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The Secret About Efficiency

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Monday, May 18th, 2020

· 6 Comments

Efficiency can be remarkably inefficient. It leads us to focus on the things we can be efficient about, which may not be the things that get us farthest toward where we, or our organizations, need to be.

Especially for engaging people and offering them ways to grow and learn, to become better at their jobs and more energized as people, efficiency just isn’t very efficient. That’s because engagement and growth take time, and efficiency is always in a hurry, and has no patience. But as Margaret Wheatley has said, “Urgency destroys capacity.”

Is this a paradox? Isn’t efficiency supposed to increase capacity by helping us get more done in less time? The question is, do we do the most things, or do we do the things that matter most? And in the big picture, the picture big enough to build real capacity, what really matters?

Here’s an example: On a Nova Scotia Sea School adventure voyage, the food for the teenage crew is kept in watertight plastic buckets. The Sea School’s boat is completely open to the weather, and everything gets wet and stepped on. The buckets protect food and gear for the week-long voyage.

Each bucket has all the food for a single meal, so the buckets are labeled “Dinner Day 1” or “Breakfast Day 5”. Some instructors like to load the food buckets into the boat in order, so the first meal is forward at the bow, the second meal next to it and so on. That way it’s easy to find the appropriate meal.

Other instructors let the crew load the buckets haphazardly, in no order at all. They don’t do this because they’re lazy or disorganized, but because without a system the crew has to have a greater awareness of where things are. When the cook for the day asks, “Where’s Day 4?” at dinner time, the crew goes into search mode. Either someone knows because they were paying attention, or no one knows and we all have to look, reminding us that it helps to pay attention. This kind of awareness of our surroundings, the ability to deal with our stuff, is one of the main goals of the Sea School’s youth development work.

It’s an inefficient way of finding the food but a very efficient way of developing people’s awareness of what’s going on around them. People who focus on getting things done are often not the best at working with the subtleties of other people’s state of mind, at bringing out the best in others. Having a state of mind that is attuned to what’s going on with the buckets is a step toward a state of mind that is attuned to what’s going on with ourselves, our shipmates, our organization.

The point of this is not that we should scatter our inventory all over the warehouse so our employees can practice greater awareness of their surroundings. The point is that when it comes to the kind of leadership that is generous enough to create conditions for others to develop their capacity as people, it can be efficient to leave efficiency behind. Growth takes time, and we can not systematize it. The most efficient way to lead people to their personal best is to not be in a hurry.

Being Close to the World

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

· No Comments

On a clear, windy day in the protected waters of Mahone Bay a few years ago, the Sea School’s boat, ELIZABETH HALL, sailed dancingly through the waves, her side only a few inches above the water. I leaned down on the edge of he hull, my elbow splashed now and then, watching the elegant curve of her planks arcing steadily through the lapping and gurgling of the waves. I was as close to the water and to the graceful strength of the boat as I can be, and the intimate vividness of it made me laugh with delight.

This is one of my most vivid memories of leading ELIZABETH’s 10-day coastal maiden voyage with a crew of twelve teenagers. We had built this 30′ traditional sailboat ourselves, through the preceeding winter. Now she was our home for a lengthy coastal exploration.

On the maiden voyage, or any Sea School voyage, the thirteen of us in the crew are also as close to each other as we can be. There’s barely room for us all to stretch out on the oars at night and sleep. This is claustrophobic and frustrating, but like the closeness of the water, it’s very real.

On a sailing craft we are close to what matters; the real world. Water and waves, wind and weather, sky and stars, all the details and demands of the boat itself and all the personalities and hopes and fears of our shipmates. It is a deeply engaged existence, and we have to be willing to engage it all, including each other, all the time, or we get the boat and each other in deep trouble.

Back ashore after that week afloat, hurricane Irene approached Halifax. I spent the afternoon securing my own boat against the storm, taking off sails, checking the mooring line. A hurricane is not something I want to be particularly close to, but preparing for the worst helps me connect with the storm as a real thing, not a TV episode.

This is one of the great gifts of boats. They offer, and demand, a closeness to the world that is not otherwise part of our everyday experience. And the gift of learning to be part of a ship’s crew is the willingness to seek the closeness of reality, to engage with things as they actually are. That closeness follows us ashore and everything is more vivid, more real, more engaging.

I’d like to be at sea more than I am these days, but without the luxury of that constant reminder, the task for me now is to still seek the closeness of what’s real in the places and the people I meet, at work and beyond. When I am willing to be close to my experience, I can know it well enough to be able to find fair winds and good sailing. When I hide, I run aground on unexpected rocks.

We don’t all have boats as reminders. But we all have something that shows us the power of being close to what’s really going on. What works for you?

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The Key to Managing Up

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Monday, May 4th, 2020

· 2 Comments

The Director of Supply Chain Management at a major Canadian industrial company, who took one of my leadership development classes, told me about the snow day policy he has to enforce that he thinks is crazy. If someone decides it’s not safe for them to drive to work in a heavy snowfall, they have 3 choices. They can make up the hours another time. They can take a vacation day. Or they can take an unpaid day.

This is because the VP of Finance doesn’t trust anyone, and assumes that, even though people can take work home and still put in a full day, if paid snow days are allowed people will just go skiing or watch TV, and he won’t be able to monitor them.

Now the director cares a lot about trust, both because it’s a big theme in business these days, and also because he personally values trust very highly. He makes building trust within his own team a priority. He knows the VP doesn’t trust him, or anyone else, and this is very personally frustrating for the director. The director is always trying to find ways to address the trust issue, and rarely gets anywhere.

This raises a very helpful guideline for dealing with attitude: the difference between an interesting question and a useful question, between a question you care about, and the question the person you’re working with cares about.

The Supply Chain Director might really want to know why the VP is so untrusting. But the VP, as the senior person, might not see any reason why he should humour the director with that conversation. It might go nowhere.

Because the question, “Why doesn’t the VP trust anyone,” may be an interesting question for the director, but it’s not a useful question. The VP probably doesn’t feel the need to be psychoanalyzed by his staff, which might be how he would take it if the director approached him about issues of trust. It’s not a question likely to start a conversation the VP cares about.

The more useful question in this case is, “What is the VP trying to protect with this snow day policy?” The VP would probably have a lot to say about that. About how the company can’t afford to throw wages away on people who aren’t doing any work, the need to keep productivity tight, having to protect the bottom line, and so on.

So if what the VP cares about is protection for productivity and the bottom line, what effect is the snow day policy having on those things?

This is the approach the Supply Chain Director and I decided he should take. He spent time assessing the effect on morale in his team. If there was snow in the prediction everyone got nervous and crabby and distracted from their work. Communication was less fluid. Details got missed. And this effect carried over even on days when snow wasn’t an issue. It pushed the enthusiasm-for-work factor down a notch altogether.

It’s hard to put an exact value on these things, but the Director made some assumptions and some estimates. He figured that the snow day policy had a negative effect on productivity overall, and he put it conservatively at 1 or 2 percent. He thought it might be more, but he had enough concrete data points of missed orders, delayed paperwork and so on that he thought he could defend 2%.

This process he went through is called dollarizing. If you can put a dollar figure on the costs of attitude, you can make it personal for people who’s job it is to care about numbers.

What’s 2% of the cost of operating the Supply Chain department for this huge company? It’s huge. It’s far more than the cost of giving every employee a paid day for every snow day even if they do just go skiing. The policy was counterproductive to what the VP actually cared about.

This was how the Director made the issue personal for the VP. Not by asking about trust, but by asking about numbers. By asking about what the VP personally cared about.

When you need to get peers or the boss unstuck from an unhelpful attitude, you have to start with understanding what they really care about, personally. That’s not always so easy to find out. And you don’t have as much sway with people at your level or above your level as you do with direct reports, to get them to engage in a conversation about it with you. Often you have to extrapolate from their behaviour, and the VP’s behaviour seems to indicate that he cares more about numbers than about trust. No matter how interested you may be in trust, the useful questions are likely to be about numbers. So you go with that. Because you have to find a way to make the question personal for the VP. When it comes down to core issues, work is always personal.

The CEO and the Chairs

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Tuesday, April 28th, 2020

· No Comments

Michael Scott was for many years CEO of Precision BioLogic, a medium-sized medical products company twice rated one of the Top Ten Best Places to Work in Canada.

Michael told me that he often pushed the chairs back against the boardroom table whenever he saw that they’re out of place. He made sure the chairs were evenly spaced and neat. He’d often do this at the end of a meeting he had been in, after people had left or as he was talking to someone who stayed behind. If he walked by the open door to the room and saw another group had left the chairs in disarray, he’d go in and arrange them, and whoever might be walking with him had to follow him in.

His employees began by thinking this was odd, not something worthy of the CEO’s attention, or anyone’s attention. Everyone’s busy, why fuss with the chairs, what difference does it make?

When I asked why he did it, Michael said only, “I like it. It makes me feel better.” He didn’t try to strategize it or put out a memo about it. He just did it.

Michael’s care about the chairs became a point of creative friction, rubbing against people’s casualness, speed and preoccupation. Slowly the practice caught on with some of Michael’s colleagues, who started paying attention to chairs in a similar way.

Michael explained that the fact the orderly chairs made him feel better is not trivial. If he felt better when he entered the room, he felt better about the prospects for the meeting. He noticed how the chairs affected his state of mind. The role of the chairs in helping to cut through casualness, speed and preoccupation had a subtly beneficial influence on the people who entered the room.

The point is not that orderliness is the best practice. Google thrives on unbridled creativity. If people start lining up the loungers and beanbag chairs in neat lines at Google that might be an indication that something is wrong.

Either way, what happens if we start paying attention to the chairs? We can probably notice how the way we relate to the chairs is a reflection of our state of mind in that moment. Can we also notice how it works the other way too, that the way we relate to the chairs can actually have an influence on our state of mind, can make us feel better or worse?

This is a subtle kind of generous leadership. Generous self-leadership first, because Michael’s practice with the chairs made him feel better and work better. But also generous team leadership, because it showed people another way to use the physical environment to influence their own state of mind, and cut through their speed and preoccupation. Not everyone took advantage of this, which is another way that Michael’s practice was generous. It works for some, not for all, and he didn’t force it. But when someone in authority makes quiet gestures like this, their gestures can have a huge, if subtle, impact. What offering do you make that is your equivalent of the board room chairs?

Win Without Fighting

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Saturday, April 25th, 2020

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When we’re attacked head on, it’s possible to deflect and redirect the attack in a way that protects both us and the attacker. This is one of the traditional teachings of the martial art Aikido, and it’s true in daily life as well as on the mat. We can learn to defeat the aggression but protect the aggressor, and turn a battle into a useful engagement.

This is what I learned from Wendy Palmer, a sixth-degree black belt Aikido master who teaches a series of “techniques that help you to recognize how your mind and body habitually react to pressure, and to access more skillful and unified responses.”

Wendy points out that usually when we want to change our mind somehow, cheer up or be more fearless or be more patient or whatever, we spend a lot of time and energy on a direct assault on the problem. We try to talk ourselves into it, we see a psychologist, we buy self-help books. But that approach usually ends up feeling like just more pressure, another attack on us, but from ourselves. It fortifies our resistance and we get nowhere.

One of Wendy’s basic teachings is that the most effective approach is the indirect approach.

Rather than try to attack our minds directly, she teaches how to change our bodies instead. We can try being upright and relaxed when we stand or sit. Being both those things at once is actually really hard. We’re usually tall and rigid or relaxed and slouchy. But we can experience how that posture, strong and gentle at the same time, actually helps us change our attitude to one of possibility and cheerfulness about things, rather than one of rigid resistance. Working with this posture through a series of Wendy’s exercises, moving and standing, we can feel the truth that how we hold our bodies has a powerful effect on the how we are in turn held by our minds.

Each of us has our own particular way that we habitually constrict and hunker down when someone pushes on us. Our body hunkers down when someone pushes physically, our mind hunkers down when someone pushes figuratively. What it’s like to “hunker up” instead? In Wendy’s Aikido exercises, when someone tires to push us over, we extend our bodies up and out in a way that creates a strong but non-combative reaction, and we become receptive and immovable at the same time. Then we can redirect the pushing, and the person’s attack turns into an engagement with them that we direct. Our stance, physical or emotional, determines our range of possible reactions. This is true of our posture when a partner is physically pushing us over in the exercises, and of course it’s equally true of how we hold ourselves when someone bursts into our office with a complaint or when a neighbor is yelling at us over the fence.

This power of the indirect approach, working with the body as a way to work with our state of mind, is something we can see over and over throughout the day, and it’s one of my favourite techniques for working with difficult situations. Before we address an attack, we first have to address ourselves. If we’re having trouble bringing the right state of mind to the situation, we can start with our bodies. It’s like magic. Ordinary magic. When our bodies are upright and relaxed, our minds can be upright and relaxed too. From that stance, we can turn the attack into a useful engagement, and everyone wins.

The Attitude of Stopping

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Saturday, April 25th, 2020

· No Comments

I am often aware of the “vapour trail of preoccupations” that I tow around with me all day. What seems like focus is actually a fog of preoccupation that obscures my effectiveness. But there are practices that can let this vapour trail dissipate.

The easiest practice is simply stopping. When we can get ourselves to stop, even for a moment, we can remember a more panoramic state of mind; a state of mind that can let us see more clearly what should happen next. We tend to mistake our whirl of activity for effectiveness. What the whirl really does is narrow our focus and constrain our energy so that we put a lid on our creativity, or lose track of the bigger things that matter most, or just have the feeling that we’re not fully there.

One way to practice stopping is to set the chime on our watch, or on our computer, to go off every hour, and when it does, to stop for a couple of minutes. Take some deep breaths, let the task of the moment subside, and see where we are.

Often we’ll find that we’re not where we should be. We’re obsessing, or off on a tangent, or just more tense than we realized and nervously going in circles. In a moment of stillness we can see this, relax, rouse some clarity, and proceed afresh. Perhaps in a different, more productive direction. Perhaps with the missing insight that comes seemingly from nowhere when we stop to make space for it. At the least, with a more steady, collected energy.

It’s the way we suddenly find the answer to some difficulty when we’re in the shower, or the elevator, or waiting in line. These are all excellent places to practice stopping, since we’re stopped anyway. Making these stops an hourly habit cultivates that panoramic state of mind, so that it can start popping up more often at other times too, throughout the day, when we need it most.

Because contrary to what we’d like to think, activity is not the same as effective action. For us to know what action has the most leverage we need two things. First, we have to see the whole situation clearly. For this we need to stand still and find a big vantage point, which we don’t get with our head down in the task. Second, we need an effective quality of effort; not mindless momentum, but well-paced application. Stopping for a moment of space lets us remember these two ingredients of success.

One Way to Motivate Performance

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Saturday, April 18th, 2020

· 2 Comments

Robert Hessen tells this story in “Steel Titan: The Life of Charles M. Schwab.” It’s a provocative way to motivate performance. Is it a good one? What do you think?

Charles Schwab was a labourer at Carnegie Steel who rose to be supervisor of all of the plant supervisors for Andrew Carnegie in the 1890s. Apparently he had an uncanny talent for engaging his people. Schwab often recalled a story which demonstrates this talent.

“I had a mill manager”, he recounted, “who was finely educated, thoroughly capable and master of every detail of the business. But he seemed unable to inspire his men to do their best.

‘How is it that a man as able as you,’ I asked him one day, ‘cannot make this mill turn out what it should?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I have coaxed the men; I have pushed them, I have sworn at them. I have done everything in my power. Yet they will not produce.’

It was near the end of the day; in a few minutes the night force would come on duty. I turned to a workman who was standing beside one of the red-mouthed furnaces and asked him for a piece of chalk.

‘How many heats has your shift made today?’ I queried.

‘Six,’ he replied.

I chalked a big ‘6’ on the floor, and then passed along without another word. When the night shift came in they saw the ‘6’ and asked about it.

‘The big boss was in here today,’ said the day men. ‘He asked us how many heats we had made, and we told him six. He chalked it down.’

The next morning I passed through the same mill. I saw that the ‘6’ had been rubbed out and a big ‘7’ written instead. The night shift had announced itself. That night I went back. The ‘7’ had been erased, and a ‘10’ swaggered in its place. The day force recognized no superiors. Thus a fine competition was started, and it went on until this mill, formerly the poorest producer, was turning out more than any other mill in the plant.”

Now maybe you think internal competition is a good motivational strategy. Maybe you think it’s manipulative. But two things strike me about Schwab’s chalk numbers.

First, his approach was wonderfully indirect. It took no effort on his part, no getting buy-in for stretch goals, no engagement strategy, no “leadership” at all really. If he’d expressed any expectation or demand when he drew the 6, it would have changed everything. But he left without a word, letting the “6” do all the work. As it turns out, the “6” was more compelling and engaging than any “leadership” could have been.

Second, Schwab knew what his employees cared about and what they didn’t. They weren’t interested in producing more steel so Carnegie could meet its quarterly earnings guidance, or be ranked among the most productive US companies for the year. They didn’t care about winning the “Mill of the Month” award. They didn’t even care about pleasing the big boss, or even about not getting yelled at by their mill manager.

What they cared about was being a better steelworker than the next guy in their own steelworkers’ sphere.

Schwab understood his people well, perhaps because he began as a labourer himself. He knew what they needed, and what they didn’t need, to perform at their best. In that sense, I call Schwab’s leadership generous. Generous leadership is giving what’s needed, not giving what’s not needed, and above all, knowing the difference.

Ask yourself, “What’s the ‘6’ for my people? What do they really care about.” If you’re not sure, you may be thinking too much about what you want them to care about, which isn’t the same thing.

For more on taking the indirect approach, click here.

(Story adpated from “Steel Titan: The Life of Charles M. Schwab” by Robert Hessen)

Mackinac in the Dark

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

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PRIDE with all sail set

Captain Jan Miles had been captain of the PRIDE OF BALTIMORE II for over 25 years when I sailed with him. Here’s a leadership lesson I learned from him.

The PRIDE is a Tall Ship, a 157’ square-topsail schooner carrying over 9,000 square feet of sail, and she sails all over the world as goodwill ambassador for Baltimore and the State of Maryland. I joined her as one of the Mates on a nine-month voyage from Baltimore up the Atlantic coast, into the Great Lakes and back.

On our way back from Chicago we were approaching Mackinac Island at the northern tip of Michigan. It was late evening, getting dark, with a light breeze from the northwest. Mackinac harbour is formed by rock breakwaters, and the widest part inside where PRIDE could anchor is only about eight times the length of the ship. Cruising boats at anchor are scattered throughout, and a lane has to be left open for the ferry. For a ship the size of PRIDE, it’s a crowded spot.

As we approached, Captain Jan had us get the anchor ready, but he said nothing about taking down sails and starting the engine. We didn’t know how full of other boats the anchorage would be or how much room we’d have to maneuver, and we were entering under full sail in the dark. But as we approached the breakwaters Jan said nothing.

Realizing what was about to happen, all of us in the crew went forward to stand by for sail handling. As PRIDE passed the end of the breakwater and entered the harbour Jan called out to “drop the headsails”, the three sails at the front of the ship. We were ready, and all three sails came running down together into a pile on the bowsprit. No time to gather them in, we let them hang there. A moment later Jan called out to “brail up the foresail”, the big sail in the middle of the ship that could be pulled up and bunched against the mast with a series of ropes called brails. We were ready, and the foresail disappeared. Then Jan turned PRIDE straight into the northwest wind, heading for a spot we could make out in the dark among the anchored yachts. There was room for us, but we were still moving, and Jan called out to “square the topsail”. PRIDE carries a rectangular sail that spreads out across the ship high up on the foremast, and unlike the other sails, this topsail can be held out against the wind to push the ship backwards, acting like a brake. We were ready, and we turned the topsail against the wind to stop the ship. Jan called out to “let go the anchor”. We were ready. The anchor chain rattled out and with the wind pushing against the topsail, we sailed the ship backward into our spot among the yachts until the anchor chain came up taut, and we were there.

Triumphantly, we set to stowing the sails for the night. This was the kind of maneuver that Captain Jan was known for, and we saw ourselves as the crew who could pull it off. Evidently he did too.

The rest of the crew and I responded to a real-life situation that demanded we be ready and do our best, and Captain Jan didn’t need to do anything more to engage us than put us in that situation. When, as leaders, we create potent situations that invite deep engagement, we can let those situations do the work of engagement for us. A potent situation can do the work of engaging people more effectively than any exhortation, charisma, personal brilliance or other “leadership” we can offer. A sailing ship at sea demands engagement, regardless of who is captain, but a good captain knows how not to diminish the ship’s power with their “leadership.”

Red-eyed_Tree_Frog_-_Litoria_chloris_edit1

New Reflections from the Frog Prince

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Wednesday, March 4th, 2020

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A young princess walked in the forest by a pool, playing with her golden ball. Being a bit clumsy, she let the ball fall into the pool, where it sank out of sight. A frog heard her cries and said, “I will get your ball for you, if you will let me live with you, eat food from your own plate and sleep in your own bed.” Distraught, and thinking the frog would never be able to get all the way back to the castle, the princess agreed. The frog brought up her ball, and she grabbed it and ran away home, leaving the frog behind

But that night the frog knocked at the castle door, come to redeem the princess’s promise. The king her father told her she must always keep her word. (Good father) So for three days, to her great disgust, the frog ate from her plate and slept beside her on her pillow. The morning of the third day she awoke to find, not a frog, but a young prince, looking at her with the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. They rode off to his kingdom in a golden coach, and lived, you know, happily ever after.

How many of our problems are enchanted? They look like frogs, but if we share our meals and our pillow with them, peaceably, as fellow travelers, we can relax enough to look deep into their big, slimy, slitted red eyes and see the prince looking back at us

This is the purpose of reflection. The struggle to act, to de-frog the world, limits our view to frogs. When we take time to reflect, we look beyond frogginess to insight, to unexpected answers, to creativity, to appreciation. But reflection requires us to treat our problems not with disgust, but with kindness and intimacy, with gentleness and inquiry, and with time. One meal didn’t do it for the frog prince. It took three days.

Sharing this kind of time with our problems is of course sharing this kind of time with ourselves. The part the Brothers Grimm left out of the story is what the princess saw in herself as she slept with her frog. When we reflect, our froggy problem is our mirror. The prince is not hiding in the frog, he’s hiding in us.

As the end of summer looms, my wish for us all is that in the fast-moving year ahead we may also have time to reflect, to rest with our difficulties and see where they might take us. The way forward for each of us begins with our own self-leadership, and our frogs invite us.

Here’s a frog practice to try: Pick a problem and go for a walk with it, or have a drink with it, or take a bath with it. Take a hosting attitude toward your time together, without too much expectation, and let the tension between you relax. Ask what your problem needs, not from your point of view, but from its point of view. Ask what of yourself is reflected in that problem. Don’t answer too quickly. If you have an answer, ask, “Why is that my answer?” And if you don’t find an answer don’t be discouraged. Try again later. And if you find an answer you don’t like, that just seems like another frog, don’t beat yourself up about it. Share the time together, without expectation, and give the magic time to work.

I am indebted to LeAnne Grillo and Reos Partners for the seed of this post. They offer an excellent facilitation tool for reflection in Lessons from the Frog Prince .

Bringing Out the Best In Everyone: A Tribute to Nelson Mandela

Posted by Crane Stookey

· Saturday, February 22nd, 2020

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Nelson Mandela

Before Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa, he invited the leader of white armed resistance, General Viljoen, to meet with him in his living room. This was a meeting that might have gone badly. General Viljoen led a large, well-trained force, and he was fiercely opposed to all Mandela’s efforts to end apartheid

But Mandela was disarmingly hospitable and cordial. He treated the general as his guest, and the genuine kindness with which Mandela served his enemy tea cut through the general’s initial resistance. Then in the course of the conversation the general said that he and his white followers had the power to stop the upcoming election by violence. Mandela replied, with great directness but without raising his voice, that they could not possibly hope to win. The black and coloured population would never give up their new freedoms, they would resort to guerrilla operations from the bush, and any white armed resistance would lead to decades of civil war. “Is that what you want, General, for your children and your grandchildren?” The general said no, and with that word, the possibility of civil war was defeated.

Mandela’s was a respectful sort of fierceness, cutting perhaps, but not undercutting. He touched the best in his adversary and himself, their mutual aspirations for their grandchildren. If we remember to speak only to the best in the people we work with, even when their best is completely submerged by their worst, our fierceness can call out their best, and they can rise to the occasion. If we cut them off at the knees, they can’t rise at all.

Speaking directly and honestly to the best in people also brings out the best in us. To see people’s best, we have to look at them as directly and honestly as we can. We try to see them as whole people, not just the embodiment of our frustration. It takes more than fierce expression. It takes fierce perception.

Excerpted from Crane’s book, ”Keep Your People in the Boat – Workforce Engagement Lessons from the Sea.” Click here to download a free e-book or audiobook.

To speak with Crane about support for your organization’s leadership development, or for personal performance coaching, please call him at (902) 240-5904, or click here

(Mandela story from Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin, Penguin Press, New York, 2008)

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