3x5 Leadership

February 16, 2020

The Emotional Side of Leadership: Why You Need to Care About Emotional Intelligence & What to do About It

Recently, I listened to a seasoned Command Sergeant Major, who was new to his senior enlisted leader billet, lecture a room of Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs; predominantly Sergeant First Classes with 11-17 years in the Army) on his leadership philosophy. His #1 point: emotional intelligence is paramount. While I could not agree more, I could tell the impact of his words were a bit lost on the audience because many NCOs in the room did not know what he meant by “emotional intelligence.” I think numerous formal and informal leaders can relate; this is a complex and often confusing concept. It’s important we clarify emotional intelligence for leaders. It drastically amplifies our leadership impact on our people.

What is “Emotional Intelligence” and Why Do I Need to Care About It?

Emotional intelligence (also referred to EQ – emotional quotient) has two sides to consider. First, it is our capacity to be aware of, control, and express our own emotions appropriately. Second, it our ability to handle relationships with others well; this involves those “squishy” topics like empathy.

Simply, EQ is what enables us to best leverage or control our emotions in our thinking, decision-making, and how we interact with others as leaders. We can probably look at our past experiences as leaders and recall a particular moment when we should have better regulated our emotions and, conversely, times when injecting a bit of our emotion into a situation positively contributed to the outcome or impact. Continue reading → The Emotional Side of Leadership: Why You Need to Care About Emotional Intelligence & What to do About It

February 10, 2020February 3, 2020

Engaging Generation Z: A Military Perspective

By Patrick Hinton

Know Your Audience

Retaining soldiers is a perennial problem for military forces the world over. It is a central topic in the British Army in the face of a difficult recruitment environment. Much stock is given to the fluid nature of employment in the modern world, with a focus on younger generations. This has necessitated a discourse on how best to retain troops who look for more than a steady wage and job security. My interest in the topic was spiked by a 2018 War on the Rocks article by KC Reid which is worth a read if you have a spare ten minutes. Reid makes the point that approaches to leadership must take into account the different age demographics which make up the military.

Much has been made of the different approach to work and life of millennials, and more importantly, Generation Z, which organisations are having to coming to terms with. Broadly, Gen Z encapsulates those under 25 years of age which captures the vast number of junior soldiers and officers serving today. The more fluid conception of career and authority identified in younger people is particularly important for the military, which is necessarily hierarchical. Moreover, it has a career management structure generally based on a 15-20 year term, rather than the 3-5 year periods favoured by a younger demographic. As such, all organisations including the military must work hard to provide engaging employment. This demographic sees no problem is leaving an organisation which is not meeting their expectations. Continue reading → Engaging Generation Z: A Military Perspective

February 3, 2020

Keeping Our Leadership Tank Full

I think many of us spend a lot of personal time thinking on, learning more about, and talking with others about leadership. As a personal example, in a year, I may read several dozen or so books, listen to numerous podcasts, and consume hundreds of different articles aimed at informing how I can lead, influence, and develop other people better.

But, why? What does all this give me? Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is a long list of behaviors and attitudes that I need to start, improve, refine, and stop doing. Realizing this can be very overwhelming and humbling though; identifying all of the things I need to fix to lead and develop others better is hard. But I think there is a less tangible, but more important, benefit to this continued personal commitment to self-development: it keeps my leadership tank full. Continue reading → Keeping Our Leadership Tank Full

January 20, 2020January 18, 2020

Four Ways Leaders Can Connect with Their Employees

By John Packham

Finding new and creative ways to connect with your employees can be difficult. It feels like everything has been done and tried already. But there’s a lot to be said about doing things in fresh and relevant ways. Figuring out how your employees want to be connected with and be engaged, for example, is an important part of effective leader communication. However, it is often overlooked with knowing confidence by many.

We naturally make a lot of assumptions about the people in our charge. It’s time to start getting at the heart of the matter of work by connecting with employees in a new way: the way they prefer. Instead of using tried and true methods of engagement to get people riled up and motivated, simply ask them, “What motivates you to be engaged?” and then work with that. Continue reading → Four Ways Leaders Can Connect with Their Employees

January 12, 2020

We Need to Talk About Our Peoples’ Engagement at Work

Would you confidently state that your people are highly and consistently engaged at work? I think many of us would naturally respond with yes, myself included, but we unfortunately see too many data points that prove otherwise.

Within my military experience, I’ve found that the #1 identifier on how engaged Soldiers are with their work and training at any given time is counting the number of cell phones currently out distracting them from training, work, and the unit’s mission. This is a universal problem though; we can walk into any large business within any industry and see similar disengagement challenges. During my recent holiday travels, I was fascinated to see the extent of employee disengagement that permeated across multiple airports.

The bottom line is that many of our people are not actively engaged in their work or committed to our team or organization. In Gallup’s 2017 State of the Global Workplace report, only 15% of employees worldwide are engage in their jobs.

That’s a problem. And it’s a leadership challenge. Continue reading → We Need to Talk About Our Peoples’ Engagement at Work

December 30, 2019December 30, 2019

An Organization that Reflects Together, Learns Together

To succeed in today’s complex, technology-saturated operating environments, organizations must become agile and adaptive. To remain so, organizations need to commit to being learning ones.

Just as reflection is an essential part of our individual leader development, learning organizations require a formal approach to “organizational reflection” to continue to learn, adapt, and succeed. I consider organizational reflection as a process that calls select groups of members to spend critical time away from their routine work to think on and capture important insights on organizational issues at many different levels in order to interpret experiences and organizational structures, clarify lessons learned, and think on the essential ways such lessons must be applied in the future.

Moreover, just as personal reflection requires us to deliberately allocate time and focused attention to thinking, so too must organizational reflection. Leaders must ensure time and space is dedicated to this collective level of learning to help make sense of our organization’s experiences and decisions, clarify what we’ve learned, and determine how and why we must apply this in the future toward improved effectiveness. Continue reading → An Organization that Reflects Together, Learns Together

December 16, 2019December 16, 2019

The Best Of: A Three-Year Anniversary Celebration

Well, 3×5 Leadership is three years old today. I’m both thrilled and humbled by this landmark. I’m thrilled in seeing what this crazy experiment has accomplished both in my personal leadership growth and in helping others make people and organizations better. I’m humbled by the amazing community of support. I offer a deep, heart-felt thank you to fellow leaders, friends, and followers. You make our leader development community and me better.

To celebrate, I want to highlight the top three things across five different topics from this past year. (3 things x 5 topics…see what I did there?). I hope these resources can inspire you and improve your developmental journey as we head into 2020.

Thank you and as always, lead well, friends. Continue reading → The Best Of: A Three-Year Anniversary Celebration

December 9, 2019December 2, 2019

2019 Holiday Shopping Guide for Leaders

While I’m no Oprah with an internationally famous “Favorite Things” list or Ellen with the 12 days of Giveaways madness, I do recognize the challenges of holiday gift giving — and professional and military leaders are no exception. To help inspire some thinking on gifts for those challenging professionals on your list, below are some of my favorite items from 2019 and ones I’m excited about in 2020.

Most of these items don’t fit the typical “military tactical leader” list of field gear or gadgets. Instead, they more reflect my current operational environment in a “broadening assignment” with less field time and more professional business workplace environment. Yet, I believe many can benefit from these items no matter their field of work or environment. Continue reading → 2019 Holiday Shopping Guide for Leaders

December 2, 2019

I Will Go On: Leadership and Resilience

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

—Samuel Beckett

Earlier this fall, I attended a GEN (Ret.) Martin Dempsey lecture to West Point Cadets on leadership and building a meaningful life. His first visual to support the lecture was this simple line from novelist, Samuel Beckett, with a black and white photo of a WWI Doughboy assaulting from a trench. Dempsey’s argument: you, as a leader, must be the period between those two thoughts. You must lead and inspire your Soldiers from a place where they think they cannot go on toward a resolute “I will go on” – in life, our professional missions, and in our own continued growth and development. I’ve thought on this point often since that lecture. Not only must leaders model resiliency themselves, but also develop it in others. Further, I continue to reflect on the fact that in a lecture on “building a meaningful life,” Dempsey’s first point addressed the importance of personal and collective resiliency. Continue reading → I Will Go On: Leadership and Resilience

November 21, 2019November 18, 2019

Reimagining Your Organizational “Improvement” Program

By Andrew Bordelon

“Embrace the inspectors!” may sound like part of a naïve motivational speech from a commander preparing his/her unit for an upcoming inspection from higher headquarters staff. However, CAPT (R) L. David Marquet and the Sailors of the USS SANTA FE submarine welcomed inspections during his command with remarkable results, as elaborated in his book Turn the Ship Around!. This kind of embracement is not common among US military units. Eyes roll and breaths sigh as leaders discuss command inspection visits. Command inspections tend to surface deficiencies and fill up red boxes on extensive PowerPoint brief slides to a commander’s supervisor. Some commanders are determined to never fail an inspection and keep their units “green” during status updates. Either mindset is focused on remaining in compliance with Army regulations. Hence, the Organizational Inspection Program (OIP) could easily be renamed the Organizational Compliance Program by those units with the wrong attitude toward inspectors. But the inspection implementation offers an opportunity for remarkable results and growth at any level. Leaders can instead consider the OIP a unit’s Organizational Improvement Program and seek ways to instill continuous improvement within a unit – a mechanism to be an enduringly learning organization. Continue reading → Reimagining Your Organizational “Improvement” Program