Try an experiment. Grab three or four people and ask them to look at this painting for 30 seconds then close their eyes and describe what they saw. Don’t be surprised if each person sees the painting in ways others do not.

If we see things so differently, what might each of us missing? Leaders need to be continually aware of what they and others may be missing. Our brains are constantly painting a picture of the world around us. Leaders need to understand what others do and do not see in order to tap into and shape a common picture of the future—whether that means convincing people to launch a new business or take action to protect the environment. Effective leaders look for ways to bridge their own and others’ mental pictures so everyone shares a sense of why their work is important, how they will get things done, and what they will accomplish.

We start constructing an understanding how things work as soon as we are born. Early in life, we see the world as it is. Imagine a 2-year-old child’s jaw dropping as grandpa pulls a coin from behind her ear; children exist in the moment. As our brains develop, we learn things may not be as they first appear. When we aren’t looking the coin is hidden behind a finger. We become aware that words and actions are not the same—I’m not really going to “pull my hair out!” We build a mental model to explain why things are as they are and how the world works. Each of us believes our model is right. Uh oh. Now what?

As leaders we first need to accept that our own mental models may be wrong and incomplete. As Kathryn Schulz writes in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, this is really hard—first, it’s hard to accept you’re wrong most of the time (trust me, I’m working on it) and, second,  it’s hard to help others recognize what they may be missing. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. In fact, it’s an essential leadership skill.

Every day we see leaders who are afraid of admitting their mistakes. Does anyone not make misteaks? Who has all the information they could possibly need before making an important decision? Still we decide things everyday. Should I be writing this blog post or doing something else? It’s always a choice and, if I miss something because I’m writing this, in retrospect, I may have made the wrong decision.

I admire leaders unafraid to make mistakes and curious to learn what they don’t know. I challenge you to be a leader who learns from others and the world around you. Going around having to be right all of the time is exhausting. Try asking yourself, “What am I missing?” I’ll bet you look at Renoir’s painting differently after hearing other people’s perspectives. Just imagine how asking what you’re missing might change your picture of the world.

The post What Am I Missing? appeared first on The Public Leadership Blog.

The question posed: “What changes in the material, if any, do you feel might strengthen this course?”

The response from the student: “Including sample papers for all assignments.”

Seriously? My initial interpretation of the comment generated negative speculation (and just a bit of sputtering outrage) about the student’s work ethic. My exploration of the underlying motivation for the comment, however, convinced me that it likely had originated with generational differences in our comfort levels in managing ambiguity.

I truly believe this student – whoever it was – would not see any relationship between this request for sample papers and the concepts of “cheating” or “do original work” or “figure it out yourself.”

Instead, this student – who already has a specific rubric for distinguishing between grade levels of work – was likely simply trying to eliminate the guess work about what “good” papers look like for each assignment in the course.

Ambiguity seems to make the youngest generation in our workforce uncomfortable, which makes sense, considering they tended to be raised with scheduled lives, with clear definitions of progressive achievement. Word on the street, for example, is that they really dislike ambiguity in terms of the timeline and expectations for professional advancement.

Also, given the power of Google, hardly anything is uncharted territory any more. Sample policies, interview questions, strategic plans, or salary ranges are readily available. Keep adjusting the search terms and clicking on links, and we can find examples of what is successful, true, or normal somewhere else.

The immediacy of technology makes instant gratification the norm and patience unnecessary, as is expressed in the following quote:

• “The era of instant gratification has led to a decrease in what therapists call “frustration tolerance.” This is how we handle upsetting situations, allow for ambiguity, and learn to navigate the normal life circumstances of breakups, bad grades, and layoffs.”

So what are the implications for me as a teacher, given that I am not willing to become the professorial equivalent of a helicopter parent? Clearly I need to express the interests that underlie my position that students do original work. Also, I should make any boundaries clear, letting them know when sharing or seeking information about the work of others is encouraged, limited, or prohibited.

I also need to coach students in working through any frustrations that emerge when creating an original work. I truly do understand the range of negative reactions that can emerge when taking the first step into the unknown in project development of any kind. Life experience provides plenty of opportunities to learn how to manage that awkwardness. Apparently I underestimated how strange and wrong that discomfort feels to others. Now that I know that, I can deal with it.

We cannot eliminate ambiguity in the public sector. Figuring out how to please elected officials or voters or residents is full of variance. Definitions of “success” are frequently offered reactively rather than proactively. “We know what we like when we see it.”

To thrive, we must adapt to the fact that we will not always – maybe rarely – have the quantity or quality of information, or the certainty,  we desire. We need to spend time uncovering facts and eliminating clutter so that we can make the best decisions and generate the best results possible. Not all of us enjoy that initial phase of discovery, trial, and error, but we all have to learn how to navigate it.

As managers and leaders, we are not able to eliminate ambiguity – nor should we, necessarily – but we can certainly allow time for the questions and answers that surface the elements of “success.”

The post Generational Differences About Ambiguity appeared first on The Public Leadership Blog.

Despite my initial confidence, the project went downhill quickly, and the negativity was suffocating. Out of desperation, I began searching for any and all small victories that could help motivate me to keep pushing forward, which essentially was just about developing manageable to-do lists. It helped, but I realized that what I actually needed was positive feedback from others as well.

Unfortunately the idea of sending out an email about celebrating small victories to my entire team made me sick to my stomach. Like, ugh…. I just couldn’t. Instead, I forced myself to use “small victories” language in all my conversations. I joked that I was looking for any and all small victories to my colleagues, told my boss that I was focusing on one small victory for a day, and then finally worked up the courage to send out “small victory alerts!” to teammates working on a particular project. It was definitely tongue-in-cheek; it was sort of joking, and it totally worked.

The painfully small and awkward attempts at celebrations started shifting our culture. Teammates began adopting the “small victories” phrase and jumped on board with their commitment to celebrate them.   A fun artifact that symbolizes the transformation is our internal messenger system (Slack) that is now riddled with the party hat emoticon as we intentionally celebrate updates from our teammates.  The mood surrounding the work and the way we discuss the every day challenges of our job have changed dramatically and for the better.

I can still think of 2,000 things I’d rather do than send out an email celebrating a small accomplishment. It is definitely still awkward. But it’s also worth it, and I encourage anyone dealing with a potentially soul-crushing project to try it out. If you do, here are a few suggestions:

1) Be obvious.  My teammates are awesome, but human, and they had no way of knowing what I was trying to do (making the effort to acknowledge and celebrate our progress) before I actually started doing it. Don’t be shy about saying what you’re trying to do. Make it a joke, let it be silly, but say it clearly.

2) Think about your forum. Whether it is in face-to-face meetings, phone calls, emails, or messaging systems, your forum matters. The main thing is to celebrate in a way that lets as many people on the team participate. For me, clogging up everyone’s inbox wasn’t the best way. But Slack worked perfectly!

3) Remember that providing updates is not the same as celebrating.  If you want others to celebrate, you’ve got to do it first. So add a “yay” and that party hat emoji in there to make it clear that something significant was accomplished!

Of course, with all this said, I still feel awkward writing about this and celebrating my own accomplishment. However, I cannot overstate the impact it had on me and my team as we worked to push a huge project across the finish line. I’m proud of our work, and I’m incredibly proud of the culture we’ve built to be able to celebrate it!

So… yay!

The post The Awkward Truths of Celebrating Small Victories appeared first on The Public Leadership Blog.

Two different ideas expressed recently at a conference and on a blog might merge to generate one strategy to address this dual challenge of identifying and developing diverse talent.

• In a recent “Engaging Women in Public Service” conference hosted by the School of Government, Margaret Brunson, Ph.D., shared her research into how high achieving women in the medical field used critical life events to develop their leadership capacity. The session, entitled “Illumined Leadership Perspective: Tapping into Your Life’s Journey to Guide Your Leadership Practice,” was thought provoking in that it directed participants to consider how their personal lives informed their public leadership.

• In a parallel thread of public discourse, Vu Lee, in his blog Nonprofit With Balls, describes the paradox of our societal message that we want to build the leadership and capacity of diverse communities, yet we are less willing to change the strategies for making that happen.

“If we value the voice of our diverse communities, we must build the capacity of organizations led by those communities. But we must do it differently than how we’ve been doing it. We must invest strategically and sufficiently. We must take some risks.”

We could, for example, encourage the development of either young or non-traditional public leaders by providing opportunities to identify and honor the lessons of life events.

Here’s an example often shared by Jim Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UNC Kenan Flagler Business School: Consider a middle school student who lives in the territory of one gang but stays after school at his grandmother’s house, in a neighborhood where another gang dominates the streets. If that kid can safely navigate the walk from one house to the other, he is probably a diplomat.

In my own life experience, I learned how to advocate for others and make complex grant applications in my nonprofit career. That experience came in handy when I helped a loved one navigate medical and disability processes as he suffered through a memory disorder. My professional experience informed my later personal work, but the order in which the critical learning took place might be reversed for someone else. The personal work could come first and go largely unrecognized and under-valued, if we do not present opportunities to name and respect it.

• We could allow job applicants to describe either personal or professional experiences when asked to describe their skills or strongest attributes.
• We could point out to our less confident staff that planning a four generation family reunion demonstrates special event planning skills that could be applied to organizing a professional conference.
• We could recognize that successfully moving homes four times in six years demonstrates the resilience and adaptability of a military spouse.

And, finally, we can examine our own lives and recognize the lessons learned in those hard years when we

• simultaneously cared for young children and ill parents,
• successfully assimilated a blended family,
• escaped a violent situation and created a new, healthier life, or
• insert-your-life-challenge-here.

As we worked through those challenges, we also developed our capacity to make good and useful things happen around us. The public sector always needs more of that.

The post Honoring the Personal Opportunities of Leadership Development appeared first on The Public Leadership Blog.