included statements of public outrage. Things like, “I’d never have walked away.” And yet, all five people in that store that day showed no hesitation in stepping over a dying woman to exit a bad situation. Maybe if at least one of them had stayed behind to help or to call 911, I’d have more faith in hypothetical responses. But they didn’t.

So the next time you feel tempted to ask a job candidate, “What would you do if two angry customers demanded your attention at the same time?” save yourself the time and trouble. Because whatever answer they give you is highly unlikely to predict what they would do in real life.

When Leadership IQ discovered in a groundbreaking study that 46% of new hires fail within their first 18 months, we wanted to know why. As we dug deeper, it turns out that 89% of them failed for attitudinal reasons – not for the lack of skills. With skills already being one of the easiest things to test in the interview process, we developed a new resource to teach the concept of “Hiring For Attitude.” Follow this link to learn more about “Hiring for Attitude” and to download the FREE white paper now.

What To Do When Employees Make Excuses

Posted on April 7, 2011 by in Articles

Excuses are very easy to fix. They are motivated by a fear of being blamed, so all you have to do is remove the presumption of blame and excuses generally go away.

Years ago, I destroyed my car. Through a combination of abusive driving and ignoring certain warnings, I basically blew up the engine. The car died while I was on a highway, I had to get towed 100 miles, and it cost me thousands of dollars to fix.

When I walked in the door that night and explained everything to my wife, I had a list of world-class excuses ready to go. After all, I deserved blame; I was totally at fault for both killing my car and being a total moron. But my wife looked at me and said, “So when do you pick up your car?” I don’t want to infer that she was happy; she clearly understood I was a moron, but she analyzed the situation and saw that blame wasn’t going to get the car back any faster, nor was it going to teach me any more lessons than I had already taught myself. (It does help that I’m married to an A-List clinical psychologist with the patience of Job).

I didn’t need my excuses because I wasn’t being blamed (I wasn’t being excused, but I wasn’t being blamed). My wife did monitor my car maintenance for a while (she even got creative with Family Car Day, where we both take our cars in for servicing and then go out to a fun breakfast with the kids), and today my car could star in commercials for a 50-point Jiffy Lube check.

When you hear lots of excuses from your employees, it means they’re under the impression that you’re blaming them or about to blame them (you may not actually be doing any blaming, but that’s what they’ve internalized). The simple resolve is to say, “I’m not interested in fixing any blame, I’m only interested in fixing the problem.”

Does this mean you excuse the behavior? Of course not. You’re still going to track mistakes and failures, and too many may result in poor reviews, action plans and even dismissal. But the moment you hear an excuse, your concern has to be fixing the issue. If you’ve got a project on deadline that needs to get out the door ASAP, you can do your employee write-up 15 minutes later. It’s far more critical to act immediately to fix the problem and deliver the project.

In our new white paper, “Why Giving Advice Doesn’t Work,” you’ll learn the 5 key reasons advice doesn’t work and how to deliver tough feedback that’s met with acceptance and immediate action. Follow this link to learn more and download your FREE white paper now.

Is Your Culture Stifling Great Ideas From Employees?

Posted on March 31, 2011 by in Articles

Every organization wants great ideas; smarter companies generally deliver better service and make more money. But not every company does a great job of harnessing all of the great ideas lurking throughout the organization.

First, not every company truly wants to hear the ideas of its frontline employees. And second, there are many companies that say they want to hear employees’ ideas, but they design “idea generating” programs (or “bright idea” programs, or whatever) that don’t fit their unique corporate cultures, so employees never participate. We need to fix this issue.

Here’s the dirty little secret of many programs designed to elicit great ideas from employees: They’re too individualistically competitive. Many idea-generating programs reward individuals, not groups, with a cut of the profits, prizes, money, a special lunch, whatever.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way those programs are designed, IF your culture is competitive and individualistic. But many are not, and that’s the problem.

Find out what type of culture is right for your organization and how to achieve it in our upcoming webinar, “Creating the Right Culture for Your Company.” You’ll learn the 4 unique types of organizational cultures, the benefits and challenges of each, and, most important, which one is right for YOU. Click here to learn more and register now. The first 100 people to register get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat.

For example, highly entrepreneurial cultures typically have a competitive streak (the best ideas win, inventors get all the glory, etc.). Similarly, hierarchical cultures also have a robust competitive streak (whoever gets the most power, or generates the most visibility, or wins the most deals will get the big promotion, corner office, etc.).

But then there are corporate cultures that tend to squash competitiveness. For example, dependable cultures tend to focus on consistency, efficiency and protocol. You could invent the next iPad in this type of culture, but if it was created outside of the accepted protocol, the idea (and inventor) will be instantly dismissed. And finally in highly social cultures, where affiliation, getting along and social bonds reign supreme, competition is frowned upon. Great ideas are instantly attacked if they even slightly damage the culture’s social bonds (harmony is more important than a few more points of market share).

Now, if your culture is one that squashes competitiveness (especially individual competitiveness), does it really make sense to market a “bright ideas” program to employees that incents individualistic competitiveness? Wouldn’t a team-based program be better? Or one where your whole department or workgroup wins a prize if you win the competition? Or one that encourages cross-departmental collaboration? Or basically anything that doesn’t reinforce individualistic competitiveness?

And if you have a more competitive culture, you really need to make sure that the program has sufficient rewards to engage the motivational drivers of your employees. If it’s loosey-goosey and touchy-feely, it will never get adequate participation.

Ultimately, your goal is to understand your unique culture. Only then can you design a process that will encourage and capture great ideas from your brightest employees.

Find out what type of culture is right for your organization and how to achieve it in our upcoming webinar, “Creating the Right Culture for Your Company.” You’ll learn the 4 unique types of organizational cultures, the benefits and challenges of each, and, most important, which one is right for YOU. Click here to learn more and register now. The first 100 people to register get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat.

Why Your Presentation Needs a Headline

Posted on March 24, 2011 by in Articles

Do your presentations have headlines? When you’re delivering a presentation, is there one sentence that sums up your presentation and sears it into the minds of your audience?

When Steve Jobs announced the launch of the iPod years ago, his headline for his presentation was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” When he announced the MacBook Air, his headline was “The world’s thinnest notebook.”

Those are headlines that immediately capture the essence of the presentation. And even more importantly, because the language used in those headlines was both pithy and highly visual, every audience member instantly remembered it. In fact, most of the press coverage following those presentations used those headlines right in the articles.

Here’s a fun little test of the “stickiness” of those headlines: Googling “1,000 songs in your pocket” returns more than 71,000 results. And “The world’s thinnest notebook” returns more than 457,000 results. That’s the kind of retention and viral discussion you get with great headlines.

In our webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you’ll learn the science of creating truly compelling presentations. You’ll learn how to write great headlines (including the correct length), and much more, like optimizing your message to reach 4 distinct personality types, developing stage charisma and using a specific storytelling technique proven to entice your audience in the first 30 seconds. Follow this link to learn more about the upcoming webinar, plus get $50 off if you’re one of the first 100 people to register.

Speaking of Google, when the founders of Google were seeking venture capital to launch the company, they described the company by saying “Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.” Starbucks founder Howard Schultz said in his presentations that “Starbucks creates a third place between work and home.”

Like the Apple headlines, notice how these headlines are short and highly visual. I know I keep beating this issue that headlines have to use highly visual language, but there’s a great reason why.

There exists a whole science of language retention that looks at the use of visual language (also called “concrete” words). Allan Paivio, now professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, is the scientist who pioneered the concept of concrete words (aka visual language). In one of my favorite studies, Paivio analyzed peoples’ ability to remember concrete words vs. abstract words.

Concrete words have high “imagery value,” that is you can visualize or picture that to which they refer. For example, words like road, bridge, clown and even picture, are all pretty concrete (and thus highly visual). But words like condition, amount, request and purpose are all pretty abstract. (Even before you read the rest of this article, just ask yourself, are the presentations in your organization filled with more concrete words or abstract words?)

Paivio paired concrete nouns and adjectives and tested them against paired abstract nouns and adjectives, to see which words were easier to recall. Some of the word pairs were related, like “young lady,” and some were not, like “soft lady.”

In every case, recall was better for concrete word pairs than it was for abstract word pairs. It’s just easier to remember “dead body” or “happy clown” than it is “essential nutrient” or “significant result.” In fact, and this is critical, you’ll remember totally unrelated concrete word pairs way better than you’ll remember related abstract word pairs. Across Paivio’s experiments, concrete words could be remembered as much as 2-3 times more frequently than the abstract words.

Now here’s the real kicker: The majority of presenters in today’s organizations suffer from abstract word disease. Let me share some of the actual abstract word pairs tested in Paivio’s study:

  • Complete set
  • Annual event
  • Useful purpose
  • Original finding
  • Critical condition
  • Reasonable request
  • Constant attention
  • Adequate amount
  • Significant result

If you’ve ever heard a corporate presentation, I guarantee you’ve heard word pairs like this (and probably these exact ones). Over and over again we hear presenters use abstract language. Then they look around bewildered as to why nobody remembers what they said. And the reason is because they are using language that is guaranteed not to be remembered.

Nobody’s going to remember every single point you make in a presentation. But if you give them a great headline, that’s both pithy and highly visual, they’ll remember the most important parts. And when other people ask them what they heard in the presentation, they’ll spit back the exact message that you want the whole world to hear.

In our upcoming webinar, “The Secrets of Killer Presentations,” you’ll learn the science of creating truly compelling presentations. You’ll learn how to write great headlines (including the correct length), and much more, like optimizing your message to reach 4 distinct personality types, developing stage charisma and using a specific storytelling technique proven to entice your audience in the first 30 seconds. Follow this link to learn more about the upcoming webinar, plus get $50 off if you’re one of the first 100 people to register.

The 5 Stages of Employee Accountability

Posted on March 14, 2011 by in Articles

Did you know the 5 stages of employee accountability follow a similar pattern to the well-known stages of grief (anger, bargaining, etc.)?

If you’ve ever experienced a significant loss or witnessed someone who has, you already know that humans typically don’t find acceptance immediately; instead we journey through a series of emotional stages until we finally arrive at Acceptance.

Well, after years of research with thousands of employees, we’ve discovered that the stages of employee accountability also follow very clear stages (just like the multiple stages of grief).

Think about it: When you’re trying to get your employees or colleagues to become more accountable, it’s not like flipping a switch. There are 5 stages of accountability, and people progress through each one in a logical flow. If you don’t know what stage your employees are in right now, it’s impossible to make them more accountable.

The four stages leading up to Accountability are as follows:

These reactions tend to follow a certain logical flow (i.e. Denial begets Blame, which evolves into Excuses, which is followed by Anxiety). Of course, not everyone evolves through these stages in perfect order. Some people jump back and forth in a roller-coaster ride of reaction. Others may never enter Denial, but spend most of their days in Anxiety or Excuses, and they may even have situational-specific reactions (e.g. certain feedback engenders Blame while other feedback is met with Accountability). But as the illustration above shows, there is a natural logic to the progression of these stages, and it’s absolutely essential for effective leaders to understand.

Get the 4 powerful conversations, including precise scripts for exactly what you should say, to push your employees past the first four stages of accountability and directly into the final stage: complete ownership and accountability. In our webinar, “Put More Accountability in Your Culture,” you’ll learn those 4 conversations and much more. The first 100 registrants get $50 off this live webinar, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

Denial

The opposite of Accountability tends to be Denial. If you’ve ever heard people say, “That rule doesn’t apply to me,” or “My performance was just fine” (even when it wasn’t), you’ve experienced Denial. These are folks who are so defensive and walled-off, or their egos are so fragile, that they’re simply not ready for feedback. They’re in effect saying, “There’s no problem; my performance was absolutely fine. If you don’t like the results, that’s a problem with your judgment, not my performance.”

Blame

Once you’ve pierced the veil of Denial, people often exhibit Blame. Blame is the unspoken acknowledgment that constructive feedback is warranted (i.e. the outcomes were subpar), coupled with an unwillingness to admit any personal fault. You’ll hear things like, “Ok, maybe the results weren’t perfect, but if you want to know where the problem is, go ask Accounting why they didn’t get the right data to my team before the deadline.” Whenever you hear an admission of subpar results, followed by somebody else’s name (or department), you’re hearing Blame. [Note: This example presumes you're not in, and don't control, Accounting].

Excuses

After Blame comes Excuses. An excuse is an admission of subpar results plus an admission of fault (insofar as no other person is getting named). But a person who makes Excuses isn’t quite ready for Accountability. The admission of fault is coupled with a host of extenuating factors that no normal human possibly could have overcome. Unlike Blame, it won’t be another person or department that gets thrown under the bus, but your servers, procedures, phone systems, etc. will take a beating. “I didn’t get the message,” or “The server crashed just as I finished the report,” or “We ran out of supplies,” are all variations on Excuses.

Anxiety

After Denial, Blame and Excuses, the final stage before Accountability is often Anxiety. The actual subpar performance and culpability have been fully acknowledged, but the person lacks the readiness to move forward and improve future performance. People in Anxiety say things like, “There’s no way we’ll finish in time,” or “We’ve tried to fix this before and it just didn’t work.” These folks get that they’re the ones who need to improve, but they lack confidence (they’re often freaked out) that they’ll be able to make the required improvements.

There’s a lot of psychology behind why people try and fall back on Denial, Blame and Excuses and Anxiety instead of just doing what’s asked of them. But you don’t need to climb inside your employees’ heads to bring them up to Accountability. You can shut down the denial, blame, excuses and anxiety; with 4 powerful conversations.

Get the 4 powerful conversations, including precise scripts for exactly what you should say, to push your employees past the first four stages of accountability and directly into the final stage: complete ownership and accountability. In our upcoming webinar, “Put More Accountability in Your Culture,” you’ll learn those 4 conversations and much more. The first 100 registrants get $50 off this live webinar, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

How To Cut 15 Minutes From Every Meeting

Posted on February 24, 2011 by in Articles

Imagine that you have a meeting scheduled for 60 minutes, but you only have 45 minutes worth of content. How long does that meeting last? Of course, it lasts the full 60 minutes.

What if you only have 35 minutes worth of content? The meeting still lasts 60 minutes. 25 minutes of content? Don’t worry, you’ll still be there for 60 minutes.

(What if you actually had 60 minutes worth of content? In that case, your meeting would probably take 90 minutes!)

For you scientist types, you learned in physics class (thanks to Boyle and Bernoulli) that a gas will expand to fill the available space (for example, there’s not a little pocket of oxygen in the middle of your office right now; it’s expanded to fill your entire office). Well, in more ways than one, meetings are like gas; they will expand to fill whatever space you give them.

Why do most meetings last 60 minutes, regardless of how much content there is? It’s because we usually don’t have any other way of knowing when the meeting is over. Our schedule said we have a 1-hour meeting, so it’ll be done when that hour is expired.

We recently conducted a study, which we’ll be releasing to the media in a few weeks, that analyzed meetings. In one part, we asked people coming out of meetings whether the meeting they just attended had accomplished its original objective. Sadly, the most common response wasn’t “yes”, and it wasn’t “no,” either. The most common response was, “I have no idea.”

(Of course, uncertainty levels are usually higher after virtual meetings, as any number of technical hiccups can exacerbate the problem.)

The overwhelming majority of meeting attendees can’t tell you the real objective of a particular meeting. Sure, they sit through lots of meetings, some of which even have agendas, but they still can’t articulate the actual objective of the meeting.

Whether your meetings are face-to-face or remote, there’s a simple tool to ensure that everyone in attendance achieves your objective (and that they do it without lots of off-topic chit-chat so everyone can get back to work). This simple yet powerful tool works in any meeting environment, but it’s absolutely essential to leaders in the virtual workplace, people who manage remote employees. Learn more about this tool in our new live webinar, “The Science of Managing Remote Employees.” The first 100 registrants get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

This causes two big problems. First, if you don’t know the real objective of the meeting, it’s pretty hard to assess whether the meeting was a success or failure. Second, if you can’t describe the objective, you don’t know when you’ve achieved that objective. And that means that you don’t know when you can tell all the participants, “Hey gang, we just accomplished our objective, so let’s get the heck out of here.”

I’ve always been amazed that so many meetings take exactly 60 minutes. Regardless of the company, industry, size, geography, type of meeting, etc., they all seem to take 60 minutes. It turns out that every meeting takes 60 minutes because we don’t have a way of measuring when we’ve accomplished our objective. Instead of clear objectives, all we’ve got is a calendar entry that says this is a 60-minute meeting.

How do you fix this (and cut the wasted time out of your meetings)? Very simply, you write a Statement of Achievement for every single meeting (including conference calls, etc.). A Statement of Achievement is one sentence that says, “As a result of this meeting, we will have achieved [insert your objective here].”

It’s not complicated; it’s just a statement that tells you what this meeting needs to achieve before we can adjourn and go back to whatever we should be doing. And if you can’t identify a hyper-specific achievement that defines the meeting, you should cancel that meeting.

It doesn’t matter what your Statement of Achievement says, as long as everyone in the meeting will know exactly when you’ve achieved it. Time is not a good metric for assessing the success of a meeting. But agreeing on a price for the proposal, picking a color for the new product, settling on a new location, or completing 10 employee reviews, are all viable Statements of Achievement. And they’ll tell you exactly when you’ve achieved success (so you can leave the meeting and go accomplish some other work).

Here’s a startling revelation: Every one of our clients that implements this simple technique saves, on average, 15 minutes from every meeting. (How much time could YOU save every single day if you could shorten every 1-hour meeting by 15 minutes?) It turns out that most 60-minute meetings do NOT have 60 minutes worth of content. And even when they do, if you tell people that the meeting ends as soon as they achieve their objective, they cut out all the nonsense and chit-chat and focus like a laser beam on achieving that objective.

Too many meetings are seen as a waste of time. But if you can eliminate the wasted time from your meetings, using the Statement of Achievement, everyone will be more productive and much happier.

Whether your meetings are face-to-face or remote, there’s a simple tool to ensure that everyone in attendance achieves your objective (and that they do it without lots of off-topic chit-chat so everyone can get back to work). This simple yet powerful tool works in any meeting environment, but it’s absolutely essential to leaders in the virtual workplace, people who manage remote employees. Learn more about this tool in our new live webinar, “The Science of Managing Remote Employees.” The first 100 registrants get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

Are Your Goals Difficult Enough?

Posted on February 17, 2011 by in Articles

It seems totally counter-intuitive that difficult goals lead to better performance. But there’s decades of research to back it up. It’s because difficult goals demand our attention and engage the brain. And with that extra neurological horsepower comes better performance.

But the challenge is in finding your personal sweet spot of difficulty. You don’t want your goals to be so difficult that you give up, any more than you want to feel so unchallenged that you stop trying.

Here’s a quick way to test whether your goals are difficult enough to inspire optimal performance. Think about a recent goal and determine whether the following three statements apply:

  • I’m really going to have to learn new skills before I’ll be able to accomplish this goal.
  • My goal is pushing me outside my comfort zone; I’m not frozen with terror, but I’m definitely on “pins and needles” and wide-awake for this goal.
  • When I think about the biggest and most significant accomplishments throughout my life, this current goal is as difficult as those were.

If you can’t answer “yes” to all three statements, keep reading.

Stop encouraging mediocre performance, and start inspiring great results. Our complimentary white paper, “Are SMART Goals Dumb?” reveals research that shows how ineffective SMART goals really are. And, more important, it teaches you the radical new and better approach to achieving things you never thought possible.

You can look to your own past accomplishments to see how effective difficult goals are. I’ll bet that every significant thing you’ve achieved, both personally and professionally, required serious work. Your brain was alive and buzzing with the challenge and you felt like you were on pins and needles. But it was the challenge, not the reassurance that you could achieve this goal no problem, that allowed you to push past the most stubborn roadblocks. It was the challenge that made you embrace (instead of dread) honing your knowledge and learning new skills. And once you achieved that difficult goal, you were left with a feeling of overwhelming pride that is still with you today.

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, psychology professors and pioneers of goal-setting theory, produced conclusive validation that people who set or are given difficult goals achieve much greater performance levels than do people who set or are given weaker goals that send a message of “Just do your best.” In one study, Professor Latham’s research team worked with Weyerhaeuser (the forestry, wood and paper giant) to study how difficult goals could improve the performance of logging-truck drivers. Ideally, you want logging trucks to come as close as possible to their maximum legal weight. This eliminates multiple runs, which cost time, fuel and additional trucks. But logging trucks present a unique challenge: Logs are all different sizes; they have to be fit on the trucks; weights have to be accurate, etc.

It was determined for this experiment that meeting 94% of the maximum legal net weight would be difficult, but not impossible to achieve. When given a goal of “do your best,” workers loaded the trucks to approximately 60% of the maximum legal net weight (lots of wasted space). But when given the more difficult goal of loading the trucks to 94% of their maximum legal weight, they met the goal, saving Weyerhaeuser about $250,000 within months.

OK, so setting difficult goals leads to better performance, but how difficult is difficult enough? An appropriately difficult goal is going to require two to four major new learning experiences. This stretches the brain and excites the neurons. Or you can determine how much you had to learn to achieve your own past great accomplishments and use this as a measuring stick.

If you can say, “This goal is a breeze, I don’t need to learn anything to ace it,” it’s a clear sign you’ve underset that goal. Just as if you find yourself scratching your head and pondering the 37 new things you’ll have to learn, you know you’ve definitely overset. Adjusting a goal by 30% is usually enough to engage the brain. If you find you still need more difficulty, you aren’t learning two to four new things, then take it up another 30%. If you are oversetting your goals, start by sliding them back 30% and reassess the situation. Stick to the 30% rule because if you start arbitrarily tripling or quadrupling the difficulty of your goals, they will all too quickly go from difficult to impossible.

When you hit your sweet spot of difficulty you should feel outside your comfort zone. Not so far that you are on a bed of nails, but not too comfortable either. You’ll know your sweet spot because you’ve been there before; it’s that place where you achieve your absolute best.

Stop encouraging mediocre performance, and start inspiring great results. Our complimentary white paper, “Are SMART Goals Dumb?” reveals research that shows how ineffective SMART goals really are. And, more important, it teaches you the radical new and better approach to achieving things you never thought possible.

Leadership Quotes: Abraham Lincoln on Leadership

Posted on February 11, 2011 by in Articles

If ever there was a 100% Leader, it was Abraham Lincoln.

Born February 12, 1809, Lincoln became America’s 16th president and one of the most effective managers of change in the U.S. history.

As a boy, he and his family lost their 1,200-acre farm in a title dispute, forcing the Lincolns to uproot from Kentucky and move to Illinois. At age nine, his mother died. Soon after, his sister died while giving birth, then his father remarried. At 23, Lincoln and a business partner bought a general store on credit. Lincoln later sold his share of the business, but when his partner later died, Lincoln was left with a $1,000 debt. Unable to pay, he entered bankruptcy and spent the next 17 years repaying his creditors.

Suffice it to say that Lincoln had vast experience in the field of change management. And, ultimately, his abilities to recognize the need for change, clearly state his goals for accomplishing it, finding common ground between bitter rivals, then motivating people to action were essential to his two greatest achievements: abolishing slavery, and reuniting the country after Civil War.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Just look at those words. The speech is about the scope and intensity of the challenge we’re going to tackle, and our indefatigable commitment to meeting that challenge. Now imagine Lincoln was being counseled by today’s experts on employee engagement (aka Appeasers). He might have said instead:

“Folks, we have a job before us, but don’t worry about that because it’s more important that you know that I really care about you and that I want you to lead lives with friends and that you wake up every day with the opportunity to be really satisfied and do what you’re already good at without having to push yourself too hard.”

I shudder to think where we’d be today if Lincoln had been an Appeaser instead of a 100% Leader. Of course, Neville Chamberlain was an Appeaser (remember the British Prime Minister who “negotiated” with Hitler and declared that “we have achieved peace for our time”)?

Thankfully, he was replaced by Winston Churchill, a 100% Leader, who said:

“Whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Yes, 100% Leaders push us hard. But when they do, they teach us something about ourselves. They help us achieve extraordinary things. And they give us real opportunities for deep and lasting fulfillment. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, GE, Southwest, Ritz-Carlton and Wegmans manage to achieve significant performance while still being fulfilling places to work. They invent and deliver exceptional products and services, while setting new standards. And they do it with the knowledge that a whole new generation of 100% Leaders and companies are coming right behind them.

So when you’re in the midst of the battlefield that is the workplace, how will you manage change: Will you give passive advice, or will you deliver the tough feedback needed to get the job done? In Leadership IQ’s complimentary white paper, 5 Reasons Giving Advice Doesn’t Work, you’ll learn how to give feedback that actually elicits positive action and improves employee performance. Follow this link to download the white paper now.