If you take the public universities in Canada and you exclude the private universities in the States, such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, etc., and you compare the public universities in Canada with the public universities in the states, you will find that Canadian universities are funded at 60% of the level of the public universities in the States. This is why our Canadian universities have larger classes and more multiple choice exams. It also shows up in NESS, the National Student Survey of Engagement where the US scores higher than Canada and the ability to teach in Canada is less concentrated because there are more students per professor. The final thing I say when talking to my university friends is that it is instructive to compare UW to MIT and the University of Michigan because we want to be their Canadian equivalents. At the UW the faculty student ratio is 27 to 1, at the University of Michigan it is 10 to 1, and at MIT it is 4 to 1. If you compare dollars from tuition fees, operating grants and private income, the UW is funded at $11,000 per student per year, Michigan gets $27,000 and MIT $100,000. As I tell my friends in business, imagine yourself selling your product or services and your competition has 10 times the resources you do.

The good side of that story is that UW is already the equal to the University of Michigan and MIT in many of our programs. That means that we are being as efficient as possible with what we have. Therefore, even a small incremental investment in us is very appealing because it has a very good ROI (Return on Investment) so every additional dollar spent on higher education would go a long way. 

This excerpt illustrates the types of pertinent questions David Johnson asks, both of himself and others to benchmark the University of Waterloo. He then uses the answers to those questions to develop credibility as a leader and to make a strong case for bringing his vision that Canada should be a world leader in higher education, innovation and research by 2020. 

To find out more about how master Canadian Leaders are inspired by vision and fueled by passion, attend the 1^st Halifax Leadership Symposium on September 28, 2010 at Pier 21 ─ The Future of Leadership in Atlantic Canada: Challenges, Opportunities and Innovative Solutions. Our keynote speakers are Françoise Morissette author of Made in Canada Leadership.  Françoise is the director of a pan Canadian leadership institute to help raise the level of leadership in Canada by sharing leadership best practices from across the country. Cora Tsouflidou, the founder of Cora’s Restaurants, who turned a café in Montreal into 120 restaurants across Canada. Chris Power, president and CEO of Capital Health is talking about the future of health care and Phil Fontaine the former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, is speaking about the type of inclusiveness we need today and will even need more of in the future because the Conference Board of Canada says that by the year 2031 we will have 23 people in Atlantic Canada to do the work that 50 people do today. For more information and to register at the early bird discount rate, visit www.futureofleadership.dal.ca. The book The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders is available at independent bookstores and at Chapters and Chapters online and at www.BradMcRae.com

There is no better place to learn about trust than during a crisis. Both Tony Hayward, the embattled CEO of British Petroleum and  Michael McCain, CEO of Maple Leaf foods had to face the worst news any Chief Executive Officer had to face. BP caused North America’s worst ecological and environment disaster as a result of the sinking of the Deep Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. In Canada, twenty people died and countless others were horribly sick due to Listeria that was found in three of Maple Leaf Food products that originated from its Toronto meat plant. 

The examples that were set by these two men, both what they said, how they said it, and how well or not well they said it resonated with their respective audiences, shareholders and constituents were as different as night and day. Tony Hayward was cold, aloof and pre-occupied. Perhaps his worst statement was that he wanted to get his life back which was in stark contrast with the people who live and work in the Gulf who may never get their lives back.  Among the statements that Hayward made are:

Almost nothing has escaped.

I think the environment of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.

The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into [the Gulf of Mexico] is tiny in relation to the total water volume.

The oil spill is on the surface. There aren’t any plumes.

What the hell did we do to deserve this?

There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.  

Yeah, of course I am (when asked if he sleeps at night)

There is a saying that if something happens once it could be an accident. If it happens twice it could be a pattern, and if it happens three times, it most assuredly is a pattern. In all of the above quotes there is a marked minimization of the problems associated with the oil spill. There is proof that BP took shortcuts and was ill prepared. The Centres of Disease Control states that 90% of accidents are predictable and preventable. BP took unacceptable risks. The fact that Hayward has almost no sense of presence, understanding and conveyed no sense of caring or empathy for the environment and the people’s who lives and livelihoods have been decimated ─  just added insult to injury. You can see the ad that PB made by typing in “A Message by Tony Hayward” and “I’d Like My Life Back” into the YouTube search box.  

In stark contrast, Michael McCain became the embodiment of the pain that befell the victims, his company, his employees that McCain was imminently believable. You can see his apology by going to YouTube and Typing in “Maple Leaf Apology”.  

When Listeria was discovered in the product, we launched immediate recalls to get it off the shelf, then we shut the plant down.

To Canadians who are ill and to the families who have lost loved ones, I offer my deepest sympathies. Words can not begin to express   our sadness for your pain.

This week our best efforts failed and we are deeply sorry.

I commit to you that our actions are guided by putting your interests first.

There is a formula that says that Trust = (Authenticity/Credibility/Presence + Reliability/ Dependability + Professionalism) divided by Self Interest where self interest is defined in the negative sense of self interest such as pre-occupation with self and/or personal interests vs. interest in the welfare of others.     

You can hear confidence, sincerity, caring and compassion in Michael McCain’s voice but not in Tony Hayward’s voice. It is because of these factors and how they contribute or take away from trust that explains why Michael McCain is still president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods and why Tony Hayward, who became the most hated man in America, was removed. I invite you to watch these segments on YouTube that embody trust and its absence. The distinction becomes even more clear when you listen to each man’s speaking with your eye’s closed. 

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.  ─ Alan Kay

There is another technique to help us make a better decision in developing and moving our career forward. You have two choices regarding your future: you can wait for it to happen, or you can invent it and then work to achieve it. In this blog we will look a technique that will help you create your desired future: The “Letter to the Future”. The “Letter to the Future” is your own personal north star. Once you have articulated what you want as clearly as possible, it will serve as a guide, and draw you towards it. To write your own “Letter to the Future,” pick a time ─ 5, 10, 15 years from now, or any length ─ longer or shorter that is meaningful to you. Date the top of the letter with that future date. Imagine the intervening years have passed and you are writing to a friend (pick someone you know, like and feel comfortable talking to about your career). Use the friend’s name in the salutation, as “Dear Terrye” (friend’s name) or if you prefer, pick some other supportive person to whom you can comfortably imagine writing about your vision of the future.

Writing the letter from the future will feel strange at first. Most people get a feeling of intense improbability because writing about the future in the past tense just does not make sense. However, as you progress in writing your letter, it will feel more and more comfortable. Amazingly, most people find that by the time they finish their letter, usually a part of what they need to do and how to make those changes, becomes much clearer. In other words, we usually have more of the answer than we think we do. Writing the letter from the future helps us tap into some of our own personal but hidden wisdom.

The purpose of dating the letter and writing it to someone you actually know is to strengthen the psychological realism of the letter. Imagine in this future you have successfully resolved the current changes, transitions and uncertainty in your life.  Describe what your ideal career would look like and how you got there.  In other words, at the time of the letter writing, you are living a wonderful, joyous, healthy, satisfying life. Alternatively, you can describe how you are spending your time, starting with getting up in the morning to where you are living, and/or what your relationships are like. Lastly, it is a good idea to update your letter to the future periodically and see where it is the same and where it has changed.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: 

First, by reflection, which is the noblest;

second by imitation, which is easiest; and

third by experience, which is the bitterest.    ─ Confucius  

The last four blogs looked at how Master Leaders are Master Decision Makers. We will now look at tips that can help you become a better decision maker about your career. In this blog we will look at the power of reflection to harvest lessons that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your life. For the purpose of this exercise, you need to briefly describe three of your best career experiences. Then you need to reflect on these experiences and derive the lessons available in them. I will use myself as an example and then you can follow suit and derive your own lessons.  

Three of My Best Career Experiences. You can learn a great deal by looking at both the similarities and the differences in your best career experiences. One of the reasons that an historical perspective is so powerful is that sometimes your best experience only turns out to be the best in terms of learning in retrospective and it may be difficult to identify the lessons learned at the time of the experience. Therefore it is a good idea to look at your best experiences over the entire life-span of your career.   

My first example of a positive career experience is as follows. After vacillating for years about whether I would finish my doctoral studies or drop out, I finally decided unequivocally to finish my dissertation.  I distinctly remember, exactly where I was, as I was walking through the University of British Columbia campus, when I decided that I would finish my dissertation no matter what the circumstances ─ No more waffling, No more indecision.  I would Finish ─ Period. 

Subsequently, I found and invited a world-class mentor to be my primary research advisor.  I then did the research, analysis and writing, sometimes working up to 18 hours a day and completed the dissertation in time to meet the deadline to graduate. At one point, I had to be assertive with the committee as to what I could and could not do in a reasonable time frame and suggested the additional work they recommended would make a great follow-up study.    I also put together a highly functioning team for my doctoral committee.  Although writing my dissertation looked like a highly individually oriented activity, it was really an exercise in mass collaboration with myself, my advisor and committee, and my support network including my exercise partner who helped me manage the great deal of stress involved in taking on such a large, multi-faceted project.  

In my second example of a positive career experience, although I didn’t fully realize it until I started writing this blog, was that I replicated this collaborative model in the writing of my sixth book. My team of researchers, editors and family support kept me going ─ especially when the going got really tough. The crunch came during the final editing of the manuscript. All my other books required extremely minor revisions, such as adding or eliminating a comma here and there or moving a few paragraphs around.

In the final editing of this book, The Seven Strategies of Master Negotiators, I worked with three different, extremely competent, extremely professional and extremely demanding editors at McGraw-Hill Ryerson who used three different coloured Post-It-Notes™.  When I received the final manuscript, I had an anxiety attack on the spot. The manuscript looked like it had the measles; there were so many suggested changes. Each note requested major revisions. For example: the writing had to be crisper and clearer; the numerous interviews, which were the heart of the book, had to be shortened; and the transitions and  conclusions of the chapters needed to be stronger and tighter ─ and all of this had to be completed within two weeks. Not only did my team of three editors help me write a much better book ─ they also taught me a great deal about writing and book publishing that has stood me in good stead in all of my subsequent writing projects.  

My third very positive career experience also revolved around writing, and the fact that all three of my best experiences involved writing is telling me something. The third writing collaboration that worked exceeding well was publishing my first self-published book ─ From Our Grandmother’s Lap:  Lessons for a Lifetime. Not only was this a very collaborative endeavor, but I also learned a great deal about publishing and cover design. I also entered into a very innovative and collaborative manner to sell the book because it was sold primarily through Credit Unions at Christmas rather than through traditional book stores. Since it was the only book for sale at the Credit Unions, and was used as a fundraiser, the book really stood out and sold exceedingly well ─ so I learned about innovative marketing.    

Lessons Learned: The lessons learned from all three positive experiences listed above involve the critical importance of: collaboration, focus, writing and publishing. In fact, now that I think about it, this is the model I need to follow in all of the large projects I undertake such as the establishment of  The Atlantic Leadership Development Institute.

It is now your turn to reflect on your best career experiences. Exercise: Briefly describe three of your best career experiences.

Let me give an example of a decision that my daughter had to make. She very much wanted to complete her Grade 10 piano exam but also wanted to go to Jamaica with me over March break. The deadline for applying to take the exam was March 4. This resulted in Katie having to make a decision because she had only completed one-third of the work needed to successfully take the Grade 10 exam. In order to take her Grade 10 exam, Katie needed to practice for two hours a day. However she was in the last four months of her senior year of high school and was already involved in many extracurricular activities, including the high school musical which meant that a great deal of her time was already committed. On the other hand, if she did not complete her Grade 10 piano at this time, it was unlikely that she would be able to work on it when she entered university. Below are the lists for the pros and cons of working on piano over March break and the pros and cons of going to Jamaica over March break.

Pros and Cons of Working to Complete the Grade 10 Piano Exam Pros                                                               

I almost always complete what I started          

Feeling of satisfaction from completing my Grade 10 piano                                                    

Keeps my options for music open                      

I don’t want to disappoint my Mom or my piano teacher     

If I don’t get my Grade 10 now, it will be very likely that I will never get it because I won’t have the time or interest to work on it when I start university

Cons

I would be disappointed if I didn’t get to go to Jamaica

I missed out on the last trip with my father to Africa when I had mono

I deserve a vacation

I won’t have time to do other things I would like to do in the four months left of my Grade 12 year

Pros and Cons of Going to Jamaica over March Break Pros                                                               

I need a break                                                                

I could spend quality time with my Dad                                               

I have always wanted to travel south               

I like learning about new cultures and seeing/visiting new places                                

My Dad knows a lot of neat people in Jamaica         

I’m tired of working all the time                      

Cons

I need practice time for Grade 10 piano

I would like to see if I could pass Grade 10 piano after all the work I have done     

My mother would be disappointed

I am too tired right now to make a decision so doing nothing is the easiest thing to do

I’m not comfortable flying

There will be other times in the future when I can travel with my Dad and I am sure that he will be doing volunteer work in Jamaica for years to come

At this point, the person doing this analysis crosses out a pro and con of equal value in both columns for each of the pro and con analyses. In the above case if “I need a break” in the pro column is equal to the “I’m not comfortable flying” in the con column, then they are both crossed off. However, if the weightings are not equal and Katie were really terrified of flying, then she might have to cross off two or more of the pros, for example, cross off both “I’m tired of working all the time” and “I need a break” to be able to cross off the con “I’m not comfortable flying.” When you have finished crossing off the pros and cons to the best of your ability for both analyses, you may see that there is a clear preference for one of the options. In the above case, it became clear to me that there was another option that we had not considered and that option was to see if Katie could spend some time practicing her piano in Jamaica. I called around to various hotels and found out that some of the hotels did not have a piano. One hotel had a piano but they would not let anyone except their resident pianist use their piano. However, when I talked to the sales department at the Jamaican Pegasus Hotel I hit gold. They had two pianos. There was no problem if Katie wanted to practice for two hours a day. If the piano was in a room or near a room where there was a conference going on, they would move the piano to somewhere where Katie could practice. I held my breath and then asked what the charge would be ─ the answer: “No Charge”. And the Pegasus is one of the nicest hotels with one of the largest and most beautiful swimming pools on the island. The idea of Katie being able to practice the piano in Jamaica would never have occurred to me if we had not done the double pro/con analysis.                

From my last Leadership Blog, we looked at how Megan and Ted used the Weighted Averages Method to help them make a decision about moving because Megan was considering a new position in a different city. However, both the option of moving and the option of staying were a virtual tie using The Weighted Averages Method. However, when Megan applied The 70% Rule, there was a difference in terms of “gut feel” there was a significant difference between position number three and Megan’s current position. Ted was equally content moving or staying put. However, when Megan thought of staying in her current position, it just didn’t feel right. It turned out that she wanted a new challenge more than she thought she did. Since they lived near a university, they could rent their current house to visiting professors and rent a condo in their new location. This would give them the opportunity to try out condo living and see if they wanted to buy a condo or return to their home when they both retired. This example points out the benefits of using more than one decision-making technique.

Exercise: Can you think of a time when you used “The 70% Rule”, even if you were not conscious that you were using it? How did the decision turn out? Alternatively, you can try the 70% Rule with an important current decision and see how it turns out.

Then grade yourself using A (Very Good) through F (Very Poor) in each of the three areas from the 70% Rule:

            Information Gathering                    

            Analysis                                             

            Gut Instinct                                       

What proof do you have that would validate the grade you gave yourself in each area?

What proof do you have that invalidates or does not substantiate the grade you gave yourself?

Ask several peers, colleagues and/or friends to rate you on the three areas.

   Information Gathering                                           

   Analysis                                                                             

  Gut Instinct                                                                    

Do their ratings substantiate the ratings that you gave yourself?

Where do their ratings not substantiate the ratings you gave yourself?

What additional information or data analysis do you need to improve the accuracy of how you rate yourself?

Next, think about another situation where you could or should apply the 70% Rule.

Megan had had a stellar career and is now a senior vice-president with her current organization. Over the past several years she has been headhunted on a fairly regular basis. Recently, the calls became more and more frequent and the offers more and more enticing. Given her age, and the fact that her husband Ted had just retired, Megan knew that this would most likely be her final working assignment before she retired. In particular, there were three offers on the table that were very tempting. However, Megan and Ted felt very comfortable in their home and in the community where they lived.

They began the process by listing the factors that were important in making the decision, such as type of city, income, learning opportunities, and distance from their children and grandchildren. The next task was to rank each factor as to its importance. The only caveat was that all of the rankings must add up to 1.0. For example, the reputation of the possible new organization could rank at .25, income could rank .3, and Megan’s opportunity for growth and development in her career could be .2. It often takes several tries to get the combined ratings to equal 1.0. 

When you do your own rankings, you will notice that just by trying out the various weighting you will get a better sense of how each factor should be rated and also if some factors should be combined or removed or whether additional factors should be added. Coming up with the right categories or factors and then giving each of those factors just the right ranking is an iterative process. For example, in Megan and Ted’s case when other factors became apparent – such as contribution to society – some of the factors changed as well as the weightings of some of the other factors. Using a spreadsheet makes it easier to try out different factors and weightings until you get it so that it feels just right.

The next task was to list the potential new positions and Megan’s current position across the top of the page. Megan then did research to better understand the ramifications of choosing each of the positions before rating them with a score from 1 to 10 to reflect how closely each position satisfies the requirement listed in the column on the left (See Table 5-1 below). For example, she rated position number one as a 6 on income and position number three as a 7 on income.

Then, for each factor, she multiplied the ranking for each possible position times the weighting she had given each criteria. The next step was to add up all of the numbers in each column and multiply the sum by 10, which gave the ranking of each position.

You can change the numbers as you discover additional information that might reflect the value of the criteria as it relates to each position in question. Table 5-1 demonstrates the rankings for Megan and Ted for each of the three possible new positions and for her current position.     
 

 As you can see, number three comes out as the top rated position, however, the difference between number three and Megan’s current position is just too close to call. Therefore, Megan and Ted will have to do some further work in order to make the best decision possible. One option is to add some additional criteria and see if that makes a substantial enough difference so that a clear decision can be made. However, because the top two scores are so close, Megan and Ted might be better off using a different decision-making method such as the 70% Rule, which we will example in our next blog.

A journalist was interviewing a successful businessman. He asked what his success was based on. The reply was “decisions.” Not being happy with the answer, the journalist asked, “What were those decisions based on?” The answer was “experience.” Still not happy, the journalist asked “how did you get that experience?” The answer – “Bad decisions.”       ─ Anonymous

Every day we all make thousands of decisions. How often do we take the time to get feedback as to how well those decisions served us? The answer is not often. There is a great deal of psychological research to back the fact that we do not tend to be good observers of our own behaviour. One classic study asked a group of dieters to list, as carefully as possible, what they ate during the past week. The dieters were then put on the exact same diet that they recalled. What was the result? They lost weight because they forgot a significant number of items that they had consumed.

In order to monitor, and hence improve, your decision-making, the method that you can use has to be effective and at the same time relatively easy to use. Psychologist Gary Klein specializes in research on decision-making. Klein suggests that decision makers should become “reflective practitioners” by thinking about and articulating the elements that contribute to their decisions’ success and failures. Klein recommends that one-third of all the time that US Marines spend in simulations that are designed to sharpen their decision-making process be spent debriefing those decisions and learning everything possible to improve their decision-making in the future. However, it is one thing to think that “reflective practice” or debriefing your decisions is a good idea and it is another thing to actually do it. There are also those of us who ruminate and keep regretting our decisions but still don’t formulate a plan for what we should do differently next time. A wise colleague of mine, Patricia Morgan suggests that we turn our resentments into commitments.

Exercise: Turning resentments into commitments:

             My resentment is:

            In the future I will:

If you have any insights into becoming a better decision-maker, we would like to hear from you on this blog. You will also find many other decision-making hints in future blogs and in The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders: Featuring Key Insights From 32 of Canada’s Top Leaders.  In our next blog we will look at how “The Weighted Averages Method ” will make you a better decision-maker.  

Mastery is being able to use the right leadership strategies combined with the right higher-order skills such as higher-order intentions, decision-making, risk-assessment, execution, commitment and follow-through for each specific leadership challenge.

You can use this leadership model to help you develop your own higher-order leadership skills, competencies and strategies, and in turn, to help others in your organization do the same by reading the subsequent entries into this blog.

For example, research by the Conference Board of Canada concluded that leadership development is more important than ever as we will need to accelerate the development of leaders in the private, public, not-for-profit and volunteer sectors as baby boomers retire in increasingly large numbers. One of the key strategies of Master Leaders is that they are master decision makers and this is a skill that takes not years, but decades to develop. If a Master Leader makes the right decision in the right way and at the right time, that decision becomes part of his or her legacy as the following examples point out.

• Louise Arbour indicting the world’s first sitting president of a nation for crimes against humanity;
• Canada Post’s decision to benchmark itself against the best postal systems in the world, then setting aggressive targets for improvement, and for the first time in its history paying its unionized members a bonus for achieving set performance targets, and
• Bombardier’s decision to build the C-Series jetliner during one of the worst downturns in aviation history. Not only will Bombardier be competing against its traditional rivals, the new 100- to 130-seat plane will compete directly with Boeing and Airbus ─ the world’s two largest manufacturers of jet airliners. 

The next series of blogs will look at the decision making processes used by Master Leaders in more detail.

Because 80% of Canadians now live in cities, cities are one of our main “economic engines that generate wealth and stimulate creativity. They are centres of opportunity that attract people and business from across the nation and around the world.” Mayor McCallion has taken this advice to heart. When she was first elected as mayor, Mississauga was a bedroom community. Based on her vision and her execution of that vision, today 80,000 to 90,000 people commute to Mississauga to work. As of July, 2008, 40 of Canada’s top 500 companies and 59 of Fortune 500 corporations have offices in Mississauga.

            I asked Mayor McCallion how she developed a cluster of economic engines in Mississauga:

H.M.   We began with a single bio company in the 1960’s and today Mississauga has the third largest bio cluster in Canada. One of the reasons for this is that we have a large and well-educated workforce. Mississauga is surrounded by some of the finest, post-secondary institutions in the world. More specifically, The University of Toronto at Mississauga offers one of the few Masters in Biotechnology programs in Canada. Mississauga is also part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and hence, part of one of North America’s largest centres of biomedical activity. The GTA is home to more than 300 biomedical companies, world class teaching hospitals and research facilities.

We also champion initiatives to support innovation and scientific breakthrough such as information technology, which is an important infrastructure for the biotechnology industry. The Mississauga Information and Communication Technologies Cluster consist of 3,912 technology-based companies with more than 37,000 employees.

We also have one of the world’s busiest and most modern airports and we are currently going through a visioning process where we want to plan for the future. We need to take a million cars off the road in the Greater Toronto Area. One way we can do that is by building a fixed link [high speed rapid transit] from the Pearson International Airport to downtown Toronto and Mississauga. We are also working on integrating all of the transportation networks in the GTA.

We need expert leaders in each and every sector of our economy and this includes Master Leaders from municipal governments. In my next blog we will look at Master Leadership Model I developed from The Seven Strategies of Master Leaders.