communication

Explore the Versatility of SLII®

/ Ken Blanchard

Most of you already know about SLII®, our company’s situational approach to leadership and our flagship product. Millions of managers around the world have found it to be the very best way to lead. The SLII® model shows leaders how to give their team members the right kind of leadership style for the person’s development level on each specific task or goal they do. Here’s how it works:

When working toward completing a task or achieving a goal, everyone moves along a continuum made up of four development levels. Managers use this practical framework to assess a person’s competence and commitment on a task and diagnose their development level:

  • Enthusiastic Beginner (D1): The person has low competence and high commitment. They don’t know how to do the task but are excited to get started.
  • Disillusioned Learner (D2): The person has some competence but low commitment. Still early in the learning process, they are feeling discouraged and insecure about moving forward.
  • Capable, but Cautious, Contributor (D3): The person has high competence and variable commitment. They are finally getting the hang of things but still need occasional help.
  • Self-Reliant Achiever (D4): The person has high competence and high commitment. They are at the top of their game on this task.

Next, the manager matches the person’s development level on the task with the leadership style that has the right combination of directive and supportive behaviors to help the person succeed: S1—Directing; S2—Coaching; S3—Supporting; and S4—Delegating.

If you have taken SLII® training, you may remember being asked by the facilitator to come up with a situation in your own life where you could apply the SLII® model. This is where everyone learns how many areas SLII® can be applied, not only on their job but also in their day-to-day life. It’s always fun to see participants’ faces light up when they discover how easily they can relate real-life activities to the SLII® process.

One example we’ve used for years in training sessions references a person learning how to ski.

  • Starting out, the instructor shows the person how to put on their skis and move forward. The person feels the thrill of starting down their first small hill, envisioning themselves easily mastering this fun sport. (D1)
    • After their first lesson—and several falls—they realize skiing isn’t as easy as they had thought it would be. They feel inadequate and a little foolish, and think about quitting. (D2)
    • Several more lessons go by, and the person is now having fun skiing and is practicing on more difficult runs. They know there is still much to learn but feel optimistic about their progress. (D3)
    • With time and the right amount of direction and support from their instructor along their learning journey, the person has achieved their goal of becoming a confident skier. (D4)

Now think of how the stages of the SLII® model could pertain to almost any task or goal you can think of—areas as diverse as showing someone how to play a musical instrument, bake cookies, or improve their driving skills. It could be used by anyone coaching a team sport involving people of any age, or by a friend helping another friend learn a foreign language. I’ve been told SLII® can be applied to the different stages of marriage, business partnerships, and raising children. Someone even said the basics of SLII® helped them train their dog! How’s that for versatile?

A few years ago, I wrote a book titled Fit at Last: Look and Feel Better Once and For All with my personal coach, Tim Kearin. In the book we describe how Tim used the SLII® model to help me through my fitness journey. He kept track of my development levels on goals such as nutrition and weight control, aerobic exercise, strength training, flexibility, balance, and rest and sleep, and he used all four leadership styles as needed. SLII® played a huge part in my reaching my goals.

SLII® teaches leaders how to build meaningful connections with team members. It creates engaged, high performing individuals and teams, and helps organizations excel. It can also make a difference in your home, your community, and your life. Give SLII® a try and let us know how it works for you!

Timeless Principle #3: Leadership Is Love

/ Ken Blanchard

My son, Scott, and I have been working together on a book about six timeless principles that are essential to great leadership. These half-dozen principles reveal fundamental truths about working with others that every leader should know and practice. In this blog I’m introducing the third principle: “Leadership Is love.”

The first two principles—“Leadership is a partnership” and “A good leader catches people doing things right”—were revolutionary when I began talking about them in the 1970s and 1980s. Today these ideas are gaining a wider acceptance. But the third principle—”Leadership is love”—is still revolutionary.

People get nervous when they hear the word love applied to the workplace. They doubt that you can approach the tough reality of leading people and organizations with something as soft and fuzzy as love. What happens when things get hard? What happens when people don’t behave well, or when financial results aren’t what you need them to be? Many leaders believe that detachment is more useful than love in the business world.

I disagree. At Blanchard we believe that loving and respecting people leads to meaningful relationships and long term, positive results. Playing it safe by keeping people at arms-length simply doesn’t inspire the kind of commitment that creates great organizations.

I feel so passionately about this principle that I even wrote a book with a leader who shares our “Leadership is love” philosophy: Colleen Barrett, president emerita of Southwest Airlines. We called our book Lead with LUV and spelled it that way because LUV is the stock symbol of SW Airlines. Southwest Airlines is one of the few companies I’ve seen over the years that puts love into action. They are committed to loving their people, loving their customers, and loving their purpose: To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, low-cost air travel.

Loving Leaders Versus Cranky Leaders

Like Colleen, the best leaders realize that they are here to love, not to be loved; they are here to serve, not to be served. Great leaders make the goals clear, roll up their sleeves, get their egos out of the way, and do whatever it takes to help people win.

Non-loving leaders—what my son, Scott, likes to call “cranky CFOs”—believe people are like pawns on a chessboard to be manipulated for the purpose of winning above all else. This approach may work for a while, but in the long run it’s a losing strategy because great results are only sustainable when people feel respected and valued.

We’ve experienced both kinds of leaders in our organization. Years ago, we hired a smart, driven person to be our company president. The only problem was, he didn’t love our people. Morale in the company plummeted under his leadership. After his departure, our company thrived.

That’s when my wife, Margie, and I realized that leadership isn’t just about love, it is love. Margie sums it up beautifully: “It’s loving your mission, it’s loving your people, it’s loving your customers, and it’s loving yourself enough to get out of the way so that other people can be magnificent.”

Unconditional Love in the Work Setting

One of the most revolutionary aspects of the “Leadership is love” principle is that this love is unconditional and not based on people’s performance. This means that you extend love and respect to people before they’ve earned it, while they’re still making mistakes. When you have love for someone in a work setting, you see them as a whole package, warts and all. You start from the assumption that God doesn’t make junk. You let people know that they’re fundamentally okay, and that you are on their side. This fosters trust.

Over time, leading with love transforms an organization’s culture. Direct reports emulate the leader’s loving behavior and start extending care and respect to others. This creates a culture where people feel safe, seen, and acknowledged. People throughout the organization become passionate about the company.

When your people are passionate about your organization, they share that passion with clients and customers. Those clients and customers become raving fans who express their love for your company to their friends, family, and followers on social media. In turn, your organization thrives. So, remember to lead with love!

If you’d like to hear more on this topic, join Scott and me for our 6 Enduring Principles of Leadership webinar on Thursday, May 25, 2023 at 7:00 AM PDT. The event is free, courtesy of Blanchard. And if you’re attending the ATD23 International Conference in San Diego, be sure to drop by the Blanchard booth and say hello!

Timeless Principle #2: A Good Leader Catches People Doing Things Right

/ Ken Blanchard

In my last How We Lead blog post, I introduced “Leadership is a partnership,” the first of six timeless principles of effective leadership that my son, Scott, and I will be highlighting in an upcoming book.

Like the first principle, this one—”A good leader catches people doing things right”—was revolutionary for its time. When I began studying leadership in the 60s, bosses were widely regarded as people whose job it was to catch their workers doing things wrong. Managers would evaluate someone’s performance, reprimand them, demand that they improve, and disappear until it happened again. To me it sounds like the opposite of a motivational environment.

I’ve said for years that if someone took away everything I’ve taught except one thing, it would be the concept of catching people doing things right. It’s in the first leadership parable I ever wrote, The One Minute Manager®, which I coauthored with Spencer Johnson in 1982—and it’s also in my latest book, Simple Truths of Leadership, which I coauthored with Randy Conley in 2022. Just think, that’s forty years of catching people doing things right!

Back in the day, I learned that most people had never looked at their boss as a friend or colleague. When people saw their boss coming, they would hide because they knew they were going to get in trouble—after all, that was the only time the boss ever showed up. I couldn’t help but think: What if that were reversed? What if the boss walked around catching people doing things right, praising their progress, and cheering them on? And if there was an area where the boss noticed behavior or performance wasn’t great, what if they said, ‘How can I help?’ Would that make a difference? You bet it would!

Catching people doing things right is a powerful tool for bringing out the best in others. This principle is consistent with how my parents raised my sister and me. I remember as a kid when my good friend and I were on the same team and our families would get together after the games. If our team won, we would all celebrate. But if we lost, my friend’s parents would get on his case and tell him everything he did wrong. In contrast, my folks would try to cheer me up. They would tell me not to get down on myself, that I played the best I could, and they would give me a chance to talk. They always led with encouragement. That’s where I got the idea of praising people not only for doing things right, but also for doing things approximately right. You don’t have to be perfect to earn a little praise.

I had several teachers through the years who were also encouragers and cheerleaders. It was easy to see that they got better results and formed better relationships with their students than the teachers who were tyrants or bullies. I was an observer who paid attention to things like that. To me, it has always seemed obvious that positive reinforcement is a better way for parents to get the best from their kids, teachers to get the best from their students, and leaders to get the best from the people on their team. Catching people doing things right is a timeless principle I learned and began practicing and teaching years ago. It is a concept that still holds true—in fact, it’s woven into most of my books and our company’s training programs. When somebody does something right or approximately right, praise them. If they stumble on the way to a goal, ask how you can help them get back on the right track. To me it just feels like common sense. And the best leaders make common sense common practice

Timeless Principle #1: Leadership Is a Partnership

/ Ken Blanchard

My son, Scott, and I have been working together on a book about six principles that are essential to great leadership. These half-dozen principles reveal fundamental truths about working with others that every leader should know and practice. Today I’ll be introducing the first principle: Leadership Is a Partnership.

When I was in graduate school in the 1960s, scholars identified two leadership styles: autocratic and democratic. Autocratic leaders direct people to perform and use their position power to get results. Democratic leaders, on the other hand, use their personal power and involve others in problem-solving and decision-making. Back in the 1960s, leadership was viewed as an either/or proposition between these two styles.

While the autocratic/democratic leadership debate was raging in graduate schools, in the real world of business, top-down leadership was the most widely practiced style. The leader was generally viewed as the person in charge who told people what, when, where, and how to do things.

In our 1969 book Management of Organizational Behavior, Paul Hersey and I presented a situational approach to leadership, which our company now calls SLII®.  This approach is based on our finding that the best leadership style is the one that matches the developmental needs of the person you’re working with.

Using SLII®, leaders partner with people, using directive and supportive styles as needed to help them reach their highest level of development. Regardless of what style a leader uses, the principle underlying SLII® is that leadership is a partnership between the leader and their direct report.

In the mid-20th century, the idea of a leader partnering with their direct report was revolutionary. It was generally believed that once you got into a position of power, leadership was something you did to people. We believed then—and we believe today—that leadership is something you do with people.

Over time, our belief that leadership is a partnership has become accepted as valid and true—at least in academic circles. Unfortunately, too many leaders in the real world still operate from the antiquated notion that leaders should make all the decisions and dictate all the tasks.

Shift to a Partnering Mindset

Leaders must make a conscious choice to reject the command-and-control mindset. This requires a major shift in attitude. The most crucial place where this shift must occur is in the mind of every leader. This is not always easy to do, as the autocratic mindset is embedded in business jargon. For example, the word “subordinate” is still sometimes used to describe a direct report. This implies that the leader is somehow superior to the follower, rather than a partner. Another example is the way some managers still talk about disciplining employees, as if their role is to punish their direct reports like children.

For many leaders accustomed to the autocratic style, it’s hard to switch to a mindset that shares responsibility with their direct reports. They feel it is their responsibility as leaders to tell people what to do, how to do it, and why it needs to be done. They believe they would be avoiding responsibility to ask direct reports what they think needs to be done and how they would go about achieving those goals. These leaders may need encouragement and support to change to a partnering approach.

Discover the Power of Partnering

Research has shown that when people are empowered to make decisions and take initiative, the organization benefits overall. Why? Because, as Don Carew, Eunice Parisi-Carew, and I wrote in our book The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams:

No one of us is as smart as all of us.

When leaders adopt a partnership mindset, they realize that they and their direct reports play key parts on the same team. Rather than leading through control, they gain people’s trust and work together to achieve success on the goals they are both responsible for. This partnership approach leads to impressive results that are simply not possible when all of the authority has moved up the hierarchy and leaders shoulder all the responsibility for success.

What are your attitudes and practices around leadership? Are you setting goals and reviewing progress together with your direct reports, or are you dictating what needs to be done and how? If it’s the latter, it may be time to update your leadership style.

The Many Values of an Industry Conference

/ Ken Blanchard

Scott, Margie, and I recently attended an annual industry conference called ISA—The Association of Learning Providers. ISA is a unique organization where members who are competitors in the training, learning, and talent development industry come together to help each other. The goal is to strengthen our industry through the strengths of each business by sharing our best practices.

Our company has been a member of ISA for more than 40 years. We love to attend these meetings because everyone is very upbeat and excited about exchanging ideas we can all benefit from. The only thing we don’t share is sales strategies. We always come away from this conference proud to be in our field and we never fail to bring home some good learnings. It’s a wonderful opportunity to spend time with knowledgeable, energy-filled colleagues in our industry.

While I was at the conference, I had a chance to visit with longtime colleagues Bill Byham, cofounder and executive chairman of DDI, and Jack Zenger, cofounder and CEO of Zenger Folkman and best-selling business author. We’ve all been in the leadership development business around six decades. Some would call us competitors, but I like to use the word co-petitor instead when I talk about people like Bill and Jack. Why? Because we have more things in common than we have differences—and we truly respect each other and our respective contributions. We really enjoyed being together at ISA and sharing stories.

A big takeaway for Margie, who has always been interested in exploring the future of our business, was learning more about artificial intelligence (AI) and its challenges and opportunities for our industry. She even went home after the retreat and tried out ChatGPT, an AI program that follows instructions and provides responses. Amazing!

From the ISA website: Founded in 1978, ISA remains committed to helping training, performance and talent development firms build, enhance, and share their success. Our membership includes more than 80 companies that are contributing to the success of more than 100,000 clients across the Fortune 500. Both in person and online, ISA members ask questions, share their knowledge, and engage in rich discussion and the roll-up-your-sleeves work of growing a business and keeping it strong. Members come together to learn key business insights, share their collective wisdom, expand their resources, and enhance their results. By creating a safe place for disclosure, the association focuses on developing the business acumen of its members to ensure their continued success for their businesses and their clients.

If you belong to an organization that participates in industry conferences or retreats, I urge you to attend one if you can. I guarantee you’ll learn things you never knew about your business. You’ll meet people you might stay in touch with for decades. And you’ll come back inspired and reenergized about your job, your team, your organization, and your industry.

Needless to say, I’m a big fan of industry conferences. In fact, our company is participating in a different conference in May—the ATD (Association for Talent Development) International Conference and Expo—which will be held right here in San Diego. I’ll tell you all about that event in a few weeks. Stay tuned!