Unlocked: Finding the Key to Practical Leadership

By Robert S. Murray

Ever feel like there’s a leader inside you just waiting to get out if you can only find the key to free it?
Perhaps, instead, you feel that being a leader sounds too overwhelming. But Robert Murray knows how to unlock the “practical leader” inside you, and he reveals that anyone willing to learn is capable of becoming one. What is a practical leader? Someone who combines left-brain textbook leadership with right-brain, emotionally connective leadership. And we all have the ability to develop both sets of leadership skills.
As someone who has helped dozens of companies “turn around” from faltering to financial success, Murray has cultivated his own practical leadership skills through observation of countless leaders. Now he shares his years of wisdom in a series of short, poignant leadership lessons.
In Unlocked, you will learn:
• How to connect with your team and nurture a culture of learning
• The payoff of persistence in becoming a modern-day pyramid builder
• The power of “coopetition” (not a typo)
• How to control technology before it controls you
• The power of planning a marriage rather than a wedding when goal-setting
• Why you must understand and how to overcome the Mango Threat
• How to live your values and cultivate them in your team
• Why you must earn your trident every day
Throughout, Murray also shares entertaining and illustrative stories, such as how being arrested in a Hong Kong airport taught him about values and what dining in Morocco has to do with leading your team.
Go ahead. Turn the page and turn the key. Unlock the Practical Leader inside you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9780987955388

Robert S. Murray

Robert “Bob” Murray, an international keynote speaker, transformational leader, strategy yoda, and author, is the award-winning chairman of The GrowthPoint Group, a Vancouver-based strategy, leadership, and business optimization organization. Bob has spoken on strategy, transformation, and leadership to audiences in more than twenty-five countries and has led eighteen startup and turn-around initiatives from concept to success, including billion-dollar business turnarounds with more than 1,600 employees and five major business acquisition and integration projects. He has faced unimaginable personal adversity in taking various businesses through the “Journey of Transformation” to help them and people reach their full potential. In addition to his work for GrowthPoint, Bob is currently a partner in the Vancouver based strategy and leadership development firm Incrementa.

Book preview

Author

introduction

Practical Leadership =

More Right-Brain, Less Left

I believe in people. I believe most of us want to leave the world a better place than we found it. I believe that can happen when we unlock the remarkable leadership talent we possess inside. I believe you, by the sheer fact that you are reading this book right now, want to be more, do more, experience more, and be remembered.

We are living in one of the craziest times ever in the world of business. Right now is one of those transition points in our history—akin to when the Industrial Revolution started and then gave way to the Technological Revolution. Each revolution has flattened or eliminated traditional competitive barriers like geography, logistics, and communications in our world to the point we are at right now.

Today, virtually every person on the planet has access to the Internet and vastly improved transportation networks. Emerging countries like China and India have more highly educated talent than North America has people. And that talent is hungry to work and willing to put in long hours to get things done. Oh, and they will work for a fraction of Western salary expectations.

Meanwhile, in the Western business world, more and more of those available for the workforce are less-educated, yet have high expectations for salaries and jobs they haven’t necessarily earned yet.

What does this mean? Competitors are now coming at us from the most unlikely places. And by competitors, I mean challengers for not only your customers, but your job too. Nothing is sacred anymore.

How then will you get noticed and be remembered? Sure, you have a great education—in fact, the letters behind your name look great on your business card. But guess what? As tough as school was, your training does not make you different or remarkable anymore. If you have become an engineer, accountant, marketer, or rocket scientist, again, guess what? A few thousand other people out there have the exact same credentials. What is going to make you distinguished, valued, and more untouchable? What is going to make you sought after and able to negotiate for a higher salary than someone else? What is going to unlock the door to your unique and remarkable ability to stand out?

The answers, I believe, are simple. The first is—and your mother was right—it takes hard work. Sorry to say it, but there is no magic wand I can wave so you will become the next Steve Jobs, Peter Drucker, or Warren Buffet. The next is to work smarter, and by smarter, I mean using your entire brain.

Recently, on a long flight home from a project in Europe, I was thinking about something Heather (Heather White—a collaborator on some projects I do and an absolutely brilliant practical leader) and I often talk about—the power of connecting both sides of our brains. What do I mean by that? Well….

Business is usually all left-brain. Data. Numbers. Analysis. Details, details, details. Management, engineering, finance, operations, and I.T. are, by occupational hazard, usually spending a lot of time with the neurons from the left side or the Neo Cortex part of their brains working hard. We are driven by key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, which keep us very centered in our left-brains.

However, people—customers and employees (yes, employees are people too!)—make decisions from the right hemisphere or their limbic brains. This part of our brain is where emotions are generated. Heather brilliantly describes it as a rainbow of colors! People are emotional in their decision-making. For example, we don’t decide to eat at a certain restaurant because it is a logical time of day or a logical location with a logical menu. No. We choose to eat at a restaurant because it just feels right. In fact, most people return to a certain restaurant not because of the menu, but mostly, due to an emotional connection we have with the place or people there.

Likewise, I have yet to find anyone who can logically explain to me why people choose the life partners they fall in love with. It can’t be done. People will describe for me a lot of emotional feelings they have for their choice of mates, but not logical ones based on data.

Our emotionally-based, decision-making mind is most likely responsible for where we live, the kind of car we drive, the friends we have, the clothes we wear, etc. It is only when we have made a purchase—a car for example—that we come over to our logical, data-centered brains and justify our decisions with data. We buy a car based on a feeling (right brain), but then we tell our friends about the cool features (left brain data) it has. We rarely tell our friends we bought a particular car because It made me feel good or It looked cool!

Why then, as leaders, are we spending so much time attempting to lead our people from the logical side of our brains?

My favorite leader and mentor, Kevin Heaney, always says, Business is simple. Go to war with a team of happy people who satisfy customers and you will have a profitable business. I so agree!

Let’s focus on bringing into our teams and organizations the very best fit for the culture we want to build. Let’s find people with amazing attitudes first. (The skills required can either come with the people or we can train them—attitude is way more important.) These brilliant cultural fits will then go to work creating a remarkable competitive advantage and delivering WOW service to customers.

That is the left-brain KPI we should be measuring—the number of brilliant people in our business serving happy customers.

Learn to get in touch with your emotional leadership abilities. It is a must-have part of the new leader’s tool kit! It is what will help build winning strategies in this new, chaotic, and flattened world.

This book is all about unlocking your practical leadership greatness and nurturing your ability to connect to both sides of your leadership brain through a collection of what I call leader’s keys or short chapters that come from the leadership school of the street. It’s stuff you will never learn in any other classroom. Yes, you can pick up these keys from twenty or thirty years of trial and error; however, I wanted to save you the grey hair and battle scars that have gone into my leadership education with these additions to your leader’s key ring. This book contains some of the lessons I have learned during my twenty-plus years of being a practical leader and turn-around mercenary.

As of my writing this book in 2014, we have not yet fully recovered from the global financial meltdown that started in 2008. And guess what? We will never recover back to where we were pre-2008. Our world will never be the same again. Keeping that in mind, I have broken this book into helpful topics to help you navigate, from a leadership perspective, the insane, chaotic world in which we are now competing.

This book is laid out in short quick read chapters. I’ve intended to create an experience for you to learn and grow by causing you to pause and reflect frequently on your own authentic style and to use some of the insights you gain to unlock and nurture the practical leader within you. Every chapter offers you tips and tricks you can incorporate into your daily leadership habits to become a practical leader. If you have been immersed in the traditional left-brain world, you potentially have disconnected from your limbic or intuitive brain. In some organizations, bringing a higher level of emotional intelligence to the office is still discouraged, or it is tolerated if the numbers are doing well. However, to thrive in the irrational world we are now living in, it is more important than ever to connect emotionally with employees and customers. Leaders today need to lead with the practical intelligence that comes from using all of their cognitive and emotional intelligence.

Become wise and be great as you unlock the practical leader within.

Enjoy the journey!

Robert Murray

Robert Murray

No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you’ve come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.

—Madonna

1

Believe That You Cannot Fail—

But Don’t Jump Off a Bridge If You Do

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight; indecision, a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.

— Gordon Graham

No one can tell you that you are not good enough, not smart enough, not whatever enough without your permission. Nor can anyone tell you that you will fail at something without your permission.

I write and speak a lot about the 97 percent of the leadership population (97 percent of the population in general for that matter) that is, in my opinion, mediocre. Why do I feel that way?

I believe the world is full of people who don’t want to see you get ahead, achieve your dreams, or push the boundaries. Why? Because they want you to stay right where you are—with them—because they do not have the dreams and desires to grow and move forward. After all, growing means change. And change is scary! So what they are really saying is, If you stay right where you are, here in the land of mediocrity with me, I won’t feel so bad.

And they accomplish all this (keeping you in your place, that is) by telling you that you can’t or you don’t have a chance. You will fail. They will remind you of the other times when you tried something new and failed, and add, This time will be the same.

Recognize this advice for what it is: Other people attempting to keep you in the 97 percent land of mediocrity. Tell yourself no one can tell you that you can’t without your permission. It is only when you believe what others are saying about you that those self-limiting doubts start to form in your head.

Instead, become the person you believe in. Keep telling yourself you are worthy, smart, strong, and capable.

No shortage of people will tell you, You can’t.... Don’t be one of them. Develop the I can! mantra. When you do, you will discover that things happen. Opportunities unfold in front of you. You will start achieving beyond your wildest expectations.

Let’s look at all the people who didn’t listen to the long line of people telling them they couldn’t, weren’t good enough, it’s too hard, etc…

Thomas Edison developed over 10,000 failed prototypes for the lightbulb—or as he put it, I discovered 10,000 ways that a lightbulb would not work.

Arguably the world’s greatest basketball player, Michael Jordan, was cut from his high school basketball team.

Steven Spielberg was rejected three times by film schools he applied to.

Beethoven’s music teacher once told him he was hopeless.

Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job because he lacked ideas.

Bestselling author John Grisham was rejected by twelve publishing houses and sixteen agents.

Oprah Winfrey was replaced as the anchorwoman after only eight months in her first big television job.

Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Harland Colonel Sanders was told No over 1,000 times when he was searching for someone to partner with for his now famous fried chicken recipe.

Abraham Lincoln probably holds the record for persevering in the face of failure. Before becoming President of the United States, he joined the military as a captain and left as a private. He started a number of failed businesses. He lost four different elections.

The list goes on and on. When you are chasing a dream and pushing to be in the 3 percent group of those who make things happen in our world, you will experience setbacks, disappointments, and failure. A long line of people will be saying, I told you so. There will be people you will lose in your life; friends, maybe even family members, will not talk to you anymore. These are probably the same people who were fighting hard to hold you back.

The key through it all is to develop the mindset that you believe in yourself and your dreams. Be secure in the knowledge that nothing worth accomplishing (nothing I have discovered so far that is) is easy. It requires a vision so clear and compelling you can taste it. It requires focus—laser beam focus. And it takes hard work—lots of it.

Every once in awhile, though, you will have setbacks and disappointments. I like to look at those as learning opportunities. They will happen—it is part of the journey