Minding Gaps

Welcome!

 

Welcome to our blog on business leadership, its communication and credibility, and workplace engagement around change and breakthrough performance. To begin reading our posts right away, just scroll down a few inches past the Announcements.

A little blog with big ideas, Minding Gaps strives to build strategic engagement by enhancing the way that corporations and other organizations think and talk about their purpose, situation, vision, values, direction, progress, priorities, goals, expectations and identity.

The more clarity, credibility, and community you can bring to these matters, the more engagement you will see. We will unpack and work through this challenge with you. You'll like the result: change and breakthrough performance that are simple, natural, foolproof, and almost inevitable.

Borrowed from the public-address warning in the London Underground, our use of "minding the gaps" refers to the need for leaders to close the myriad gaps that compromise the credibility of leaders and leadership. These are gaps between aspirations and reality, between rhetoric and fact, between expectations and experience, between visions and achievement, between official truth and ground truth, and most of all between leaders and followers. Unless and until leaders close these gaps, they cannot lead people to a better, brighter future.

We invite you to browse, read, and learn; we ask only that you respect our copyrights and give us full credit for anything printed here. You can reach us whenever you wish by calling +1-847-247-2241 or by writing to info@arceil.com. We would like very much to hear from you.

(Note: We reserve the right to revise, refine, and republish prior posts. Corrections submitted to us and verified will be incorporated in a revised post. Otherwise, we anticipate anything posted here to remain here indefinitely.)

Thank you, and we hope you will check back often.

Announcements

University of California Online Course in Communication / Engagement

Thomas Lee will teach a six-week online course in internal communication and employee engagement for credit this winter for the University of California—Irvine.

Because the course is asynchronous—that is, all the lectures are either written or taped and available online, and the class discussions are in a threaded forum—you can participate at whatever time of the day you wish. Thus, anyone in the world can take the course. (The course is taught in English only, however.)

If you're interested, write to Tom at tom@arceil.com and he will send you a link to register. Tuition is $600, and the course will take approximately three to four hours per week of your time. It runs from February 1 to March 15, 2010.

New Best-Practice Studies by Sector on Social Media

We're launching four new best-practice studies on social media, specific to particular industries, in the first quarter of 2010. One will look at social media for service companies such as law firms, medical practices, airlines, engineering and construction companies, consulting firms, and hospitals. Another will examine social media for the retail sector. Still another study will explore social media for manufacturing companies. Finally, another study will delve into social media for non-profit organizations.   

We’re enrolling corporatations and organizations as co-sponsors of these four best-practice studies now. To inquire, just send us a note (to info@arceil.com) with your name and telephone number or call us (at +1.847.247.2241), and we will follow up.

These studies will produce real-world answers for real-world questions in each of the four sectors. They will find real-world solutions for real-world problems. Each study will be broad enough to provide guidance on general strategies and policies but specific enough to be appropriate and relevant to its sector.

Each co-sponsor will help design and customize the research, so the studies will reflect every co-sponsor’s own concerns and interests. They will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. Best of all, because several companies will join together to sponsor it, each company's share of the total cost will be moderate.

For further details, call us or scroll down to the December 1, 2009 post.

Webinar on Employee Engagement: Noon EST on Friday, February 19

Set aside 90 minutes, from noon to 1:30 pm Eastern Time (9 am to 10:30 am Pacific Time) on Friday, February 19, for a powerful webinar on the GearBox hierarchy of employee engagement.

The hierarchy is a simple but compelling model illustrating five progressive levels of employee engagement around business strategy, from active disengagement (the worst), to passive disengagement, to passive engagement, to active engagement, and finally to creative engagement (the best).

Enrollment is just $79 per person or $295 for four or more. Reserve your place by calling us at +1.847.247.2241.

Holiday Break: December 19, 2009, to January 4, 2010

Minding Gaps is taking two weeks off for the Christmas and New Year's holidays. Our last post prior to the holiday break will be Friday, December 18, 2009. We will return on Monday, January 4, 2010.

 

Technorati Claim Code WUU227Z6455M

 

 

A Lawsuit for Our Times

 

Anyone interested in business communication and employee engagement should make a point of following the arguments and decision in City of Ontario v. Quon, a lawsuit that has just been accepted on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is whether employees have a right to privacy in using electronic devices supplied by their employers. The high court will rule on the case by the end of this term in June.

Police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three other officers had sued the City of Ontario, California, after their superiors read personal text messages the officers had sent on the city-owned devices. The city had an explicit policy in place that employees had no guarantee of privacy.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th District ruled last year that the officers did have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, because a supervisor had told the officers they could use the devices for personal communication, so long as they paid for any excessive use.

One of the judges on the three-judge appellate panel, Kim McLane Wardlaw, said the city’s formal policy was marginalized by the “operational reality” of the supervisor's informal policy.

If nothing else, the case serves as a salient reminder that employers must have clear, consistent policies—and then follow those policies to the letter. At a minimum, that entails detailed training for all supervisors, lest the supervisors give mixed or muddled signals to employees. As for employees, it would be wise for them to remember that digital messages often find unintended audiences.

You can read more here.

 

Note: Minding Gaps will be on holiday break beginning tomorrow. We will return on Monday, January 4, 2010. Have a wonderful holiday season and a terrific new year’s celebration. Good luck to the Wisconsin Badgers in the Champs Sports Bowl on December 29 and to the Northwestern Wildcats in the Outback Bowl on January 1. Celebrate safely, everyone!

 

Quote / Unquote: Edward M. Kennedy on Shouting

 

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

I just finished reading the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, and I heartily recommend it to anyone—Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal—for a fascinating look at politics and public policy through the eyes of the liberal lion.

The book is compulsively readable. Kennedy strings together story after story about his life. He spares no self-incrimination, especially around Chappaquiddick and his personal lifestyle during the 1970s and 1980s. Nor is he stinting in his praise for people he liked and respected, including some noteworthy Republicans, or in his scorn for those he didn’t, including some well-known Democrats.

Toward the end of the book, the late senator tells of a couple of speeches he gave. One of the speeches was to the students and faculty of Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The other was to his peers at the Senate Prayer breakfast.

In both speeches, Kennedy would be uncommonly forthright about his life—its promises, its principles, its practice, and its pain.

Prior to the Senate Prayer Breakfast speech, Kennedy reminded himself of the need to speak softly, in a quiet and temperate voice. He told himself:

 

The louder our voices become, the more

we grow strangers to each other and ourselves.

 

As you reflect on this quotation, ask yourself whether people argue too much. Ask yourself whether we actively look for common ground as much as we should. Ask yourself what the effect would be of lowering the volume of our debates, and of asking more genuine questions and making fewer tenuous assertions.

 

Paul A. Samuelson (1915-2009)

 

In my first semester at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I took the introductory survey course in macroeconomics. Our textbook was the eighth edition of Economics by Paul A. Samuelson. Its 866 pages must have weighed in at three pounds or better. Still, it was exquisitely well-written, for it explained that dismal science with clarity and even some wit.

When the semester ended, I was in need of money, so I took the text to a campus bookstore and sold it for a few dollars. Later that same day, I realized my mistake. I returned to the bookstore and bought back my old textbook at a tidy profit for the store. It was an object lesson in economics. Decades later, I still have that book, right alongside the desk in my study.

Over the years, many millions of economics students around the world would rely on the Samuelson text for their introduction to economics. By dint of Economics, which made a fortune for the professor and his family, Samuelson taught all of us a good deal of what we know about economics.

All these years later, I still remember a particular example Samuelson set forth in the book. He was explaining the concept of the “Invisible Hand,” the notion articulated by the 18th century economic theorist Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, which laid the intellectual groundwork for free enterprise.

Smith wrote that multiple purchases by individuals, each in pursuit of his own self-interest, would create a favorable public interest by automatically directing the flow of goods and services to the right places. No coordination, control, or coercion by a "visible hand" (i.e., government) is necessary or desirable.

It was Samuelson’s example that crystallized the concept for me. He pointed to New York City, whose millions of people would starve in a week were it not for the orderly flow of food into and throughout the city. Yet no one, Samuelson observed, worries much about the problem.

That’s because the Invisible Hand is taking care of it. Apart from levying taxes or tariffs and ensuring food safety, the government plays no role in the distribution of all that food. Indeed, the professor wrote, contrary to complaints by purists, the government plays a remarkably modest role in the entire economy. That’s the beauty of the Invisible Hand and of free enterprise.

Samuelson, who was born in 1915 and died Sunday at the age of 94, lived through a period of remarkable economic growth and change. At the dawn of the Great Depression, he himself was taking a survey course in economics as a University of Chicago undergraduate. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 1970, the discipline reflected the post-Depression influence of John Maynard Keynes. For a while, the noxious concept of industrial planning was in vogue, by which government would determine what industries and products would thrive.

A few years later, the intellectual pendulum began swinging the other way, under the monetarist thinking of Milton Friedman. By the time Samuelson died, Keynesianism wasn't looking so bad anymore.

Because almost all of us supped at the trough of Samuelson's wisdom, we are all the beneficiaries of his insights and teaching, and we are all indebted to him, as we are, indeed, to all great teachers.

Whither parking meters?

Last week in this space we found ourselves discussing which companies and brands were unlikely to survive the coming year.

The list was entirely speculative, of course, but the names that made their way to the list would certainly give their owners and employees reason for pause. They included Newsweek magazine, Motorola, Palm, Borders, Blockbuster, and Eastman Kodak.

One reader offered up Tiger Woods as another possibility. That was before the famous golfer took a self-imposed sabbatical.

To the list of endangered brands, we may also wish to speculate as to what products are unlikely to survive more than a year or two more. In just the last decade, we have seen the virtual demise of camera film, the VCR machine, floppy disks, newspaper classified ads, dial-up connections, and operator-assisted telephone information. When was the last time you saw anyone using a Sony Walkman or a portable radio?

Will paper telephone books survive another couple of years? Will ordinary cell phones? How about CDs and DVDs?

And how about fax machines? I personally haven’t had a fax machine in my office for several years. Have you? I have a fax number, but the few faxes anyone sends me come straight to my computer. Come to think of it, I don’t use the post office as much as I used to, and I don’t send overnight express mail as much, either.

My local park district is removing all the pay telephones from its facilities. There’s just no need for them. All of us carry telephones in our pocket, even when we’re jogging in the park.

I live just outside Chicago, a city that has replaced its parking meters with a machine that takes credit cards and automatically sends out invoices for late parking. There was a hue and cry at first, but now people seem to like the system. You don’t need to search for quarters anymore.

What products do you see facing an uncertain future? Conversely, what products do you think are safe bets to survive innovative competition?

 

By the Numbers: Off-Hours Connectivity

 

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored strategic communication, quality, job satisfaction, information overload, employee engagement, trust in business, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

Today we take a look technology and off-hours connectivity, a relevant subject during the holidays, when so many people take time off from work. (Please note that this column is on vacation for two weeks beginning on December 19. By the Numbers will return on January 4.)

 

According to a new study by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel Corporation, 55 percent of Americans believe that business today demands constant connectivity by mobile devices. If that means taking a laptop on vacation or answering a call from the office during a meal, so be it.

Some managers and professionals have always been tethered to their office. A typical plant manager, obstetrician, or firefighter lives with the prospect of being called at inconvenient times. For the rest of us, the last decade has been an adjustment.

The same survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believe that society has tacit expectations and boundaries for the use of mobile technology in social situations, and almost as many, 69 percent, believe that violating those standards is unacceptable.

Some questions to consider:

• What expectations or guidelines does your team have for off-hours connectivity?

• Are any times sacrosanct, protected from interruption?

• How do you treat personal vacations, weekends, and holidays?

• Is there an expectation of a work-life balance in your organization, or is that just a myth?

 

Quote / Unquote: Albert Einstein on Curiosity

 

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

Albert Einstein was a legend in his own time. His name is synonymous with intellectual brilliance, and his contributions to theoretical physics are well known. Few people, however, appreciate the authenticity of his humility and the importance of his unorthodox and persistent curiosity.

 

Einstein had an exquisite way of explaining his complex ideas. Take the theory of relativity. He put it this way: “Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

Or consider the limits of human inquiry. The great physicist once remarked: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.”

Indeed one of Einstein’s salient traits was his deep and abiding curiosity. He never relented from asking more and better questions. The habit of questioning the unquestioned, he believed, was at the foundation of intellectual progress. He put it this way:

 

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

The important thing is not to stop questioning."

 

As you reflect on this quotation, you may wish to consider the following questions of our own. We invite you to submit a comment with your thoughts.

· As you examine your life's work, what fires your curiosity?

  

· What are your assumptions, your prejudices, your biases? Which of them are unfounded?

  

· What big questions do you retreat or shrink from asking?

 

· What should be the focus of curiosity on your team or throughout your organization?

  

· How can you create an environment of curiosity?

 

 

 

 

Which Companies and Brands Won't Survive 2010?

 

Just as history is filled with the skeletal remains of dinosaurs that failed to adapt, so is the present. We just don’t know which dinosaurs will adapt, and which ones won’t.

I'm speaking of companies and their brands, of course. Anyone of a certain age can remember a grocery aisle of brands that are with us no longer: Ipana and Stripe toothpastes, Hamm’s “the beer refreshing,” 20 Mule Team Borax, Ivory soap, Dad’s Old Fashioned root beer, L&M cigarettes.

Even the grocery stores have changed; if there’s a Red Owl or an A&P still in business somewhere, I don’t know about it. You cannot drive a Studebaker or a Nash Rambler to the grocery store, either. You can’t even drive a new Olds, and you cannot fill your tank with Pure or Union 76 gasoline. Nor will you find ads for any of these brands in this week's issue of Saturday Review.

For some companies, like struggling Xerox and the American carmakers, the unseen demon is foreign innovation. For others, such as Compaq and TWA, it is absorption by acquisition and merger. For still others, like Pickett slide rules and even AOL, it is the relentless drive of technology.

In some cases, whole industries have emigrated from the United States. Only twelve or fifteen years ago, thousands of people were employed in the fabrics industry. Not anymore.

Some years ago, when I was an executive speechwriter, I was meeting with the CEO of a Fortune 25 company. He told me then that, within a decade, the industry would experience a great deal of consolidation. He was right. The company he led no longer exists.

Yesterday I came across this article that speculated on brands and companies that will not survive even the next twelve months. It includes such venerable names as Newsweek magazine, Motorola, Palm, Borders, Blockbuster, and Eastman Kodak. It omits mention of more newspapers and magazines, which will surely be among the casualties.

Now I have no special knowledge to support the article’s speculation. But having seen so much commercial carnage over the last few decades, I find it difficult to argue otherwise, too.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What other brands and companies do you think are in danger? Do you think they know it?

• What are the unseen threats to your own success?

• To what extent is insufficient employee engagement a factor in the demise of companies?

• To what extent is poor and myopic leadership a factor?

• To what extent are factors beyond the control or influence of the threatened companies to blame?

 

By the Numbers: Communication and the Bottom Line

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored issues of quality, job satisfaction, information overload, employee engagement, trust in business, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

Today we take a look at data on organizational communication and economic performance.

According to a new study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, effective employee communication is such a powerful driver of employee engagement that it is a leading indicator of economic performance. Companies that are highly effective communicators had 47 percent higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.

As you reflect on this, ask yourself:

• How much do ground-level workers in your organization know about the competitive situation and strategy?

• What does your organization do to train managers for their role and responsibilities in communication?

• What are the expectations on communication for managers and supervisors?

• What excuses does your organization make around communication?

Leadership Is More Than Influence

 

There are those who say that leadership is nothing more and nothing less than leadership.

Is it really? What do you think?

I believe that leadership is a great deal more than influence. It is actually nothing less than inspiration. These are not the same things. They are not even close.

After all, a fast-talking salesman can persuade you to buy a used car. That’s influence, but is it leadership?

A neighborhood bully knows how to get his way. Is that influence? Yes, I suppose. But is it leadership?

Propagandists have influence. Tyrants have influence. Are they leaders? To me, they are mere martinets.

Torture and duress and manipulation and addiction can exercise a perverse but effective kind of influence. Is any of it leadership? No, of course not.

The promise of a quick buck can influence some people. Madison Avenue can influence people. The allure of forbidden fruit has influence. None of it is leadership.

No, leadership is something more than any of that. The essential kernel of leadership is its capacity to inspire people to think for themselves, to expect more from themselves, to imagine more, to give more, and to be more. Influence can do none of that.

Leadership—true leadership, generous leadership, big leadership—is all about inspiration. Leaders don’t settle for influence, except inasmuch as they influence themselves to become inspiring examples of the change they champion. Leaders know the difference between influence and inspiration, and they know they must do the hard, sweaty work of inspiring people.

The people you would lead are asking and waiting for nothing less. They are asking and waiting to be inspired.

So give them what they want. Give them what they need. Give them what they are asking and waiting for. Give them the magic, the power of inspiration.

 

Introducing the GearBox 2.1

(c) 2009 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Those of you who have participated in our workshops and seminars will recall the collaborative GearBox exercise. We use it to spark creative, structured thinking around the execution of business initiatives and strategies.

The proprietary GearBox itself is a terrific tool for systematically analyzing an organization's cohesion around its vision, goals, and strategy. The accompanying exercise has never failed to grab everyone’s attention.

But in the interest of continuous improvement, and after using the GearBox for six years, we saw the need to revise it. With the benefit of your suggestions, we have produced a new model that better reflects the reality of the work place today. The exercise works the same way as it always did. We’re just using a different, updated set of descriptive terms to describe the cells.

Curtain and Trumpets, Please

Here then is the GearBox version 2.1:

Awareness	Understanding	Acceptance	Commitment
Focus	Curiosity	Passion	Courage
Attention	Clarity	Trust	Cooperation
Familiarity	Recognition	Skepticism	Inertia
Distraction	Confusion	Apathy	Complacency
Alienation	Denial	Cynicism	Resistance

The four column headers, taken from our proprietary Rainbow model, remain the same: Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance, and Commitment. They represent the four successive stages that any leadership initiative or change program must go through.

Arrayed beneath the column headers is a 4X5 matrix. It provides a structure for gauging the relative orientation of employees (or members, or volunteers, or supporters) toward the organization's mission or toward a particular initiative or strategy. The five rows reflect levels of disposition. We named them for the gears of a transmission. (The model and its use are protected by copyright.)

Five Levels of Performance

The very best level is at the top. Think of it as creative engagement. For casual reference, we have dubbed it Overdrive. We regard this as an operational definition of engagement in the work place: employees in a state of strategic focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. (It is unchanged from Version 1.0.) Here is where you find high-engagement organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Apple Computer, Nordstrom, Google, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, championship sports teams, victorious political campaigns, and the legendary Skunk Works R&D operation of Lockheed Martin.

The next-best level appears one level down. Think of it as active engagement. For the sake of the metaphor, we call it Drive. We regard this as basic employee support: attention, clarity, trust, and cooperation. It is hard to imagine a cohesive, competitive work force in a dynamic market without this basic support.

Importantly, any organization competing on the basis of innovation, service, technology, creativity, culture, research, speed, or quality must minimally be at active or creative engagement. Anything less runs the risk of abrupt defection of key customers or employees and the sudden erosion of market share.

The middle level is Neutral. You can think of it as passive engagement. It is really mediocrity. We regard it as a sense of affiliation, not much more. The descriptors we chose for this level are: familiarity, recognition, skepticism, and inertia. A work force at this level may be enough to survive in commodity or generic markets, but it is inadequate for competing on turf any more demanding than price discounting.

Another level down is Park. Think of it as passive disengagement. It is inferiority, a state of internal, corrosive disregard. Here you will find distraction, confusion, apathy, and complacency. It is dangerous territory. Unfortunately, all too many organizations find themselves here after years of treating their people like depreciable assets. From here, it is imperative to climb out and up, lest you stagnate or even slip further down.

The very worst level we call Reverse. Think of it as active disengagement. We regard of it as an operational definition of toxins in the work place. It consists of employees (or even the executive suite, as in the cases of companies whose management was corrupt) in a state of alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. Only the saddest organizations find themselves here. This is where non-represented labor forces are actively seeking to organize, where unions threaten to strike at any perceived offense, or where particularly venal employees engage in sabotage or other demonstrations of contempt. It is possible to climb out—indeed, I have seen it—but it requires a sustained and concerted effort.

The Exercise

The exercise is simple in form but quite compelling in impact. Here is an overview; in our consulting engagements and workshops, the discussion goes quite a bit deeper and drills into the particulars of your organization.

Begin by reflecting on the entire chart, one column at a time. Now, in privacy, pinpoint the level of your management team within each column. Next, do the same for the organization as a whole, thinking in terms of the typical non-supervisory, non-managerial person. Keep your choices to yourself.

Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What would full strategic focus look like? Where do you already see it? Where do you instead see distraction or even alienation? How do media and social “noise” affect this? What can you do to heighten awareness of your business environment, vision, and strategy? What obstacles are in the way? How do you get around them? What have you done that interferes with strategic focus?

• What would broadly based, strategic curiosity look like? Why do you want it? Why is curiosity even more important than clarity? Where do you already see it? Where don’t you? How much confusion and denial are there? What can you do to cultivate greater understanding of the implications of strategy on day-to-day work? What obstacles are in the way? How do you get around them? Which of your own behaviors must you change to demonstrate by example?

• What would real passion look like? Why is it important? Passion for what? Where do you see it? Where do you only wish you saw it? Where do you instead see apathy and cynicism? Do you see real passion in yourselves? In one another? In what ways? What specifically can you do to nurture enthusiastic acceptance of your vision? What is in the way? How much apathy and cynicism is there? How does emotion complement reasoning toward full engagement?

• What would genuine courage look like in business? Do you ever see it? Where, if at all? Where instead do you see complacency or resistance? What emotions do you see when you peel back the complacency and resistance? In what ways is courage in the workplace important? What does it have to do with commitment? What specifically can you do to build more commitment to this organization? What should you refrain from doing? What stands in the way?

An impartial third party should be asked to interview each member of the senior management team, in confidence, so as to collect a true self-portrait of the management team as well as its perception of the state of ground-level employees. Then it becomes imperative to close whatever gaps emerge within the senior management team and between senior management and the workforce. The shorter the "distance" between leader and follower, the more taut will be the line that connects them.

Our clients have found this exercise to be quite powerful. It provides a framework and linear process for the execution of initiatives and strategies. While it may oversimplify things a little, it also sheds light on some real difficulties, and it’s a powerful inducement to a large, overdue conversation.

* * *

For onsite/offsite facilitation of a GearBox exercise, contact Thomas J. Lee

by email at info@arceil.com or by telephone at +1-847-247-2241.

Please note that the GearBox is protected by copyright.

Answers to Your Questions on Social Media

 

The questions about social media just keep coming. If your CEO or chairman asked, could you confidently answer any of these questions, let alone all of them?

• How are high-performance organizations making the most of social media? What are they being sure to do, and what are they being sure to avoid?

• Is there a compelling value proposition for proactively using social media?

• Is a lot of what you hear about social media just the usual hype? Is there any real value to a company? Is it just another fad? What can anyone say of value in 140 characters, anyway?

• Are high-performance companies really using social media to connect with employees faster than ever? If so, how is it working? Exactly how are they doing it?

• How are they using social media to enhance and maintain their reputation in the marketplace? How well is it working?

• How are high-performance companies using social media to respond to rumors? To reach and attract Millennium Generation employees? To exercise more agility in the marketplace? To monitor cyberspace conversations? To troubleshoot customer complaints and issues?

• Are they just using the "old standbys" of social media: Twitter and Facebook? Or are they identifying other, lesser-known social-media sites that reach niche stakeholders?

• Are high-performance companies forbidding employees from reading any social-media sites while at work? If so, is such a ban effective? Doesn't it backfire with Millennial employees?

• Are executives of high-performing organizations blogging? Have these blogs taken the place of conventional, slower media? Do the executives write their own? Who has time to ghost them? Is ghostwriting publicly acknowledged?

• In short, what's working, and what isn't working, in the new world of social media?

We’ll get the answers to those questions—and to your own specific questions about social media—in a battery of studies in early 2010. We’ll conduct four studies on social media. Each will target a particular sector. One will look at social media for service companies such as law firms, medical practices, airlines, engineering and construction companies, consulting firms, and hospitals. Another will examine social media for the retail sector. Still another study will explore social media for manufacturing companies. Finally, yet another study will delve into social media for non-profit organizations.   

We’re enrolling corporatations and organizations as co-sponsors of these four studies now. To inquire, just send us a note (to info@arceil.com) with your name and telephone number or telephone (+1.847.247.2241), and we will follow up.

These studies will produce real-world answers for real-world questions in each of these four sectors. They will find real-world solutions for real-world problems. Each study will be broad enough to provide guidance on general strategies and policies but specific enough to be appropriate and relevant to its sector.

Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will benefit from them. The studies will be proprietary to the co-sponsoring companies for one full year from the completion of the projects.

Each co-sponsor will help design and customize the research, so the studies will reflect every co-sponsor’s own concerns and interests. They will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. Best of all, because several companies will join together to sponsor it, each company's share of the total cost will be moderate.

The final reports will have a written executive summary and PowerPoint slides for presentation of findings. At the conclusion of the projects, we will host webinars for the co-sponsors that present the findings and responds to questions.

Our initial research shows a wide variety of approaches and practices, in terms of both substance and tone. Our intent is to establish a benchmark of policies that each sponsor can use for evaluation and improvement.

We will enroll co-sponsors on a first-come, first-serve basis. Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will share the results.

The research will be managed by Thomas J. Lee, founder and president of Arceil Leadership Ltd. A subject-matter expert and frequent speaker on leadership and organizational communication, Tom has culled best practices from many major, pace-setting corporations: Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Federal Express, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A, 3M, McDonald’s, DuPont, Motorola, Weyerhaeuser, Walgreens, and others.

A former journalist and speechwriter for Fortune 100 CEOs, Tom is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, where he serves as a mentor to graduate students, and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His clients have included the No. 1 or No. 2 company in such disparate industries as heavy manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, motorcycles, energy, food and beverage, and chemicals, among others. Beginning in 2010, he will teach an online course in communication and engagement for the University of California.

Please contact us at 847-247-2241 for details, including fees and procedures, or write to us at info@arceil.com. Or write to us at info@arceil.com, and we can arrange a convenient time to talk by telephone. We look forward to working with you.

By the Numbers: U.S. Financial Companies Inspire Little Trust

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Thus far, By the Numbers has explored issues of quality, job satisfaction, information overload, employee engagement, trust in business, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

Returning today from Thanksgiving break, we take a look at levels of trust among Americans in various industries.

U.S.-based financial institutions are apparently not inspiring a great deal of trust. Research by Harris Interactive looked at trust in banks, accounting firms, life-insurance companies, financial planning firms, health-insurance companies, investment firms, mortgage companies, Wall Street, and credit-card companies.

Across all generations and income levels, 58 percent of Americans said none of these industries were “generally honest and trustworthy.”

Distrust was greatest among Generation X respondents (64 percent) and households with income of less than $35,000 (64 percent).

Distrust was least among Generation Y respondents, (also known as Millennials, 52 percent) and households with income between $50,000 and $75,000 (48 percent), but even they showed substantial levels of distrust. (Generation X consists of people born from 1965 to 1976. Generation Y consists of people born from 1977 to 1991).

Plainly the turbulence in the economy and especially in the financial sector accounts for much of the distrust. Still, one can reasonably ask other questions of consequence:

• What is the toll on society and business from such an erosion of trust?

• In your own business, do you see fallout from the erosion of trust in the financial sector?

• If not, are you looking hard enough? Who might have a divergent opinion, and are you talking to them?

• If so, how are you attempting to restore trust? Do you have a plan, and are you executing it?

Query: The Questions You Don’t Ask of Yourself

Appearing irregularly but not infrequently, Query is a short, simple, and hopefully powerful feature. It consists of a single question, or perhaps two or three (or four, or five) closely related questions—and that’s it, nothing more. It is intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

We won’t belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication. As you wrestle with each particular question, also ask yourself why we're posing it and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

• Who is asking you the questions you won’t ask of yourself?
• What are those questions?
• How are you responding to them?
• How are you treating the people who muster the courage to ask them?

Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli on Leadership

 

Here are two famous quotations on leadership. Both come from prominent figures in British history. Read them both and then choose the statement that you think represents the truer path to effective leadership.

You can select either statement, or neither, or both. Be prepared to explain your answer. I may call on you.

Finally, after answering but before reading any further, determine exactly what the statement or statements you deem true should mean for your leadership style. In particular, should you change your style? If so, how? Will you? When?

The first quotation, a paradox on its face, was uttered by Benjamin Disraeli, who was prime minister of Britain in the mid-19th century. Disraeli declared:

I must follow my people. Am I not their leader?

The second statement, which collides headlong with modern notions of representative democracy, is commonly attributed to Edmund Burke. In a 1774 address to the electors of Bristol, England, he declared:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment,

and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

There you have it: two tidy quotations representing two diametrically opposed approaches to leadership. Disraeli beckons the leader to lead only to the extent his followers want. Burke calls on the leader to realize her own vision and to follow not her constituents but her own conscience, as a moral duty to her followers.

Which statement do you believe holds the key to true leadership? Does either? Do both? If both, how can they not undermine each other?

The first statement holds important lessons for business leaders, who typically wear two hats: one as a leader, the other as a manager. We often default to our role as managers, which has the unhappy effect of stymieing and thwarting change. Business leaders would do well to listen more to their followers and to question more often their own assumptions, biases, perspective, and knowledge, for their own arrogance is their biggest enemy. To them, I say: Listen to Disraeli.

But there's a fine line between heeding Disraeli's counsel and fatuously putting a finger to the wind without finding a center of your own. Having a core identity, knowing it, and bringing it to the table are vital to the cause of leadership. Yes, of course it will cost you some followers. No leader can appeal to everyone. But willow-to-the-wind navigation is scarcely leadership at all.

So we turn to Burke. He asks us to look inside ourselves, to reach deep into our souls as leaders, so that we can find the true north of our own moral compass. Then he commands us to follow it. "If you should be a leader, then lead!" he would say.

That approach is enormously appealing. After eons of depending on leaders, we survivors of 100,000 generations of humanoids and humans have a culturally instinctive need for leadership, embodying at the very least an innate sense of direction, a tireless energy, the steady sunburst of hope and perseverance, and frequent articulation of what followers need to know and remember and feel and do.

So which, you ask, do I believe is the truer path to leadership? You knew the answer all along, of course. Disraeli and Burke are both on to something big, something important. It is a paradox of leadership, and a profound paradox at that, to realize that they both counsel essential roads to leadership. Far from being mutually exclusive, they are mutually reinforcing. Each is stronger for the other.

For further reflection, ask yourself and your colleagues:

• What do we learn from Burke? From Disraeli?

• Why are these lessons from the 18th and 19th centuries important to a 21st century business?

• How do they challenge our leadership? What do they say about our connectivity with followers? About our authenticity as leaders?

• Can we forge a stronger connection with our people?

• What is the value of a strong, resilient connection with our people?

• What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? When?

• How can we hold ourselves accountable?

By the Numbers: More Employees Want to Remain at Their Jobs

 

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday, although we will be taking next week off for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the United States.

Thus far, By the Numbers has explored issues of quality, job satisfaction, information overload, employee engagement, trust in business, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

Today we take a look at employee intention to remain with their current employer.

 

In spite of the recent recession, or perhaps because of it, researchers have detected a sharp increase in the percentage of workers who intend to remain at their current place of employment.

According to Minneapolis-based Modern Survey, in August 2008 the figure stood at just 52 percent. It climbed to 57 percent in February 2009 and to 63 percent in September 2009.

As you think about your own team, department, division, or enterprise, ask yourself:

• What do you think accounts for the increase? Is it a function of changes in the denominator, the base of employees still in their jobs after extensive cutbacks? Or does it reflect a real change in attitude?

• How can business leaders, at whatever level, increase the percentages further?

• More fundamentally, other than an offer of better compensation, what causes employees to want to leave a place of employment?

• How important do you think compensation is in the whole mix of factors affecting intent to remain?

• How important do you think an employee's relationship with his or ehr manager is?

 

 

Side Roads: "The Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! post above and on the Our Philosophy page.

Our first two Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto and recounted one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.* Today we review a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. Published in 1989, the story is presently in production as a television miniseries.

 

 

My off-hour reading tends to favor non-fiction: memoirs, mainly, and books on business and public policy. A few times a year I read a novel. For the most part the novels I choose are breezy and relatively short.

The Pillars of the Earth is neither breezy nor short. It is an epic story, spanning four generations in medieval England, about the construction of a Gothic cathedral. When I noticed the sheer girth of the book—at 973 pages, it is nearly two inches thick—and felt its heft, I winced. Surely I had better things to do with my time.

My daughter insisted otherwise. Now a law student, she had read Pillars during spring break on her junior year abroad. The college she was attending required courses in classical philosophy and literature, and she had explored Gothic cathedrals across Europe. With a week off between semesters, she tore through the book even as she was traipsing around the ruins of ancient Athens. She promised it would be the fastest 973-page book I would ever read; I knew it would be the only 973-page book I would ever read.

It took me appreciably more than a week—four is closer to the truth—and I could not claim the Acropolis as a distraction. Yet night after night, I curled up with this book and hours later fell asleep with it on my lap. In short, I loved it.

Pillars appeals on no fewer than five levels. First, like any other Ken Follett book, it is a spellbinding thriller. As he explains in a preface to a recent edition, he has written a series of melodramas, one on the heels of another. No sooner do you find the resolution of one crisis, and you are in the thick of another. All of them link together in a bigger picture. Well into the book, you think it is about a particular character, but that man dies with 400-odd pages to go, and life goes on.

Second, it offers an incredible tapestry of fully realized characters, all of whom are vulnerable to weaknesses of one sort or another, and most of whom ultimately have redeeming features that render them intensely human. The worst of the lot is William Hamleigh (above, being appointed an earl by King Stephen, in a scene from the TV production) and his parents, but a bishop by the name of Waleran Bigod and a monk known as Brother Remigius aren’t far behind. Even the saintly Prior Philip commits the sin of pride. At the other end of the spectrum are the beautiful Lady Aliena and Jack, the man she patiently loves. He is the son of Ellen, a mysterious woman who lives in the forest and whom Prior Philip regards as a witch.

Third, Pillars is a fascinating primer on the architecture and construction of cathedrals. These huge buildings were built with none of the tools that modern architects take for granted, and yet today they stand as testament to the power of religious faith and discipline. All medieval cathedrals took decades to build; in many cases, the men who finished them were the grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who started them. The story of their construction is absorbing—itself a moral lesson in dedication and perseverance.

Fourth, it transports the reader to a time and place that most of us know little about. It is filled with accurate details on the quotidian lives of Twelfth Century people: their housing, their clothing, their nutrition and health, their community, their traditions and customs, their farming, their fears and superstitions, their economy, their laws and government, their technology, and their passions and rivalries. Follett devoted the necessary time and effort to working with medieval scholars who provided him with extensive and colorful detail on the subsistence of our ancestors. It shows.

Fifth, and finally, The Pillars of the Earth reveals enduring truths about organizations and leadership. Depending on the culture of your own organization, the politics of governance can be brutal and dehumanizing, or it can be collaborative and ennobling. In all cases, the way people relate to one another has an enormous impact on their capacity to come together and work to everyone’s advantage.

All in all, Pillars is a rip-roaring good read, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

_________________________

* N.B. You can read the post on my pesto recipe here, and you can read about my hike to the summit of Half Dome here.

 

Verizon Sends Its Employees a Message of Chicanery

I left Verizon’s mobile-phone service in a huff years ago. While I haven’t been happy with my current carrier (are you listening, AT&T?), I am loath to return to Verizon. Just yesterday, New York Times columnist David Pogue reminded me why. Read his column here.

In a nutshell, Pogue is irritated at Verizon’s billing practices. He complains about an early-termination fee that amounts to a profit center. Even worse, he writes, is a policy of billing for accidental data downloading—and worst of all, designing and programming telephones in such a way as to make those mishaps all but inevitable.

Pogue quotes a whistle-blowing Verizon employee who explains how the chicanery works:

"The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. Not cool. I've had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I'm sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, no.

"Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That's over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

"Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue? Customer Service might credit you if you call and complain, but this practice is just not right.

"Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it's blocked—but you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!

"They have started training us reps that too many data blocks are being put on accounts now; they're actually making us take classes called Alternatives to Data Blocks. They do not want all the blocks, because 40% of Verizon's revenue now comes from data use. I just know there are millions of people out there that don't even notice this $1.99 on the bill."

Pogue reports that he is deluged with mail from unhappy Verizon customers.

“I realize that it's a business, that Verizon exists to make money,” writes Pogue. “But the part I don't get is, why doesn't Verizon calculate the business cost of making customers unhappy? Surely some accountant can show that customer anger over these fees and dirty button tricks translate into negative corporate image, and therefore lost business."

Pogue asks: “Why wouldn't it be a hugely profitable move to start pitching yourself as the good cell company, the one that actually likes its customers?”

From my own perspective, I just wonder kind of employee engagement Verizon expects to get as a result of policies like these. When your own employees are writing vitriolic notes to a New York Times columnist, you have a lot of reason to look at your leadership in the mirror.

  

Leadership as an Act of Creativity

Many years ago I came across a disarmingly simple definition of creativity. Though I have never forgotten it, I have no idea who articulated it. Today’s powerful search engines are powerless to tell us. So I am unable to give credit where credit is due.

The definition presented creativity as a three-stage process: first, seeing reality as it actually is; second, imagining it differently; and third, making it so.

That’s it. Simple, isn’t it? And yet it is such a very difficult thing.

Most of us have our hands full even seeing reality as it actually is, let alone imagining it differently. And making it so? Presidents and potentates have died trying.

Yet creativity flourishes: in the arts, in science and technology, even in business. Without it, the human spirit would surely languish.

Now here is a different question. What would we get if we began to think of leadership as its own kind of creativity—beautiful, inspiring, noble—as an act of creating a new way of being?

We might apply the same three-stage process of creativity to the work of leadership: seeing reality as it actually is, not as we suppose or want it to be, but as it truly is; then vividly imagining it differently, so as to feel its texture and hear its words; and finally managing ourselves so that we make the imagined new reality our present-day reality.

When we do this, we begin to break the bondage of management and free ourselves to lead, don’t we? We begin to feel our way to a new and different place.

You may ask yourself:

• What is the place you are at now?
• When you cast away your own biases, what exactly is this reality? Can you describe it so objectively that everyone agrees on the description?

• In what ways could and should this reality be different?

• How can you yourself behave differently so as to make it so?

Quote / Unquote: Eric Hoffer on Change and Continuous Learning

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman first and a philosopher second, and that makes for a powerful kind of philosophizing—its roots deep in the reality of hard work and harder living. Blind from the ages of five to fifteen, he was so thrilled to regain his eyesight that he began to read books voraciously, and he never quit.

The books and essays he himself wrote were always unorthodox and provocative. He was among the first to probe the psyche of the follower, the loner, the outcast, and the fanatic. He realized long before others the importance of self-esteem and the effects of self-doubt, isolation, and anxiety on social cohesion.

Hoffer, who never attended college but whose intellectual curiosity was towering, had a gift for packing a lightning bolt of meaning into a candlestick of prose. Thus, we are blessed with many quotations from his pen, like this:

In times of change, learners inherit the earth,

while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped

to deal with a world that no longer exists.

As you reflect on this quote, ask yourself some questions:

• What are the changes you and your organization face today?

• To what extent are you already insightful, or learned, about these changes and their impact?

• To what extent are you and your colleagues disposed to learning?

"You Must Be the Change You Seek"

You have always known that actions speak louder than words. You have known that leaders lead best who lead by example. You have known, too, that people remember a leader's human touch long after they forget his words.

Knowing all this to be true, how are you, as a leader, managing your day-to-day behaviors to send a message of change? How has the message itself changed, and what exactly are you doing to walk the talk?

What old habits have you abandoned? What new behaviors have you begun? How have your priorities changed? What gets an hour of your time now that didn't get a minute before?

How have your routine conversations changed? Who are you greeting by name that you didn't notice before? What questions are you asking that you had never thought to ask?

What are you seeing about people and their work that you didn't see before? More important, what are other people seeing that they didn't see before?

As people watch you and your actions, what is the message they receive? Does it reinforce or contravene the words you speak? How have your behaviors changed to reflect the change in the message? What gaps remain? What are you doing to close them?

Gandhi said: "You must be the change you seek in the world." So be, indeed.

Minding Gaps Minds a Little Milestone

We’re taking a little bow, to you—our readers.

As of today, ten thousand of you have perused these pages. We’re honored and humbled.

Thank you for reading. If there’s anything we can do for you, please speak up.

— TJL    

 

By the Numbers: The Time Suck

 

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the challenge of quality, the tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job, the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature and extent of disengagement in the workplace, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace.

Today we take a look at unproductive uses of time.

 

According to research by salary.com, 22 percent of American workers report wasting as much as two hours every day at work. Common wasteful activities include personal email, casual conversation with coworkers, online shopping, personal telephone calls, and overlong lunch breaks.

There is a silver lining. Salary.com said the amount of time devoted to time-wasting activities is steadily declining. It has decreased in each of four consecutive surveys.

But even nominally work-related activity can be unproductive. More than half of all workers said they took their own time to fix a colleague’s substandard work, and almost as many pointed to dealing with internal politics and waiting for a colleague to finish his part on a joint project.

As you think about productivity on your team, in your division, or throughout your enterprise, ask yourself these questions:

• What aspects on your work processes are wasteful?

• How do you manage expectations around productivity?

• To what extent do employees just look busy, so as to avoid recrimination, while they are actually not very productive?

• How much time does bureaucracy consume—filling out forms, standing in line, waiting for inspections and approvals, looking up official procedures, deciphering unclear instructions, and so forth?

• Would you have a more productive and more efficient workplace if more decisions were delegated to a lower level?

 

 

Translate Your Strategy to Specific, Day-to-Day Behaviors

 

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as you adopt a new strategy, roll out a new initiative, or bring about any change is to neglect interpreting or translating the grand strategy to specific, day-to-day tasks and responsibilities for employees.

By and large, people want to do the right thing on the job. Often, however, they don’t know what the right thing is, and they guess wrong. Instead they do what they have always done, and they do it the same way. They do what their peers do. They do what they assume customers want. They think they understand the new strategy, but they don’t. And so on.

To successfully introduce a new strategy or roll out a new initiative, management must go from the big picture to the little picture. This is employee communication writ small. It is a necessary step for any management team introducing change. It requires serious thought and the involvement of front-line managers, because an employee’s boss is in a position to determine what gets done and how.

Here is an example. A new seafood restaurant is opening next spring on Long Island. The owner is focusing not only on the menu and the ambience but also on the dining experience; he wants to change the way restaurants treat customers. He wants to make sure that customers return to his restaurant in part because they receive unparalleled service from waiters.

Now it’s one thing to simply tell waiters to put a special emphasis on each and every guest and to make all guests feel comfortable. That’s fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t get specific.

To go from the big picture to the small picture, management must interpret the broad idea to actions and behaviors as customers would experience them. Ideally, it should be a collaborative effort by everyone from top to bottom, including front-line employees and conceivably even customers themselves.

Bruce Buschel, the new restaurant owner, has done something like this. Writing in The New York Times, he lists 100 things he wants waiters in his new restaurant to do or not do. It’s a lengthy list of dos and don'ts. After reading it, you can only wish that every restaurant would post it in the kitchen and require every waiter to memorize it.

The list is so long it is in two parts. Here is a link to the first fifty things, and here is a link to the other fifty. As you can see, Mr. Buschel gets specific. Readers weigh in with their own suggestions, just as customers might.

Now my question for you: In your business, is the larger strategy translated to specific, day-to-day behaviors in this manner? If so, give yourself a pat on the back. If not, you have some real work cut out for you. 

 

 

 

The Need for Endless Curiosity

 

Regular readers of Minding Gaps will recall that my definition of employee engagement includes a reference to curiosity. I put a premium on asking good questions, and lots of them.

Why is curiosity so important?

Isn’t that which curiosity generates—a spark of insight, a flame of belief—more important? Isn't it the essential thing of engagement?

Not really. Let me explain.

Curiosity represents the promise of the future. It is where achievement and discovery will occur. So, too, engagement. It too is all about the future.

Self-satisfied companies assume their present is their future. Taking comfort in what they already know, they believe it is sufficient for them to succeed indefinitely.

Curious companies are hungrier. They assume that what they don't know matters more than what they do know. They realize they will need to learn something new to succeed in the future, and they are determined to learn it.

Which company would you invest your own money in? The self-satisfied company? Or the curious company?

My point exactly.

 

Strategic Focus Is the Foundational Work of Leadership

Lou Gerstner, who was so successful in turning around IBM in the 1990s, often remarked that nothing in business is more important than focus.

A company's focus must be sharp. It must be true. It must be sustained. It must be robust and relevant. Above all, it must be shared and widely embraced.

Sadly, few companies have such a focus, even in their senior management. What passes for a vision is typically nothing more than a grandiose dream devoid of meaning and value. Most visions that I've seen lack substance and specificity. Moreover, they are unaccompanied by real-world priorities, roles, metrics, resources, accountability—the very watchwords that are universally acknowledged as essential to business success.

That's a real failure of leadership. Think about it: Without a common focus, a company can have no real sense of direction. Without direction, there can be no progress. Without progress, there can be no achievement. And without achievement, there can be no success.

To build a common focus, the leadership team must first have one. The strategic focus must be a clear and sharp. After all, you can't share what you don't have.

Establishing and occasionally refining the strategic focus is the foundational work of leadership. It is absolutely imperative. In the absence of a focus, a company lacks a core, and it tends to jump from fad to fad. Its leaders often carry a long laundry list of initiatives and priorities—those programs of the month that everyone reviles—few or none of which have the earnest, sustainable commitment of leadership.

People see right through those programs; they inevitably become their own mockery. Each successive program, to quote Shakespeare, betrays itself as another "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."

Creating or refining a strategic focus requires first determining your unique selling proposition, the essence of your brand. What is it that truly sets you apart? What do your competitors envy about you? Why do your customers choose you over your competitors? You must get to the beating heart of your distinctiveness.

From the beginning, it's important to keep the end in mind. The end is naturally a high level of employee commitment toward executing the strategy, so that the leader's focus becomes everyone's focus. Thus a focus must have the potential to resonate with your people. Therefore it must have roots in the legitimate, authentic values and in the noble self-identity of your organization.

While the strategic focus is yours to create, the organization's values and self-identity are already there. In the short term, they can only be discovered, not imposed from on high. Over time, with inspiring leadership and supportive stewardship, they can grow to something better and greater, just as a houseplant leans toward sunlight. But that takes time and leadership.

Life Support for Your Vital Front-Line Managers

 

Consider these stunning, disturbing facts:

• Four out of every five change initiatives fall short of expectations.

• A clear majority of employees in U.S.-based companies admit they are disengaged.

• Almost all corporate employees say they know in advance when a project will fail.

• Only a handful are willing to tell their supervisor about it for fear of being blamed for the failure.

Why is that? What could possibly account for it? How can we finally make big change and genuine engagement a reality?

The answer involves the front-line supervisor. Typically overlooked or undervalued, front-line supervisors are a critical link in the execution of any business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. Supervisors are uniquely positioned to translate the implications of the strategy or initiative to the day-to-day work that employees do on the factory floor, in the front office, on the loading dock, in the research laboratory, at the call center, or in face-to-face contact with the customer.

Fully 25 percent of all employee engagement is driven by front-line supervisors. Good supervisors create a halo effect around a company that makes it easy to find and recruit the best employees. By the same token, bad supervisors drive good employees out the door. Either way, front-line supervisors are the critical link in engagement. In fact, no other factor accounts for more employee engagement than supervisors.

Yet far more often than you may assume, front-line supervisors are not onboard with a strategy or initiative, and they don’t believe it will last more than a few months. They feel safe dismissing it and ignoring it. Consequently, business strategies and initiatives are often DOA long before senior management realizes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here is an opportunity to learn how to enroll front-line supervisors as champions of your next business strategy, change initiative, operating priority, or rebranding campaign. You can learn:

• How front-line supervisors may starve a strategy or initiative to death even before it can achieve anything.

• How you can manage implicit as well as explicit communication around a strategy, initiative, or brand.

• How you can win the hearts and minds of supervisors, so that their initial disposition is to support senior management.

• How your communication planning can benefit from a continuing dialogue with front-line supervisors.

Seats are limited, so register now for this important webinar:

 

Friday, November 20, 2009

11 a.m. Eastern Time / 8 a.m. Pacific Time

"The Front-Line Supervisor: Strategies

for a Critical Link in Performance and Change"

$159 per person

( $79 for the first 50 registrants)

 

To register or get more information, send us an email or telephone us at +1-847-247-2241. Be sure to include your name, affiliation, email, and telephone. (Please note we have reverted to single-seat pricing to accommodate more individuals. This reduces the price; however, each person who participates is asked to be individually registered. Fees are non-refundable but fully transferable within your organization.)

 

The Single Most Powerful Means of Communication You Have

A kind and generous mentor once taught a salient lesson about communication in business. I have never forgotten it.

It is just this.

The single most powerful means of communication you have—far and away more commanding than any words you speak or write—is the decision.

Yes, that decision.

You make dozens of decisions every day. Many of these decisions are inconsequential. Others have lasting implications. Some decisions are deliberate. Others are impetuous. Some are wise, others foolish. Some are collaborative, the product of discussion and debate. Others are yours alone.

In the next few hours, you may decide whether to take a young employee to lunch, whether to challenge a bureaucratic policy, whether to visit a client, whether to accept a proposal, whether to ask for assistance, or even whether to make a decision about something you have been putting off.

More to the point, you may decide whether to cut corners on a project, whether to promote a technically competent manager who is short with her people, whether to ship a product that meets a deadline but misses a standard, whether to laugh at offensive humor, whether to pick up litter on the sidewalk, whether to tell a little white lie.

By all these decisions and many more, you will reveal yourself and your character to others. Your will show the truth of your priorities and your values. You will declare to the world what is important in your eyes.

Your words may be eloquent. Your baritone may fill an auditorium. You may have a gift for saying just the right thing. But if your decisions stand apart from your words, you will invariably lose control of your message, and ultimately of yourself.

So always remember and never forget: Day in and day out, far and away the single most powerful means of communication you have is the decision. Your decision. This decision, now.

By the Numbers: The Stalemate on Quality

Last summer we introduced a weekly feature we’re calling By the Numbers, published at the start of each business week. Here we present a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job, the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature and extent of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine sluggish progress on quality in business.

 

By the appearance of it, you would think that quality is institutionalized in business. Thousands of books have been published on quality. Dozens of professional organizations focus on it. There are standards and certifications that managers everywhere study to earn.

And in terms of product quality, we do see signs of progress. Certainly the much maligned American automobile is of better quality now than it was a decade ago. Moreover, to the extent that innovation reflects a drive for greater quality, we can take satisfaction in new products that no one dreamed of just a few years ago: the iPhone and iPod, search engines, the BlackBerry, wikis, blogs on every conceivable subject, and more.

Still, quality in business operations is not yet part of an enduring cultural ethic. According to research by McKinsey & Co., the global consulting firm, 67 percent of companies report that their quality efforts have “stalled or fallen short” of yielding real improvement. That figure comports with my own conversations with business leaders, few of whom are satisfied with their own company’s progress on quality.

As you reflect on this data, ask yourself:

• What is your company’s vision of quality, and how are you progressing toward it?

• Taking off the rose-colored glasses of management, what do you think is really happening on quality in your organization?

• What has your company (or organization) done to create not just a process of quality but a culture of quality?

• What are the specific charges on quality to leadership at all levels?

• What resources and training are devoted to it?

Why Change Fails

Unfortunately little has changed in the years since the Harvard Business Review published an incisive analysis by John P. Kotter on failures in corporate transformation. In it Kotter listed a handful of reasons why change efforts founder. One major reason was inadequate, slow, unclear, dodge-the-bullet communication.

“Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices,” Kotter wrote. “Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured.”

Kotter, a professor at Harvard Business School, went on to suggest that companies undergoing transformation typically devote only a minuscule share of their formal internal communication—newsletters, brochures, Intranet sites—to their new vision. His estimates ranged from just .0001 percent to .0005 percent. In a subsequent book, Leading Change, he generously calculated it at .58 percent, still leaving 99.42 percent of a company’s formal in-house communication to non-strategic matters.

Quibble about decimal points, if you will. Kotter’s essential point is still on target. The messages that an organization’s leadership presumably considers the most important—messages which can make the difference for the company between profit and loss, between innovation and catch-up, between growth and stagnation—are typically lost in the din of minutia and noise.

The bottom line: Transformations fail in large part because of the absence, for all intents and purposes, of clear, compelling, credible, constructive communication. You cannot expect employees who lack awareness, understanding, and acceptance of a strategy to become enthusiastically committed to carrying out the strategy.

We can take Kotter’s argument a step or two further, by addressing another critical fault line in strategic communication. For even the organization that carefully orchestrates its formal media in support of transformation still faces long odds against success—unless and until it brings its non-formal communication in line with its strategic intent.

Not only is the overwhelming share of formal communication usually given over to non-strategic matters, the overwhelming majority of all communication within an organization stands quite apart from strategic messages in those formal media.

Most workplace communication by far is semi-formal or informal. Unfortunately, many line managers (and even some communication professionals) mistakenly fail to regard semi-formal and informal communication as real communication at all. But it most certainly is, and average employees most certainly realize it.

Managing and Leading: Differences Both Subtle and Profound

We talk a lot in this space about the differences between management and leadership—not as levels of an organization but rather as hard work, performed by anyone in a position of official authority and responsibility. Senior executives manage as well as lead. Front-line supervisors lead as well as manage.

Throughout any organization, both management and leadership—the work they represent, not positions in a hierarchy—are essential to the success and growth of an organization. They complement each other in ways little and large. But often the differences between them are lost amid the hustle and bustle of running an organization.

You can think of management as the hard work of ensuring performance to a certain standard. That standard may involve money (such as a budget or a revenue target), or time (in the case of a deadline), or quality (as tolerance for defects), or production (a quota, say, or a truck waiting at the loading dock).

By contrast, you can think of leadership as the hard work of bringing about change—cultural, operational, structural—that depends on the discretionary but critical participation of people, who essentially choose the pace if not the direction of change.

Management and leadership both require their own energy, as well. But the energy for each comes from different sources.

Management takes its energy from the power of an organization's hierarchy, and its thrust is accountability. Persons in a position of authority have the duty and power to enforce a standard.

Stylistically, communication for management is typically directive, authoritative, even implicitly threatening, because it reflects the imposition of accountability.

Leadership, on the other hand, takes its energy from its nobility, its quest for something big, and its empathy and connection with people. Influential leaders often emerge from relative obscurity or from institutional positions of dependency, not power. They get more from people by asking for and expecting more.

Stylistically, communication for leadership is ennobling, inspiring, and purposeful. It recognizes the de facto democratic nature of organizational change, and it reaches for a live-wire connection between leader and led. The thrust is opportunity to achieve and become something more than we are today or were yesterday.

To the extent that these differences are overlooked, most organizations default to the accountability of management. That’s not surprising, since the people in charge were schooled, selected, and rewarded for their ability to control results. But it misses the glorious potential for change that looms in opportunity, in the connectivity of real leadership.

Ask yourself:

• Does your organization value management over leadership?

• Does it appreciate the differences between management and leadership—not so much the differences in their position on your organizational chart, but the differences in their work?

• Does it recognize that the work of management and the work of leadership each has its own kind of energy?

• Does it see the profound stylistic differences between communication for the sake of management and communication for the sake of leadership?

• What could your organization accomplish with a greater appreciation of leadership?

• What should change?

• How can you change to embody the importance of leadership as a force for change?

Query: Just Curious About Curiosity

Two weeks ago we introduced another new feature. Appearing irregularly but not infrequently, Query will aspire to be short, simple, and powerful. It will consist of a single question, or perhaps two or three (or four, or five) closely related questions—and that’s it, nothing more—intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

Our intent is not to belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication. As you wrestle with each question, also ask yourself why we're posing this particular question, and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

Here is our second installment:

 

What is the role of curiosity in a business? How much does it matter? What is the value of it, and how much of success is dependent on it?

In what ways do senior managers unintentionally quash the spirit of curiosity in their best people? How does that happen, and why might senior managers be blind or tone deaf to it?

 

To Communicate a Focus, You Must First Have a Focus

Here are a half-dozen short, breezy, familiar catchphrases, each of which supports a corporate brand identity:

• Just do it!
• When you absolutely, positively need it overnight.
• We love to fly, and it shows.
• Nothing runs like a Deere.
• We pick you up.
• The few. The proud.

What do they have in common? They're all splendid examples of successful marketing initiatives, quite obviously. Each takes you only an instant to associate with its sponsor.

But they have something else in common. They're all statements of strategic focus. For all six organizations, these catchphrases succinctly state what their people must know, do, believe, and ultimately be in order to live out the organization's mission and purpose. Think of them as the verbal foundation of engagement.

For Nike, it's initiative and action. For FedEx, it's reliability and speed. For Delta Air Lines, it's enthusiasm for flight. For John Deere, it's unparalleled mechanical performance. For Enterprise Rent-a-Car, it's service and optimism. For the United States Marine Corps, it's duty and honor.

In each case, distilled to a few well-chosen words, the catchphrase captures the essence of the organization's legacy, identity and competitive advantage.

Externally, these familiar words convey an image designed to enhance the organization's public persona. Internally, they establish a cultural norm that sets a high bar for work expectations.

Both externally and internally, all six statements operationalize a strategy. That is why they work so well as statements of shared strategic focus.

Sadly, most companies lack such a sharp, shared focus. It isn't so much a failure of marketing as of leadership. To communicate a shared focus, you must first have a clear, well-honed strategic focus. You can't communicate what you don't have.

Establishing and occasionally refining the strategic focus is the foundational work of leadership. It is absolutely imperative. Without focus, a company lacks a core, and it tends to jump from fad to fad. Its leaders often carry a long laundry list of initiatives and priorities—programs of the month—few or none of which have their earnest commitment.

Those programs become their own mockery;  people see right through them. To borrow from the Bard, each successive new program soon reveals itself as another "poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."

Creating or refining a strategic focus requires first determining your unique selling proposition, the essence of your brand. What is it that truly sets you apart? What do your competitors envy about you? You must get to the beating heart of your distinctiveness.

From the beginning, it's important to keep the end in mind. The end is naturally a high level of employee commitment, so that the leader's focus becomes everyone's focus. Thus the prospective focus must have the potential to resonate with your people. Therefore it must have roots in the legitimate, authentic values and in the noble self-identity of your organization.

While the strategic focus is yours to create, the values and self-identity are already there. In the short term, they can only be discovered, not imposed from on high. Over time, with inspiring leadership and supportive stewardship, they can grow to something better and greater, just as a plant leans toward sunlight. But that takes time and leadership.

Once a values-driven strategic focus is in place, the challenge shifts to the hard work of translating the broad theme to particular behaviors: ways of thinking and acting so that the focus can take root and thrive.

On one level, that can be expressed in a concise, memorable phrase, as we have seen at Nike, FedEx, and the Marine Corps. On another level, it must also become specific to each individual job. This process will ultimately require the intimate involvement of all managers.

Then it's a matter of repetition, reiteration, and redundancy. Saying it once is tantamount to never saying it at all. You must say it over and over and over. When you think you have it said too many times, you're just getting started.

By the Numbers: The Tradeoff Between Income and Job Satisfaction

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far, the data appearing in this feature have explored the explosion of information in the media, the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the nature of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine public opinion on tradeoff between income and satisfaction on the job.

According to research by Frank I. Luntz that appears in his new book, What Americans Really Want . . . Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears, Americans overwhelmingly prefer job satisfaction to economic prosperity.

Some 84 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot less money” in a job they love to the converse. Only 16 percent of Americans say they would prefer making “a lot more money” in a job they hate.

As you reflect on this, consider these questions:

• What correlation, if any, do you see between job satisfaction and the execution of a business strategy?

• How important do you believe job satisfaction is to customer satisfaction?

• In your position and role, what can you do now to leverage the importance of job satisfaction?

• What have you done recently?

• How has the economy compounded the difficulty of ensuring job satisfaction?

• What steps can you take to improve job satisfaction in spite of a lackluster economy?

Quote / Unquote: John Quincy Adams on Inspirational Leadership

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

John Quincy Adams, the first son of a U.S. president to follow in his father’s footsteps, is not particularly known for his leadership. His single term as president, from 1825 to 1829, ended in electoral defeat at the hands of Andrew Jackson, and Adams had little to show for his tenure in office.

Nevertheless, he was a scholarly and deeply reflective gentleman. For more than half a century, he kept a daily diary of his observations and thoughts. He wrestled with big issues, and his insights shine on nearly two centuries later.

Here is a quotation attributed to John Quincy Adams that emphasizes the inspirational component of leadership. Too often, it seems to me, leaders settle for merely influencing others. That is a good start, but it is a small kind of leadership—necessary in exigencies, to be sure, but significantly less than the legacy of historic leaders: Churchill or Mandela or Lincoln, for example. 

Adams declared:

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more,
do more, and become more, you are a leader.

As you reflect on these words, you may wish to ask yourself:

• What does a leader’s influence look like? What does a leader’s inspiration look like? How are they similar? In what important ways are they different?

• Are there certain behaviors more amendable to simple influence? Do others require inspiration to take hold?

• How have you been influenced but not inspired by leaders? How have you been inspired as well as influenced? How did the difference feel?

• To the extent anyone has remarked on your leadership, directly to you or indirectly about you, has the remark zeroed in on influence or inspiration particularly?

• What are some elementary ways to influence someone? When you list these, do they strike you as the mettle of leadership?

• In what ways are words adequate to the task of influence? In what ways does inspiration require the example of your own decisions, behavior, and dedication?

• How will you adjust your leadership style accordingly?

Beware the Metamessage

We don’t coin many words around Minding Gaps, but there’s a real need for this one: the metamessage.

Actually, we coined it years ago. Those of you who have participated in our workshops on leadership communication should remember the term.

Anyone in management or its strategic support functions is familiar with messages. These are the statements of what matters to a company, of where the organization is headed, of how products and services need to be improved, of just what lies ahead.

Messages are plainly important, but focusing on them exclusively as they’re stated plays a nasty trick on management. It is too easy, altogether too easy, for management to believe that a message as stated is a message if and as received, if and as understood, if and as believed, and if and as applied—when, in fact, it may not be any of those other things.

The natural inclination is to assume that because you said something, other people got the message. Unhappily, as we know from extensive research, that is often just not the case. Focus groups repeatedly tell of messages that come across as happy talk, fast talk, sweet talk, or even double talk—or as just incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo.

The trouble is, no one tells management, because no one knows what the intended message was.

It’s a real hornet’s nest.

The solution to this problem is to focus on messages not as they are stated but rather as they are heard. The truth is, messages are rarely heard as they are stated.

In business, employees commonly filter messages through their own lenses. Each employee’s lens is unique. So the “rays” of a message bend this way for one employee and that way for another employee.

The message as bent is the metamessage. Meta, as a prefix, means changed or changing, beyond, transcending, over and above. The metamessage, then, is a message that has undergone some change that takes it away from its intended meaning. It's a kind of parallel universe of communication. We ignore it at our peril. 

In my mind’s eye, I envision a glass prism. A message is a beam of light headed into the prism. The prism consists of the environment of the organization, the experiences of employees on similar and related messages, and the expectations of employees as to management’s integrity and intent. All those things refract the message to render it somewhat different.

If the firm’s environment is stable and prosperous, a particular message will have one meaning. If the environment is unstable and uncertain, the same message may have a dramatically different reading. The same is true of experiences and expectations. Each bends the message.

The beam of light as refracted through the prism is the metamessage: the message as heard or not, as understood or not, as believed or not, as applied or not. Unless you are acknowledging the metamessage, you are not communicating as you intended to.

It’s the metamessage that counts. Beware the metamessage.

Three Causes of Poor Communication in Companies

In my years of consulting on organizational communication in mid-size and larger companies, I have seen all too many problems boil down to three broad categories of miscommunication: mixed messages, muddled messages, and mute messages.

Let's look at each of them.

Mixed messages are those where the explicit and the implicit communication are at odds with each other. The company has said something is important, but its actions say otherwise. For example, perhaps it has said that safety in the workplace is important, but front-line supervisors commonly overlook hazards. Or perhaps it has said that customer service is important, but telephone bank operators have rigid quotas of 20 calls per hour. Or perhaps it has said that product quality is important, but the choice is always to ship a deficient product rather than send it back for rework.

These mixed messages compromise the credibility of the company. That, in turn, undermines the integrity of leaders and their leadership. No chief executive should stand for it.

Muddled messages are those beset by confusion. Some are explained poorly. Some are fickle, changing daily with the breeze. Some are lost in a fusillade of communication around too many initiatives, and people just cannot keep them all straight. Some are the victims of so many acronyms and so much jargon that even long-time employees scratch their head at times. Some are the unhappy result of cascading, which succeeds only at feeding the rumor mill.

These muddled messages are a lost opportunity. They prevent an organization’s leadership from creating a keen strategic focus. Without that focus, employees cannot possibly engage themselves in the work of the organization or the satisfaction of its patrons.

Mute messages, the silent killers of business, are the issues and challenges that management either ignores altogether or simply chooses not to talk about. Often, this is a deliberate choice not to invest time and resources in communication on anything at all. There are managers who genuinely believe they can run the business and even grow it without engaging employees in the brand promise and strategic direction of the company. With luck, and for a short time, they may be able to. Sooner or later, they pay the piper.

These mute messages leave well-meaning and eager employees without a sense of strategic priorities and direction. They don’t know which thing is more important than which other thing. They must rely on their own intuition and guesswork. That may work for a while. Ultimately, the lack of communication will lead to a conflict in expectations, and that will mark a profound failure.

Smart companies don't settle for any of this. Alas, many companies out there aren't so smart as they think.

What Do You Have in Common with Riccardo Muti?

Riccardo Muti, the newly designated music director of the acclaimed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was drawing one analogy in an interview yesterday morning, and it was a good one. I would like to borrow his analogy and apply it differently, to make a parallel point.

 

In an interview published in the Chicago Tribune, the Italian maestro was addressing a cultural barrier between much of working-class Chicago and the city’s symphony, which has garnered praise and honors around the globe. Then he observed that a symphony must function as a model of civic cooperation.

“Each section of the orchestra plays a different and independent part,” said Muti, referring to the strings and the horns and so forth. “But they put their parts together without killing what their colleagues are doing, so as to achieve a finished performance. They perform together to reach a superior goal—a unity of sound and expression—through cooperation.” He said this broad cooperation was instructive for any community and indeed any society.

A business of any appreciable size has a similar challenge. For sake of example, let’s think of a manufacturer, though the analogy would be equally valid for a service provider or a retail store or a distributor—any organization with divisions and departments. In our example, the sales department, the manufacturing division, and the accounting office are like the strings and the horns of an orchestra. They must work together for everyone’s benefit. If instead they choose to elevate their own interest over the whole organization’s interest, they will wind up with noise, not music. Their “audience”—the customer, after all—will not be happy.

Unfortunately for the business, each division and department does not have its own musical score, its own formal part of the composition to play, note for note. In this respect, the business enterprise is perhaps more like a jazz combo, performing from a theme but with individual instruments playing harmonic riffs of their own, all within the overall framework of the piece. Still, the analogy holds.

Muti’s comment reminded me of a remark that his predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, once made in an interview with Chicago’s classical music radio station, WFMT. Barenboim observed that, as a conductor, it was essential for him to step back and let each performer contribute to the best of her ability. If he ignored that vital principle, if he instead played with a heavy baton that controlled and stifled the individual musicians, the orchestra's music would be heard as oppressed and lifeless.

In both cases, we have tensions that, if managed well, ultimately work to the advantage of the whole, and ultimately to the benefit of the customer. And in both cases, the role of the leader is more to coalesce than to control, more to draw forth than to draw tight, more to inspire than to influence. 

 

By the Numbers: The Information Glut

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Thus far the data appearing in this feature have explored the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement, the degree of trust that Americans hold in business, the extent of candor and honesty in supervisory communication, the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies, the degree of disengagement in the workplace, the frequency of projects that fail, the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism, the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication, and the fear of recrimination in the workplace.

Today we examine the phenomenal increase of data itself in the business environment.

According to Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk, more than 3,000 discrete messages descend on each of us every day. A single message may be anything from an item in the news to a television or radio commercial to an email to a newspaper editorial to a whispered intimacy by that special someone.

These messages account for more than 1,000,000 words—the equivalent of twelve to fifteen book-length novels—per week.

Most alarming of all, Data Smog was published in 1997, before the explosion of email and spam!

As you reflect on this data, ask yourself:

• What does this deluge of data mean for executing a business strategy?

• What does it mean for creating relationships of mutual trust, dignity, respect, and interdependence?

• How does such a "fire hose" of data affect a quest for greater focus in the workplace?

• What, if anything, can you do to mitigate its effects?

• How, if at all, can you use it to your advantage?

In Praise of Mentoring

I haven’t been a full-time student in twenty years, and my daughter, now in law school, has long since ceased to ask her old man's advice on anything academic. Nevertheless, each autumn I look forward to the start of the school year, for a special reason: It’s mentoring time again.

For more than a decade now, I have been mentoring public-policy graduate students at The University of Chicago, where I earned my own master’s degree. I have found mentoring to be as satisfying and rewarding for me as it is intended to be for the student.

For any of you who are not presently involved in a formal mentoring program, I have two words of free advice: Get involved. Mentoring is a powerful opportunity to cultivate another generation of leaders. It is also a wonderful way to give back to the greater community, even if it's just within your company.

If your business already has a mentoring program for younger staff but you’re not involved in it, see if you can become involved. If it doesn’t have a program, take the initiative of establishing one, or at least get the conversation going in that direction. If you are a mentor but you haven’t been putting your heart into it, pause to reflect on the opportunity you are missing.

Alternatively, seek out a college or university that may have a need for someone like you, or find an organization for youth in your community that needs adult role models.

Each year, I am assigned a University of Chicago graduate student who has requested a mentor. We meet several times during the school year for lunch or coffee, and we exchange emails and take time for telephone conversations whenever the need arises.

Our conversations cover the landscape. Sometimes I find myself offering advice on job interviewing and résumés. Because of my own professional expertise, I have worked on a student's skills in expository writing and public speaking. Other times I have just listened as a student vents about a professor whose grading curve is harsh. Still other times I have pushed a student to think more creatively and broadly about his or her future or values or commitment. The students assigned to me are typically new to Chicago, so I have even offered advice on how to enjoy the city on weekends.

The university’s roster of mentors consists of established leaders in metropolitan Chicago. Some are corporate executives. Others are elected or appointed officials of government. Still others are entrepreneurs, or attorneys, or physicians, or administrators of non-profit associations. They all have jam-packed schedules, but they all make time for these high-potential young people.

Just last week, we gathered for our annual mentoring reception and dinner, and I met the young woman with whom I will work this year. Like all the students who have been assigned to me over the years, she is bright, reflective, and articulate. I look forward to working with her.

I have found mentoring to be a constant wellspring of insight and ideas. It keeps me young and continuously invigorated. You will benefit, too. Do give it a try, if not in your place of business then in the greater community. Someone out there needs you, and you have more to offer than you realize now.

First Person Plural

 

Anyone who has studied languages knows the template for personal pronouns. It looks like this:

Person and Case \ Number	Singular	Plural
First Person Nominative First Person Possessive First Person Objective	I my or mine me	we our or ours us
Second Person Nominative Second Person Possessive Second Person Objective	you your or yours you	you your or yours you
Third Person Nominative Third Person Possessive Third Person Objective	he / she / it his / her or hers / its him / her / it	they their or theirs them

Too often in business, we hide behind the wrong personal pronouns. We lock ourselves into the singular, and we focus on our separateness.

We get caught up in my this and I that. We hold you accountable, but not me. We blame him or them.

It's long past time we change this. Our linguistic habits reflect an orientation of division, argument, and apportionment. It's not good for anyone.

Organizations of any kind—profit or nonprofit, small or large, old or new—need cohesion and camaraderie. So let’s make a concerted effort to go beyond this little talk.

From this point forward, let’s shift to the first person plural whenever we can.

Everyone in the company should be part of us. We all should be we. Let’s pull everyone together under the same big tent. Let’s look for what binds us together, not what drives us apart. The competition is out there, not in here.

We. Now that’s a sweet sounding word.

Query: Where Are You in a Typical Meeting?

We’re introducing another new feature today. To appear irregularly but not infrequently, Query will aspire to be short, simple, and powerful. It will consist of a single question or perhaps two or three closely related questions—and that’s it, nothing more—intended to ignite or reignite a flame of introspection, reflection, exploration, and reinvention.

 We won’t belabor the point. We won’t build an elaborate context. We won’t try to manage your thinking. All we want to do is start or restart some deeper thinking about your role as a leader, your efforts to engage people, and the effectiveness of your communication. As you wrestle with each question, also ask yourself why we're posing this particular question, and what it means for your impact, influence, and inspiration as a leader.

Here is our first installment:

In a typical meeting, when someone else has the floor, how much of your time is devoted to intense listening and how much to thinking what you will say next?

If you had to choose between one extreme and the other, is your purpose in a meeting closer to learning and reaching a robust consensus or to directing and controlling the outcome?

 

Quote / Unquote: Charles Osgood on Responsibility

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation stands alone, as it does today.

Charles Osgood is a broadcaster on both radio and television for CBS News. Since 1994, he has anchored the weekly program CBS News Sunday Morning. He also anchors the daily radio program The Osgood File, from which today's quotation is taken.

Often referred to as the network’s poet-in-residence, Osgood is famous for his witticisms and poems. Today we share a simple poem Osgood wrote on shared responsibility without accountability.

It is titled “The Responsibility Poem.”  

 

 

There was a most important job that needed to be done, 
And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none. 
But in vital matters such as this, the thing you have to ask 
Is who exactly will it be who'll carry out the task?

Anybody could have told you that Everybody knew 
That this was something Somebody would surely have to do. 
Nobody was unwilling; Anybody had the ability. 
But Nobody believed that it was their responsibility.  

It seemed to be a job that Anybody could have done, 
If Anybody thought he was supposed to be the one. 
But since Everybody recognized that Anybody could, 
Everybody took for granted that Somebody would.

But Nobody told Anybody that we are aware of, 
That he would be in charge of seeing it was taken care of. 
And Nobody took it on himself to follow through, 
And do what Everybody thought that Somebody would do.

When what Everybody needed so did not get done at all, 
Everybody was complaining that Somebody dropped the ball. 
Anybody then could see it was an awful crying shame, 
And Everybody looked around for Somebody to blame.

Somebody should have done the job 
And Everybody should have, 
But in the end Nobody did 
What Anybody could have.

Four Warning Signs of Disengagement

How can you tell if your organization is teetering toward disengagement?

Here are four common warning signs. None of them will surprise you, but from time to time you should remind yourself just how ominous they are.

If you notice even one, you should take action. If you don't act, you will soon notice another one, and then another, and eventually all four.

1. Not in My Silo. Companies consist of divisions and departments. In the best organizations, these divisions and departments work together. There are lots of cross-functional efforts to resolve issues and develop new products and services. The “enemy” is understood to be the competition, not another part of the same company. In the worst organizations, the various divisions and departments keep to themselves and scorn one another. They never exchange best practices or collaborate on common challenges. The executives in one division or department may not trust or even know their counterparts elsewhere in the organization. So you hear blame and recrimination when you should hear camaraderie and collective good will. Most organizations are somewhere between the extremes. Which way you're trending is an important indicator. When in doubt, ask the smokers who take breaks outside with smokers from other departments. They have the inside scoop. 

2. The Proverbial Gorilla. Let’s say you are planning the agenda for an important management meeting. Everyone knows that a particular issue needs to be addressed. But no one is willing to say so. The planning proceeds apace, and the agenda gains final approval—without any mention of the critical issue. What you have here is fear and cynicism. No one wants to risk censure for speaking up, and no one expects anything to change anyway. So everyone just goes along. You can bet the issue will come up at the important management meeting. It just won’t be on the agenda, and it won't have a microphone. It will be in the hallways, in whispers.

3. The Three Monkeys. Japanese folklore offers a wonderful metaphor for this common problem: the three wise monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Similar to the Proverbial Gorilla, this phenomenon instead describes the reluctance of employees, supervisors, and middle managers to alert senior management to imminent delays and problems, until it is too late to do anything about them. Research shows that almost everyone is aware of a pending issue of some sort, but few people have the courage and confidence to speak up. Management that “shoots the messenger” is usually why.

4. The Naked Emperor. We all remember the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about the emperor who buys new clothes from swindlers who sell him such fancy silk that only the smartest and wisest people can see it. Of course the emperor is embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that he cannot see the fabric. So he proceeds to dress in his new "suit," and he goes out in public stark naked. No one dares tell him he is naked, save a little boy who is too innocent to know better. If, as a manager at any level, you do not have relationships of candor and honesty, you risk walking naked in public. At the very least, you need someone to tell you the truth about your leadership. If you have no one, get a coach and listen to her or him. Above all, don’t shoot the messenger!

There are others, but in most organizations with engagement issues, these four are the most common. The good news is you can see them plainly. The tough part is turning things around.

By the Numbers: Supervisors are the No. 1 Driver of Engagement

Two months ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers, which leads off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a relevant statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

To date we have explored the degree of trust that Americans hold in business (scroll down to last week’s post on October 5), the lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication (September 28), the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (see September 21), the extent of disengagement in the workplace (September 14), the frequency of projects that fail (August 31), the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism (August 24), the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17), and the fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the role of front-line supervisors in building strategic engagement.

A truism in the human resources profession is that people come to work a company but leave because of a manager or supervisor. That appears borne out by data. According to research by the British firm Melcrum, front-line supervisors drive fully 25 percent of all engagement. That makes supervisors the No. 1 driver of engagement. Nothing else accounts for more than supervisors.

Here are some questions to think about and discuss:

• How is engagement different from—and more important than—morale, alignment, or commitment?

• What would full engagement of your people look like, sound like, and feel like?

• How close to that are you now?

• What is this gap costing you in terms of missed opportunities? Market share? Revenue? Profitability? Valuation?

• What accountabilities do you have in place for front-line supervisors? Do any address engagement? How are you measuring it?

• What specific steps has your organization taken this year to support front-line supervisors?

• What is the ROI on that investment?

Not surprisingly, our service package includes planning and training for building employee engagement through the front line. Few other investments affect profitability more directly. Call us at +1-847-247-2241 for a complimentary assessment.

Managing and Leading with Intentionality, or Not

I happen to belong to a men’s group that meets for dinner every few weeks and discusses—well, life. We try to take things deep. Apart from a little chit-chat at the beginning, we avoid talking about sports, investments, business, the weather, women, vacations, music, food, wine, books, politics, movies, religion, cars, or hobbies. You may ask what else there is. Actually, lots.

We take turns setting the agenda. For our next meeting, it’s my turn. The theme for this meeting will be intentionality and purpose. I sent out the agenda couple of days ago. We will apply a series of questions to the course of our lives, past and future, in the hope of gaining insight to our own intentionality.

It occurs to me that the same—or similar, anyway—questions can shed light on the degree to which we manage and lead our teams and organizations with intentionality and purpose.

To begin thinking about it, grapple with these questions:

• What significant elements in the course of your organization now appear, with 20/20 hindsight in your rear-view mirror, to have occurred unintentionally—without much or careful forethought and deliberate planning, but rather as one thing “sort of” leading to another?

• What were the surprising benefits of this meandering path?

• Conversely, what price did you pay?

• What disconnects do you observe in retrospect between your values, pholosophy, or vision and a largely unintentional path, if that is what you have taken?

• What events and developments in the course of your business now appear as the product of deliberate planning?

• To what extent has a more deliberate course, if that is what you have taken, truly affirmed your value structure, your philosophy, or your vision?

• If your course has been more deliberately planned—call it “buttoned down”—what surprising costs did you pay from following a straight and narrow path? What were the benefits? Were they the conventional benefits you expected?

• What was a hybrid, and of which was it more?

• How and how not are the two paths mutually exclusive?

• In what ways are you now managing and leading with greater deliberate intentionality? Or with greater agility, so as to exploit unforeseen opportunities? If there is a change, why?

• On balance, do you wish for more intentionality and purpose? Or more serendipity and unanticipated opportunity?

Side Roads: Hiking to the Summit of Half Dome in Yosemite Park

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a couple of months ago we began publishing Side Roads, an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It will recognize and celebrate passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We’ll post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we’ll stick to the mission of this column, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully in the Welcome! and Our Philosophy posts.

In our inaugural Side Roads column on August 15, I shared my recipe for pesto. If you haven’t yet tried it, be sure to do so soon, before fresh basil becomes difficult to find for the winter.

Today, in the second installment of Side Roads, we will revisit one of the most phenomenal days of my life—the day I climbed Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. If you have ever climbed it, you know just how exhilarating a hike can be.

 

 

That’s me. In the navy blue shirt, waving to you. From the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. It was ten years ago today. Look closely, and you will notice the orange date in the lower right corner.

The view from the summit of Half Dome is spectacular, as you can see for yourself. That little bluff a couple of miles behind my arm is the legendary El Capitan—its own face so very intimidating.

From where I am sitting to the valley floor below is just about one mile, straight up and down. Starting from the valley floor, I climbed Half Dome in a single day, and I took the long way. My route was closer to twenty miles, plus the vertical mile on the ascent and the vertical mile on the descent.

It was pitch dark when I started around six o’clock in the morning, and it was pitch dark when I finished around eight in the evening. (The trail itself is only about eight miles horizontal and one mile vertical, each way. But without an overnight camping permit you cannot park close to the trailhead, and if you are embarking before dawn there are no shuttles to the trailhead. So you walk.)

By comparison, running the Chicago Marathon was easy and brief. I was in pretty good shape for this climb, and yet it was so debilitating that I couldn’t walk for three days afterward. I could scarcely stand. Even sleeping was painful, even with prescription-strength doses of ibuprofen.

Because I was hiking in the autumn, when the waterfalls are comparative trickles, I was able to climb right alongside the Vernal and Nevada falls. In springtime, thunderous cataracts prevent anything of the sort. It was straight up, rock upon rock, each a foot-high step. When I got to the top of each waterfall, I expected to see the bald head of Half Dome ahead of me. But the trail kept going and going.

At times, I thought I was lost. It was nearly noon before the rocky promontory showed itself, and I still had two more hours to the top. The last mile of the climb (from where I am in this picture) is extremely strenuous. Multiple switchbacks lead upward to the shoulder. There you discover a pair of iron cables draping down the final 150 meters of bare granite at a slope of maybe 40 to 55 degrees. To reach the summit, you pull yourself up hand-over-hand, and you hold on tightly. If you let go, you die.

When I finally stepped onto the peak, I had an odd feeling of disappointment that the climbing had ended. The journey was so exhilarating; now I would just turn around? Then I looked out across the valley. Oh. My. Gosh. Under a pure, cerulean sky, I could see probably fifty or sixty miles. A mile below, Yosemite Valley looked like a child's playset. Maybe, I thought, this is how we appear to God.

I noticed a little cairn of rocks in the middle of the summit. Each climber could contribute a stone or a rock to it as the only evidence of his presence. I placed mine alongside the others. In parks, as you know, you leave nothing behind but your footprints, and you take nothing out but your pictures.

Naturally I took quite a few pictures. Though climbing alone that day, I traded cameras with other climbers so that we all had photographic proof of our success. For the picture of me on the summit, I ventured daringly close to the sheer cliff. I felt eerily invulnerable. Below, I could see nothing smaller than a shed.

Though the hike would take fourteen hours, I could remain on the summit for only thirty minutes at midday. The descent would be long and grueling. Fortunately, the most frightening moments were the initial return down the granite slope to the shoulder. It took more upper body strength to go down the cables than up, and it was scarier—owing to the fact I was looking at where my body would land if I fell. 

The sun set an hour or so before I got all the way down to the valley floor. Fortunately, I had brought a halogen flashlight. The last few miles were excruciatingly painful. My quads and hamstrings were piercing with pain. Neither leg wanted to move. I needed both, and I forced myself to keep walking.

Only after my descent did I learn that an early explorer of the High Sierra had once confidently predicted that no one would ever reach the summit of Half Dome. The bald head of steep granite was just too forbidding. Eventually someone did summit, of course. Today, hundreds of climbers reach the peak every year.

A few weeks after this adventure, I was flying back to San Francisco, and the pilot took us right over Yosemite. By then it had already snowed. But I could clearly make out Half Dome and the Vernal and Nevada falls. The memory of agony and of ecstacy they had given me that day in October brought a satisfying smile.

What a day it was. What a day.

A Teachable Moment on Humility for Leaders Everywhere

At the risk of alienating some of you, I have to express astonishment at the selection of President Barack Obama to receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year. In my estimation, the president does not deserve this honor. He himself came close to saying as much this morning. He may deserve it some day—all of us can pray that every president does—but he doesn’t deserve it yet.

I believe President Obama should respectfully decline it: in part to demonstrate the importance of humility in leadership, in part to throw a spotlight on more deserving leaders, and in part to emphasize that mere aspirations are not enough for credible leadership or for civilization's most important award. Humanity needs leaders who selflessly devote their entire lives to humanitarian ideals. It is they whom the Nobel Peace Prize should recognize and honor: the Dalai Lama, for example, and Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, all of whom certainly did deserve the honor they received.

To be sure, the choice of recipients for the Nobel Peace Prize has often been controversial, as much by omission as by fact. No one questions the selection of Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela, or Elie Wiesel. But such pivotal figures as Mahatma Gandhi, Corazon Aquino, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II, Steve Biko, Dorothy Day, Ronald Reagan, and Cesar Chavez were never so honored, while the awards to Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Al Gore, Le Duc Tho, and some others ignited a firestorm of criticism.

Rather, it is the simple question of whether anyone on the world stage so briefly as President Obama, and whose file of achievement is so thin, should receive this award, at the expense of others who have done so much more to deserve it. Note that the deadline for nominations for this year’s prize was on February 1, less than two weeks after Obama assumed office.

The will of Alfred Nobel, which endowed the Prizes, stipulated that the award be given only to living persons. Happily, quite a few living persons are fully deserving of it.

I think first of Morgan Tsvangirai, the courageous Zimbabwe opposition leader, whom I had the pleasure of meeting on a trip to South Africa some years ago. Tsvangirai has been risking life and limb to fight the forces of oppression in Zimbabwe for a decade or longer. Earlier this year, his wife and the mother of their six children was killed in a head-on auto collision; not coincidentally, auto “accidents” are the method of choice by Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe for stifling critics of his regime.

I think next of Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia before its dissolution and the first president of the Czech Republic. As much or more than Lech Walesa and Mikhail Gorbachev, both of whom were honored by the Nobel, Havel led millions of East Europeans to revolt against their calcified oppressors and eventually to demand democracy. (He could as well be honored by the Nobel Prize for Literature: He is the author of nearly two dozen acclaimed books and dramatic plays.)

I think also of George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who brokered a peace between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Troubles had persisted for generations before the accord. At the time Senator Mitchell got involved, there was no realistic hope for peace anytime soon.

I think even of Greg Mortenson, the American mountain climber who has built hundreds of schools in rural Pakistan, for girls as well as boys. Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea chronicles his effort. Of special note, he was so impoverished when he began building the schools that he was sleeping in the back seat of his car. Imagine, a homeless man on one side of the planet building schools for children on the other side.

There are others, too numerous to be listed. Because of their courage, a number of benighted countries with a history of violence or oppression or neglect are on the cusp of change. To paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, these brave leaders have dared the dark to stand.

To my thinking, what we have here is one of those teachable moments that President Obama is always talking about. He should think about it all weekend, and he should ask himself whether he ought to accept this award at this time. Then, on Monday morning, he should write to the Nobel Committee to say he respectfully declines the award because so many others deserve it so much more.

Now that would exemplify humility in leadership, and it would truly rise to a teachable moment for leaders everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, a few leaders would realize that leadership isn't about themselves, after all.

 

Join Us in Co-Sponsoring Research on Social Media, Safety, and Lean

We are preparing to launch three research projects that may interest you, and we're enrolling sponsors for them. All three projects will produce real-world solutions for real-world problems. However, only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will benefit from them. We invite you to join a consortium of co-sponsors for one or more of these endeavors.

Each project will dig into an issue that companies like yours already face. Because each co-sponsor will help design and customize the research, each project will reflect every co-sponsor’s own concerns and interests. Each will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. Each will provide external benchmarks for comparison, evaluation, and benefit.

Every co-sponsor will be interviewed for specific concerns and interests relevant to the research, so that each project addresses every co-sponsor’s particular needs. In addition, co-sponsors will have exclusive access to the reports for one full year. Each report will have a written executive summary and PowerPoint slides for presentation of findings. At the conclusion of each project, we will host a webinar for co-sponsors that presents the findings and responds to questions.

The three research projects are:

1. Blogging and social-media policies and practices. Companies are walking a tightrope on social media. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn pose issues of control and empowerment, generational divide, and responsibility and accountability. This research project will collate and compare policies and standards adopted by corporations, government agencies, and non-profit organizations on the use of social media by their employees. It will sort through competing approaches and determine what priorities are most important and necessary. We’ll also look at what companies are doing proactively with social media in terms of marketing, employee engagement, and reputation management. Our initial research shows a wide variety of approaches and practices, in terms of both substance and tone. Our intent is to establish a benchmark of policies that each sponsor can use for evaluation and improvement.

2. Communication for engagement on workplace safety. Workplace safety is a never-ending challenge for many companies, especially in the process manufacturing, transportation, and resource-recovery sectors (e.g., energy, fishing, timber). This research will look at policies and standards for the communication of safety goals and practices. It will compare and contrast differing approaches. To the extent possible, it will also cautiously connect communication of safety goals and practices with relative performance. Our experience in this arena has taught us the real difficulty of ensuring alignment, even among front-line supervisors, when it comes to workplace safety. This report will identify successful practices and enable sponsoring companies to compare their own policies and procedures and to manage the communication of workplace safety more effectively.

3. Communication for engagement on lean management. Lean management, the gold standard of production, is a well-organized drive to identify and eliminate any source of waste. Pioneered by Toyota, it has made a significant difference in many operating environments. How well is it supported by resources and processes of professional communication, and how lean are those resources and processes? What opportunities are there for lean approaches to non-manufacturing and staff functions? Here, too, we will look for trailblazing companies and identify what and how they are communicating the principles of lean to and with employees.

We will enroll co-sponsors on a first-come, first-serve basis. The first five co-sponsors to enroll in each consortium will receive favorable pricing. We hope to finalize these consortia by October 16, 2009 to ensure the timely completion of these projects.

If one or more of these projects is of interest to you, please call us directly at +1-847-247-2241 for further information, including fees and scheduling, and for registration. Or write to us at info@arceil.com, and we can arrange a convenient time to talk by telephone. We look forward to working with you.

 

What Exactly Do We Mean by Engagement, Anyway?

This word engagement sticks in the craw of some people. I still use it. In fact, I recently signed on to teach an online course on organizational communication and employee engagement for the University of California, beginning next February.

But what exactly does employee engagement mean? How do we recognize it?

In a casual sense, engagement is all about an orientation to, and a preoccupation with, the success of a business enterprise. However, there is no precise, standardized meaning for the term, and dictionaries don’t provide much help.

Dictionaries favor non-business definitions such as a betrothal, or a meeting (as in a speaking engagement or a dinner engagement), or even a battle in wartime. Some dictionaries don’t even bother to define the term in the context of business. (So if you Google the word, be prepared for lots of extraneous references!)

In business, employee engagement has a common understanding around focus and passion, but experts tirelessly debate exactly what it means and what behaviors are necessarily associated with it. Thus there is a definition, inasmuch as everyone concerned with it generally agrees on the broad outlines; but there isn’t a definition, inasmuch as no one has ever been able to pin down a precise meaning that everyone is willing to use.

There is also a lot of confusion over three other terms, all commonly used in business, which mean something similar to engagement. People talk of morale, alignment, and commitment in the same breath as engagement.

It may be splitting hairs, but we can think of morale as contentment or happiness, which can result from any number of things—winning the lottery, falling in love, buying a new car. We can regard alignment as a physical, nearly mechanical consistency with expectations, such as compliance with an ethics code or a production process, and we can think of commitment as loyalty to an organization, its mission, and the satisfaction of its patrons and stakeholders.

Engagement, on the other hand, is an attitude or orientation to the work itself for the sake of the work and its importance to customers. Engagement is what matters.

Most of the serious work on employee engagement has come from practitioners of one kind or another, especially consultants who have an obvious economic self-interest in the subject. Surprisingly little research and writing on engagement has come from the academic community. Thus, only sporadic research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and what has emerged from academic literature tends to be narrowly construed and of marginal practical value.

Perhaps the earliest academic definition of engagement was offered in 1990 by W.A. Kahn, who coolly described it as “people who employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.”

A decade later, N.P. Rothbard went further. Rothbard put the emphasis on attention (“the cognitive availability and the amount of time one spends thinking about a role”) and absorption (“being engrossed in a role” and “the intensity of one’s focus on a role”). Meanwhile, W.B. Schaufeli and a team defined engagement as “a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption.” Similar work by others since then is in the same general orbit.

In any case, it is safe to say that few if any academic researchers on the subject of employee engagement are well-known in business circles. Yet the subject of employee engagement commands keen interest among business leaders at the highest levels, because of its plain impact on an organization’s efficiency and performance.

The Gallup Organization, an American company known originally for its broad consumer and political public-opinion surveys, and more recently for its business consulting services in human resource management, offers a popular but simplistic approach to employee engagement. It strikes me and many others as, well, intellectual pretzels.

In part to promote its consulting practice, Gallup devised a twelve-point checklist of factors that it asserts are closely correlated to employee engagement. Keep in mind that correlation is not causation; just because two phenomena show up together (like baseball and dandelions in springtime, for example) doesn’t mean that one of them causes the other.

However, because of the proprietary nature of Gallup’s research and the absence of any peer review, its assertions are impossible for you to validate. None of that has stopped hundreds of large companies from adopting the paradigm, at an appreciable financial investment.

The twelve-point Gallup checklist consists of these factors:

1. Knowing what is expected of oneself on the job.

2. Having appropriate materials and equipment.

3. Having the opportunity to do what one does best every day.

4. Receiving recognition or praise for doing good work within the past seven days.

5. Having someone who encourages one’s development.

6. Having a supervisor who cares about oneself as a person.

7. Being heard and taken seriously.

8. Feeling a connection to the organization’s mission.

9. Having coworkers who are committed to doing quality work.

10. Having a best friend at work.

11. Receiving a progress report on one’s work.

12. Having opportunities to grow and learn.

Although this framework is probably the dominant reference point to employee engagement in business today, it has many critics who observe that certain of the variables (especially having a best friend at work) seem well-beyond the capacity of management to affect and, in any case, are of dubious causal relationship to real employee engagement.

Gallup also sorts employees into three camps: engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged. It describes engaged employees as those who “work with passion and feel a profound connection to the company” and who “drive innovation and move the organization forward.” Gallup describes disengaged employees as “checked out . . . sleepwalking through their workday, putting time but not energy or passion into their work.” It describes actively disengaged employees as “acting out their unhappiness” and actually undermining “what their engaged coworkers accomplish."

Gallup has not revealed just how it makes its calculations, but its business customers seem more interested in sheer numbers (perhaps to document a business case) than in the complexities of methodology anyway.

I favor a simpler definition of engagement, a definition we can grasp and accept intuitively because our own experience conforms to it. It is just this: lots of focus, lots of curiosity, lots of passion, and lots of courage in the workplace to do whatever is necessary and proper to satisfy a customer.

My argument is straightforward and, I think, irrefutable. Think over the course of human history. Think of all the great things that our forebears have ever done. Think of ending slavery, of setting foot on the moon, of conquering diseases, of splitting the atom, of settling the western hemisphere, of establishing democracy. In our time, think of building computers, of tearing down the Berlin Wall, of ending apartheid, of transplanting a human heart, of creating a global network of cellular telephones or the Internet—you name it.

Then pause to realize: Nothing of great value has ever been invented or discovered, and nothing of great significance has ever been achieved, that wasn’t, at some time, the point of someone’s intense focus, the subject of someone’s deep curiosity, the object of someone’s all-consuming passion, and the product of someone’s relentless courage—and not much else. Money? Sure. Timing, granted. Luck or prayer? Perhaps. Maybe even desperation. But the variables that always count are focus, curiosity, passion, and the courage to persevere, to try again, to search, to keep on going.

That, to me, is the real stuff of engagement. It’s closer to the elixir we need to bring people at work fully into the service of customers. Come to think of it, that is really why I work.

17 Questions to Ask About Your Culture of Communication

Everyone is familiar with corporate culture. But you may be surprised to learn that, less than a generation ago, it was unheard of. Indeed, the concept was initially controversial. Companies resisted the notion they were about anything more than their numbers.

Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy introduced the term in their trailblazing 1982 book, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Since then, companies have come to compete on culture as much as on goods and services. You see it whenever a company touts its ranking on the Best Places to Work list.

Sociologists define culture as the totality of attitudes and behaviors that distinguish one group of people from another. In business, culture is commonly regarded as "the way we do things around here."

There are profound cultural differences between Google and Microsoft, between Toyota and General Motors, between Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines, between Nordstrom and Macy's, between Bank of America and Chase Bank. The list could go on.

Now just as cultures vary from company to company, so do cultures vary within a single company. Each corporate culture consists of many smaller subcultures. The closer you look at subcultures, the more variability you see.

For example, in any one company, you may notice cultural differences between headquarters personnel and field representatives, between the engineering geeks and the marketing mavens, between salaried staff and hourly workers, between the day shift and the night shift, between manufacturing and sales, and so forth.

All these fault lines reflect the priorities and sensitivities of various perspectives, owing to the divergent circumstances, backgrounds, and values of people.

Another kind of subculture, equally important, gets too little attention. It reflects particular processes, such as quality or planning. Of special importance to me is the culture around communication of business issues and information.

By culture of communication, I mean the tendency of people throughout a company to share information, ideas and their intuition on business matters in a particular way. It is less about the flow of official information and more about the countless decentralized eddies of information converging and diverging throughout a company.

Ideally, any company's culture of communication would have as its hallmarks eight descriptors that just coincidentally begin with the same letter: clear, credible, compelling, constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. That's a tall order, but it's mightily important to a company's success.

You can easily think of examples, for better and for worse. A worst-case scenario might involve the proverbial Mushroom Theory, keeping employees in the dark and feeding them--well, you get the idea. A best-case scenario would embrace employees as intellectual partners in the enterprise, whose thinking is integral to the company's success. You can see just how critical communication is to performance.

Here are 17 diagnostic questions that a company's leadership should ask itself to get a quick fix on its communication culture: