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    Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge
    Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge
    Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge
    Ebook270 pages4 hours

    Boundaries for Leaders: Results, Relationships, and Being Ridiculously in Charge

    By Henry Cloud

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    About this ebook

    In Boundaries for Leaders, clinical psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud leverages his expertise of human behavior, neuroscience, and business leadership to explain how the best leaders set boundaries within their organizations--with their teams and with themselves--to improve performance and increase employee and customer satisfaction.

    In a voice that is motivating and inspiring, Dr. Cloud offers practical advice on how to manage teams, coach direct reports, and instill an organization with strong values and culture.

    Boundaries for Leaders: Take Charge of Your Business, Your Team, and Your Life is essential reading for executives and aspiring leaders who want to create successful companies with satisfied employees and customers, while becoming more resilient leaders themselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 16, 2013
    ISBN9780062206350
    Author

    Henry Cloud

    Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, pastor to pastors, and New York Times bestselling author. His 45 books, including the iconic Boundaries, have sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Throughout his storied career as a clinician, he started treatment centers, created breakthrough new models rooted in research, and has been a leading voice on issues of mental health and leadership on a global scale. Dr. Cloud lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Tori, and their two daughters, Olivia and Lucy.  

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      Book preview

      Boundaries for Leaders - Henry Cloud

      PREFACE

      To get results, leadership matters. Leadership matters for an entire organization, and it matters in smaller contexts such as in teams or departments. Because of that, we often talk about leadership disciplines that are essential to creating results and making it all work—disciplines such as casting a vision, shaping the future, developing strategy, engaging the right talent in the right places, fostering innovation and agility, execution, and more. As you know, all of these leadership competencies must be in place for a vision to become a reality.

      But . . . there is another truth. Leaders lead people, and it is the people who get it all done. And to get it done, they have to be led in a way that they can actually perform, and use all of their horsepower. Said another way, their brains need to work. You can cast a great vision, get the right talent, and yet be leading in ways that people’s brains literally cannot follow, or sometimes even make work, much less their hearts.

      I learned this when I began practice as a clinician. My first job was in a leadership consulting firm, as they wanted a clinician to work with leaders to help them with their personal and interpersonal leadership style to become more effective in leading people. As a result, I fell in love with the topic of leadership, as it relates to the people side of the equation. For three decades, that has been a major focus of my hands-on work: listening to and working with leaders, their teams, and their organizations.

      What I have come to believe is this: while leadership as a discipline is very, very important, the personal and interpersonal sides of leadership are every bit as important as the great leadership themes of vision, execution, strategy, and the like. For what actually happens is that no matter how great a vision or a strategy, the leader must get it all done with and through people. And there are ways that leaders lead that make vision and strategy work, and there are ways that leaders lead that get in the way or ultimately cause it all to not work very well.

      Leaders can motivate or demotivate their people. They can propel them down a runway to great results, or confuse them so that they cannot clearly get from A to Z. They can bring a team or a group together to achieve shared, extraordinary goals, or they can cause division and fragmentation. They can create a culture that augments high performance, accountability, results, and thriving, or cause a culture to exist in which people become less than who they are or could be. And most of the time, these issues have little to do with the leader’s business acumen at all . . . but more to do with how they lead people and build cultures.

      It turns out, as neuroscience has shown us, that there are reasons for all of this. People’s brains, hearts, minds, and souls are constructed to perform under certain conditions and dynamics, and when these are present, they produce and thrive. They think, behave, and perform to their capacities. When these conditions are violated or not provided, people cannot and do not bring visions and plans to fruition. And they all depend on the leader’s style and behavior.

      There are several aspects of a leader’s behavior that make everything work, and one of those is his or her boundaries. A boundary is a structure that determines what will exist and what will not. In the 1990s I co-authored a book called Boundaries, which laid out the principles of boundaries for people’s personal lives, and millions of people have found the boundaries principles to be transformative in their personal lives. As I was working with CEOs and management teams, I began introducing those principles into how they led their people as well. The results were always profound for their business results, as no matter what role they played, whether a CEO, a VP, or a team or department leader, the leader sets the boundaries that will determine whether the vision and the people thrive or fail. The leaders determine what will exist and what will not.

      Which brings us to the topic of this book, Boundaries for Leaders. While the concept of boundaries has been a familiar term in people’s personal functioning, there is not much written on it in the field of leadership.

      That is what this book is about. You will learn how seven leadership boundaries make everything else work and how they set the stage, tone, and climate for people’s brains to perform. Literally. You will learn how to set boundaries that:

          Help people’s brains work better

          Build the emotional climate that fuels performance

          Facilitate connections that boost people’s functioning

          Facilitate thinking patterns that drive results

          Focus on what behaviors shape results

          Build high-performance teams that achieve desired results

          Help you lead yourself in a manner that drives and protects the vision.

      And you will be reminded that, as a leader, you always get what you create and what you allow. So join me as we look at how to take charge and implement the powerful concepts great leaders use to create organizations, teams, and cultures that thrive and get incredible results.

      CHAPTER 1

      THE PEOPLE ARE THE PLAN

      My client, CEO of a $20 billion company, looked at me with one of those expressions that smart people get sometimes when something extra smart goes off in their heads, the kind of thought that captures even their own attention. Head tilted and eyes squinted, he said something profound: You know what is weird?

      What? I asked.

      "Everybody out there is always trying to figure out the right plan. They meet, they argue, they worry and they put all of their energy into trying to come up with the ‘right’ plan. But the truth is that there are five right plans. There are a lot of ways to get there. The real problem is getting the people to do what it takes to make the plan work. That is where you win or lose. It’s always about the people."

      He was right. Ultimately, leadership is about turning a vision into reality; it’s about producing real results in the real world. And that is only done through people doing what it takes to make it happen. So, as a leader, how do you get that to happen? What are the things that you have to do to ensure they will do what will make it work—with a team, a direct report, or an entire organization? That is the focus of this book.

      This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision.

      WHEN THE PEOPLE SIDE OF THINGS DOESN’T WORK

      This particular CEO had come to me for help with his team. They had become disconnected from one another, and their divide had begun to manifest itself in the rest of the organization. At the root of the problem was a breach between the leader of operations in the home office and the leader of the sales force out in the field. Communication had broken down, and results were slowing down too—all for no good reason, other than that the people side of things wasn’t working. Even though the plan was good, the team was not functioning like a good team, with shared objectives and healthy relationships that would help make the plan work. Similarly, the culture was at risk, with negativity creeping in where positive energy should have been. The dilemma for the CEO was that even though he had a good plan, as he said, and he had really great people, they were just not working together.

      As I meet with leaders and their companies, I find that more often than not, they have smart plans. They know their business, or they would not be where they are. They are strategic, talented, gifted, and experienced. Their business expertise got them to where they are, but as they rise to more significant positions of leadership, they need other skills in addition to what their business smarts can provide. They need to be able to lead people to get results.

      What usually got them there was being good at the business, devising and executing the plan. But now, as leaders, they also have to be good at something else: getting people to do what it takes to make the plan work. It is about leading the right people, empowering them to find and do the right things in the right ways at the right times. That is what will bring a plan to real results.

      As one leader told me, "I wanted this position because I love the hunt, the strategy, the winning. I love focusing on how to make it work and getting there. But the longer I am at it, the more and more of my time is spent on the people leadership issues, and less on the work. I have great people, but getting them all on the same page and working together takes more time and energy than it seems like it should. Some days I feel more like a psychologist than a business leader."

      How much time and energy it should take is debatable, but the key takeaway is this: the time and energy that you do invest in people issues should produce better results and create teams and a culture where momentum and energy thrive. And the work of building a great team should feel personally rewarding instead of draining. Put simply: the people side of it should not be what he was experiencing. It should be an investment with a high rate of return for you and for the business, not a constant drain on your personal and organizational resources. It should produce positive, not negative, energy.

      As a leader, you probably spend a lot of time on the people side of business already—even more time when results are poor. You are always building teams and culture, leading direct reports, driving initiatives and change through your organization, and pushing for innovation, adaptation, and agility. And what you want is for all of that effort to produce results, and for people to be positively energized as they help drive the vision forward.

      GREAT PLAN, GOOD PEOPLE, BUT POOR RESULTS

      Sometimes even with all of that energy spent, results are negatively affected by the ways that different people function both in teams and as individuals. Too often such soft issues become ingrained patterns that determine how the business itself looks and functions. When added up, individual weaknesses and poor interpersonal dynamics can overshadow the strengths. All the smarts and skills of individual team members just don’t produce the results you are looking for. Opportunities are lost, even as you spend more time and more energy trying to get people moving forward together in the right direction. Such a great plan, such good people, and still not getting the results you want.

      See if you can identify with any of these issues:

          Results are less than the combined talent should be producing.

          Negative thinking and negative outlooks take root, and people sound like victims of the economy, the market, or someone else’s actions.

          One or two people have too much power on a team or in a department, which allows dysfunction to seep into the rest of the team.

          Speed is absent as plans and decisions lag in a sea of desired but difficult-to-nail-down consensus.

          The culture tolerates mediocrity or even poor performance.

          People and teams are not focused on what truly drives results.

          Pettiness and blame games replace healthy problem solving.

          Communication in teams and departments happens in the meeting after the meeting, instead of face-to-face with all stakeholders present.

          Even though people have bosses and performance reviews, accountability is not truly being exercised.

          Execution is not swift, and being late in launches or with other deliverables has become the norm.

          Celebration of wins is not as regular as it was, or as it should be.

          Morale is not where you need it to be.

          The business feels scattered and not on a focused, upward trajectory.

          Competing agendas abound and never quite come together.

          Some leaders and bosses in the organization build great teams and develop great people, but others don’t, creating an organization that looks like a crazy quilt of inconsistency and uneven results.

      Do any of these sound familiar? Don’t worry: you are not alone. The frustrations described here happen frequently, even to very talented people and even in high-performance organizations. People issues tend to sneak up on even the best leaders, sometimes derailing even the best talent and the best-laid plans.

      CHRIS: A GREAT PLAN HITS THE WALL

      Consider the experience of one such leader: Chris founded his company by building on his success as a rainmaker. He had worked for a technology company and had consistently closed more sales than everyone around him. Like many successful people, Chris decided to do on his own what he had done for others. So, with some investors, he launched a new venture. Why sell this stuff for someone else when I can do it for myself? he reasoned. He was soon to find out the answer.

      Things went well early on. Chris landed a few big accounts and built a company around those early successes. The new company grew quickly, landing more big accounts with global companies who wanted to use its equipment. Adding more and more employees, Chris’s company soon became a substantial entity, with revenue growing every year until it became a true market leader in its competitive space. The future looked good. Chris could see a public offering in the near future.

      But within a few years things began to be not so good inside the walls of the company. Key employees who had joined Chris because of his high energy and can-do spirit began feeling overworked and increasingly stressed out because of what they called the chaos. The company seemed to lack its original direction and momentum. For a time, success seemed to go hand in hand with the chaos, but slowly at first and then more rapidly, the chaos began to overshadow all that was good. That is when Chris’s board, comprised of key investors, called me.

      The board’s concern came from what they were hearing directly from some members of Chris’s executive team. The team told the board that they had reached the breaking point, that they couldn’t take the chaos and dysfunction anymore, and that if the board did not do something soon, they were going to leave. That amount of talent threatening a mass exodus certainly got the board’s attention.

      In trying to get to the bottom of the problem, my first step was to set up interviews with all of the members of the executive team. I wanted to get a feel for what was happening. What struck me first was their love for Chris. They really admired him, the energy that he created, his passion for what they were doing, and his creativity about the technology they had developed. They wanted to be on his team and make what they had created succeed and grow. Even more important, they wanted to give their talents to the company, and they all wanted to be part of the endeavor for the long term.

      But they had gotten to a bad place. When I interviewed them they were as dismayed and as frustrated as they had been motivated and inspired at the beginning of the company’s journey. They reported feeling like they were running around in a thousand different directions. They would be headed down one path, only to suddenly get an e-mail from Chris about another new deal that required team members to marshal all of their resources around this latest, exciting opportunity—never mind last week’s latest, exciting opportunity. Obviously this near-constant rejiggering of priorities created confusion and disruptions, leaving the rank and file unsure about whether what they were working on yesterday was still what they were supposed to be worrying about tomorrow morning. Or was the new emphasis the main thing now?

      Even worse, Chris would send e-mails to his executive team’s employees, putting those people into a state of confusion as to whom they were supposed to be answering to—the CEO or their own boss? Employees felt torn between two bosses and two agendas, and their own workloads. No matter how informal the work environment or how loose the chain of command, it is very difficult for most employees to tell a CEO, I can’t do that. I am busy. When employees went to their own bosses in frustration, their bosses would get upset and call Chris and say something along the lines of We can’t do this project ‘all of a sudden’ . . . and also do what we were already working on at the same time. And you have to go through us to get to our people. It’s killing us.

      Chris would not respond well, alternating between scolding them for not being adaptive enough and accusing them of stifling growth through negativity or by usurping his authority. Depending on individual personalities—some being confrontational and others preferring to avoid conflict—the executive team ended up either getting into nasty arguments with Chris or slinking back to their desks to complain behind his back. Watercooler meetings and rumors were rampant even though, on the surface, it appeared that everyone had fallen into line with Chris’s latest pronouncements. In reality, there wasn’t even one clear line to follow—more like three or four or more all headed in different directions.

      On top of this, Chris had a bad habit of not being involved enough and failing to really lead his team and his people for good stretches of time, only to then swoop back in with what his team came to call intermittent micro-downbursts. When the mood struck him, Chris would drop in uninvited on one of his executive’s turf just to help, but he would end up upsetting team members and demotivating the team’s leader. Too often the team was already struggling with its own cohesion and thus wasn’t able to block Chris’s interference in a constructive manner. Everyone, it seemed, had begun to feel powerless to deal with Chris’s leadership; they couldn’t figure out how to get him to lead differently. And he was such a nice guy, to top it off.

      In all of this, what struck me in my first interview with Chris was the extent to which Chris felt and sounded a bit like a victim. He was busting his butt, as he put it, for everyone and feeling extremely unappreciated by the troops. I am creating all of this opportunity for them and what do I get? Whining and complaining. What he couldn’t seem to understand was that they were feeling what they were feeling for good reasons. He just didn’t get it. But what also struck me was that there were no bad guys anywhere in the mix—only good and talented people, all trying to do the best they could.

      The board’s concerns about Chris’s leadership skills had reached a critical moment. It had gotten to the point where the board of directors started talking with Chris about the possibility of a buyout that would send him packing. One board member confided to me: I don’t have a lot of hope for your being able to fix this. The only answers are to bring in a new CEO, or sell it. But without Chris’s drive and skills at generating revenue, how would the board replace him without taking a big hit? At the same time, if a new CEO were brought in to assume the helm, then it was hard to imagine Chris, the founder of the company, wanting to stay. How could he possibly let go of his baby? At forty-four, it seemed like his entire life and his future were bound up in the company’s success.

      Both outcomes seemed completely unattractive, so . . . what to do? Obviously you could treat the symptoms—such as trying to get Chris to behave and stop doing more deals than they could deliver, or getting the rest of his team to communicate better. Or you could bring someone in to be a real leader and take charge of the operations in ways that Chris was not doing. Certainly all of those things would

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