I have a dream that leadership opportunities come only to those who demonstrate that their decisions are informed by deeply held core values. Lee Thayer, author of Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing and I are on the same page about that.

Lee says, “The right values and beliefs are the “right stuff.” If you don’t have “the right stuff,” then you are not going to accomplish anything extraordinary, either individually or as a leader of others. And if those key others are not right-minded, right-hearted, and right-spirited (if they don’t have “the right stuff”), then your mission will likely fail. The right values and beliefs are critical because values and beliefs do not take us where we want to go. They take us in the direction they go. Their direction and their ends are inherent in them. They are blind to everything but their own ends. Get them right, and they will carry you along to where you want to go. Get them wrong, and they will carry you along to wherever they are headed.”

In your organization haven’t you observed someone with a title who has position power, but someone else has credibility and whose decisions people would choose to follow? I certainly have. If hiring choices have been good optimally the person with position power also is someone people would choose to follow. That scenario is least stressful on all systems and the people in them. It is also the path to extraordinary success.

Yet when was the last time you had a conversation with someone in leadership about their character as evidenced by the values that underlie their decisions?

Maybe it’s time to bring that background issue to the foreground at an executive session. Your employees know who you are, really.

I invite your comments, questions, and thoughts.

So what is transparency?  Transparency is a choice, a value in an organization that optimizes candor (telling the truth regardless of the impact of that truth, fast and forward).  These authors assert that candor maximizes the probability of success.

Transparency has to be lived as a value from the top of the organization down through its toes, where it does the walking.  And it either walks its talk or it doesn’t.  Like pregnancy, there is no such thing as being partly transparent.  What would that be?  We’ll tell you the truth part of the time but not all of the time?  It’s up to you to guess which part is true, though.

Like humanity, this is a complex subject in application.  We have seen the absence of transparency in highly visible cases where leaders did not intend to dupe their stakeholders, reality just got away from them at Enron, British Petroleum (BP) and most of the global organizational financial failures that created our drop in economic safety in the world.   Reality was known in these cases, it was not transparent to those who could make a difference before the crisis.

Does transparency occur differently inside an organization with the lightening speed of the digital era, where things said cannot be retracted?  The magnitude of emails and sometimes-careless comments and thought, can complicate discerning transparency for actionable matters.

These authors assert that transparency begins at home, in your own organization, where you will build a muscle around being transparent so that when called for in the world at large, you won’t be left without capacity for it like BP’s ex-CEO Tony Hayward, who eventually got around to admitting BP was not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.”    They also call for leaders to empower transparency in both directions — enabling others to “speak truth to power.”

You do know what I mean.  And if you have built a muscle around screwing your courage to the sticking point to look into the mirror, and if you enable your people to show you a mirror, good for you!  If you have not, there is no time like the present.

Tell me your stories, your questions, your thoughts.

But I am not attached to what that looks like.  In other words your version of the triple bottom line is up to you.

That I am committed to accountability paying off and increasing vitality gives me freedom to listen carefully for what is important to you.  It is the access to something.  It feeds my interest in you.  I don’t have to be right about how you get to the triple bottom line.  My ego is not in the conversation.

So what is attachment? Being attached may lead to doing things YOUR way, which might not be the most effective way, or the way with the highest ROI, or the way that works for the most number of people. Donald Trump’s leadership’s style is a good example of attachment.  You will do it MY way or hit the highway.   Emotions usually ride high with attachment .  Ego is very present.

Being committed or being attached are places you come from when moving a project forward or moving toward a goal.  Profit is a goal.  People and the planet are not goals, they are stakeholders in how you reach that goal. As a leader, one of the most difficult dynamics to manage are people’s unmet expectations about how other people should behave on the way to a common goal.

If you have been leading organizations for a while you are probably smiling that little recognition smile.   This means you have to bring people together sometimes to remind them of the value of civility, because each is attached to his or her own opinion of how something should be done.

When attachment is present, listening stops.  Progress is impeded when this happens.  What there is to do is take the conversation back to the commitment that is shared, and see what opens up.

Where are you attached?  Where are you committed?  Can you feel the difference?  I would enjoy hearing your stories.

So you are a leader.  If you are successful by financial standards you could fall into that trap.  As leaders, it can be tempting to read our own press and believe it.

Power is a reflection of effectiveness.   You could be the best at your profession — you might be the expert in your field. I have met leaders who, when they walk into a room all eyes turn.  If you have that power, you have a responsibility.  The more reference power, the more personal power, or the more expert power you have, the more responsibility is called for.

Consider that some people may have stopped telling you the truth, truth that could be useful.  They may have trouble being themselves around you.  If your presence is so overwhelming that others have to shade their eyes not to get sunburn, then you have missed an opportunity to be contributed to and frankly, to contribute.  The separation of inequality is a barrier to communication.

Bottom line is, being bigger than your britches creates a barrier to hearing the thoughts, observations, or desires of others.   Communication is lessened, altered, missed.

I was once advised, “Take advice from a rock.” Everyone has a contribution to make if you will allow it, even listen for it.  A little humility goes a long way to making others comfortable in your presence, giving you access to them and them access to you.

Do you have the experience of being powerful?  When do you tend to listen, and to whom?  When do you not?   Dialog is healthy.  I welcome yours here.

A Wrap-up of the University Club’s Roundtable on the Tech Industry

Christine Benton

The biggest challenge facing the technology industry is people. Or more specifically, the lack thereof, according to tech industry leaders at a recent San Diego business breakfast. The event, hosted by the University Club San Diego, brought together executives from a broad swath of the technology industry to discuss the state of the industry in San Diego and beyond. The discussion was led by Jim Goldman, chairman of the U.S. Technology Practice at public relations firm Burson-Marsteller and former CNBC Silicon Valley bureau chief.

The panelists didn’t identify capital or revenue as the greatest challenge facing tech industry companies. They said their biggest challenge was staffing and recruiting tech-related positions—such as software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople.

In a time of double-digit unemployment, “there are more than 6,000 technology-related positions open in San Diego alone,” said David Titus, president of the San Diego Venture Group and managing director at venture capital firm Windward Ventures.

George Mathew, president and COO of Irvine-based Alteryx, nodded. “Fifty percent of my time is spent on staffing and recruiting,” he said.

While a few were surprised by this, Titus backed up Mathews, saying that when he looks at companies to invest in, he looks for senior executives who spend a significant amount of time on staffing, pointing out that these executives are more realistic than those who turn to recruiting and staffing as a second or third priority.

The challenge is exacerbated by U.S. immigration policy, said Titus, which currently requires foreign students who matriculate and earn advanced degrees at U.S. universities to return to their home countries after graduation. “We are educating them and then sending them back,” noted Titus. “Why not allow them to work here and make our companies and economy stronger?” He urged people to support the STAPLE Act, which would authorize certain students from foreign countries to be admitted for permanent residence after earning a PhD from a U.S. university in the field of science, technology, engineering or mathematics.

Admiral Jim Zortman, sector vice president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, shared a few ways that he has approached the staffing issue, including working with high schools and colleges within the framework of internship programs. “If you have a good internship program, by the time the intern is in his or her third year of internship you have a pretty good idea of whether they’re a good fit for your company,” he said.

In addition, he pointed out, “Not everyone peaks at the moment of graduation.” While other companies go for the top graduates, he may aim a few spots down, looking for qualities in a candidate that will help them to be strong in the long-term. Zortman mentions that, like others on the panel, his team has been able to lure candidates to move to San Diego from other parts of the country by giving them a taste of Southern California in the winter. However, many leave after two to three years, so he has learned to focus on candidates he believes will be here for the long run.

Do you share the same challenges in your industry? Use the comment section below to let us know!

Christine Benton is a director in the Technology Practice at Burson-Marsteller. Based in North County San Diego, she is an avid lover of both San Diego and Technology. You can reach her at christine.benton[at]bm.com.

Ken is an MIT Alum and sits on the MIT Enterprise Forum Global Board of Directors. Additionally, in the thirteen years (1996 – 2009) that Ken served as Founding Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, the number of students taking entrepreneurship courses increased from 220 to 1,600 per year while the number of professors grew from 3 to over 36.

He still remembers that first disaster and he talks about it here, at the MIT Enterprise Forum Global Leadership Conference — proudly wearing his “Drama Queen” sash, affectionately given by the Conference organizers. Just before this clip, he was saying that everyone got two weeks’ pay, and the founders got what was left over.

Ken got the furniture, which they re-sold to “the NEXT under-capitalized start-up” — all but two chairs which are his reminders that disaster is always nearby. All was not lost. Quite likely the lessons in that failure helped make him the approachable, warm, person he is today.

Ken promises to make an appearance at the San Diego Enterprise Forum this next year. His witticisms alone are worth the drive and the price of admission.

I am a BIG fan of Robert Edelman’s because he has managed to quantify a very difficult phenomenon to quantify. Trust lives in the “in between,” it isn’t my job nor is it your job to foster trust, trust is in the realm of the relationship and we are both accountable for it. I liken trust to marriage — I have a friend who jokes, “marriage is an institution, and I’m not ready for an institution yet.” Marriage is an AGREEMENT between to people that implies a lot of behaviors must align for the marriage to withhold the test of time.

Similarly, trust is created and destroyed by the actions and words that occur over time between people. By the aggregate of those actions and those words, trust is either buttressed like a fortress or torn down.

Edelman’s message here is that today’s trust buttressing involves more than it used to for corporations, and the U.S. as an aggregate corporate community has been slipping, other countries have been gaining ground.

There is much that could be inferred by this slippage of trust. Suffice it to say, as Robert Porter Lynch says, trust is the bedrock of democracy and we are hanging by a thin thread. We just don’t know when or how our Tsunami might happen, and we are precipitously close to that event, or those events.

It isn’t so surprising to know that people who aren’t suited to their jobs aren’t going to perform as well as those who sought out work that matched their interests, their desires, their values, who they are. It is surprising, however, that they stay miserable in their jobs, under-performing. Equally surprising to me is the fact that CEOs or senior executives or department, division heads allow/enable/tolerate “B” player behavior.

Why is that? What are they seeing, or not seeing? If you ask an “A” player — someone who performs extraordinary accomplishments on a regular basis — they will tell you it is discouraging to work along side a “B” player. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I didn’t make that up.

In the February 28 Forbes magazine, I in “Ten Tips: Great Restructuring Winners,” talent was one of the ten tips. It said, “Bill Gates once said that a great programmer is worth ten thousand times the price of a good programmer.” In other words, be sure you are garnering talent evolution versus talent deterioration because people are your key leverage point and “B” players hide inside the organization and take up time, energy, resources.

Too often “B” players are tolerated because leaders don’t measure what matters. “A” players LIKE to be measured. If you don’t measure them, they are very likely measuring themselves! “A” players have an internal yardstic against which they perform that “B” players lack.

I like Leonardo da Vinci’s statement on self-mastery. “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.”

Ask yourself, are you measuring what matters regarding your own performance? The performance of those who report to you? To really get mileage on the conversation however, I suggest sharing it with others in your workplace. See if, by shining a light on what matters, you will effectively raise the bar on your own performance and those around you.

So now, I’ve been through 2 keyboards and check out my FINAL CHOICE!  (three’s the magic number, right?)  Besides the delight of the video itself, I am excited about the case….. Zagg zigged and zagged to a better solution than Apple did for tilting the iPad and having a keyboard.  Really great coup, guys!

I have spent considerable time speaking with business friends about trust in leaders.  These conversations were prompted by last year’s results of the 10-year annual Edelman Trust Barometer survey.  They sampled 4,475 opinion leaders in two age groups (25-34 and 35-64) in 20 countries, a 30-minute telephone survey of “informed publics.”  (www.edelman.com/trust/2009/)

One disturbing finding that led to these conversations is that only 17 percent of the 35-64 year old “informed publics” trust information given by a CEO about his or her company.  This is six-year low.

For better or for worse, my understanding is that, in terms of influence, it only takes about 15% of people agreeing to anything (a philosophy, a code of behavior, a belief) to change the tide and move the masses.  Robert Porter Lynch, who has done considerable research in the area of trust and leaders, posits that trust is the bedrock of democracy, and when our trust is damaged, we are doing damage to the very principles upon which this country is founded.  We are precipitously close to that tipping point.

Since I coach CEOs and their executive teams, I am personally appalled.  But more appalling than the sense that our business leaders have behaved badly and deserve this reputation — some do and most don’t — is my concern that all CEOs have been painted with the same brush as those who deserve to be penalized and put away for a very long time, damaging others’ reputations by association.  There are leaders who do wrong intentionally, and others who are simply careless.  In a Financial Times some months ago, for example, BP’s CEO Tony Hayward admitted that they were not prepared for a category disaster he called “low probability, high risk.” Indeed.

BP, after an estimated $20 bn leak with costs to our environment and the human psyche that are unconscionable and immeasurable finally began looking into their strategy and tools to resolve such risks.  Tony Hayward is not a bad person, but inadequate thinking and planning has exacted an extraordinarily high toll.  Regardless, whether they make a mistake of wrongful thinking, or they are out to get us as was the case with Bernie Madoff, bad decisions of those in power cost us trust in leaders inclusively.

A recent release that should be a MUST READ for every executive in the world is Herb Baum’s The Transparent Leader, in which Baum said, “A lot of executives who made headlines (because of a scandal) were just plain white-collar thieves who deserved to do time.  And there were others who were basically good people who made compromises when they shouldn’t have.  They stretched the truth because they thought they had to, and they made some business decisions that were short on integrity. They had risen to leadership positions, but they failed because they didn’t understand how to be open with various constituents and they were unable to build a culture base on trust in the organizations they led.”

Let’s assume leaders should do more to warrant our trust.  BP’s Hayward has admitted the criticism of the oil spill and subsequent inability to stop the damage was ‘entirely fair.”  Ok, it was an event, a mishap.  Let’s look at an ordinary, reoccurring factor.  Who is culpable, for instance, for extraordinarily high CEO wages?   Considerable finger wagging has been going on in the press at CEOs about this.  It isn’t the CEO who sets his or her own salary; it is the board of directors.  Yet they are invisible to the press in these stories.  So often our assumptions lead us to conclusions that malign others without full consideration for the facts.  This disturbs me greatly but I know I have done it, too.  Why is that?

Walking with a friend, I mentioned a situation that was just this kind of wrongful maligning, and she asked me, “How long does it take to find a witch?”  She was alluding to the days in Europe from 1480 to 1700 when legally sanctioned and official witchcraft trials resulted in from 40,000 to 100,000 executions. It was decided someone was a witch, and next thing you know that person was burned at the stake.

While we’ve moved beyond flagrantly burning people at the stake, we still do character assassinations every day, in the form of judgment and gossip.   Some of this finger wagging and witch-hunting and broad-brush painting is projection — making someone else responsible for what we, ourselves, don’t want to be responsible.