Workplace Hope

Frustrated with the proliferation of lofty leadership models, in the face of sometimes wretched leadership practice, I took a stab recently at bare-minimum leadership guidelines I think ought to be in place. The best-selling leadership books aim to raise the ceiling on leadership practices, and that’s all well and good. But, first, I think we should look at raising the floor.

Here are some modestly proposed rules for leaders:

- Give people regular feedback on their performance. Take 5 minutes every month and tell each direct report what’s going well, what could be better and how you will help. People need to know where they stand.

- If an employee is not living up to your expectations, tell him or her exactly what needs to improve and establish a timeline for making improvements. If he or she doesn’t improve enough and needs to be relieved of a responsibility, tell the employee privately.

- Harness the skills of those who work for you. That is your raison d’etre. You are there to help others contribute for the good of the organization. Combine others’ talents with your own, and you’ll be able to have much bigger impact than you can alone.

- Whenever possible, consult employees before making decisions that will affect them. Include them as early as possible, explore options with them and take their ideas and concerns to heart.

- Take an interest in each employee’s professional well-being as a unique individual and provide assignments that will help him or her to develop.

- Take action to address employees’ needs, and follow up with them when you say you will. Don’t leave them hanging.

- Treat each employee with respect and establish a relationship with each, even those who are very different from you. Beware of favoring those with whom you have natural rapport.

- Treat employees’ mistakes, especially as they are learning new skills, as learning opportunities. Don’t punish initiative.

- Keep your promises, or tell employees promptly why you have to break your word.

- Don’t include anything negative in a performance appraisal that you haven’t spoken about with the employee.

- Tell your employees about these rules, and ask them to hold you accountable so that you can grow. Acknowledge that you are a work in progress too.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/chdARK

I’ve noticed a trend among my 40- and 50-something peers – people who climbed the corporate ladder, put in the 60-hour weeks and made personal sacrifices over many years. Many – especially those who’ve lost their jobs in this rough economy – want a change of pace. They’ve had authority, they’ve made money, they’ve seized opportunities. Now they want meaning.

One good friend, who has managed to find money and meaning in the same high-level job at Cargill, says people are motivated by one of three kinds of meaning in their work: achievement, affiliation or content.

If you work the long hours because you want to be a VP or buy the expensive car, you find the most meaning in achievement. You want to be challenged, dig deep, reach a pinnacle and earn the rewards that prove you’ve done it.

If you like the hurly-burly of work life – the relationship tending, the interactions, inside jokes and team dynamics – you’re probably after affiliation.

If you subject yourself to years of penniless toil in med school to become a doctor, chances are you are content-driven. Your relationships with patients are short-lived, and your achievements unlikely to be so different from the next doctor’s (unless you write a best-selling diet book). It’s got to be the content of medicine you find enthralling.

Like my Cargill friend, I’ve always found meaning at work through my affiliations. I’ve often thought of writing a play based on the snippets of conversation one hears in the hallways and cubicles of the average company. When I taught for four years in an academic institution, I struggled with the loose, confederacy culture among the faculty. Nobody wanted to talk to each other, much less really work together. (When I suggested to a colleague that we collaborate on a seminar session, he said, “I can’t change my approach; that’s my shtick!”)

I was happier working in a news organization – where all day long I was exchanging goods and services with others – negotiating, delivering, connecting and proving my value as a colleague. I have former colleagues who can’t leave the news business, even as it collapses, because the content means so much to them. For me, news was just a good backdrop for interesting interactions.

Ironically, I now find that the content of organization life – leadership, change, relationships, communication – is more important to me than relationships. I want to help others make the most of their work relationships, and that’s a content motivation. I’ve had the experience, and now I want to make it joyful for others.

This shift is part of getting older, I suppose, and my quest for meaning.

My friend Marta is great at getting jobs. She is the only person I know who can submit her resume to an online posting and actually get an interview. She doesn’t network. She doesn’t worry about her LinkedIn profile or go to elaborate extremes to get recruiters to notice her. She just trolls for director-level jobs in her field, submits her perfect resume, and waits for the call from HR.

Marta is a textbook candidate. She knows what HR is looking for. She is an expert when it comes to the keywords and databases used to spot good candidates these days. She rehearses impressive anecdotes for interviews, and repeats them with confidence. She talks of becoming a career counselor, because she is so skilled where others are so lacking.

Page 1 of my ill-conceived resume

When I was looking for a job a while back, she had lots to say about my resume. I’ve spent much of my life as a creative person – crafting programs that catch people off guard (in a good way) and creating communications that look good enough to eat. Marta took a look at my offbeat (but striking), horizontally oriented PDF resume, and sighed with exasperation. “It’s got to be vertical. Use Times Roman. Do it over as a Word doc. You have to do it that way or nobody will look at it.”

But if it’s horizontal, I argued, I can get more in without it looking cramped. Use Word? Impossible! No software developed by Microsoft can artfully handle typography or spacing. Times Roman? What’s next? Orthopedic shoes?

These are not aesthetic compromises I can make, I told Marta, ridiculous as that may sound. I didn’t care that I wasn’t looking for a creative job. My resume reflects not only my facility with words and design but also an ingrained tendency to question and invent. Doesn’t every field need that?

The reason Marta is so good at getting hired is not just her perfectly, predictably vanilla resume. It’s her experience and how she presents it. She knows how to read a job listing and tweak her already-impressive experience to represent exactly what the recruiters are looking for.

And that’s smart these days. The career experts urge candidates to show that they’ve already done exactly what the job requires. Prove there will be no surprises, they advise – no questions, no little extras that don’t fit the profile, no need for any kind of transition or growth. In other words, show you have absolutely nothing to learn.

Which brings me to the problem with Marta. Though she’s brilliant at getting jobs, she is not so good at keeping them. Usually a month or two into a new job, her frustration starts to build. The limitations of the role, which she knows so well from her 20 years in the field, start to wear her down. She starts to snap at people, roll her eyes and wear out her welcome.

“Perfect on paper” is probably how Marta is described when she’s been on the job for a while, and the bosses are wondering what to do with her.

Marta needs a new field. She needs a career change. But how can she get that when she is so “perfect” in her current career?

People will change careers three or four times in their working lives, the experts say. I wonder: How will they do that if veering off the path is never allowed?

I’ve known Marta a long time. She’s loaded with skills and talents. She would be spectacular – energized, motivated, engaged – if she got a chance to learn something new. But what recruiter would ever let that happen?

Last night I talked to an acquaintance who lost his job as a vice president for a large, global, telecommunications company almost a year ago. The year before that, he won the company’s highest honor, a big award recognizing extraordinary contribution to the company. This guy is genuine, personable, smart, handsome, energetic. He’s got connections all over the world. He’s got a fabulous track record in his industry. And he’s not been able to get a new job. He’s middle-aged, so the body is starting to break down a bit, requiring tough choices about when to call the doctor and the dentist. He’s long been the big earner for his family, and they have costly needs too.

I meet people like this – they are everywhere these days, of course – and I think: Really? This is how it’s going to be? We in American business are OK with the kind of ruthlessness this guy has experienced? He did everything right, and we accept that he’s gotten a pretty rotten payback? We’re OK with violating our own implied social contract and letting loose the poisons of distrust and hardship among even our best contributors?

Most of us are dependent on employers not only for a paycheck and a sense of purpose but also for health care benefits. The emotional implications of widespread unemployment are scary; how much disillusionment will we tolerate?

We used to hear grave warnings about spendthrift consumers who were “one illness away from financial ruin.” Well, now there are many very responsible people in that boat.

One key to transformational leadership may be a kind of mindfulness. Transformational leadership entails a willingness to engage with individuals – as deeply as necessary – and to learn from them and be influenced by them. It means be willing to withhold judgment, think long-term, be proven wrong.

A few ways transformational leadership might show up:

• A leader hears about a recurrence of a problem in her department. Immediately her mind jumps to a likely culprit; she can imagine, vividly, the who and the how behind the problem. “Just like last time, I’ll bet,” she thinks. But she’s open-minded enough to avoid scapegoating the suspect before the facts are in. Instead, she asks around, without prejudice, and checks with the alleged culprit. Because she’s willing to be educated by others, she may find that the suspect is actually the hero in this case. She may discover a completely new perspective on the problem. She may find a real solution if she listens.
• A new employee moves to the leader’s department. The employee’s previous supervisor warns the leader that the new guy tends to whine and complain. But the transformational leader puts that out of her mind as she interviews her new staffer. As they talk, she discovers that this new guy is actually quite insightful about some ongoing competitive issues that the company hasn’t confronted. In the broadest sense, perhaps, he is “complaining,” but his criticisms are well-founded and the leader sees ways to make him part of the solution. An employee another leader was eager to dump becomes a valuable member of the company after all.
• The leader asks a member of her team to take on a project that involves a number of tight, interim deadlines and quick thinking. “I’m not good with those kinds of deadlines,” the employee objects. The leader probes and gets a clear picture of the employee’s hesitation. She begins to see it as a development opportunity, which she then presents to the employee, promising to support him as he tackles his fears in the new project. He balks, but trusts her and so goes along. In a few months’ time, after some struggle, he has a whole new competence, and feels a new, wonderful sense of mastery. New learning has given him an unexpected boost. He’s more engaged in his work than ever.A transformational leader knows that everyone is a work in progress and capable of important growth with the right kind of support. She knows to question conventional wisdom, stereotypes, limiting beliefs, and short-term benefits. She knows to be open, exploratory, and experimental – because those practices bring new possibilities.

Are your memos, speeches, and presentations about the new change initiative tiring out your people? Change is such a constant in organizations these days that communications that implore people to change can wear them down rather than spur them on.

I’ve written my share of “sky is falling” intranet pieces and designed more than a few precipitous fever charts, trying to shake loose that complacency that grips so many groups. But as I’ve studied more about successful change, I’ve come to believe that trying to convince people they need to change is like nagging them to lose weight. No matter how valid your case, you’re mostly making the task seem obligatory and onerous. You’re asking them to act on your imperatives, not theirs.

Plus, if your communications are negative, you may be trampling on the healthy emotional attachments people have to the status quo. Human beings seek stability and security, and organizational culture protects those things. Therefore, it’s important that change communications – formal memos as well as informal conversations between leaders and staff – honor the past and tie the change to the organization’s higher, broader, ongoing brand mission. Employees are inspired to build cathedrals, not to lay bricks; human beings want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and a change initiative is an opportunity to reiterate the organization’s highest mission and infuse it with new meaning.

Leaders should focus on the organization’s strengths and achievements, not its deficits. Change requires extra effort and stamina. Deficit thinking taxes the energy of the organization and makes change feel arduous. Individuals are more likely to be motivated by the promise of new competence, contribution, and meaning than by duty, dissatisfaction, guilt, or fear.

A focus on strengths can create momentum in an organization, freeing energy to deal with the discomfiting details of change. “In the presence of greatness, pettiness disappears,” says global organizational consultant Robert Fritz.

John Kotter’s popular approach stresses the need for urgency. But urgency can be overdone in today’s volatile conditions. If the platform is continually burning, won’t people suffer from smoke inhalation? David Cooperrider, the father of the change approach known as Appreciative Inquiry, argues that organizations grow toward the questions they ask. Therefore, leaders should ask positive questions as they design a change initiative – and communicate about it. Instead of “how can we correct our faulty financial processes before they cripple us?” they should ask “how can we build our financial expertise to make a bigger difference in our customers’ lives?”

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned as a change agent is to be clear on the scope of your project from the outset. And be clear on that with the stakeholders whose help you need.

A few years ago I had big ambitions for an organization widely believed to be too entrenched and too internally focused for its own good. After a three-year overhaul – addressing products, processes, structure, culture –  the place was a little different, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped. I was a lot different: tired and disillusioned. Had I had the presence of mind to assessment key cultural dimensions up front, I would have seen the enormity of my hopes – and their likelihood to fall short in the allotted time.

The OCAI is a remarkable simple diagnostic tool I’ve written about before, which can be used to gather individual assessments of six key dimensions of organizational culture. Participants – usually a representative sampling of executives and employees – assess the organization twice: first, based on the current culture and, second, based on a desired future. For each question, a participant allocates 100 points among four alternatives. The raw data is then compiled to form profiles of the current organization and that which is desired. It’s best if a wide-ranging discussion of the company’s strengths and challenges precedes the survey, to inform preferences for the future.

Raw data is plotted on a grid to illustrate the strength of four cultural strains in the organization:

• The Hierarchy Culture values tradition, consistency, cooperation, and conformity. This model focuses more on internal than external issues and values stability and control over flexibility and discretion. This is the traditional “command and control” organization, which can work well if the goal is efficiency and the organizational environment is stable and simple.
• The Market Culture also values stability and control but focuses more on external issues. This culture seeks to identify threats and opportunities as it seeks competitive advantage and profits.
• The Clan Culture focuses on internal issues and values flexibility and discretion over stability and control. It works to manage the environment through teamwork, participation and consensus.
• The Adhocracy Culture focuses on external issues and values flexibility and discretion over stability and control; its key values are creativity and risk taking. Organizational charts may or may not exist; roles and physical space are subject to frequent changes.

The OCAI allows change leaders to compare the current assessment with the desired state, to gauge how ambitious, challenging, and long the change process needs to be.

The assessment, as I think many people in my organization would have completed it, would have shown the company culture was far too conservative to make the kinds of changes we set out to make. I was trying to move six dots to other quadrants. This is a rough formula, but assume a year for movement of just one – and bigger companies will take longer. When you look at it that way, you see just how much stamina you really need to change a place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eckhart Tolle is right, I think, that many conflicts, obstacles and inefficiencies in organizations stem from the human failure to be present, in the moment. In our dealings with each other, this failure to be present is often a failure to listen. If we are in conversation with someone but not really listening, what are we doing? We may be formulating our response to what we think the other person is saying, drawing major conclusions from a minor phrase we glommed onto, ignoring the rest. We may be comparing their circumstance with our own. We may be strategizing about the relationship, replaying mental tape from previous conversations. Hell, we may be thinking about our stomachs, our kids, our mortgages.

The temptation to decide the meaning of what another person is communicating before the message is complete, without really listening, is a chronic human failing with major consequences. We hear a few words, impressionistically, attach them to patterns already in our heads, and characterize the situation, and shift our attention elsewhere. Neuroscientists say we’ve got 11 million bits of information whirling toward our senses every second; distraction is continual; the temptation to move on is big. And so we miss the chance to really understand another person’s point of view, blend it with our own and find a vantage point that benefits both of us.

A couple of brilliant facilitators I know phrase it this way: We are typically so caught up in our own monologues that we can’t listen to another’s and begin the fruitful process of dialogue. Snap judgments and assumptions rule the day. The result is misconception, conflict, alienation, struggle. How many work relationships – and thus projects and teams and whole companies – have been foiled by misunderstandings rooted in the failure to listen?

Recently Jim Ericson, who brings together bold business thinkers for The Masters Forum, told me about a 90-minute listening exercise he created with amazing results. In his training sessions, dyads took turns asking preset questions about themselves and disclosing information. The key was that the listener was allowed one of only two responses:

•    “That’s interesting, tell me more.”
•    Or, “I don’t understand. Can you give me an example?”

The structured conversation began innocuously, with the exchange of names, titles, job responsibilities, tenure, etc. Eventually, the teller would be asked to disclose progressively more intimate material, such as: “My hardest day is when…” or “My biggest fear at work is…” And still, the listener could ask only for elaboration or an example.

Because responses were so restricted, listeners were forced to stay present in the conversation, rather than offering up their own stories, expertise, affirmations, tangents. Essentially, each pair was forced to learn, forced to take in new information, rather than recycling their own, forced to make sense of the real person in front of them.

Jim tells the story of a couple of executives who had been in great conflict, did this exercise, and in 90 minutes became lifelong colleagues and friends.

Real listening can yield surprising results.

The other day I had breakfast with a prospective client who feels great urgency to change the paradigm in his organization. And his is an organization, shall we say, unaccustomed to innovation and change, one where employees feel almost entitled to the status quo.

My prospect is a forward thinker, a thought leader in his field, with a big vision. He knows the culture of his 3,000-person staff needs an overhaul, and he’s more than ready to make it happen. I told him a bit about the hard realities I have learned about organizational change, first-hand.  Yeah, yeah, he said. “Why do I have to think about where we’ve been or where we are? Can’t we just focus on where we need to be?”

Ah, yes. The fallacy of the perfect vision. The vision so compelling, so obviously superior, that employees run screaming from the status quo into the arms of the future. I’ve done that one. And it didn’t go so well. As I told my new friend, attempting to move a group to Point B without understanding Point A is like mapping your route to New York without knowing where you’re starting from.

There are reasons things are as they are – and the past must be honored before its constituents can move on.

To even begin to change the way a group sees the world and operates, it’s critical to deeply understand the culture and major subcultures before attempting change. Each organization is different and has its own cultural “artifacts”: behaviors, norms, values, and tacit assumptions about work, leadership, teamwork, change, human nature, and the meaning of success.

One efficient tool I have used for understanding culture is the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, devised by Cameron and Quinn. It’s a simple, quick, open-source assessment of six key elements of culture. The OCAI asks stakeholders to identify elements of the current culture and to compare it with a preferred culture – one most likely to meet the goals at hand. The compiled responses give an immediate, stark picture of areas of stakeholder consensus and controversy and the distance between current culture and preferred culture.

Organizational expert Edgar Schein recommends getting leadership commitment up front to moving the culture as needed to move the operation, making sure leaders know the process might be uncomfortable. Some leaders aren’t so quick to call for change if it means they will have to look hard at themselves, their past decisions, and their own departments. And, given the risks of organizational change, that might not be such a bad thing.

Engagement is scarce in many organizations. According to Gallup, just 30 percent of people in the average organization are engaged, and 20 percent are actively disengaged.

Many, if not most, employees can’t describe the distinct mission of the organization, the biggest competitive threat, or the plan for the future. They just work there.

This is particularly true in large organizations, of course, where “line of sight” to organizational strategy may be blocked by poor leadership, onerous workload, and lack of communication. People are too far-flung to feel the organizational purpose in a real, personal, visceral, engaging way.

Communication is an obvious way to engage employees around an important purpose, to make them champions of strategy. Research from Watson Wyatt shows companies that communicate well with employees realized a 47 percent higher shareholder return over five years.

But so often internal communication programs are an afterthought. Generally, internal communication is a staff function, and the poor team charged with crafting executive messages into intranet updates and newsletters is at the mercy of people much more powerful than they. The SVP/Sales is burning to say something? It’s the internal communications team’s job to make him sound smart, trustworthy, and in sync with overall company goals – probably with as little editing as possible. And then they pray employees have the attention span to get the message.

Only sometimes is communication with employees seen as important enough for a real strategy and disciplined commitment to an overarching message. We have elaborate strategies for understanding and communicating with customers, not necessarily for those who make or break relations with customers.

And so we have the kind of banal corporate-speak that comprises so many internal communication programs. No surprises, nothing bold or thought-provoking. What follows: distrust and disengagement. Why pay attention to internal communication if it’s the corporate equivalent of small talk?

The rise of social media – and the empowered consumer/employee – may make classic internal communication programs weaker than ever. Employees have lots of ways now to tell the world why they are disengaged – with potentially disastrous consequences for the brand. Executives can get out in front of the new transparency or be run over by it.

A couple of years ago I heard James Greathouse, then leading internal communication at Starbucks, talk about what he was doing to communicate authentically with employees – and to keep executives with individual agendas in check. There is hope in those best practices. Read more here.