Leadership Fundamentals

And who the heck is Suze Orman?
I haven’t been under a rock, I swear. I just had never heard of Suze (pronounced Suzy) Orman until I saw her on a PBS special titled The Money Class on March 8, 2011, for which she was the host, writer, and co-producer.

My immediate impression was a good one — she comes off as compassionate yet financially savvy, but I’m never one to let first impressions stand without further information to back it up. So after Googling her name and reading up on her, I went ahead and ordered  Suze Orman’s new book The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream– I’m told it is her 8th and that all 7 of her previous books were on the NY Times Bestseller List. With so much controversy surrounding this woman who is recognized as a financial guru, I knew I had to find out more about her via her own words.

Despite the fact that Orman declares the American Dream dead, she is a pretty good illustration of the potency of that dream in America while it lived strong. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois to working class parents, until she was almost 30 she was a waitress earning $400 a month. Today at 60, she is worth tens of millions of dollars, does speaking engagements all over the country, has her own personal finance show on CNBC, writes a finance column for Oprah’s O Magazine, and in 2009 Forbes named her #18 on their list of The Most Influential Women In Media. Not bad, eh? And I’m only giving you some of the highlights.

You may ask “how does a former waitress arrive at this point in her life?” She began her career in finance by applying for a job as an account executive trainee at Merrill Lynch. She got the job [at $1500 a month -- considerably more than the $400 per month she was making as a waitress] and after her training, she remained there until 1983.

From 1983 – 1987, she served as Vice President of Investments for Prudential Bache Securities. She then created and directed the Suze Orman Financial Group from 1987-1997. She’s won 5 or 6 Gracie awards (awards given to honor programming for women, by women, and about women). She has appeared on half a dozen PBS specials. As mentioned before, she is heavily involved in those specials. It strikes me that whatever Suze Orman is involved with, she’s the one doing the driving, the one controlling the outcome. What’s wrong with that? That’s part of the old American dream. You know — pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That was then. This is now.

With good reason, Orman is not optimistic about the financial future of millions of Americans. She says we must create a New American Dream. During an interview she did with Forbes, when asked about her financial fears, Orman said: “My only fear in life, when it comes to money, is what’s happening in the United States of America. The American dream is dead for the majority of America.”

“The middle class has disappeared,” she continued, during her Forbes interview. “We have a highway to poverty and no roads coming out. I fear for [those] who have been kicked out of their homes, could be living on the streets and don’t know how to get another job. Many of the millions of jobs lost I don’t think are coming back. I am really afraid for the majority of Americans today.”

That is the topic of her new book The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream.

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“A close friend of mine, a senior manager for a large London publishing company and the epitome of steadiness and understatement, suddenly, around thirty-five, found himself plunged into a complete abyss over the path his life had taken. He looked around one day and wondered how he could carefully construct, over so many years, a daily life he could barely endure.”

–David Whyte, The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

It’s a cumulative thing, this losing of the soul.

It may start with something as simple as keeping silent when you disagree with your boss’s opinion.

If you’re a manager contributing to loss of soul

– It may have dawned on you that as you rose up through the ranks,  those friends and associates you used to lunch and chat with all the time are no longer  part of your “friendships”. In fact, your friendships are now with those who are on similar rungs of the corporate ladder and have status the same as yours or greater — never lower.

–  You no longer share personal information with those lower on the ladder.

– All or most of the information you know about your employees would fit nicely in a spreadsheet.

– You cannot tolerate anyone knowing that there is something you do not know or do not have the answer for. Ignorance in any business topic must not be admitted to. Therefore, you have drifted into becoming very guarded in your conversations. Others quickly recognize this, and so a loss of trust occurs. Without trust, your direct reports won’t feel they can raise any issues with you, so now the loss of trust is accompanied by deception and avoidance of hot topics. Because of the working relationship the above generates, you suspect — and are undoubtedly correct — that the team is talking about you negatively behind your back. But at least they know who’s in charge.

– You cannot remember the last time you were able to laugh at yourself or admit to any shortcomings.

Experiencing Loss of Soul

In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost
-- Dante Alighieri

Losing the soul in the workplace is almost like a bereavement. There is a disconnection, a lack of engagement. The days seem longer, the accomplishments diminished, talents feel unappreciated or unused. An emptiness settles in. There is a general feeling of unease, being on guard, being less open. Where the emotional high of workday anticipation carried you along to work on wings, you begin to feel a heavy heart and feet of clay.

The challenge in modern corporate America is to hold on to the values we are taught in our personal lives – creativity, compassion, duty, sharing, and yes – understanding. In order to be whole, we cannot separate our humanity from our working lives.

Recovering the Soul

If you are in management and you have been in the same workplace for a long period of time, it may not be possible to recover the soul without moving on and moving out. Your persona has been established there and it will be difficult to change it, but it can be done — with patience and resolve. Initially, those who have worked with you simply won’t believe that the change in you is anything but temporary.  As time goes on and day settles upon day, this should come to pass. As long as it’s an honest resolve and deeper understanding, it can be done.

Take a good look around you. Do you see individuals, people with objectives, losses, striving, creativity? Or do you just see bodies performing tasks? Do you believe that most people want to give their best effort? What are your beliefs and when was the last time you looked at them? When was the last time you looked at members of your team as something more than job titles?

There is a wonderful dialogue in Amy Tan’s book, The Joy Luck Club, where June  protests to her mother:

... no matter
what you hope for...

I'll never be more
than what I am.

And you never see that!

And her mother responds:

I see you. I see you.

We must all see each other.

The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

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I think to-do lists should be written on scrolls. I mean, they grow and grow so long, we have to keep starting new lists. If we used scrolls, we could work from the bottom up and just cut off each item as we do it.

Seriously, to-do lists cause me a lot of stress. I usually have 2 or 3 going at once. One is for personal stuff – birthday cards to send, errands to do, people to call, things to buy, appointments to make [you know - medical, haircuts, etc.]. These are not so bad, because they are usually items that are plugged into my Outlook calendar and I can set up the alerts and everything works just fine – most of the time.

It’s the business one that is tough. It’s constantly being revised as new events take place and new requests come up. An unscheduled meeting is called, for which information has to be gathered. A report is asked for. Someone needs help or input on a project that ran into trouble. A direct report need some of your time today to talk about a production issue. You have to clean out your email – come on, 197 unread messages?!! Now, if you had a scroll, you could just keep unwinding it when you needed to add all this other stuff that came up.

It all comes down to time management. One can only do so much in a day, so we have to make decisions on what’s important. I always consider it important to make room for discussion with associates. In order to do so, you have to be able to sort all the other activities into their proper place of importance. That’s where The Time Management Matrix comes in. I talked about this in another post, and showed how Stephen Covey assigned the level of importance to different activities:

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I have just received a new book in the mail, which should be an interesting reading experience, since it brings together 2 of my particular interests – poetry and leadership/management. The book is titled The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate Americaand is by a poet whose name is David Whyte. He writes in the opening chapter:

The Heart Aroused is written for those who have chosen to live out their lives as managers and employees of post-modern corporate America, and who struggle to keep their humanity in the process.

Such an intriguing explanation of what this book intends to examine is making it difficult for me not to plunge right in and begin yet another book [I'm already in the middle of two]. Of course one of them is a silly mystery which it would be very easy for me to forget about, but the other one is one to which I should give my undivided attention. More about that book in some future post.

In the meantime, without meaning to, my eyes have drifted to the top of the next page, where Whyte writes:

The split between what is nourishing at work and what is agonizing is the very chasm from which our personal destiny emerges. By accepting the presence of this chasm we can begin to deal, one step at a time, with the continually hidden, underground forces that shape our lives, often against our will.

I can hardly wait to see what the rest of this book has in store for me.

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The Time Management Matrix is from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. This book  really saved my sanity. I found myself daily getting sidetracked and diverted from my To Do list by what everyone else thought was the top priority. It was their priority, of course, not mine, and I had a bad habit of wanting to please everyone. So what happens is that the last person to hand you a “priority”  gets bumped to the top of the list. If you don’t set your own priorities, you will be tossed like a bottle on the sea. Stephen Covey simplified it immensely with his 4 quadrants in the Time Management Matrix.

Covey says that many of us spend most of our time in Quadrant IV and almost no time in Quadrant II.

Consider the activities shown in each quadrant:

I. URGENT and IMPORTANT
Clearly, these activities should take first priority. However, your long term goal should be to reduce time spent here by prevention, preparation, etc. (see Quadrant II).

II. NOT URGENT but IMPORTANT
The key to success in gaining control of your time priorities is to focus on activities in this quadrant . If you are currently doing very little here, begin by carving out a small amount of time each day and building on it.

III. URGENT and NOT IMPORTANT
Many of us get trapped by other people’s sense of urgency telling us what is important. Allowing your priorities to fall here can result in a frenzied rush to get “things” done, followed by a sense of emptiness and lack of satisfaction.

IV. NOT URGENT and NOT IMPORTANT
Obviously, minimize time spent in activities in this quadrant.

I wish you luck with this and warn you that you have to be ever vigilant about it. There will always be someone who wants to revise your priorities.

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On the right side of this blog page, you will see a link to Who Trusts You, which I encourage you to use. You choose the people to whom you want to send the rating requests, and they receive an email request to rate you and a link to the rate sheet. You will be notified by email to tell you where you can see the results. You will not see who did the ratings, but you will get some excellent input on how much you are trusted. If you haven’t done it yet, give it a whirl.

Good Luck,

Barbara

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