Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, both British, both researchers studying leadership, were the speakers. They have talked to many, many people and asked, “What do you want from a leader?” The answers are “a bewildering variety,” but have coalesced into four categories, which together make up the acronym CASE:

• Community
• Authenticity
• Significance
• Energy and excitement

If this sounds interesting to you, too, watch the video and learn more.

The article the headline led me to was about a guy named Stephen Mansfield, the president and CEO of Methodist Health System, North Texas. He went to the same university that I attended, for both undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Mansfield believes that as a leader, it’s his job to put people first. He sees himself as a “servant-leader,” and he regularly schedules at least two hours on his calendar every week to spend time with hospital staff. He is prepared, says the article, to “lead the Methodist Health System through the changes that health-care reform will bring.”

Mansfield is convinced that corporate leaders can make a difference in society.

His doctoral dissertaion focused on how “hope plays into the effectiveness of a work group,” so his leadership beliefs are grounded in research. He says, “I think that leaders, instead of whining about all that’s wrong, can do so much more for their organizaitons if they create a hopeful, optimistic view of the future for their employees.”

He quotes John Maxwell’s book The 21 Indispensible Qualities of a Leader, who said, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

It’s very easy for leaders today to be so busy that they forget to let people know they care … and if Mansfield is right, they undercut productivity and engagement by doing so. It may seem counter-intuitive to make time for people — but it’s almost always time well spent — in terms of how people feel and how productive they are.

Today, in fact, he was able to spend only about half an hour in his office the entire day. Tonight I asked him a few questions about meetings. Here’s what he had to say.

Q: Do you think there are too many meetings at work?
Yes. We would all get more done if people could work on what they need to accomplish instead of talking about it. Actions speak louder than words. But if you have to meet, make it time well spent.

Needless to say, he’s not that crazy about meetings. But given that he attends and/or leads so many of them, what does he do to make them palatable?

Q: How do you make your meetings time well spent?
A: Having a good meeting takes preparation. Here’s what I do:

• I prepare an agenda ahead of time.
• I send it out the day before the meeting, so that everyone will know what to expect.
• I make assignments on the agenda, letting people know of things they need to know, bring, and do.
• At the meeting, we create an action item list, with responsibilities and due dates.
• I publish minutes to a data folder. Sometimes I take the minutes; at other times another attendee does.
• We typically use an iMeeting and project materials over the Internet for those who are not in the same room.

No matter what kind of meeting it is, these tools work well to make the meeting not seem like a waste of time.

Q: What makes the worst meetings you’ve been to bad?
Having a guest executive arrive late to the meeting, forcing us to go back over material I or someone else has already covered. Leaders are busy, I know, but they should be considerate of others’ time.

Q: Can meetings ever be fun?
They can be. One group of meetings I have is about collaboration and creativity. Those meetings are usually more fun than problem-solving meetings. Taking a few minutes to talk or share at the beginning of a meeting can make the upcoming time together a little more enjoyable, too.

There’s nothing new or earthshaking here. But despite the fact that these best practices for meetings are widely known, it’s amazing how many people at work don’t follow them.

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According to Pickens, Americans have many sources of alternative energy to choose from: solar, wind, propane, natural gas, ethanol made from algae or switchgrass, geothermal, electricity, and more.

If Obama were to call on Americans to choose one or more of these alternatives and prepare to move to them in ten years or so, here’s what I would do:

• Put solar panels on the roof of my barn
• Install a windmill
• Tighen up my house considerably
• Grow most or all of my own food, and as much as possible, get myself and my family out of the industrial food chain
• Adapt our automobiles to use either ethanol or natural gas
• Learn a lot more about all these energy resources than I currently know

I don’t know if this would be enough — but in truth, I’d prefer to live this way.

What choices would you make?

Do you think President Obama should lead us to a new energy future?

Q: What’s the most important thing a leader has to do?
A: The good leader has to model the behaviors he wants his/her people to exhibit. If he wants them to be open and honest, then he has to be open and honest himself. If he wants them to collaborate, then he must callaborate with others himself. A leader who wants good teamwork cannot sit in his office with the door closed and do all of his work alone.

Q: What is the most difficult challenge leaders face?
A: A really good leader gets people to engage. He either has developed the skill to do that, or perhaps he has an innate ability. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t have the necessary skill. They try what they know, but they become frustrated when the results are not what they want. They don’t understand why people don’t engage, or choose not to engage — and because they don’t understand, they do more of what they’ve been doing that hasn’t so far worked.

Usually, the reason people don’t engage is because when they do, they don’t feel valued.

The biggest challenge for the leader, then, is to develop the right skills to properly value employees. Blaming them or issuing ever more strident commands never works, yet that’s exactly what a frustrated leader is tempted to do.

The best leaders take time to get to know their employees and learn about their skills and work preferences. Then they can coach them to be the best they can be. Less effective leaders coach their employees to become more like them. It’s a huge, but subtle, difference.

Q: So how does a leader develop those skills if he lacks that innate ability?
A. First of all he has to recognize that he doesn’t have the skills he needs. Most leaders, when asked, will say they do have the ability to get people to engage. Once the leader recognizes that he lacks skills, however, he has to seek them out. He can reach out to other leaders who are achieving the desired results for mentoring; or, he can attend training; or perhaps he can just read leadership literature. Then he has to take the risk of applying newly learned skills, even though he may have to venture out of his comfort zone to do so.

It’s an iterative process, a growth process — and it can be painful at times, but it enables the magic to happen. The growth he will almost surely see in his employees will make his efforts well worth the price he has to pay. Their growth reinforces his growth, and they become more engaged and therefore more effective in their joint effort. And this ultimately changes the climate of the work place for the better.

The real key is being self-aware enough to realize that the problem of non-engagement is his, and the solution is his as well.

His “little thing” was a statement he heard at a leadership session he attended: “You can be right, or you can be in relationship.”  That statement resonated with him, he said, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It resonated with me, too, because several years ago, I heard a similar statement from a leadership coach: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?”

I balked at that question back then, because I assumed that the opposite of “right” was “wrong.” And I didn’t want to be wrong, or to be in the position of not standing up for what I believe.

The point is, I think, that people — just as I was wont to do — can often fix on a position that they are sure is “right.” In defending that position, they often alienate others that could be helpful to them. In the end, the two positions polarize; the two parties shout at each other; and nothing gets done. The status quo remains. (Does this sound like Congress to anyone?)

So, in fact, the opposite of “right” is not “wrong.” It’s simply these things:

• The recognition that someone else has a different take on things
• The idea that the other person may have a valuable position to add
• The willingness to listen, ask honest questions, and discuss
• The possibility of  finding points of agreement and a way forward that doesn’t cause total loss to one side or the other
• The ability and good sense to compromise
• The continuation of important relationships, rather than the end of them

Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in relationship? Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?

One of the easy puzzles didn’t seem so easy. It actually required me to put little numbers in squares, which most of the easy puzzles don’t need. As I was determining which little numbers a particular square needed, it turned out that only one would fit — in this case, an 8.

Lo and behold, that 8 unlocked the entire puzzle. From it, every single square that I had so far been unable to fill (other than with little numbers) became obvious. Every number just fell into place.

The insight? Sometimes one change sets in motion a domino cascade of other changes, making everything work together as expected. Rare — but occasionally true.

As for me and Sudoku, I tend to focus in on a particular square, block, row, or column. I notice that this prevents me from stepping back and seeing the whole picture. A good leader has to do both: see the big picture, and attend to details. Doing only one or the other will just not work. You don’t necessarily have to do toth at the same time, but just be sure to do both.

Leadership is nothing if not a balancing act!

The news people at the table praised Blomberg to the skies for managing New York effectively in a trying economic/cultural time. He would have none of it. It wasn’t him, he said, that kept New York solvent and safe — it was the 300,000 New York City employees who played those roles and did that work. They heaped praise upon the man at the helm several times — and each time, he gave the credit to others.

Today was bad news for Goldman Sachs, a major player on Wall Street facing serious allegations about actions that precipitated the collapse of the market in late 2008. The news people tried to get Blomberg to offer opinions. They were, I suppose, hoping for him to say something potentially incendiary, so as to stir up controversy and news — but he refused. He said, “I only know what I read in  he papers. They have been accused. They have denied. And we must give them the benefit of the doubt  until we learn more.”

My exercise session ended before the interview with Blomberg was over, but I was impressed with what I saw.

Here are the common sense principles Blomberg demonstrated:

• Give credit where credit is due. (Good leaders give credit to others when things go right; they take responsibility when things go wrong.)
• Get the facts before making a judgment.

If more leaders followed his example, the world of work would be a better place.

I listened to Joe Scarborough rant and rave this morning on Morning Joe, and he said this (paraphrased): Barack Obama promised to insure 40 million uninsured people, and he promised to control costs. He did the first, but not the second. My thought was, “So now we can stop fighting over whether or not to insure the uninsured (a fight we never should have had to have) and start figuring out how to control costs.”

Obama did lose control of the health care message in the middle of the summer, I think, and the other side took advantage of that. So much of what they said seemed to me to be ideological rather than true. In the end, though, Obama prevailed. He took his lumps, kept the effort going, and pushed it through. That required strength, courage, and perserverance — all qualities the best leaders possess.

Congratulations, Mr. President. And thank you.

I had a history professor once, many years ago, who made history come alive for me for the first time in my life. How did he do it? He told stories about the historical characters. No more dry recitation of dates and wars — but stories. I and my classmates listened with fascination as the tales from the past unfolded before us.

Just the other day, I was in a meeting where the lead person was trying to explain several difficult concepts. She did what the best communicators/leaders do: she thought of an example from common life that many have experienced and most everyone understands (in this case, the experience of being in retail). She took each difficult concept and compared it to a corresponding component of managing a retail operation. Voila! The concepts began to make sense.

And of course, we can’t forget one of the greatest storytellers of our time — President Barack Obama. Often he illustrates his speeches with brief stories garnered from the ten letters he reads each day. Those stories add the human touch — and they are powerful indeed.

So, yes, Miss Brown and I agree with Howard Gardner. Stories matter. Here are some tips for leaders to help them with telling stories:

• Know your own stories — hone them, make them funny if you can, and don’t be afraid to tell them (a joke at your own expense is usually a good thing!)
• Do as the leader above did, and compare difficult concepts to simpler ones with which people are more familiar.
• Ask questions of  those you lead, and listen to their stories.
• Do research, and come up with the bold stories from the past that resonate with the challenges you face today.

You’ll be a better communicator — and a better leader — when you become a storyteller!