idealawg

Free report from Harvard Law -- Team-Building Strategies: Building a Winning Team for Your Organization

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law is offering a free report. From the Web page:

In Team-Building Strategies: Building a Winning Team for Your Organization, you’ll discover:

• How to “unfreeze” old thought processes so that real change can happen.
• How to structure negotiation training so that it actually delivers results. (Simply reciting interesting concepts and retelling war stories is not a model for success.)
• How to be certain you understand the key concepts and practical applications of a negotiation simulation.
• What to do when making decisions based on faulty intuition threatens your self-esteem.
• How delegating responsibility without adequate authority can stymie negotiations. (The all-important organizational changes required to help negotiators succeed.)
• Measuring responsibility, accountability and dollar impact. (The essential factors for establishing a well-formed outcome, justifying criteria for success, and rewarding performance objectively.)
• A simple exercise for reducing contentiousness and competition. (Simply adopting this mindset can improve the negotiation outcome.)

Go here to download your copy of the report.

NeuroLeadership Summit 2009: Speakers and topics

Here's a list of speakers from the brochure (linked to below):

• Daniel Siegel – author of best seller ‘The Developing Mind’, co-director of UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center
• Warren Bennis – one of the greats of leadership development
• Werner Erhard – founding father of transformational leadership
• Jonah Lehrer – neuroscientist and author of recent bestseller ‘How We Decide’
• Marco Iacoboni – leading mirror neuron researcher
• Naomi Eisenberger – leading social neuroscience researcher
• Yi-Yuan Tang – leading attention researcher
• Matthew Lieberman – founding father of social neuroscience
• Evian Gordon – leading brain researcher, building world’s largest database of brain research
• John Joseph – expert on teaching kids about the brain
• Dr Al Ringleb – Director, CIMBA Business School, Italy, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute
• David Rock – author and global leadership consultant, co-founder, NeuroLeadership Institute

And some of the topics to be covered:

• Mindfulness and the integrated brain
• How we make decisions
• The neuroscience of flow
• Making decisions in groups
• Emotional regulation and the brain
• The neuroscience of motivation
• How we know each other
• The social brain
• Learning from the masters of change
• Making leadership development stick

More in this NeuroLeadership Summit brochure [pdf].

"Educating Law Students for Leadership Roles and Responsibilities"

Each day I sort through old e-mail trying to catch up and usually find some gems. This evening I found an article I believe many of you will want to read. It is written by Don Polden, the dean of my alma mater.

Excerpt from "Educating Law Students for Leadership Roles and Responsibilities" (University of Toledo Law Review) [pdf]:

I. INTRODUCTION

This essay articulates the case for educating law students for leadership roles and responsibilities they will assume throughout their careers. While leadership education is relatively commonplace in American business schools, it is not a familiar part of the law school curriculum at American law schools. This essay describes this new educational initiative and the fundamental reasons for this approach to preparing law students for the roles and responsibilities they will assume in their communities and in the legal profession. In particular, this essay discusses the components and purposes of the program and defines what is meant by education for leadership by lawyers. It also attempts to make the case that leadership skills and attributes are fundamental lawyering skills and that educating law students for leadership roles and responsibilities advances efforts to expose our students to a broader array of fundamental lawyering skills and values. This essay expresses the hope that legal educators and law firm professional development experts will build leadership training into their curricula and their programs.

II. THE GENESIS OF SANTA CLARA LAW’S PROGRAM FOR EDUCATING LAW STUDENTS FOR LEADERSHIP ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

My school, Santa Clara University School of Law, recently initiated efforts to educate its law students for leadership roles and responsibilities in the legal profession and in their communities. The programmatic efforts included a “first of its kind” course in leadership skills for lawyers, the development of some scholarship about the concept of leadership by lawyers, several discussions of the importance of educating law students for leadership roles, and leadership skills training for student leaders at the law school. Moreover, leadership course components are being constructed and used in a law school course with the hope that other components in other courses will be developed in the future.

Several purposes were served by launching this initiative at Santa Clara University. First, the education of students for leadership roles as lawyers is consistent with many aspects of the law school’s mission.1 The law school attempts to educate ethical, competent, and compassionate lawyers who are encouraged to make a difference in their communities and to prepare them for the

Do you have grit? Most people do not: Test yours now

What's grit? Authors of this article "Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) [pdf] define it right in the article's title. They add:

Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.

They begin the article with a somewhat sobering, even depressing, statement by William James:

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources. . .men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.

They go on to look at whether grit is critical to success, and believe their findings suggest that indeed it is.

Want to test your grit? Here's the Grit Scale [pdf]. Read more about the Grit Scale here [pdf]. And you can participate in a Grit Study. How much grit do you have?

Blog Glob: "The notion of mindfulness: For better self-management and better leadership"

Excerpt:

You must avoid two common extremes in reacting to events. How you respond to the world can affect how fast your company responds to an economic downturn.

...

Fixation

It is always likely in any crisis situation that managers will become so preoccupied with a few central signals that they largely ignore things at the periphery. In the case of the Tenerife disaster, the KLM pilot was undoubtedly focused on three important matters: (1) the need to proceed with a quick takeoff (the KLM crew was approaching the legal limit of time it was allowed to fly in a month), (2) the complex maneuvers of turning around a 747 on a short runway and (3) clouds that reduced visibility in important traffic areas. Because the crew members were so preoccupied, they didn't give sufficient attention to the presumably very important communications coming in from air traffic controllers.

Relaxation

This is almost the opposite problem, and it tends to follow sustained periods of high concentration. Managers who have achieved a certain level of success often become less vigilant toward subtle changes in the situations they face. This was also explicitly cited as a likely contributing factor in the Tenerife disaster. The Spanish Ministry of Transport reported: "Relaxation - after having

Blog Glob: Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask

Excerpt:

One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, recently shared with me a mentorship framework, first inspired by wellness guru, Deepak Chopra, that he's evolved and used over the years. The framework is an amazingly simple-yet-powerful set of five critical questions. ... These five questions, when asked in the order presented, form an effective diagnostic tool that can provide better guidance to mentees, employees, or generally anyone with whom you are playing the role of a counselor. Additionally, they can serve as a self-diagnosis of one's own capabilities and opportunities.

Here are the questions:

Click to read the rest of Five Questions Every Mentor Must Ask (Harvard Business Publishing blog).

Apology training as a growth business? Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes about three words every leader needs to know

Those words are: "I am sorry." From Three Little Words Every Leader Needs to Learn (Harvard Business Publishing blog):

If a leader cannot admit being wrong in a timely fashion, he or she can never correct mistakes, change direction, and restore success. The consequences get worse the longer denial prevails. Hiding bad news from stockholders and creditors while offering rosy forecasts has brought down many a CEO. Samsung's 20-year chairman stepped down after being indicted on tax evasion charges, but this was not his first mistake. He faced corruption scandals and a bribery charge in the 1990s. Had he said then "I was wrong" and chosen a more ethical course, perhaps he could have preserved his job and his legacy.

Some people find it so hard to admit a mistake that they dig themselves into a deeper hole even when given an easy chance to correct themselves. Eason Jordan's inability to back down from an extreme position taken at a World Economic Forum session in Davos cost him his job. On a panel in a

Are you a T-shaped lawyer? A T-shaped person? Or do you look more like an I?

Kind of an interesting concept—the T-shaped person. I read about it in an interview of Stanford entrepreneurship professor Tina Seelig. From the interview (San Jose Mercury News):

One of the things I talk about in my book is creating T-shaped people. This means people with a great depth of knowledge in at least one discipline, like chemical engineering or biology, and a breadth of knowledge across many skills. Across the top of the T are a knowledge of leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship.

It's no longer good enough to be an individual contributor where you have a clearly defined role. You need to be able to work across disciplines. The classes range from traditional business topics such as strategy, finance and marketing, but also focus on leadership, dealing with innovation and negotiation — the softer skills that are very, very important. So it's about management and leadership.

So is the opposite of a T-shaped person an I-shaped person? I am going to declare it so and add that I know several I-shaped lawyers, those with depth but no breadth or "softer skills." In fact, in some firms, the I's have it. What's the best way for them to add arms to their I's turning them into multi-skilled T's? What are your thoughts?

Note: Seelig's new book (mentioned above) is What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World.

"10 Secrets to Finding Happiness During the Recession"

Lots of old wisdom but some new research supporting it. From "10 Secrets to Finding Happiness During the Recession" (US News & World Report)

How can we truly feel happy right now, in this moment when our 401(k)'s and house values are tanking? When our jobs are threatened or already lost? U . S . News posed this question to leading happiness researchers to find out what tools we can employ to stay upbeat in gloomy days. While it's true that some lucky folks are born with sunny dispositions, others, according to the latest studies, can learn to be happy. How? "We need to move away from the concept of trying to fill our days with frequent pleasurable moments and fewer negative moments," explains Todd Kashdan, a professor of positive psychology at George Mason University and author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. "What truly provides satisfaction is having a meaning and purpose in life, which is doubly important in the midst of this current economic nightmare." Ten other secrets:

Click to read the rest.

Ready, aim ... fail: Another article on the downside of goal setting

With such an emphasis on goals in the US, cautionary words about setting and using them are always for me a welcomed balance. A Boston Globe article this morning takes a look at the pros and cons of setting goals. From "Ready, aim ... fail: Why setting goals can backfire":

[A] few management scholars are now looking deeper into the effects of goals, and finding that goals have a dangerous side. Individuals, governments, and companies like GM show ample ability to hurt themselves by setting and blindly following goals, even those that seem to make sense at the time. These skeptics draw on a broad array of large-scale failures - the design of the Ford Pinto, the Enron collapse, the rash lending practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - as evidence of the pernicious effects of goals. Outside the workplace, these thinkers point to the unintended consequences of high-stakes testing in grade schools, and psychological literature showing that goals and other incentives can constrict our thinking. Even the scarcity of cabs on rainy days, some argue, illustrates the ways that goals can blind people to their own best interests.

The argument is not that goal setting doesn't work - it does, just not always in the way we intend. "It can focus attention too much, or on the wrong things; it can lead to crazy behaviors to get people to