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When he first sat down at the table, Ramon Woodson barely opened his mouth to speak and rarely raised his head to make eye contact with his listeners. By the end of Noel Tichy’s Leadership Workshop at Gleacher Center January 9, Woodson, 14, a member of the Boys and Girls Club on Chicago’s West Side, had sprung to life. “If you don’t speak loudly, nobody can hear you,” Woodson said afterwards.
Tichy, a professor at University of Michigan, said high school and junior high school students must use the same tools as business leaders in making judgments and decisions. “There are only three kinds of judgments that matter,” he said. “The first is people - who’s on your team and off your team. The second is strategy - what mountain do we climb. And the last is crisis - what happens when something goes wrong.”
As outlined in Tichy’s book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, good judgments start with a preparation phase, he said. To sense and identify when action must be taken, a good leader picks up on signals in the environment and is energized about the future, Tichy said. Good leaders frame and name strategic issues by cutting through complexity to get to the essence of an issue, establishing clear parameters, and providing a context and shared language, he said.
“You can make a mistake as a leader in any part along the way,” Tichy said. “You can always go back and try again if you skip a step or handle it poorly. But I argue that if you don’t get the people right, nothing else matters. There are plenty of business examples where the people judgments are wrong.”
During the workshop, Tichy invited Chicago alumni and MBA students to mentor a few dozen members of the Boys and Girls Clubs on judgments regarding people, strategy, and crisis for one hour. Scot Berkey, ’99, a partner in Media Systems, Inc., and Bob Nagel, ’83, a partner in CEO Partners, Inc., spent 30 minutes extracting comments from the quiet, bashful Woodson, a seventh-grader at Willa Cather, before Berkey zeroed in on the key issue.
“You’ve got real thought-out things to say, so deliver them in a real direct way,” Berkey told Woodson. “First, look the person you’re talking to right in the eye. You want that person to know you’re talking to him. When you make that connection, it’s difficult for him to look away. Second, speak louder. You’re talking and you have something to say. Point your finger at me, if you need to make your point.”
Afterwards, Berkey and Nagel agreed that the key leadership issue for Woodson was speaking directly to his listeners.
“He’ll probably remember five percent of what we said about goals, objectives, and crises, but he’ll remember a lot about Scot saying, ‘Face me, shoulders square, talk a little louder,’” Nagel said. “If he remembers that, our coaching was worthwhile, because one of the things he needs to work on is to build self-confidence and project himself more.”
- Phil Rockrohr