Category Archives: leadership

Mar 23 2012
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leadership, officer transition

Leave Your Chapter in Good Hands

Brian Lamb, founder and CEO of C-SPAN, announced his retirement this week after starting the television network over three decades ago. Inc. magazine has a nice piece up now about Lamb’s efforts to ensure a smooth “officer transition,” so to speak.

The practical reason for an executive to help his successor is to make certain the organization continues to survive. Leadership at its core is not about self; it’s about commitment to others. For an executive who is retiring that means devoting time to succession as well as to helping the successor understand the roles and responsibilities of the job.

Read the full story here.

Mar 14 2012
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culture change, group culture, Honor, leadership, values-based leadership

Fixing a Toxic Culture

The resignation letter from a former Goldman Sachs executive, published today in the New York Times, has been making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter this morning. As former executive Greg Smith walks readers through the reasons for his resignation, he touches on a number of lessons surrounding group culture and ethical leadership – two subjects that couldn’t be more relevant for fraternity life.

Smith wastes no time in identifying a lack of leadership as the culprit for Goldman Sachs’ increasingly negative work culture.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

It’s hard to say where profit fits into an analogy between a business and a student organization. As you read on, know that Smith’s letter is not an indictment of profit-seeking per se, but rather a lesson in what happens when an organization strays from its core purpose.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

For better or worse, the fastest way to change the culture of a group is the behavior of the leadership. As Smith witnessed, younger employees would observe and later mimic the insidious behavior of the senior analysts. Sure enough, new members are likely to take cues from older members, particularly the leadership. When upperclassmen abuse alcohol, act irresponsibly, and otherwise neglect their duties, the new members will undoubtedly do the same.

Smith closes with some advice for the remaining Goldman Sachs executives – people with the ability to reshape the company’s culture.

Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons.

It’s not easy to tell a peer, one who might even be a good friend, that he can’t be in the fraternity anymore. But that’s what being in a fraternity founded on the Honor principle is all about – self-governance and peer-accountability. That aside, a chapter that lacks the fortitude to remove members who contribute to a toxic culture will not be around for very long.

//Nathaniel Clarkson (James Madison)

Oct 31 2011
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apathy, complacency, culture change, effective meetings, goal setting, group culture, innovation, leadership, motivation

Give your chapter meetings (and chapter culture) a makeover

Here’s a small excerpt from a must-read piece by Martin Lindstrom:

The first thing I do during the course of my change-agent work for Fortune 100 companies is to establish the 4:30 rule. The maximum number of people in any meeting should be four, and meetings should never last any longer than 30 minutes. No phones allowed. You may think this a little radical but, if you want to act entrepreneurial, then these are the most important steps to take.

…

If you’re able to get the right people into one room over two days, the stage is set. Make sure the room is far from the office and prep everyone on the notion that it’s essential to not only come up with ideas for change, but actually lock them in by the end of the second day. If the incentive is great enough, and everyone’s prepared to roll up their sleeves, in my experience, it will happen.

Do yourself a favor and set aside 5 minutes to read the full story.

How could you apply Lindstrom’s other ideas to your chapter?

Oct 27 2011
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leadership, professional development

Employers facing shortage of workers with strong social and analytical skills

“As our cities grow larger,” writes Richard Florida, “the synapses that connect them—people with exceptional social skills—are becoming ever more essential to economic growth.”

These “exceptional social skills,” many of which are practiced in the LEAD Program, can have tangible benefits in the form of higher compensation.

Analytic and social skills add greatly to wages and salaries: after ranking every occupation by the type of skill required to perform it, we observed that on average, occupations in the top quarter as measured by required analytic skill pay $25,600 more than those in the lowest quarter […]

Fraternities enhance social skills for many – nothing we didn’t know already. But what about the analytical skills? How does your chapter’s culture foster strong critical thinking skills (i.e. sound decision making and good judgement)?

“We’ve always done it this way,” “It’s tradition” and other common defenses of the status quo do just the opposite. Where does your chapter fall?

You’ve probably heard many times before how Sigma Nu and the LEAD Program prepare collegians for life after school. But how exactly? What skills? Florida outlines a few here:

Highly developed social skills are different from mere sociability. They include persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project, the ability to help develop other people, and a keen sense of empathy. These are quintessential leadership skills needed to innovate, mobilize resources, build effective organizations, and launch new firms. They are highly complementary to analytic skills—and indeed, the very highest-paying jobs (and the most robust economies) usually require exceptional skill in both realms.

“Bring the right people together” = Recruit the people who will push the chapter to new heights while maintaining the discipline to avoid those who join for the wrong reasons.

“Develop other people” = Build people up through a legitimate new member process free of hazing and other arbitrary time wasters. This also means using all phases of LEAD to develop members through graduation and beyond.

A growing chorus has noted the failure of U.S. schools to adequately teach math, science, and technology, but social intelligence is equally important, and we need to cultivate it more systematically.

Today’s students need a stronger focus on teamwork, persuasion, and entrepreneurship; a better integration of liberal arts with technological literacy; and an emphasis on the social intelligence that makes for creative collaboration and leadership.

Fraternity, when done the right way, builds this teamwork, collaboration, leadership and entrepreneurship that is apparently missing from so many job seekers.

Will you take advantage?

Read the full story here.

-Nathaniel Clarkson

Aug 09 2011
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groupthink, hazing, leadership, new member education, personal servitude, pledging, purpose of fraternity, values, values-based leadership

Are you a fan or a fanatic?

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -Aristotle

We all have strong convictions about something. It could be a political belief (“taxes hurt small businesses”), or a historical narrative (“FDR ended the Great Depression”) or even the eminence of a favorite sports team (“Chicago Cubs are the best baseball team ever”).

Maybe it’s something as simple as a favorite TV show (“Hands down, Entourage is the best show to ever grace the airwaves”). Whatever it may be, everyone is passionate about something.

In everyday usage, “fan” describes someone passionate about a sports team, a TV show, a musician, and so on. “I’m a lifelong Redskins fan,” one might say in casual conversation, or “I’m a huge fan of Tom Petty.”

But the root word of fan carries a much different, and more harmful, meaning. Merriam-Webster defines fanatic as “marked by excessive enthusiasm and often intense uncritical devotion.” (Synonyms include “extremist” and “radical.”)

For a fan of the Detroit Lions a win brings him a sense of joy, but he can acknowledge, after observing the team’s record over the past ten years, that the franchise is not the best in the League.

For a fanatic, on the other hand, evidence doesn’t matter. The Detroit Lions are the best team in the League, period, and no amount of reason or logic will change his mind. It sounds silly in a sports analogy, but from time to time we’re all prone to such blindness in our decision making in other areas of our lives.

So what happens when we’re confronted with new evidence that conflicts with an existing worldview? How will you react? Will you take a big gulp, swallow your pride and change your mind? Or will you frantically search for stories that confirm your narrative and ignore anything that refutes it?

Thankfully for us Sigma Nus, the anecdote to fanaticism is right in front of us. Our founding principle of Truth expects us to make decisions based on sound information, even if it might not support our existing belief.

In short, Truth calls on us to keep an open mind–to consider the possibility that we made a mistake in our thinking. It requires us to walk away from a false paradigm no matter how psychologically painful it might be.

Which brings us to the #40 Answers in 40 Days Campaign. Beginning tomorrow, and continuing through National Hazing Prevention Week, hazers will be confronted with a steady assault of evidence and logic that questions a deeply rooted worldview—a worldview that regards the arbitrary mistreatment of new members as a legitimate way to build lifelong friendships and commitment to the fraternity.

For hazing’s True Believers we ask one thing: Consider the possibility that you might be wrong.

Aug 03 2011
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leadership

Leadership Lessons from Earnest Shackleton

Here are some highlights from The Art of Manliness on leadership lessons from Earnest Shackleton:

On setbacks:

Numerous times, Shackleton and his men felt incredibly hopeful that a goal was in sight and things were turning their way, only to have these hopes utterly dashed.

…

And here is the mark of a real leader: the worse things got, the more cool and collected Shackleton became. Worsley remembered that Shackleton could sometimes be irritable when the going was good and he could afford it, “but never when things were going badly and we were up against it.”

On maintaining morale:

A leader who serves and loves his men as Shackleton did, makes a sacrifice that is not simply altruistic, for such actions have the effect of forging the deepest loyalty.

Read the full story here.

Jul 12 2011
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books, group psychology, leadership, situational forces, strategic planning

7 Books Every Fraternity Leader Should Read This Summer

1. The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment asks, Why do good people commit evil acts? Zimbardo explains how cognitive dissonance, groupthink and other elements of behavioral psychology contribute to breakdowns in group decision making.

For fraternities, self-awareness can be a powerful anecdote to hazing. Mere knowledge of these group psychology phenomena is sometimes all it takes to change a chapter for the better.

2. Building Leaders the West Point Way by Major General Joseph P. Franklin

Think one of the nation’s premier leadership labs creates leaders through hazing? Think again:

“I handled this abuse as well as anyone, I guess, but I couldn’t help wondering what was going on. On the one hand, I was required to commit to memory this great pronouncement by Schofield and his farsighted, thoughtful approach to discipline; on the other hand, my day was an endless barrage of insults and threatened punishments. There seemed to be a clear and obvious contradiction, and yet nobody bothered to express it!”

3. Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement by William Duggan

A refreshing complement to strategic planning. The best ideas often arrive as a flash of insight when we least expect it.

4. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman

“A provocative new book about the psychological forces that lead us to disregard facts or logic and behave in surprisingly irrational ways.” –New York Times

5. Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

“A revelatory study of how lovers, lawyers, doctors, politicians–and all of us–pull the wool over our own eyes. The politician who can’t apologize, the torturer who feels no guilt, the co-worker who’ll say anything to win an argument–in case you’ve ever wondered how such people can sleep at night, Mistakes Were Made supplies some intriguing and useful insights…Reading it, we recognize the behavior of our leaders, our loved ones, and–if we’re honest–ourselves.” -Francis Prose

6. Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Confusing correlation with causation is a common source of ill-advised decision making, leading us to make important decisions based on a false interpretation of data. By explaining the “hidden role of chance,” Taleb encourages readers to consider the possibility of randomness in attempting to connect the dots of life’s everyday events.

From chapters that credit hazing with creating a strong brotherhood (rather than the shared positive experiences) to the recruitment chairman who mistakenly concludes that parties produced a record candidate class (ignoring a campus-wide increase), Fooled by Randomness holds insightful parallels for fraternity leaders.

7. The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

What could tennis possibly have to do with student leadership? This sports psychology classic was written to help players improve their tennis swing, but each lesson begs a parallel to leadership. From creating self-awareness by filming and watching your own swing (evaluating your chapter’s progress) to creating a vision of your ideal shot (strategic planning and visionary leadership), The Inner Game of Tennis teaches leaders to watch for advice from unexpected sources.

BONUS: The Story of Sigma Nu by John C. Scott (Purdue)

The story of three men who challenged the status quo.

Jun 30 2011
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apathy, complacency, goal setting, group culture, innovation, leadership, strategic planning, values-based leadership

The Fraternity Stock Market

Pandora, Groupon, LinkedIn, and coming soon to a portfolio near you: Facebook. If you’re a business major or just generally someone who keeps up with business news then you’re well aware of the recent scramble of tech companies to the IPO cash cow. Just the other day, Facebook was given a valuation estimate of $100 billion. These companies are searching for capital, which will hopefully result in both a better product and higher profits.

However, these companies also have to prove their worth both literally and figuratively. That’s what the stock market is all about, isn’t it? Is Company A worth so-and-so amount or is it not? Product recalls, poor leadership, bad money management, and failing to achieve benchmarks will result in a dropping stock value. On the other hand, the opposite of these negatives will attract confident investors eager to throw some money your way in return for an anticipated increase of value.

All business talk aside, isn’t this a rather nifty metaphor for a fraternity? If I run chapter A and we have strong leadership, a strategic plan, defined goals, rock solid dues collection and budgeting, and of course providing the best fraternity product on our campus then why wouldn’t others want to “invest” and join us? For a nice cherry on top of this sundae we also mention that those who invest with us will see an increase of value. With each bid signed and an additional investor we can use that capital to fund brotherhood retreats, run an effective LEAD program, host safe social events, and the added bonus of developing as a scholar, leader, and gentleman.

Now let’s say I run chapter B and we don’t have a very organized group of leadership, we’re in debt because we don’t collect dues very or bother to follow a budget, we don’t have any goals (which means we’re either in neutral or sliding backwards), and our overall product is mediocre at best.

In fact, to hide our downfalls we like to throw up the smoke-screen of parties and the image that everything is A-Okay (Sounds like Enron might have pulled a page from this playbook, actually). But then we had an incident thanks to our risky social practices. Now we’re wondering why no one wants to sign a bid and invest in us (or why we’re only attracting people who want to party).

Millenials are smarter than your average bear. If anything, to follow the running stock market metaphor, they’re smart bulls looking to invest in something that is going to provide them value for the capital they invest. So as you enjoy your summer vacation and reach that point of excitement to return back to school to see brothers and rehash your summer exploits, think about your answer to two simple questions: If your chapter were to launch as an IPO what would it be worth, and would it ultimately boom or bust?

May 10 2011
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goal setting, leadership, strategic planning

When Players and Stakeholders Have Different Expectations

By Nick Claghorn

The sports business industry ‘happenings’ frequently are microcosms of society. Sport teaches us important lessons about teamwork, work ethic, and other important behavioral sciences that relate to other facets of life.

I recently viewed a Harvard Business Review interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, about a chapter of his new book, “Fixing The Game.” His book is an explicative insight of the National Football League’s relativity to capitalism.

In business, there are two games. The first is the ‘real’ game, which involves building factories, creating products, selling those products, and making a profit.

The second is the ‘expectations’ game. Shareholders create a provisionary statement of where they believe the company’s bottom line, among other things, will stand over a certain period of time.

Martin goes on to explain how these relate to the NFL by indicating the CEOs are the company’s quarterbacks.

These games exist in the NFL, as well. The ‘real’ game is the winning versus losing concept. The quarterback is out there to win the game, regardless of the score. But, in the second game, ‘expectations’ are set throughout the week to create a point spread so bettors can gamble on the outcome of the game.

This is largely the reason athletes are prohibited from gambling, to preserve the integrity of the game. If they had a vested interest in the expectation that they will win by a certain margin, they may gamble the ‘real’ game for the ‘expectation.’

In professional sports, players and gamblers often have different sets of expectations. Gamblers hope for the point spread; players don't care about the margin of victory as long as they get the win. The same scenario often plays out in the business world, where shareholders and employees hold different expectations of the company's performance.

As an alumnus who works closely with one of our chapters, I find the ‘expectations’ game to be dangerous, not only for business and the NFL, but also for the fraternity chapter. Think of a time you were upset with the active chapter. Were you a fan or were you a shareholder? Which one do you think elicits the best reaction from the active chapter’s executive committee?

It might serve a chapter best to communicate expectations of the alumni while understanding that the ‘real’ game is what creates winners. Reward the chapter for a great recruitment process by providing a barbeque for initiation. Publicly recognize the chapter for a job well done (e.g. increased manpower from last year), even if they may not have met your expectations (say, 25% increase in manpower). The real indicator is the growth of improvement.

Pressure can be a great motivator or a great de-motivator. Fellow alumni advisors should expect excellence from their chapters, but celebrate the wins along with the milestones. As the post-game press conference saying goes, a win is a win.

Read the full HBR story here.

Video: http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2011/05/what-capitalism-can-learn-from.html

May 04 2011
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headquarters staff, Honor, integrity, leadership, values-based leadership

Self-governance in Action at Boise State

Every two years Sigma Nus from across the country convene at Grand Chapter–the supreme governing body of the Fraternity–where collegiate and alumni delegates vote on changes to The Law and elect new national leadership, among other matters.

As every Sigma Nu should know, the votes at Grand Chapter are overwhelmingly controlled by the collegians. This means that no bylaw is passed and no leader is elected without the collective approval of the undergraduate members.

It was established from the beginning that the General Fraternity would regard undergraduate chapters as self-governing entities; this is the essence of the Honor system.

Even the best chapters make mistakes on occasion. With sound chapter operations, these groups are prepared to handle their own problems, whether it be through a local honor court or a more formal Trial Court. Excellent chapters are willing to discipline their own members.

The High Council (Sigma Nu’s elected board of directors) and the General Fraternity are obligated to take action only when a chapter is so operationally dysfunctional that it’s incapable of holding its own members accountable.

Boise State’s response to the recent NCAA allegations serves as a positive example in self-governance. After multiple NCAA violations surfaced at Boise State this spring, school officials were quick to take action and self-impose sanctions:

Boise State has self-imposed sanctions on its football program as it faces NCAA allegations charging the school’s athletic program with a lack of institutional control.

…

“We pride ourselves on doing things the right way at Boise State. As soon as we became aware that these inadvertent infractions were not in accordance with NCAA rules, we acted swiftly and without hesitation,” football coach Chris Petersen said Monday in a statement released by the school.

“The university, our staff and the involved student-athletes worked together with the NCAA to resolve the situation, including reimbursement of the benefits received, and that money was donated to a local charity,” Petersen said.

After being notified by the NCAA of the potential violations, Boise State officials launched their own inquiry in 2009 and ultimately self-reported some previously unknown infractions. But before a resolution could be reached with the NCAA, Boise State officials discovered more serious problems in the women’s tennis program last fall.

If your chapter slips up, how will your leadership react? Exercise self-governance and acknowledge the mistake, take appropriate action and move on?

Or deny all wrongdoing, orchestrate a cover-up and let the problem worsen?

There are too many stories of now dormant chapters that chose the latter.

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