Heartfeldt Leadership Advice

Happy New Year! Personally, I like these round numbered years. They make me feel optimistic for no apparent reason.

What about you? What’s your frame of mind as you start 2012?

Wow! Thanks, for sharing so many fabulous, and fabulously helpful, leadership lessons that you are thankful for! With the season of giving in full swing, here are more great gifts of wisdom shared by women leaders.

Want to give a gift to others? Post your leadership lesson in the comments section below.

And while you’re at it, post YOUR most burning leadership question for the New Year too…

This is an advice column where I’m supposed to answer your questions. But this Thanksgiving, I’m shaking things up in my life, so I turned the tables and asked some fabulous women leaders this question:

What leadership lesson are you most thankful for?

The outpouring of responses made me exceedingly grateful. Not a turkey among them.

Here with a Thanksgiving feast of delicious wisdom you can savor calorie-free—and use all year.

Saying grace (and listening to it)

Anita Sands last year at age 34 became COO of UBS Wealth Management Americas, and is one of the smartest and best grounded leaders I know. She credits her father with her most important leadership lesson: “common sense is not the common.” Not surprisingly, she then resonated with this advice:

My first boss when I was a young academic really trained me in how to “think”. The first thing he told me was that people who can find the answers are a dime a dozen but people who know what are the right questions to ask are really valuable. So I’ve always tried to employ that skill as a leader – am I asking the right questions, what question is not being asked in the room.

“Was there ever any domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?” John Stuart Mill, 18th century economist

If you’re a woman over 40, you’ve probably had an Anita Hill Moment. That aha when you realized those suggestive comments, undesired gropes, and surreptitious ass-pats you’d long endured in the male-dominated workplace had a name: sexual harassment.

If you’re under age 40, you probably grew up knowing not only about sexual harassment as a concept, but also that it is a prosecutable offense you shouldn’t put up with it for one minute. You’ve probably had training about it in your workplace, and know how to report it safely if it rears its ugly head. So whether or not you realized it, you’ve had your Anita Hill moment too.

All because of unsought leadership.

I get a little nostalgic in October remembering my late parents whose birthdays were this month. So when Bonnie McEwan, president of the public interest communications firm Make Waves, suggested I write about how people in middle management can be leaders, I chuckled to think of one of my father’s favorite sayings:

“Everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time.”

That conjures up amusing pictures that equalize people regardless of their stature in the formal organization chart.

But the question of how to be a leader whether or not you have the formal authority isn’t about cutting others down to size. That famous scene from the 1980 movie 9 to 5 where the secretaries, played to the comedic hilt by Dolly Parton, Lilly Tomlin, and Jane Fonda, tie up their boss and make him beg for mercy. It’s sweet revenge in fantasy, but in reality comes from a place of feeling powerless to influence or lead in any other way…

I knew there’d be pushback the minute I dubbed vision the #1 leadership characteristic.

“Get real,” several readers e-mailed. It reminded me of the cartoon a colleague once gave me, bearing the caption: “When you’re up to your a** in alligators, it’s hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp.”

In a time of economic chaos, when many people are desperately trying to keep those writhing reptiles from nipping off their knees, lofty vision talk sounds unrealistic.

It’s difficult to keep your eyes on the prize, your focus on the vision, your hand steady to the wheel when the assumptions you thought were well grounded turn out to be quicksand. But a counterintuitive skill that can help you thrive in times of change and disruption is to embrace chaos as opportunity…

Greetings from Tucson, I couldn’t be more excited to be here today to keynote the 2011 Annual YWCA’s Women’s Leadership Conference on my favorite topic, No Excuses and doing a brief workshop on the 9 Ways Power tools with about 400 women.

I’m honored to be tag-teaming with the inspiring Shoshana Johnson, the first African American female prisoner of war (POW) of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Plus, we were Glamour Women of the Year honorees together in 2003! I can’t wait to hear what she has to say.

Thursday was a big day as I was getting ready for Tucson…

I know I said this column would explore what we can learn about leadership from the presidential candidates’ endless mud-wrestling on our television screens these days. That’s a fascinating analysis I’ll get to eventually—we’ll have plenty of time since the election is still fourteen months away!

But when I realized I’d be writing this column on September 14, the birthday of a significant mentor in my life, I chose instead to focus on the most important leadership lesson I learned from her…

A “Heartfeldt” THANK YOU to everyone who read and commented on my virgin column on leadership at BlogHer Career. Your lively responses, challenges, and questions affirm that leadership issues are high on the agenda.

Fork in the Road courtesy of Debra Condren, author of "Ambition Is Not a Dirty Word"

Hands down the hottest topic in questions this past two weeks was mentoring. Such as:

What’s the relationship between mentoring and fostering leadership capacity in women? Mentoring compared to sponsorship? How do you get a mentor and cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship? How to lead, mentor, and retain high performing employees? How to get a mentor or be a mentor when you’re a consultant or an entrepreneurial business of one?

Great questions all, threading into two major categories around which there are many stories and studies to share:

My 30-something niece called to ask my advice last night. Her boss, she said, kept sending notes suggesting she attend skill-building workshops. She worried that these suggestions obliquely signaled criticism of her performance. Yet her reviews had been stellar and the department she manages exceeded its goals for the year.

My response?