Tag: Harvard Business Review

Writing by numbers

Back in July I blogged about the numbers behind the blog, and I received some useful feedback at the time, and I think sharing the information was useful for other bloggers too. A couple of months on here is a quick update.

Total visits to the site are up from 33,884 in July to 39,563 now. September 2011 closed as the busiest month to date with a small milestone of 3,003 visits, a step up from August which was the previous best at 2,076. I’m pleased with the increase in headline numbers and let’s look a little further.

Correlation

I previously observed a close correlation between number of posts and number of visits. Last month I wrote the fewest number of posts since January 2011, nine in total. Why the shift? Well two posts I wrote in September were particularly busy, Naked Whine and You Will Fail. Beehive Yourself, a review of David Zinger’s London engagement workshop I wrote in July remains popular and is drawing lots of visitors in from Harvard Business Review. And a post I wrote in June, Kung Fu Panda – The Illusion of Control is getting lots of hits. I Googled Kung Fu Panda and my blog post came up on the first page. Lots of folks are landing at that page and leaving pretty quickly too – sorry kids. You’ve heard of the saying an elephant in the room, well I have a panda!

Comments

At the time of the previous update, 145 posts had generated 708 comments. Wind forward and 168 posts have now generated 984 comments. I’m delighted that the level of conversation, feedback and exchange of views seems to be thriving. This for me is much more important than a topline view of visit numbers. As I’ve learned from the wise panda, you can probably engineer traffic flows to your site. In this instance it was completely unintentional, I had no idea he would be so popular but he’s costing me a fortune in bamboo shoots.

Sources

In the last month (with July 2011 figures in brackets for comparison) the traffic source figures are 15% (23%) direct, 35% (23%) search engines, 40% (43%) referred (almost half of all referrals came from Harvard Business Review last month), and 10% (17%) others. I note that folks referred in via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social type sites spend several minutes here per visit. Traffic from search engines produces briefer visits.

So there you have it. I’ve found it useful to take a quick look under the bonnet and see what’s going on, I hope it helps a few of you out there too. I enjoy writing very much and I enjoy practicing and hopefully improving as a result. As always – thanks so much for reading, and if you have any questions and observations I’d love to hear them.

 

Are You Committing Leadership Malpractice?

Over at the Harvard Business Review, Susan Cramm has written a very interesting piece about leadership malpractice. The article starts:

“There’s only one kind of leadership malpractice: wasting the lives of those we lead.”

I imagine there must have been a huge temptation to just leave it at that and submit the shortest HBR blog ever. Susan Cramm goes on to highlight a few leadership howlers that can soak up and waste huge amounts of precious time. These include:

• Sponsoring a project that isn’t ready for prime time.
• Overloading star performers.
• Managing jobs rather than careers.
• Refusing to address performance issues.

The article is worth a read to learn more about these, however one point in particular stood out for me. Cramm calls it: Negatively Labelling Others.

She uses a particularly angry example that makes me think of a spoiled child stamping their feet to try and get what they want. The outcome she suggests is a self fulfilling prophecy where staff just act out, rather than act right. I prefer to think of it as doing what we say we will, or maybe just actions speak louder than words.

Authentic leadership is powerful stuff. It can make, and break an organisation. You probably think I’m talking about the guys and (regrettably few) gals who sit round the top table, right? Well it’s not just them. In the West, we seem to be obsessed with looking upwards for leadership. In doing so we miss out on lots of creative, energetic, engaging work being led at all layers in the organisation.

Too often the leader is called upon to make a great speech. Rallying the troops I think they call it? My experience shows me that too often their subsequent behaviour completely contradicts their bold words. For example I know of a CEO in a global business who implores his staff to complete the quarterly attitude survey, and yet has never done so himself. So how can he even contemplate what it feels like to participate, let alone understand the huge frustration that comes from the subsequent lack of action? He talks about the importance of open communication yet he won’t blog, he says it’s a waste of time. Is he fearful of what his staff may ask of him and say to him? I don’t know but I do know he says one thing and does another. I don’t know about you but I couldn’t trust or follow someone like that.

Today I would like to start a campaign for authentic leadership. Leadership demonstrated by action, not by title, position or words. I hope you’ll join me.