Lessons From Lincoln: 5 Leadership Tips History And Science Agree On

Lessons From Lincoln: 5 Leadership Tips History And Science Agree On

• Eric Barker

 

Abraham Lincoln gets a lot of credit for being a great leader. And he deserves it, but…

Frankly, most of us don't really know why he deserves it.

What made him such an extraordinary leader? And does modern research back up his methods?

Here's what Honest Abe did, why it works and how it can make you a better leader.

1) Get Out Of The Office And Circulate Among The Troops

In 1861 Lincoln spent more time outside the White House than in it.

And it's believed he met every single Union soldier who enlisted early in the Civil War.

How's that for being an accessible leader?

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

As remarkable as it may seem, in 1861 Lincoln spent more time out of the White House than he did in it. And the chances are good that if a Union soldier had enlisted early in the Civil War, he saw the president in person. Lincoln made it a point to personally inspect every state regiment of volunteers that passed through Washington D.C., on their way to the front; and early in the war they all passed through Washington, D.C.

Lincoln knew people were his best source of information. And accessibility built trust. He spent 75% of the day meeting with people.

Lincoln had an open-door policy. Yeah, the President of the United States had an open-door policy.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Lincoln was probably the most accessible chief executive the United States has ever known… John Nicolay and John Hay, his personal secretaries, reported that Lincoln spent 75 percent of his time meeting with people. No matter how busy the president was, he always seemed to find time for those who called on him.

Guess what? Modern business theory backs him up.

These days the management gurus call it "Managing by Wandering Around." Seriously.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

…Lincoln revealed the cornerstone of his own personal leadership philosophy, an approach that would become part of a revolution in modern leadership thinking 100 years later when it was dubbed MBWA (Managing by Wandering Around) by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in their 1982 book In Search Of Excellence.

Lincoln was always trying to get the best information so he could make good decisions.

He was constantly emailing and texting on his iPhone… Umm, well, the 19th century equivalent of it, at least.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

He virtually lived at the War Department's telegraph office so he could gain access to key information for quick, timely decisions.

What do CEO's of the modern era still spend much of their time doing?

The exact same thing Lincoln did: trying to get the information they need to make good decisions.

Via John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do:

The GMs do not limit their focus to planning, business strategy, staffing, and other "top management concerns." They discuss virtually anything and everything even remotely associated with their businesses and organizations…. In these conversations, GMs typically ask a lot of questions. In a half-hour conversation, some will ask literally hundreds.

(More on what all great leaders have in common here.)

2) Persuade Rather Than Coerce

Despite having the power of the presidency, Lincoln didn't strongarm people; he persuaded them. How did he do it?

He made them his friends. He made them like him. Here's Lincoln talking about his methods:

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find by little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.

And it shows in the way he handled subordinates.

He didn't give orders — he made requests. Look at his letters:

To McClellan (10-13-63): "…This letter is in no sense an order."

To Halleck (9-19-63): "I hope you will consider it…"

To Burnside (9-27-63): "It was suggested to you, not ordered…"

Does the modern research agree? Oh yeah.

What's the #1 thing Harvard Business School teaches it's MBA students about negotiation?

"They need to like you."

About 3:30 into the video below:

Here's the equation for getting what you want. Cutting to the chase: You want to get more. You want more money, a better offer, a better deal; here are the components of what you need to do. First, they need to like you. That's the first component. The things you do that make them like you less make it less likely that you are going to get what you want…

From my interview with Bob: Liking is one of fundamental principles that leading persuasion expert Robert Cialdini's detailed in his classic book, Influence.

No surprise that people prefer to say yes to a request to the degree that they know and like the requester. A simple way to make things happen in your direction is to uncover genuine similarities or parallels that exist between you and the person you want to influence, and then raise them to the surface. That increases rapport.

Lincoln has a famous quote on the subject:

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

(Learn the methods hostage negotiators use to bond with hostage takers here.)

3) Lead By Being Led

Lincoln always gave credit where credit was due and took responsibility when things went wrong.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Not only did this satisfy Lincoln's need for honesty, integrity and human dignity; it also gave his subordinates the correct perception that they were, in many ways, doing the leading, not Lincoln. If nothing else, it made them feel good about their jobs. It also encouraged innovation and risk taking because they knew that if they failed, Lincoln would not blame them.

By doing this he dodged what Harvard professor Gautam Mukunda says is the most common leadership mistake: hubris.

Lincoln had no problem saying he screwed up, like in this letter to General Ulysses S. Grant:

I write this now as a grateful acknowledgement for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you reached the vicinity of Vicksburg… I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I that the expedition could succeed… I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong.

He trusted the judgment of the people who were on the front lines. This is one of the hallmarks of good military leadership.

Looking at the research, what type of leadership works in the toughest situations?

Lincoln's method: being democratic and listening.

Via Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration:

During the early 1960s, the Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit (now the Naval Health Research Center) conducted a series of studies concerning leadership at small Antarctic stations. In that research program, Nelson (1962) found that esteemed leaders tended to possess a relatively democratic leadership orientation and a leadership style characterized by greater participation in activities than traditional for a military organization. Further, the esteemed leaders developed individual relationships with each of their crew members and reportedly sought the opinions of individual crew members about issues directly concerning them.

Leaders take note: research shows that not worrying about who gets the credit for an idea is key to influencing people.

And the greatest minds of history agree. As Lao Tzu said:

Fail to honor people, they fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say "We did this ourselves."

(Learn what type of leader you are here.)

4) Encourage Innovation

Lots of lip service is paid to encouraging innovation these days. What did Lincoln know about innovating?

Well, he's the only U.S. President to ever patent something.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

Years before assuming the presidency, Lincoln had shown his interest in innovation when, on March 10, 1849 (at age forty), he received a patent for a new method of making grounded boats more buoyant.

What does it take to increase creativity and innovation in an organization? As I've said before, it's pretty straightforward:

Reward people for trying new things and don't punish them for failure.

Lincoln knew this.

Via Lincoln On Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times:

And even during his most difficult times, Lincoln continued to call on his subordinates to screen new advances, implement ideas, and win while learning. He realized that, as an executive leader, it was his chief responsibility to create the climate of risk-free entrepreneurship necessary to foster effective innovation.

(More on the single most proven way to innovate here.)

5) Influence People Through Storytelling

By all accounts, Lincoln was a great storyteller and he actively leveraged this skill to win people over.

Lincoln himself said it plainly:

They say I tell a great many stories. I reckon I do; but I have learned from long experience that plain people, take them as they run, are more easily influenced through the medium of a broad and humorous illustration than in any other way…

And research from Stanford backs him up.

Facts and statistics are great but when people hear presentations what do they remember? The stories.

Via Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die:

When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the stories. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic.

If you're a leader as Lincoln was, you need to know what studies show inspires team morale. And the answer is great stories:

"Institutions that can communicate a compelling historical narrative often inspire a special kind of commitment among employees. It is this dedication that directly affects a company's success and is critical to creating a strong corporate legacy," said author Adam Galinsky, Morris and Alice Kaplan professor of ethics and decision in management.

As I've posted many times, storytelling can improve almost every area of your life. Why is storytelling so powerful?

Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker has done research showing stories are key to our sense of meaning:

Some new studies suggest if we spend time thinking about stories in our lives, that might be a more effective way of figuring out what is meaningful versus not.

(More on how to tell great stories from a UCLA film school professor here.)

Sum Up

Leadership lessons you can learn from Lincoln:

1.   Get Out Of The Office And Circulate Among The Troops

2.   Persuade Rather Than Coerce

3.   Lead By Being Led

4.   Encourage Innovation

5.   Influence People Through Storytelling

There's a lot to learn from Lincoln.

And people didn't just love Honest Abe because he was a wise leader; he also had a good sense of humor:

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

 

How To Make Friends Easily And Strengthen The Friendships You Have

How To Make Friends Easily And Strengthen The Friendships You Have

• Eric Barker

Friendship is a good thing. That's hardly front-page news — but somehow we all forget how important it is.

We take friends for granted. As we raise families we neglect friends. We don't put in the effort to make and keep friends.

And the problem is growing. In 1985 most people said they had 3 close friends. In 2004 the most common number was zero.

Via Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect:

In a survey given in 1985, people were asked to list their friends in response to the question "Over the last six months, who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?" The most common number of friends listed was three; 59 percent of respondents listed three or more friends fitting this description. The same survey was given again in 2004. This time the most common number of friends was zero. And only 37 percent of respondents listed three or more friends. Back in 1985, only 10 percent indicated that they had zero confidants. In 2004, this number skyrocketed to 25 percent. One out of every four of us is walking around with no one to share our lives with.

This is sad, and for more reasons than you might expect. We need friends to keep us healthy. Lack of social support predicts all causes of death.

Having few friends is more dangerous than obesity and is the equivalent health risk of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, did a meta-analysis of 148 studies and concluded that a lack of social support predicts all causes of death. People with a solid group of friends are 50 percent more likely to survive at any given time than those without one. Holt-Lunstad calculated that having few social ties is an equivalent mortality risk to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day and even riskier than being obese or not exercising!

You need friends for self-knowledge — because your friends often know more about you than you do.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

They can truly know us, sometimes better than we know ourselves. Specifically, friends are better at describing our behavioral traits than we are, says Simine Vazire, Ph.D., a psychologist who runs the Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. "Friends can assess whether we are funny, dominant, or charming better than we can," she says. They may not be better than we are at knowing what we are feeling and thinking, unsurprisingly, but they are superior at guessing our IQs. (Incidentally, it's often the case that we judge ourselves as less intelligent than we are.)

And friends make you happier than pretty much anything else in life.

Got three friends at work? You're 96% more likely to be extremely satisfied with your life.

Happiness is contagious. Happy friends boost your chance of happiness by 15%. Unhappy friends decrease it by 7%.

Each additional friend means two fewer days of feeling lonely every year. Family members don't even move the needle here.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

If you can count at least three dear friends at the office, you are 96 percent more likely to be extremely satisfied with life in general…

Fowler and Christakis found that you are about 15 percent more likely to be happy if one of your friends is happy (overall, not in any particular moment). Even if a friend of your friend is happy, you're 10 percent more likely to be in a contented state. "We found that each happy friend a person has increases that person's probability of being happy by about 9 percent. Each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent," they write. Since these stats imply that happiness is more contagious than unhappiness, they conclude that "the more, the merrier" holds true, despite what is usually said about quality over quantity in friendships. They also found that an additional friend amounts to two fewer days of feeling lonely each year. "Since on average (in our data) people feel lonely forty-eight days per year, having a couple of extra friends makes you about 10 percent less lonely than other people. Interestingly, the number of family members has no effect at all."

Having a friend you see on most days is the happiness equivalent of an extra 100K a year.

Via Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect:

…having a friend whom you see on most days, compared to not having such a friend, had the same impact on well-being as making an extra $100,000 a year.

Marriage And Kids Aren't Enough

Researchers have been seeing a trend: increasingly, people expect to get all their social needs met by their spouse or partner.

This is a prescription for disaster. It's too much pressure for a spouse and there's much that we can only get from friends.

Nobel Prize winner David Kahneman did research showing time with friends is more enjoyable than time with spouses or children.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., of Princeton, and colleagues conducted an innovative study about a decade ago that captured people's happiness "in the moment" as they went about their daily lives. They found, controversially, that time with friends is even more enjoyable than moments with spouses or children.

Not that there's anything wrong with spouses and kids but time with friends does not involve the same responsibilities — and we all need a break.

Beyond that, time with friends as a couple has been shown to improve long term relationships.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Most intriguing was how couples rated their own relationships more positively after interacting with other pairs. Married partners fall into routine interactions and often fail to make the effort to entertain and please as they did when they were winning each other over. Putting your best self forward for new friends allows you to shine and to see your partner through new eyes as she shines, too. Maintaining older mutual friendships also strengthens the bond between long-term partners: Having people around who think of the two of you as a unit, who admire your relationship, and who expect you to stay together can sustain you through times of doubt or distance.

And You Will Lose Friends

Within seven years, half of your close friends will not be around anymore.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

A study by a Dutch sociologist who tracked about a thousand people of all ages found that on average, we lose half of our close network members every seven years. To think that half of the people currently on your "most dialed" list will fade out of your life in less than a decade is frightening indeed.

So if you want to keep close friends in your life, it'll take some effort. But what do you need to do?

Here's what some of the latest research has to say.

What To Do

Most importantly, make the time.

What are the most common friendship fights about? Time commitments.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Daniel Hruschka reviewed studies on the causes of conflict in friendship and found that the most common friendship fights boil down to time commitments. Spending time with someone is a sure indicator that you value him; no one likes to feel undervalued.

This is also the part of friendship that makes us happiest — doing things together.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

It's no news flash that friends make us happy, but Meliksah Demir, Ph.D., a professor at Northern Arizona University, has drilled down to reveal exactly what about friendship warms our hearts. It turns out that companionship— simply doing things together— is the component of friendship that most makes us happy. And the reason friends make us happy, Demir has concluded, is that they make us feel that we matter.

Mere proximity — being nearby, is one of the most powerful drivers of friendship — far more than personality. So be around.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Yet research does not show that friends are particularly alike in personality, granting scientific credibility to hundreds of romantic comedies wherein the uptight leading lady has a free spirit for a sidekick and the charismatic main man has a buffoonish buddy…Half a century ago, researchers came up with the "proximity theory" of friendship— that we befriend people who live geographically close to us or who frequently cross our path because they go to our school, grocery store, office, or favorite diner. Proximity, first and foremost, grants easy opportunities to meet. But also, familiarity breeds positivity. Called the "mere-exposure effect," it's a phenomenon that is widely documented: Just seeing someone over and over can make you like him or her more.

What else do you need to do? Be patient. If you're not willing to be bored sometimes, you can't have friends.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

'If you're not willing to be bored sometimes, you can't have friends,' " Jacob says. "Sometimes friends are going to drone on about their mother or something that you don't quite care about. But it's not just about what they can do for you, it's a deeper thing. You can't expect to always be entertained, or to always feel like everything is one hundred percent reciprocal." Jacob, who likes to entertain, says, "I'm willing to invite someone to dinner ten times and never see their house, because if you get into the cycle of pettiness, you won't end up having any friends."

Be flexible. Having social skills means adapting to your environment, not stubbornly "being who you are."

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Children who are natural social stars, Rubin adds, present themselves "successfully to others by putting on somewhat different faces for different audiences.… They understand when to put on which face, without ever appearing shallow or false to others and without feeling like fakes or frauds. In short, these are children who are sensitive and responsive to social cues." This is the child who knows how to work the room with jokes or dance moves at her own birthday party with her adoring relatives, but who also knows to hang back and let a friend shine at his birthday party.

And this one is key: Support the person's view of themselves and make them feel good about their pursuits.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Best friends don't have to share an identity per se, but they do need to support the other's view of himself and make each other feel great about their pursuits. Weisz asked a group of college freshmen about their close friends and used questionnaires to determine whether they received social identity support from them. She then followed up five years later, when the students had graduated and moved off campus. Social identity support didn't predict whether the friendships generally endured, but it did predict whether one of the friends became a best friend. Part of maintaining a close friendship, Weisz points out, is supporting someone's identity as it inevitably shifts over time.

My theory on this: be a cheerleader for your friends.

Be their biggest fan.

This is what we all want from our friends. And the more you give it, the more you will get it yourself.