ISV Blog 9

Building Imagination

This is “The Coveted Glove”, the symbol of a fun imagination contest in our annual leadership course. I include it here in ISV because its purpose is to stimulate the creative thinking of our participants. The contest rule is simple: “Imagine how our lives would be improved if our hands each had 5 fingers and 2 opposable thumbs”. It is one of a number of games and challenges I have been borrowing for over 25 years from A Whack on the Side of the Head, by Roger von Oech, an American author and toy-maker.

Those who choose to participate gain nothing but the exercise of a most precious mental muscle: the power to see a better world, but I have to say, when we announce the winner at our final banquet, the vision is always a gift to everyone.

Over the years, the ideas have fallen into 3 general categories: physical, societal and spiritual (i.e., good for the soul). Here’s a sampling of ideas about how much better our lives would be with these beautiful hands:

• Physical:

  • way better air guitars

  • more possibility in sign language

  • ability to open 2 beers at the same time

  • sublime massage therapy and back scratches

  • finally accomplishing that pull-up!

  • fork AND spoon could be held in one hand

  • faster cupping and baling in a sinking boat

  • fewer dropped balls by outfielders, due to massive gloves

• Societal:

  • superior ability to count

  • more complex numbering system (based on 14), leading to greater mathematical competence all round

  • giving people 4 thumbs up

  • typing 40% faster increases our WPM, so more information is communicated = less time @ work = more time with family and friends

  • Playstations will have 4 joysticks!

• Spiritual:

  • greater ability to grasp the inner strengths of others

  • giving someone a hand will be on an entirely different scale

  • ability to hold the hand of a family/team member AND point them in the right direction, all with one hand

  • when we count our friends on one hand, we would have 2 more close friends

  • our musical instruments would be more complex and more beautiful music for our souls

Interested in sending one/some in? I can add to this list …

ISV Blog 8

Learning About Words and Pictures …

Scott Adkins,

P.Eng.

I would like to introduce you to Scott Adkins, Operations Manager, PCL Construction, BC Region. Scott is a Civil Engineer who has the responsibility for pursuing, winning and building civil projects.

Working on civil projects means that when PCL builds bridges, highway interchanges, LRT stations, wastewater treatment plants, pump stations and the like on Canada’s west coast, Scott will be somehow involved. He has been with PCL for 15 years and I first met him when he was chosen to be one of the 2007 PCL Leadership Course participants.

Being named to this course is a bit of an honour, since it is only offered once-a-year and only accepts 32 participants at-a-time … so you can imagine that in a company of 4,500 salaried employees, seeing your name and picture go up on the Leadership Wall as part of the company’s bright future is not an everyyear occurrence. It is an honour to be selected and it should be, it is a whale of a learning experience (now there’s a word picture!).

At the course, which is a 4-day, intensive, immersive, residential program, the instructor team works hard to offer every participant multiple opportunities to:

• learn each of the Kouzes and Posner 5 Leadership Practices and integrate into one’s daily habits

• understand where one’s personal strengths and personal development challenges are; and

• make (hopefully!) a leadership commitment to model the way for others in family circles, in the company and in the communities in which each we live.

The course culminates with a final banquet, a major encourage the heart event that requires each participant to publicly share something personal about the learning week and a sense of their commitment going forward. We do not record these declarations, although if we did, they would be the stuff of motivational posters and a few leadership bestsellers, they are nothing short of inspirational. This final event on this final evening is unlike anything any of the participants have experienced before and naturally the instructors try their best to select a final speaker, a class valedictorian who epitomizes that class, someone who has clearly demonstrated skill and character in applying the 5 practices and who has helped others ‘get it’ along the way. To use the words of The Last Crusader in that marvelous Indiana Jones movie, we try to “choose wisely”.

In 2007, we did indeed “choose wisely”, we chose Scott Adkins. Now, you need to know that our valedictorians are not been forewarned of their selection, all they know is that they seem to wait for ages for their names to be called. I was at the podium in 2007, the ringmaster if you like, calling out names, saying a few laudatory words about each participant as he/she came up, and I remember watching Scott as I spoke about him and told the class he would be their valedictorian.

As he heard this announcement, his head dropped as if a heavy weight had just been placed on it: it was obviously an honour he was not expecting, not even suspecting. In a moment, though, he leapt to his feet and wound his way around the dining tables towards the podium, carrying a roll of flip chart papers. This is different, I remember thinking, usually people bring up a small piece of note paper containing the elements of their ‘speech’. Scoot arrived at the podium and said to his classmates that he indeed had words to share, but that he thought the pictures he drew of his words would do a better job of letting us all know how he felt.

He then walked to the front of the podium and revealed his drawings one-at-a-time, dropping each one to the floor as he finished with it (à la Bob Dylan, if you ever saw his wonderful music video of Subterranean Homesick Blues?). Here’s what he “said” to us:

For me as one of his “teachers”, this was the reward of a lifetime. Not only did I (I should say “we”, because everyone in that room ‘got it’ instantly!) realize that we had chosen just about as freaking wisely as we could have, but Scott had used an important element of inspiring a shared vision, that of connecting powerful imagery to his words. He literally demonstrated his learning through illustration. It is a moment I will never, ever forget.

In our leadership development efforts, and very particularly in our personal visioning process, we encourage people to strengthen their word-picture language so that when their followers hear words like: “stronger”, “humble”, “noticed”, “focused”, “recharged” and “blessed”, they see the same images that the speaker has in mind. And we do this because we know this is how our memories work: we store and retrieve images much more easily than we do facts and figures … and if emotion is attached to those words and images, like the ones I am feeling right now, as I write this blog some 13 years later, they resurface quickly, accurately and with great power.

Thank you Scott!

P.S. I should add that, after the evening had come to a close and everyone was leaving the room, I saw Scott bend down and begin to clean up his loose paper, with the obvious intention of scrunching up these works of art and throwing them out. Here’s another memory I have of that event: me running frantically across the room to Scott to save these treasures from destruction. I took them home and asked my photographer son Sean to see if he could record them in a smaller, more permanent format and what you see in the photos above is his work. They stayed on my office wall until I retired in 2012, at which point I gave them to Mike Olsson, who was officially taking over the running of the leadership course (although he claims he had been ‘unofficially’ running it from the day he arrived as a participant in 2008!). They now have a home in Mike’s office.

ISV Blog 7

The Power of a Symbol

This blog contains 2 stories. I settled on Inspiring a Shared Vision as their home, but I could have just as easily chosen Model the Way since the stories, like the two leadership practices, are deeply connected.

The first story is about 12 participants in a high-potential development program, straight-forward acronym is HPDP. They are the 5th wave of the program, each of which lasts about 15 months. HPDP participation requirements include:

• intensive psychometric assessment

• detailed behavioral feedback from supervisors

• 8 two-day, face-to-face development programs which include focus on:

• impactful communications through Improv classes

• deepening personal vision and personal purpose

• knowledge and skill development at the self, team, organizational and industry levels of leadership

• interaction with senior company executives

• preparation, delivery and defense of original business/leadership-related research to the Board of Directors

• workshop with a futurist to launch their own ‘community of leaders’

all while continuing to perform their regular duties; and oh yes, perhaps a relocation and reassignment somewhere in this rather busy process. Not for the faint-of-heart nor the uncommitted.

Sometime into this process, the participants are asked to come up with a team identity. Wave V decide on The Hanged Men.

The symbolism is nothing short of remarkable, a plethora of possible meanings, such as the:

• 12th Tarot card: a man hanging by the ankle upside down, a common punishment for traitors in Italy. You can see the humor here, being in such a intensive program with everyone watching your performance could well feel like a punishment at times!

• solemn expression on the hanged man’s face could also represent self-sacrifice, also fitting

• viewing of the world from a new perspective, gaining new insight, new awareness and enlightenment, VERY appropriate; or the

• depiction of the Norse god Odin, who suspended himself from a tree to gain knowledge.

As I say, a remarkable symbol!

Next, they decide to get a Challenge Coin made, part of the backstory here being of an America soldier, lost behind enemy lines and the only proof he had to successfully identify himself was his challenge coin. Of course it’s not lost on anyone near Wave V in a social setting to learn that the coin can be presented as a challenge, in a bar, and the one or ones who cannot produce their coin(s) must pay for everyone else’s drinks!

Here’s side #1 of their coin:

This is a serious piece of work: pewter, 2” in diameter, a heft of about 4oz. The side shown above has symbols for HPDP Wave V, the company PCL, Canadian and American flags, the 3 sectors in which PCL operates: commercial, civil and industrial and a continuous skyline around the edge. So far, so good for the symbolism, but check out the second side:

Now that is a powerful image! And the symbolism continues: not only are the years 2016/17 there in Latin, but so is VINCIT QUI SE VINCIT, or “he conquers who conquers himself”, an absolutely brilliant capture of the determination Wave V had to become the best versions of themselves. And so you get a sense of what this coin might represent to Wave V. THIS is an identity! They have answered our challenge!

And now here’s the second story. Fast forward to the same timing in HPDP for Wave VI, about 2 years later. When we ask what they are considering for an identity, I wouldn’t say they ‘scoff’ at us, but it does not appear that they are thinking that creating an identity will be all that difficult, and so we pull out the challenge coin of The Hanged Men, tell their story and watch their faces fall as they realize their focus is even not in the same galaxy … or deck of cards, so to speak.

The room gets quieter ... but not as quiet as it does when Geoff Curzon steps up. Geoff (seen below) is the main facilitator for the modules on self-team-organization-industry leadership. He is not a PCL employee, he is an independent thought-leader and an expert designer/instructor in leadership. We are indeed fortunate to have him helping us shape the futures of our high-potentials! He is world-class.

Geoff tells Wave VI about the importance of his coin, which Wave V had so graciously presented to him with some ceremony after he was unable to help facilitate one of their modules due to a bad turn in his wife Jennifer’s health.

Geoff’s story is that he has carried his coin with him throughout the year-long treatment of Jen’s chemo and radiation treatments for invasive breast cancer.  He says the coin symbolizes the person he wants to be for her and so he puts it in his pocket every time he leaves the house ... and he says that if he realizes that he has forgotten it, he returns home to get it before carrying on with his day.

He says that when, in the tough times, in those deeply-emotional moments, he needs to remind himself of who he wants to be for Jen, he reaches into his pocket and squeezes the coin, sometimes so hard it leaves the mark of the Hanged Men on his palm.

Jennifer has come through her trials, thank goodness, due I am sure to a combination of her strength (I mean, just look the power of her smile!), her treatments and Geoff’s love and dedication, but I have to believe that, without the gift of the coin by The Hanged Men, it would have been that much harder for both Curzons.

BTW, is it just coincidence that the name Curzon comes from the Spanish word “corazon”, meaning “heart”?

Thus the power of the symbol, the vision of who Geoff wanted to be and how he used it to model his way. Inspiring.

ISV Blog 6

Inspiring Creativity

In 2008, Bernadette McDonald produced a marvellous book that celebrated 75 years of Inspiring Creativity at The Banff Centre.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this unique institution, it is probably best known as The Banff School of Fine Arts (created in 1933). Later, as the Government of Alberta created The Banff Centre Act and provided more stable, annual financial support, an international conference centre and The Banff Centre School of Management were added into the mix on Tunnel Mountain.

I spent the 1980’s as part of the School of Management. Our mission was to offer short (2 days to 3 weeks), residential seminars, workshops and conferences to the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. When we began the decade, there were about 30 of us working with faculty from all around the world to produce approximately 3 dozen of these events for fewer than 1,000 paying participants mostly from Canada and we were costing The Banff Centre about a half-million dollars a year for that privilege. By the end of the 80’s, there were 17 of us producing 60+ such events for over 2,000 participants from many parts of the world and we were actually making money. We had huge pride in that accomplishment.

I left The Banff Centre to join PCL Construction in 1989 and was approached by Bernadette some years later to write up a short tribute for the publication she was leading. The following is what I wrote for Inspiring Creativity.

“During the 1980’s, I had the honour of being part of a team of dedicated professionals who took the School of Management out of the red and into the black. I believe our accomplishment had a lot to do with the empowering faith The Banff Centre had in us. We were inspired by the vision we shared, and its achievement was constrained only by our creativity. As the years have gone by, I have come to realize that working in that environment with those colleague was a rare gift.”

I still feel that way today, in 2020.  I am very proud to have my words appear in the same space as tributes to the work of David and Peggy Leighton, Les Manning, Tom and Isobel Rolston and so many more incredible talents.

ISV Blog 5

The Power of Imagery (Part II)

In their research into Enlisting Others, the second commitment of Inspiring a Shared Vision, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner tell us that we need to:

• connect to what’s meaningful to others; and

• use symbolic language.

I will tell you a quick story about how of my favorite creative souls put these practices to work. Fred Auch, PCL’s district manager in the Minneapolis area, and his … well, let’s call him a business development leader … Dan Ilten, a mechanical engineer and architect, wanted to make a project proposal to Medtronic.

Medtronic was and is a global leader in medical technology, and at the time of this story, had put out a call for contractor services to build a medical building on their Lake Pointe campus. Fred and Dan’s challenge here had nothing to do with their technical competence: they knew how to do what was being asked because they had done it before, very successfully. Their major obstacle was the fact that Medtronic had been sole sourcing their construction work to a favored general contractor … Fred and Dan had to find a way to convince Medtronic it was time for a change.

Here’s how they ‘communicated’ with Medtronic … with images that connected to what was meaningful to them and to use language that was symbolic of the Medtronic world. Of all the project proposals I have seen, this is perhaps the most original.

These 6 drawings (one of Dan’s many talents!) represented the 6 major stages of construction for the building Medtronic had put out to tender, each cleverly showing schedule impact:

1. foundations, depicted here as the ‘feet’ of the building

2. steel and concrete, the skeletal structure

3. mechanical/electrical/HVAC, the ‘brain’ and the major living ‘organs’ of the building

4. the building systems: heating, cooling plumbing, electrical, fire, data communications, etc, seen here as how and where life flows through the building

5. the building envelope, the ‘skin’ of the building, which controls air pressure and quality, temperature, etc

6. the cladding, the ‘clothing’, what people see as the final visual product.

Now, what you can’t see, unless you know Fred, is that the gorgeous man in the hat in image #6 looks exactly like Fred. How I wish I had seen the Medtronic people reacting to this creativity! It did not convince them to leave their favored contractor for this project, but I am very sure Medtronic were now aware of, and positively disposed to, Fred and Dan working for them in the future. Inspiring a Shared Vision indeed!

ISV Blog 4

From One Tree, a Forest …

In September of 2019, Mike Olsson (trusted friend and esteemed colleague) and I presented the following article in The Leadership Challenge Monthly Newsletter, a John Wiley $ Sons publication. Since the article is all about how we are applying Inspire a Shared Vision in our great company, I thought it would appropriate to republish it here.

“Driven by our vision, “From one tree, a forest,” at PCL Construction we plant our leadership seeds one-at-a-time in the rich soil of our shared values. Our sun and rain are timely combinations of education, exposure, and experience. Our bright future is a thick and healthy forest, providing shelter and nutrients to a ‘forever’ cycle of growth.

How we arrived at this current stage of our journey was due, in large part, to the power of The Leadership Challenge®. But before that, our company began its impressive history as a humble, one-man start-up on the Canadian prairies in 1906. Today, we are the largest general contractor in Canada (7th in North America), owned and operated together by over 4,000 employees—a veritable forest of ownership.

Year-over-year growth, the transition from entrepreneurship to an employee-owned and run operation, as well as a myriad of marketplace changes have each brought their own challenges. But in the early 1990s, the company realized it was at a ‘tipping point’ of organizational development: the volume of work was increasing exponentially with rapid geographical expansion and an ever-growing number of employees to engage and lead. We knew we would have to get serious about deliberately strengthening our corporate culture. 

General contractors (the good ones, at least) are basically in the business of bringing leadership to construction projects, unifying the dreams of the owner, the visionary designs of the architect, the codes of the engineers and the specific building skills of the trades. So in keeping with the leading role we have chosen to play in our industry, it became apparent that we needed to make leadership everyone’s business within our employee-owner ranks as well. By the late 1990s, we had developed a solid leadership development program with The Leadership Challenge® at its core. And as our own education, exposure, and experience grew, our Human Resources Professional Development team realized that we had no business preaching practices we did not ourselves model—thus, the team creation of our shared vision, “From One Tree, a Forest …” displayed as a healthy, growing tree.

The PCL Tree … wordy version

This symbolism has proven memorable (simplicity helps) and connective across generations of employees, evoking pictures of a healthy place for us all to live. Now in its second decade of use, it is a highly-recognizable image of a key cultural component for PCL. The positive, long-term impact of our tree on our diverse employees, operating remote projects in far-flung districts across North America, has encouraged us to extend the Practice of Inspire a Shared Vision to the personal level. Just as PCL, as an organization, needs to know where it is going and how to act on the journey there, so must all PCL employees have a personal destination/purpose/legacy in mind as they live their lives with us.

Anyone participating in one of our leadership development programs or completing the LPI® 360 assessments part of their professional development plan, must create and nurture a personal vision.  This is a practice we adopted from esteemed scholar and author Richard Boyatzis after hearing him present his important work on behavior change to us several years ago. In its simplest form, our personal visioning process provides the context in which a person takes in feedback, plans for a very specific future, and takes action steps to carry out that plan. It has been our general experience that leaders are very receptive to such feedback, that development plans are more behaviorally-specific, and that the motivation to follow through lasts longer. We have found that when people feel a sense of ownership for their future, personal accountability grows stronger. When they know the specific behavioral differences between who they are and who they want to be, the path forward is clearer and more compelling.

In our most comprehensive use of the personal visioning practice, over periods of many months, we guide each leader to take  ever-deeper dives into their character drivers and how/when they were developed, into their short- and medium-term goals, into their desired legacy, and finally into their personal purpose:  why they are here on the planet.  We use storytelling, improvisational theatre, impromptu speeches, and formal presentations. We encourage the use of word pictures and metaphor. Results can be quite remarkable: greater personal clarity of purpose means easier/quicker decision-making in challenging situations and greater confidence, calm and perseverance in working through those times, to say nothing of the impactful presence shown in more normal times. Inspiring a personal vision may well be our greatest contribution to the PCL leader of today and tomorrow.

Every leader is a tree in the PCL forest and has the responsibility to grow more trees. When each one of us has a shared vision for greatness, can you imagine the incredible forest we are developing?  We can. And we have:

§  In the last 3 decades, over 700 PCL employees have been honored with an invitation to participate in our annual, intensive, residential leadership course

§  The well-respected PCL Leadership Academy now hosts three distinct development programs for high-potentials plus a blended personal leadership development program, called E3, accessible to all employees…ensuring that leadership is everyone’s business!”

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ISV Blog 3

The Power of Imagery

This is a shopping list for groceries, penned by an artist named di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, first name Michelangelo.

Those buying and preparing his foods were not literate … what better way to empower them than to include an image beside the words describing the food? Or to help them learn the words that describe the images?

This is what we must all try and do with our speech: add in powerful word pictures so others can literally see what we are saying!

Blog 2: Rainbow Brain

A friend and colleague is a gifted visual communicator. He uses only words to paint his pictures: his tools are metaphors, analogies, similes, word pictures … anything that allows the listener to conjure up rich imagery.

Of course the brain gobbles up images, slides them into the long-term memory drawers of our mental filing cabinets and so what our friend says stays with us. This is a powerful leadership practice indeed, part of the second commitment of Inspire a Shared Vision, which we call projecting. When it is important the followers see the exact same picture in their minds as the one the leader carries, projecting is the practice to follow.

In fact, our little tribute here includes a story in which another colleague, himself no slouch when it comes to colourful language, said of Rainbow Brain: “OMG! Did you swallow a bucket of paint chips when you were a kid?”

ISV Blog 1

Blog 1: Storytelling is THE most basic form of human communication.  It is how we pass along lessons from generation to generation AND it is a powerful technique to help others see themselves interacting successfully in the brighter future. Storytelling is a more powerful influence on the human brain than facts and figures.  People believe stories more than they believe numbers.

The renowned trail attorney Gerry Spence “the strongest structure for any argument is the story”.  He goes on to illustrate the point: 

“Storytelling has been the principal means by which we have taught one another from the beginning of time:  the campfire.  The tribal members gathered around, the little children peeping from behind the adults, their eyes as wide as dollars, listening, listening.  The old man – can you hear his crackly voice, telling his stories of days gone by?  Something is learned from the story – the way to surround and kill a saber-toothed tiger, the hunt for the king of the mastodons in a far-off valley, how the old man survived the storm.  There are stories of love, of the discovery of special magic potions, of the evil of the warring neighborhood tribes – all learning of man has been handed down for eons in the form of stories.”

Stories teach, mobilize and motivate.  Research clearly demonstrates that information is more quickly and accurately remembered when it is presented in the form of an example or a story. Gary Klein, scientist and researcher into how people make decisions under conditions of extreme emergencies, says:

“Storytelling is an essential skill for passing along the lessons that we learn from highly-complex, challenging situations.”

Well-told stories reach inside us and pull us along, much better than bulleted points on a screen.  Stories give us the actual experience of being there and of learning what is really important about the experience.

Great leaders are great storytellers.  We need leaders to mobilize us for our common good.