Leading: the Way — Behaviors That Drive Success

Copyright © 2016 Paulette Ashlin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-9245-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9246-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9247-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016904792

iUniverse rev. date: 3/28/2016

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Follow the Leader

Followership; Behavioral conditioning; The 360-degree feedback process; Fishbowl leadership; Leadership roundup

Chapter 2 Self-Awareness

Liabilities of low self-awareness; Identifying your blind spots; Enhancing your self-awareness; Habitual self-awareness; Hyperactive self-awareness; Leadership roundup

Chapter 3 Self-Control

Self-control positives; Moral licensing; The three-second rule; The WAIT principle; Laid-back leaders; Profanity; Mastering self-control; Leadership roundup

Chapter 4 Empathy

Empathy defined; Understanding your followers; Using empathy; The Platinum Rule; Measuring your empathy; Increasing your empathy; Leadership roundup

Chapter 5 Humility

Importance of humility; Hyperactive humility; Your humility quotient; Good karma; Leadership roundup

Chapter 6 Integrity

The snowball effect; Why integrity works; Nurturing integrity; Leadership roundup

Chapter 7 Personal Stewardship

The three-legged stool; Leg 1: Body; Leg 2: Mind; Leg 3: Spirit; Striking a balance; Workaholics; Leadership roundup

Chapter 8 Communication

Clarity; Passionate communication; Communicating your vision; Repetition; Leadership roundup

Chapter 9 Global Intelligence

Global intelligence defined; Global intelligence works; Becoming globally intelligent; Leadership roundup

Chapter 10 Acting the Part

Leaders as actors; Curtain call

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Praise for

Leading: The Way---Behaviors That Drive Success

Research-based yet highly practical, Leading: The Way shows you how to transform your leadership style; communicate effectively up, down, and across; boost employee engagement; and exemplify vision and purpose. Get the complete picture of what's working, what's not working, and what you can do to improve from Paulette Ashlin's straightforward, behavior-based strategies! A terrific resource!

---Marshall Goldsmith, world-renowned executive coach and New York Times best-selling author of Triggers, MOJO, and What Got You Here Won't Get You There

Leading: The Way is a must-read for anyone aspiring to, or already in, a leadership position in the modern corporate world. Leading: The Way's behavioral approach through self-assessment, empathy, vision, and followership in the context of global awareness has transformed my leadership abilities and will most certainly enhance yours.

---David A. Iannitti, MD, FACS, chief of Hepatic Pancreatic Biliary Surgery, program director of HPB Surgery Fellowship, and professor of surgery at Carolinas HealthCare System

Paulette Ashlin has leveraged her unique cultural upbringing and extensive business experience to write an outstanding book on leadership. She has woven decades of rigorous analysis with personal-best leadership stories to create a thorough yet easy-to-follow source for leadership development. Leading: The Way is a must-read whether you are an experienced executive looking to enhance your leadership skills or are a new manager embarking on your first significant leadership challenge.

---Geoffrey A. Peters, president and CEO of Wikoff Color Corporation

Leading: The Way reflects Paulette Ashlin's coaching style. It is a pragmatic, strategic, and realistic method to leadership success. The behavioral approach fills a gap in leadership development and builds upon competency and strengths models.

---Cathy Burns, president, Produce Marketing Association

Leadership retreats are a common practice for companies to invest in the growth of their leaders. Reading this book made me feel I went off-site to learn. The breadth of topics and depth of the insight was absorbing and transformative.

---Dr. Izzy Justice, chief talent officer, Premier Inc, author of Epowerment and Triathlete EQ

If you are a leader who wants to change, is able to change, and understands that changing behavior is a process, as stated by Paulette Ashlin, then her new book Leading: The Way is a must read. Paulette's fresh take on leading is inspirational and something to be enjoyed by all.

---Kristin Malbasa, vice president of human resources, MacLean-Fogg Component Solutions

This book is a deeply personal account of Paulette Ashlin's views on leadership, illustrated with relevant stories drawn from her successful coaching practice. Bottom line, it is a very accessible, behavioral approach to the challenging issues of effective leadership.

---John E. Kello, PhD, professor of psychology, Davidson College

Leading: The Way is the most clear, practical, and actionable business book I've ever read. Ms. Ashlin serves up the critical concepts of leadership in simple, bite-sized portions and brings each into razor-sharp focus using real-world examples---people and personalities we've all encountered in the workplace. Superb! Essential reading for anyone in business.

---Preston Fay, founder, Technekes

Paulette Ashlin has used her vast experience and knowledge to build a new road for leaders to travel if they are serious about making themselves and the organizations they serve achieve greater success. This book should be read by all who lead or aspire to.

---Harry L. Jones Sr., county manager (retired), Mecklenburg County (North Carolina)

In Leading: The Way, Paulette Ashlin effectively applies her experience from the board room to the manufacturing floor to give insight into the dynamics of how the real workplace functions. This guidance for improving business leaders is both inspired and practical coaching that's certain to improve skills in any business environment.

---John M. Schultz, general manager, Carmel Country Club

To my parents, the best coaches anyone could ever have. I am eternally grateful for your lifelong lessons, encouragement, wisdom, and love.

Introduction

Leaders aren't born, they are made.

And they are made just like anything else, through hard work.

---Vince Lombardi

I have always been an observer, even as a child. My family moved around a lot when I was growing up, literally skirting the globe and exposing me to a variety of different cultures that helped shape who I am today. At the age of eleven, I was propelled from a private French school to a US inner-city public school. Talk about culture shock! In my old world, uniforms and strict teachers were the norm, and the smartest kid in the class was also the most popular. I scarcely gave it a thought. But in my new world in America, everything was inside out and upside down. To be cool, kids showed off their clothes, not their intellect. Teachers were, by turns, friendly or disinterested or unpredictable. And the popular kids? Suffice to say that popularity in my new school had nothing to do with academic ability or classroom achievements.

I scrambled to conform to my new city, culture, customs, and classes. I'd like to say that, being a resilient kid, I adapted quickly, but I did not. Oh, I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be respected and acknowledged. I wanted to be held in high regard and to have influence. But my initial attempts at befriending others failed. I spoke English fluently because my dad was American, but I didn't understand what my American classmates were saying even though we spoke the same language. Slang words, different idioms, and a completely alien take on things struck me as strange. The more I observed and tried to fit in, the stranger things became. I got good at observing nonverbal cues---body language, if you will---and I was able to figure out a path I could follow. I gradually became fascinated with behavior, and that fascination still holds today.

The one thing going in my favor was that I was a child who liked to get to the bottom of life's dilemmas. Introspective and results oriented, I made a practice of regarding my surroundings more keenly. I dug in. I wasn't included? Oh well. Not being included gave me perspective. And as I watched people more carefully, I realized that my classmates tended to cluster in groups based on similarities in demographics, looks, socioeconomic class, and intellect. Moreover, the individuals in those groups tended to mirror one another. They behaved similarly---sometimes, identically. Their behavior defined them. Their behavior was the key to how they were regarded and what they were able to accomplish.

I now know that this phenomenon isn't restricted to teenagers. But at the time, recognizing the influence of behavior was a revelation to me. The way certain people stuck to one another was intriguing to me, albeit also disconcerting because it became difficult to penetrate certain cliques. The concept of cliques is also known as tribalism and is present in some corporate cultures. It can be deadly in terms of cooperation, productivity, and profitability within the company. A good leader will recognize tribalism and do everything possible to defeat this very real and natural human tendency. Once I identified behaviors of the people around me, it made it easier to determine whom I wanted to be, wanted to be with, and wanted to be like. It made it easier for me to make my way.

In a simplistic way, fitting in was my first scientific, albeit primitive, research. I took note of the people I admired and wanted to emulate. I also observed people I disliked and would never want to imitate. And I didn't limit my observational study group to classmates. I expanded my observations to include teachers, businesspeople, celebrities, clergy, and, of course and most importantly, my parents. I watched people's actions, behaviors, and facial expressions and tried to reconcile what they said with what they did.

Many years later, the observational skills I sharpened for survival as an adolescent served me well as an executive in the boardrooms of corporate America, where much of what I observed didn't make sense. I saw corporate executives who were smart and kind but not held in high regard. I saw leaders who achieved a certain level of success but were held in disdain by their teams and colleagues. I saw people who were well educated and well traveled but who couldn't inspire. And likewise, I saw people with the weakest of résumés and credentials who seemed to inspire legions to produce and excel.

What is the secret of professional success? For anybody? What is that magic formula that will propel you to ultimate professional and personal success? How do people become and, more importantly, remain leaders? From my over a decade of executive coaching, I have concluded that behavior is indeed a defining element of success and failure in a leadership role. This book is aimed at managers as well as high-level executives. But if you are new in your career or are an entry-level individual, this book serves as a guide to your future as you become a leader yourself. The book is organized around core concepts of self-awareness, self-control, humility, integrity, empathy, global intelligence, personal stewardship, and performance. I will use personal anecdotes to illustrate some of these core concepts that are central to my behavior-based philosophy of leadership success.

One of the most defining moments for me as an executive coach was when I realized that great leaders are also great actors. They are great performers. They know how to act, how to perform, and, in a nutshell, how to behave---how to behave appropriately.

A client of mine recently asked me to consider why I am writing this book. It is, after all, a considerable undertaking, requiring time from my work and my friends and family. But I've always known that this is a book that I'd need to write, because as simple as it sounds, I want people to be happy at work.

I studied psychology and received my masters in industrial/organizational psychology. As an executive coach, I work with companies and leaders around the world, to help those leaders become more successful and effective. I am not so naive as to believe that bliss ensures corporate success, of course. But I do know that when a leader is successful and effective, his or her workplace and team become more productive, more disciplined, more focused, and, yes, more content---happy---in their work environment. Moreover, I know that many corporate efforts and coaching trends---with the same goals of creating a more productive, more disciplined, and more focused workplace---fall short for a number of reasons.

Where most leadership literature focuses on leadership competencies (like character and integrity), my intention is to go a step beyond and describe the behaviors that support and sustain those competencies. What you'll find here are general principles of effective leadership drawn from my colleagues' and my consulting experience, supported by research. Indeed, you'll find a comprehensive bibliography in the back of the book that may be of interest should you desire to do your own research. The anecdotes I use in the book are based on real experiences. Of course, I changed the names to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. The important point is that the stories will help you more easily understand the situations that come up where behavior really counts, both on a negative and on a positive level.

While not an academic text, this book is for leaders who understand and are willing to change their behaviors to become the best they can be. By and large, most of my clients are high achieving and well intentioned. Even more than their bosses or boards of directors, they themselves want to be better, more effective leaders. And on their journeys to do so, most, somewhere in their careers, have undergone various assessments. Because you are reading this book, I'm betting that you too have undergone assessments, either to identify your strengths and skill sets or perhaps to assess your personality or to delineate your competencies. If so, you likely were intrigued by the results. The difference, however, between identifying those behaviors and then changing those behaviors is vast.

You likely have already realized that it's not enough to know your strengths and weaknesses. Instead, you need to understand how to behave your way into more-effective behaviors. Sounds pretty simple, right? If you act like a great leader, your actual behavior will begin to change for the better as the acting becomes second nature.

Assessments are important, of course, but they are only a first step. Some assessments, for example, measure competencies like inquisitiveness or prudence, which is good to know. But test results aren't solutions. They are information. And while self-knowledge is informative, this book is not only about informing. It's about responding, changing, and improving. It's about behavior. It's about pulling out strengths that need to be exhibited and about squelching the tendencies that impede effective leadership.

From my years of observation and coaching, I know that the one factor that most differentiates effective leaders from ineffective leaders is behavior. Not education. Not experience. Not motivation. Not family history. And certainly not good intentions. (As one of my colleagues often says, The road to hell is paved with good intentions.)

And here's the good news: behavior, unlike some of those other factors, is something you can control and change. You just have to be willing to make the change.

Great leaders behave in great ways. The key to being a great leader isn't luck or being gifted or highly educated or unusually driven. The key to being a great leader is behavior. Great leaders behave in great ways. Sometimes, taking the first step in a journey is the hardest. You have to psych yourself up to get started, but once you do, there is joy and enlightenment in the journey itself. The outcome, what you