Thankfulness

Since it’s the week of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, I have to write about the role of being thankful in leadership. Leaders need to demonstrate how much they appreciate their followers. In the workplace, that translates into showing gratitude to your direct reports for their hard work and performance. Brain research shows that people want to be treated with respect and fairness and will respond positively to sincere positive reinforcement. Showing your employees and team members that you value them and their efforts reinforces their motivation and loyalty. Your demonstration of thanks through recognition and appreciation creates a reinforcing loop that leads to higher performance and happier people. So thank your people this week, but make sure you mean it!

Humility or Arrogance?

I consider humility a characteristic of leadership that reflects emotional intelligence. Balancing humility with confidence moves a leader away from arrogance towards inclusion and sharing the ownership of success. My political leanings are generally left of center and I voted for President Obama because I saw him as the kind of collaborative leader that we needed to reposition the perception of the US around the world. Recently, however, I read a column by a political conservative about the president that raised questions for me. This conservative writer claimed Obama’s language has shifted from “we” to “I” and he pointed out the dangers inherent in that shift. Without more research, I can’t refute at the moment whether Obama’s language is now “I” centered or not. But the language leaders use is critically important and they must pay attention to how they speak about success, because their language can reveal whether they are acting from a place of arrogance or humility.

Principles or Compromise?

Here in Massachusetts, as everyone knows, we lost our senior senator, Ted Kennedy. And now there’s a race to fill his seat. One of those running is our female attorney general, Martha Coakley, who has a strong following among Democratic women. But Coakley just took a stand that could jeopardize her position as a front runner: she said she wouldn’t vote for health care bill approved by the House last Saturday because it restricts federal funding for abortion. I happen to be a strong advocate for choice and was disappointed but not surprised to see that provision in the health care bill and thought it was a compromise that probably had to be made. Coakley’s stand surprised me and it raised a key leadership question. In the long run, what is wiser: holding to your principles or compromising in order to move forward? I’ll be interested to see how the answer unfolds.

Timing and Success

That old saying, “timing is everything,” holds truth. I was recently reminded of this when I read about Gail Collins new book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. I also saw her present on The Colbert Report, where she held up pretty well under Stephen Colbert’s funny but unyielding interviewing techniques. In 1998, I wrote Success on Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary Business Women, which focused on women’s definitions of success and strategies women had used in Corporate America to succeed. I also presented my view that women had come quite a distance since 1960 and should feel positive about the progress they had made rather than just focusing on the fact that there weren’t more women at the top of the Fortune 500. At that time, I was pretty heavily criticized by some for making positive statements about women’s experience in the corporate world. So, maybe it was just too soon to say that or maybe Collins is saying it better — either way I hope people read her work and realize the great strides that women have made.