Minding Gaps

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?

 

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, December 18

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

The GearBox 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

 

 

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.

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?

 

 

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.

 

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.)

 

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?

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?

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.

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. 

 

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.

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:

Quote / Unquote: Peter Drucker on Discretionary Commitment

 

Recently we introduced another new feature, which appears irregularly but frequently. Known as Quote/Unquote, 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.

Our inaugural Quote/Unquote quoted the British novelist Charles Dickens, who presciently imagined some of the difficulties with email—140 years ago. Next we quoted another Brit from the same era, Benjamin Disraeli, on the great paradox of leadership: that leaders must follow, and followers must lead.

Today we jump across the Pond to the legendary American management consultant Peter Drucker, whom we will probably quote often in the future.

No one, absolutely no one, has had greater influence on modern business management than Peter Drucker, as we wrote in this space four years ago on his passing just before his 96th birthday. The author of more than thirty books, Drucker single-handedly changed the focus of legions of progressive, far-sighted business executives.

For the record, it was Peter Drucker who first:

• predicted the importance of computers in business

• suggested that Japan would emerge from the ash heap of World War II to become an economic titan

• regarded employees not as a cost but as a resource to be nurtured and developed

• broached the issue of excessive executive compensation and its consequences

• urged business leaders to set measurable goals

• criticized mindless meetings as displacing productive work

• revolutionized performance evaluations as a developmental tool

• coined the term "knowledge worker"

• counseled managers to empower employees to complete tasks their own way

• voiced criticism of stock options for promoting short-term thinking

• suggested that teams could function as well or better than traditional hierarchies

and so very much more.

Drucker, almost alone and certainly more than anyone else, championed the heroic role of entrepreneurs and progressive managers. Not unlike millions of parents, schoolteachers, and coaches, and far more than all but a handful of presidents and potentates, these unnoticed, unseen managers ultimately shape the course of economic growth and a great deal of social history.

Drucker left behind hundreds of memorable observations and provocative thoughts, not the least of which had to do with discretionary effort of employees and discretionary patronage by customers. In large ways, he observed, business is at the behest of independent decisions by others.

It was Drucker who said:

We must accept the fact that we have to treat

almost anybody as a volunteer.

Reflect on that observation for a few minutes, and then consider the following questions:

• In what ways are employees “volunteers?

• In what ways are customers volunteers? Strategic partners? Investors?

• Which of these stakeholders do you treat as volunteers?

• What does it look like, sound like, and feel like to treat them as volunteers? Not as volunteers?

• What is the burden of treating employees in particular as volunteers?

• What are the benefits?

• What changes will you make accordingly? Where? When?

• What kinds of management training and leadership development do you need to bring about those changes?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. (Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published.)

Leaders Are Not Bullies, and Bullies Are Not Leaders

Here is an interesting column by Joe Nocera, published Saturday in The New York Times, that illustrates the differences between the work of leadership and the work of management.

It focuses on Kenneth Lewis, who announced his resignation a few days ago as chief executive of the Bank of America, the bank he helped build.

I claim no special insight or perspective on the gentleman. Nocera paints a picture of a self-absorbed, defensive, aloof tyrant. You can decide for yourself.

Several of Nocera’s observations stood out for me, however.

One was the striking contrast between Lewis and his mentor, Hugh L. McColl Jr., who nurtured a small North Carolina bank into a regional powerhouse that bought the San Francisco-based Bank of America for $65 billion in 1998 and moved its headquarters to Charlotte.

McColl was and remains a natural leader who relates well to people. He created a powerful sense of purpose in employees, and they worked fingers to the bone for him. Lewis was just the opposite: brusque, belligerent, bullying. Many employees came to loathe him. No leader can expect to be universally beloved. But every leader needs sufficient loyalty such that followers will give him the benefit of doubt. Lewis didn't have that. He didn't come close.

Another was a problem of performance and purse. You know the story. On his watch, Bank of America stock lost 13 percent of its value, while rival Wells Fargo gained 53 percent. Lewis paid himself well though: Over the last three years, he took home $60 million. “He was hideously overpaid for hideously bad performance,” said one critic, Nell Minow, who monitors corporate executives and boards.

Still another was the lack of succession. Nocera observes that, in the resignation announcement, Lewis said he would remain as chief executive through the end of the year because no one is groomed to succeed him. That’s an obvious mark of a weak leader; it tells you the chief executive is fearful of any threat to his power. Every leader should know who will succeed him, and indeed should take pride in the fact he has successfully cultivated someone who is capable of stepping up.

But you tell me what you think. Perhaps you have a different perspective.

Insights on Leadership from the 2016 Olympics Host Decision

Having lived in or near Chicago for most of my adulthood, I am naturally disappointed at the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2016 summer games to Rio de Janeiro. Yes, it will be good finally to have the Games in South America, but the world will miss an exquisite opportunity to see my own beautiful city.

Let's try to extract some lessons on leadership from yesterday's voting. Now that it has become clearer what happened and why, perhaps we can learn something from the experience about how leadership plays out in our day-to-day work.

Four cities were competing for the honors: Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio. Each had some advantages and disadvantages. I like to think that Chicago’s advantages were overwhelming and its disadvantages minuscule. London’s bookies had laid odds on Chicago. The prevailing expectation was that Chicago would win. Yet our city was the first to be sidelined in the tiered voting.

The structure and process of voting was key. The IOC consists largely of former Olympians, the bulk of them from Europe and few from North America. Although representatives of the competing cities and countries do not vote, their loyalists do. The actual voting proceeds in rounds. Barring an outright majority, in each sucessive round, the city with the fewest votes loses. Then the surviving cities move on to the next round.

With 20/20 hindsight, we can now clearly see that it was in no one’s interest to let the United States survive the first vote. Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio could all hold out hope for their own bids only if Chicago lost early. Otherwise, the American city would prevail.

So they cooperated on that first round. Because it appeared that Tokyo would most likely be the first city to lose, enough IOC delegates who favored Rio shifted their first vote in Tokyo’s favor so that it could survive the first round. These were insincere votes, intended only to defeat Chicago. The gambit worked. The first-round tally was fairly even, but Chicago came up with the least support.

What meaning does this have for leaders and would-be leaders? Just this.

Leaders must never presume that their followers will fall into line, and they must never presume that their skeptics and rivals will be idle. Followers, both real and potential, will think and choose for themselves and align in their own strategic interest. They may or may not identify themselves in ways that the leaders presume. Their alliances may or may not reflect the assumptions of leaders. Their self-interest may or may not be apparent to leaders.

The support that leaders expect to enjoy may or may not materialize. Whether it does is not up to the leader. It is up to the followers. Indeed it is always the follower, never the leader, that determines who will lead and who will follow.

That is the lesson we draw. In the IOC voting, it was painful for us in Chicago. But that’s life.

One final note of unabashed civic boosterism. For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, you really do  owe it to yourselves to discover Chicago.

Ours is a city of spectacular beauty and charm. We have incredible architecture, phenomenal museums and orchestras, two world-class universities, towering skyscrapers, impressive public sculture, a network of virgin prairies and forests, flower-laden boulevards, unrivaled ethnic diversity, and riveting dramatic theater and opera.

We have an inland coastline with beaches and an azure sea dappled with white sailboat masts to the horizon, extraordinary shopping, a river that flows backward and bridges that open to the sky, the best baseball park in the world, restaurants for any taste, a patchwork quilt of charming and livable neighborhoods, and—how can we put this?—endlessly intriguing politics.

On top of all that, in Lincoln Park, Grant Park, and now Millennium Park we actually have a front yard. In every respect, we are truly the quintessential American city.

Give me a call if you're coming. I would love to show you around.

Is Your Fancy Title Getting in Your Way?

I just got off the telephone with an executive at one of America’s leading retailers. With dozens of stores throughout the United States, this company is well-known for its classy merchandise and well-respected for its terrific customer service. To my thinking, it should be equally well-regarded for its culture of innovation and humility.

After years of loyally shopping at this store, and having benchmarked it several years ago, I thought I knew the company’s culture pretty well. But even now, it became clear today, I had something to learn.

Our conversation had wandered around to job titles. The executive shared her opinion that job titles are a distraction—and a divisive one at that. Whether someone is a senior sales associate or a regional vice president or the director of this department isn’t material. With few exceptions, no one but the betitled really cares.

What truly matters is whether someone is helping a customer, how someone is helping a customer, or how someone is helping a colleague help a customer. We should think of ourselves in terms of what we actually do and how we do it, not in terms of who we artificially are. We should think of our role as a verb, not as a noun.

The difference is partly a question of focus. It throws a spotlight on the actions and behaviors that give life to our mission. That's a good thing. 

It is also a subtle matter of perceived status. Lofty titles create the illusion of relative importance. They imply that certain persons in an organization are more important than others. That can only mean that the others will come to see themselves as less important. When that happens, they will naturally reduce their value to the organization and ultimately to the customer. After all, they aren’t so important.

Thus, job titles actually create distance between and among colleagues and teammates. They erode the fabric of an organization, and they undermine the value proposition. That’s silly, isn’t it? Why create distance when what we need is connection? Why let value and service decline?

I realize I am kicking a hornet’s nest on this one. Many of you think of yourselves largely in terms of your title. You worked long and hard to get your title, and you feel—well, entitled to it.

I used to think that way myself. No more. From this point forward, I am what I do.

Instead of Playing the Devil's Advocate, Play the Angel's Advocate

Have you ever noticed how many good ideas, really good ideas, crash and burn after someone responds with the words, "Well, let me play devil's advocate here . . ."?

It probably happens every day in every organization, hundreds of times. Over time, the net result is that fewer and fewer people muster the courage to offer a good, creative idea. No one likes getting shot down.

So, what would happen if we agreed to trash the entire concept of devil's advocate?

What if we and everyone else agreed to banish the phrase?

What if we further agreed to look not for the weaknesses in someone else's good idea but for the strengths?

What if we took pride not in a skeptical, devil's advocacy but in a supportive, nurturing, angel’s advocacy?

Would we not see more courage and creativity in people? Would we not nourish more courage and creativity, as well?

Most of the truly lousy ideas will fall by the wayside anyway. The few bad ones that get through will ultimately go down in flames. The very few that survive amid the flames may prove themselves not so lousy after all.

So the next time you are tempted to play devil’s advocate, stop. Don’t do it. Decide instead to play the angel’s advocate, and see for yourself the difference it can make.

(Adapted and republished from December 17, 2004.)

By the Numbers: Front-Line Supervisors Fail to Communicate

About a month ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a 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 economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (scroll down to the September 21 post), 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 lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication.

Probably most companies still rely on the front-line manager or supervisor as their mouthpiece in the workplace. In those companies, the supervisor is supposed to convey key strategic information and messages to employees who do the work.

We will return to the question of whether that is the most appropriate role for front-line supervisors in the 21st century, with the ubiquity of communication by BlackBerry, text, Twitter, and good old-fashioned email. Today, far more and far faster than in the 1990s and before, electronic communication reaches everyone in an organization by leak and by rumor. (Those of you who participated in my webinar last Thursday know that I have a perspective on this issue. We’ll come back to it here in Minding Gaps in a few days.)

For now, let’s concentrate on how well front-line supervisors communicate. They appear to need some help. According to research by Towers Perrin, only 38 percent of employees of global corporations say their managers communicate openly and honestly. As for the other 62 percent, we can only speculate.

It’s hard to imagine that employers or the managers in question would agree with that perception, but communication, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is the listener’s judgment that counts. If the listener perceives half-truth or untruth, or if the listener perceives double talk or fast talk, then that is what it is. You have to deal with the perception, because perception is reality.

Here are some questions to frame your thinking on this challenge:

• What roles and responsibilities with respect to communicating business strategy and priorities do managers and supervisors in your organization have?

• What particular skills and competencies are necessary to carry out those roles and responsibilities?

• To what extent does the organization assume those skills and competencies are inherent in anyone with the normal and overall qualifications to work in management?

• To what extent are they, truly?

• What training in strategic communication—that is, the communication of business strategy—is provided to the new front-line manager or supervisor? How well and how often is that training upgraded and renewed?

• What does the training say about clarity and honesty?

• What is the process of support in strategic communication for the front-line manager or supervisor? In particular, how does the organization funnel strategic information to the front line?

• What accountabilities for strategic communication does the front-line manager or supervisor face?

• Does your organization have a review process, involving the people who report to the front-line manager or supervisor, to assess each manager’s and supervisor’s communication of business strategy?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published. 

Maslow's Hierarchy and Workplace Engagement

You doubtless remember studying Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a paradigm in which the legendary psychologist rank ordered human needs from the most basic to the most transcendent. This hierarchy makes so much good, plain sense, it’s odd that more of us don’t use it as a foundation for ensuring workplace engagement.

The most basic needs of every human are those of survival: air, water, food, and shelter. Only after those needs are met, Maslow argued, can people look after their personal safety and mobility. Here we find concerns about security, protection, and transportation. Then with both their survival and safety in place, people can proceed to look for a sense of social belonging and purpose: friendship, family, and community. These are the relational bonds of affection and love that give our lives so much richness.

With all that set, we can go on to seek the esteem and approval of our peers, so we begin to strive for status, achievement, and respect. Kids learn this on the playground. We keep it up as grownups. We jockey for promotions, promotions, bonuses, high-visibility assignments, bigger offices, lofty titles, and more stripes.

Finally, at the zenith of the hierarchy, we can seek personal growth and fulfillment, what Maslow termed “self-actualization.” This, the highest level of personal needs, we can think of as a kind of ambrosia of engagement. People with such an extraordinary sense of growth and fulfillment are truly engaged in their work.

Now, organizations can easily satisfy the hierarchy’s two foundational levels simply by offering a clean, safe place to work at compensation sufficient to meet the employee’s demand for food, shelter, and personal security. Beyond that, the camaraderie of like-minded peers goes a long way toward meeting our needs at the third level.

Here is where it gets tricky. Without thinking, most organizations tend to reserve the fourth and fifth levels—esteem and approval, and then personal growth and fulfillment—for only a small subset of their workforce. These higher levels of personal needs are typically the province of well-educated professionals, managers, and executives. The rest of the workforce, often including front-line supervisors, are commonly out of luck. That’s where disengagement is so pervasive, and it sows the seeds of cynicism.

All of us should give some serious reflection to ways we can offer a greater sense of esteem and approval, along with personal growth and fulfillment, to more people at more strata of an organization. If you agree, ask yourself:

• What would that look like?

• What attitudes would have to change? Whose attitudes?

• What visible behaviors can you adopt today to communicate the need for change?

• How will you change your leadership accordingly?

By the Numbers: The High Cost of Disengagement

About a month ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a 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 extent of disengagement in the workplace (scroll down to 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 economic impact of disengagement in U.S.-based companies.

There is no universally accepted definition of workplace engagement. Nor is there an objective, standardized process for identifying it or measuring it.

However, there is a common, if casual, sense that full workplace engagement reflects a high degree of focus and passion for one’s work and for the patrons and stakeholders of one’s employer. As regular readers know, I add curiosity and courage to the recipe.

When we speak of disengagement, we’re simply referring to the opposite of all this. If the measurement of engagement is imperfect, the typical results are not strikingly at odds with intuition. In fact, most employees at U.S.-based companies are disengaged, in key respects.

Disengagement takes many forms, and it has many costs. It can appear as easy distraction from duty. It can be a blind eye to defects in a product or a service that cause customers to flee to competitors. It can be inattention to safety precautions that leads to workplace injuries and even fatalities. It can be laxity on procedures that result in all kinds of problems. It can be frequent tardiness or absenteeism.

It can also be the use of texting or email or telephone as self-defeating efforts at multitasking. Or it can be the use of alcohol or illicit drugs before work or even on the job. More commonly, it can be the lack of intense focus. Often it looks and sounds like the retreat from asking a critical question or offering up vital information from a production line or a service detail.

To begin getting a handle on all that, let’s try calculating the cost of one aspect of disengagement:  physical absenteeism alone, in the United States alone. (We’ll leave emotional, social, and intellectual absenteeism for later, and we’ll let our offshore readers run their own numbers.) For starters, we can use the incremental 4.05 more days of work missed by disengaged employees per year (scroll down to our August 24 post), and we can assume a work year of 240 days after vacation, weekends, and excused absences. We can also plug in the median wage or salary paid to U.S. workers ($53,483 for 2008, the most recent year for which data is available). That gives us a figure of $902 per disengaged employee for physical absenteeism.

(In the event you doubt the figure of 4.05 more days missed by disengaged employees, remind yourself that engaged employees have few if any unexcused absences from work. They want to be at work.)

Next, taking at face value the broad estimates of disengagement offered by well-regarded consulting firms like Towers Perrin and survey research concerns like Gallup, we can figure that between 56 and 72 percent of employees at U.S.-based companies are not fully engaged in their work. We’ll use the midpoint 64 percent, to determine the number of disengaged employees in the non-farm private sector, which totals a little more than 130,000,000. Do the arithmetic, and you reach a total cost of a little over $75 billion per year—for physical absenteeism alone. That inefficiency comes straight off the bottom line.

When you add in other forms and consequences of disengagement—everything from ignoring product defects in a manufacturing plant to neglecting customers in a retail environment—you have vastly greater figures. Many estimates put the total cost of disengagement at between $300 billion and $350 billion per year. That’s somewhere between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.

As a consultant who sees the inside of many companies, I find that many management teams wring their hands over disengagement but do little or nothing about it, more or less like the weather. Yet there are simple, straightforward actions that any management team can take to improve workplace engagement. High-performing companies have a small fraction of the disengaged employees that low-performing companies routinely tolerate. As always, the kind of organization you get is the kind of organization you probably deserve.

Here are some questions to think about:

• Does the figure of 2.1 to 2.5 percent of GDP strike you as realistic? Too high? Too low?

• As a collaborative exercise, explore with other managers the relative level of engagement and disengagement in your organization: the enterprise, a division, a site, or a team. Try to put a percentage on it.

• If you apply that percentage to the revenue stream of your own organization, what is the loss in dollars per year attributable to disengagement?

• How much of it do you think is recoverable?

• Disengagement has many root causes, which vary from organization to organization. What do you think explains most of it in your own organization? How much of it can be laid at your own doorstep?

• What are you doing to change the situation?

My Ordeal With Comcast's Customer Service

Last weekend, and again yesterday afternoon, I spent close to an hour on the telephone waiting for customer service from Comcast, the cable company for the village where I live north of Chicago—two hours, altogether. I have cable television, digital telephone, and high-speed internet with wireless service through Comcast. Many of my neighbors have defected to satellite service, but I have stuck with cable.

The ordeal of these past few days has severely tested my loyalty to Comcast, and I came away a very unhappy customer. I was asked repeatedly—both by recorded prompts and by customer-service agents speaking English as a not-quite second language—for my account number. I was transferred six or seven times each day, including twice in complete circles back to the original recorded greeting.

That isn't all. I was hung up on, automatically, after I had patiently listened to marketing pitches while on hold for five or ten minutes after being continually transferred. Finally, I was told that I needed a new Internet router (provided by Comcast under my contract), and then I was told that if the service technician found that I actually didn’t need a new router, I would be billed $49.95 for an unnecessary service call.

Arghhhh!

Now I don’t make a habit of using social media to slam companies by name, but yesterday afternoon I just had to vent. There’s a limit to anyone's patience, and mine was rapidly fading in the rear-view mirror. So I sent out messages on both Twitter and Facebook vividly recounting my travails. Comcast, you deserved this one.

Now, a day later and still without satisfaction, I wonder if Comcast's senior management has a clue how its customers regard its call-center service. If they do, why do they tolerate such a dysfunctional system?

Extrapolating from this experience, all of us can ask ourselves whether we have a clue how our own customers regard our products and service. On this, I will have to admit a shortcoming of my own. I tend to accept kudos at face value, instead of developing a robust evaluation process. 

Ultimately, any complaint about cumbersome and exasperating customer service reflects disappointment with employees, for it is employees that design and support the process that customers experience. That means a perception of low employee engagement. The employee disengagement translates into your frustration as a customer.

On an encouraging note, The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Comcast has created a new position of senior vice president for employee engagement of Comcast Cable, and has appointed Ron Phillips to the post as of October 1.

By my experience, Mr. Phillips certainly has his work cut out for him. Millions of customers doubtless wish him well, and I am guessing that thousands of Comcast employees do, too.

Quote / Unquote: Benjamin Disraeli on the Paradox of Leadership

 

Last week we introduced another new feature, which will appear irregularly but frequently. To be known as Quote/Unquote, it will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation will stand alone.

Our inaugural feature quoted the British novelist Charles Dickens, who presciently imagined some of the difficulties with email—140 years ago. (Scroll down to the September 11 post.) Today we quote another Brit from the same era, Benjamin Disraeli, who was both an author and a Conservative Party political leader. Not incidentally, he was also a wit; scores of his incisive quotations have survived the decades and are as relevant today as they were in the 19th century.

Benjamin Disraeli was twice the prime minister of England during the reign of Queen Victoria. An intimate friend of the monarch, and the only person of Jewish heritage ever to serve as prime minister, Disraeli intuitively knew that compelling leadership is a kind of spiritual transaction between the leader and the led. Moreover, he understood and appreciated a paradox of leadership: that leaders must follow, and followers must lead.

In one of his most famous remarks, Disraeli said:

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

 

Take a moment to think about that. Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What exactly do you think Disraeli is driving at?

• Is he suggesting that leaders should abdicate the responsibility of leading?

• Is he calling for anarchy or a kind of mob rule?

• What relevance, if any, does Disraeli's remark have for leadership in business generally? For leadership at your level (enterprise, division, department, team) more particularly?

• Should leaders be more humble than prideful? Why or why not?

• Why should, if at all, leaders follow the people they are nominally leading?

• Doesn’t that undermine the leader's role?

• In a modern organization—a large business enterprise, or one of its divisions, or one of its operating teams—what would this look like and sound like?

• What would be its practical impact?

By the Numbers: Disengaged and Actively Disengaged Employees

After taking last Monday off for Labor Day here in the United States, we resume our new feature on data, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

In our last installment of By the Numbers (scroll down to August 31), we explored the prevalence of projects that fail. The prior week (on August 24), we presented data linking employee disengagement to absenteeism. Previous posts on data have shattered the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17) and looked at fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the extent of disengagement in the typical workplace. (Check back next week, when we will report on the economic impact of disengagement in U.S.-based companies.)

According to research by Gallup, the ratio of engaged employees to disengaged employees in high-performing organizations is approximately 8 to 1. However, that is the exception. In typical organizations, according to Gallup, the ratio is 1.5 to 1. Thus, on average, for every three employees who are engaged, two are not just disengaged but actively disengaged.

Gallup sorts employees into three broad categories: 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."

Reflecting on this data, ask yourself these questions:

• What ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is true of the enterprise, division, site, or team that you most identify with?

• What visible, day-to-day behaviors do you believe characterize engaged employees? Disengaged employees? Actively disengaged employees?

• Which managers or supervisors in your organization veer toward disengagement or even active disengagement? What, if anything, are you doing about it?

• Can you think of incidents in which a disengaged employee has adversely affected a customer’s loyalty to your product or service? If so, how easy did you find it to think of such an incident?

• Has the customer or customers in question remained with your company, or have they defected to a competitor? Can you get them back? How much revenue have you lost? What is the secondary cost of bad “buzz” about your company in the marketplace?

• Looking back to the August 24 post of this blog, in which we discussed absenteeism as a consequence of disengagement, what would calculate as the financial cost of physical absenteeism of disengaged and actively disengaged employees in your organization?

• What are you doing to shore up engagement?

• In particular, what are you doing to make sure your managers and supervisors are fully engaged?

Quote / Unquote: Charles Dickens on Face-to-Face Communication

 

Today we introduce another feature of the Minding Gaps blog. It will appear frequently but irregularly. To be known as Quote/Unquote, the feature will offer a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In some cases we will also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion; in other instances, the quotation will stand alone. We begin with a prescient quotation from a famous 19th century British author.

Charles Dickens, perhaps best known for his Victorian novels A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and A Christmas Carol, must have been thinking of only the telegraph when he remarked:

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone

who with his soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Dickens, who died in 1870, could have known only of the theoretical basis for the telephone, which wouldn’t be developed and patented until 1876. The generations of technology since—from the telephone to tubes and transistors to teletype to television to Telex to texting to Twitter (honest, the alliteration wasn't intentional)—have brought us ever greater speed and access to information, while steadily reducing the intimacy and touch between and among us, and perhaps raising shields behind which we cower and quiver, as Dickens seems to have been predicting.

What would Dickens think of today's communication? We pass more data back and forth, to be sure, but whether we understand one another even an iota more is questionable. Today, many of us take peculiar pride in cramming indecipherable and impromptu abbreviations into 140 characters and quickly pressing SEND, often disseminating the shorthand to people we have never met and never will meet.

Let’s ponder:

• Was Dickens exaggerating the social or psychic cost of electronic communication?

• Do you think he was just a Luddite at heart?

• What have we lost through technology? What role does email play in that?

• Is the rush to social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging) problematic for you?

• Beyond speed and access, what have we gained through technology?

• What is Dickens implying by references to “soul” and “brave and true”?

• Are we less soulful, brave, and true than our parents and grandparents? If so, what exactly is the nature and cost of that? 

• How do we best cope with the implications of all this on human understanding and social cohesion?

Leadership Is In the Eye of the Beholder

Leadership, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Followers, potential or actual, determine whether they will follow anyone, and, if so, whom. They follow at their own discretion. No one can be ordered or required to follow anyone else. Choice is fundamental to leadership.

As a manager, you can enjoy one promotion after another throughout a long career. You can earn your MBA with highest honors. You can manage productive teams for twenty, thirty, or forty years. You can rise from manager to director to vice president and beyond. You can become the chief executive and chairman of the board.

But none of that means you are actually leading anyone. While the company designates you as a manager, you are a leader only if you have followers. It is the followers, not the company, that anoint you as a leader, by dint of their decision to follow.

Thus, anyone aspiring to lead other people must earn the mantle of leadership. That requires communication—clear, credible, cogent communication—and lots of it, for communication is the energy of leadership. Without it, leadership dies before it is born.

Fleshing Out Differences Between Management and Leadership

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that we bring not just a scalpel but a meat cleaver to distinctions between management and leadership.

We define them both not by position or level in an organization but rather by the work, the purpose, the energy, and the communication that differentiate them. Anyone in a position of authority in any organization carries the burden and opportunity of both; the CEO manages as well as leads, and the front-line supervisor leads as well as manages. 

Briefly, we think of management as the work of ensuring a group’s performance of a task to a predetermined standard of some sort. If the standard involves money, we call it making budget or making the numbers. If it involves time, we call it beating a deadline. If it involves quantity, perhaps in terms of sales or production, we call it exceeding a quota. Often it involves anomalies in product quality or a linear process such as manufacturing, and there we refer to it as quality control or process control.

Conversely, we think of leadership as the work of bringing about change, either cultural or operational, through the discretionary (or optional) and often self-sacrificing efforts of people. That requires knitting together disparate people as a coalition or community, identifying and describing a threat or opportunity, developing and offering a cause (or solution) that addresses the concern, modeling the behaviors appropriate to that cause, campaigning for the cause, and finally meeting the rewards of success or the penalties for failure. All of that is in orbit around the connection between leaders and the led.

It is important to emphasize that we define and compare these two concepts as work, not as levels of responsibility or as positions in an organization. The nature of the work is what counts.

Prior posts in Minding Gaps have explored, and future posts will continue to explore, particular aspects of this model. Today, I want to devote some attention to differences in style, disposition, and communication serving the purposes of management, on the one hand, and the purposes of leadership, on the other hand.

Consider this framework:

Aspect	Work of Management	Work of Leadership
Nature of work relationship	Legal, official, structural	Intuitive, perceptual, fluid
Source of authority	Power, employment	Insight, conviction, shared values
Presumption of manager	Atypical knowledge	Atypical wisdom
Best-case scenario	Influence for meeting expectations	Inspiration for realizing a vision
Orientation	To the task	To the person, the relationship
Thrust	Accountability, dependability	Opportunity, innovation
Consequences	Rewards or penalties	Satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Language, rhetoric	Directive, commanding, “I”	Inviting, collaborative, “we”
Process	Iterative, corrective	Exploratory, adaptive
Peril of insufficiency, too little	Purpose, motivation	Attention to detail
Peril of excess, too much	Micro-managing, self-execution	Leeway, loss of focus and drive
Need for empathy	Of marginal, occasional importance	Of great, constant importance
Attitude toward exceptions	Fear of deviation (snafus)	Hope for deviation (ideas)
Motivational energy	Requires external impetus	Potentially self-sustaining
Systems, training required	Typically already in place	Typically needs deployment

As you look over this chart, ask yourself these questions:

• What makes immediate and obvious sense here?

• What don’t you quite grasp?

• What is most challenging to your own style?

• Do you see how the work of management and the work of leadership are complementary?

• What aspects of your own business require the steady hand of management?

• What aspects of your business can benefit from less management and more leadership?

• What kinds of leadership should your extended management team do more of?

• How are you supporting the leadership work of your middle managers and front-line supervisors?

Feel free to telephone us at +1-847-247-2241, or write to us at info@arceil.com, for more explanation. And, yes, we do offer workshops in leadership development (apologies for shameless plug).

Our Philosophy

Now that have you had a chance to get to know us at Minding Gaps, we would like to set forth more fully our philosophy and purpose.

Minding Gaps reflects a philosophy of leadership and communication. In brief, our philosophy holds that:

• Leadership and management are two different things. Individuals who are good managers are not necessary good leaders. Management concerns itself with organizing and ensuring performance to a predetermined standard. Leadership, on the other hand, concerns itself with envisioning the future and inspiring people to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve that vision.

• Good communication—clear, credible, compelling—is the energy of leadership. Words are powerful, for they mold attitudes and identity and bring people together behind a concern and a cause.

• Communication for the sake of management is different from communication for the sake of leadership. The former is detailed and directive, and its essential message is accountability. The latter is general and inspiring, and its essential message is opportunity.

• Leadership is essential to change, and therefore enduring change is impossible without leadership. The single most important change that most companies can make is a dramatic increase in the engagement of their people.

• Many organizations have solid management but few have dynamic leadership and sufficient levels of engagement. Consequently, few organizations are able to marshal change.

• Leaders need followers more than followers need leaders. Leaders must connect with followers so as not to leave them behind, and leaders connect best with followers through a systematic process of integrated, strategic leadership communication*.

Our purpose is simple and straightforward. We want to make leadership and change simple, natural, and as close to inevitable in your organization as we possibly can. We think you will like that.

Offered by Arceil Leadership Ltd., Minding Gaps is written by the firm's founder and president, THOMAS J. LEE, who is solely responsible for its content. Mr. Lee is president of Arceil Leadership Ltd., a niche consultancy at the crossroads of leadership, communication, and change. He works with management teams of large and medium-size companies to enhance their leadership credibility and impact. An alumnus of the University of Chicago and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he is formerly a Fortune 25 corporate speechwriter and a newspaper journalist, serving as political editor and editorial columnist.

A dynamic and popular speaker, THOMAS J. LEE has lectured, consulted and led workshops throughout the United States, across Canada, and in nearly a dozen other countries in South America, Europe, and Africa. He has benchmarked organizational communication in nearly 30 major corporations, including Starbucks, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Shell Oil, DuPont, Levi-Strauss, Nordstrom, Walgreens, Federal Express, Chick-fil-A, Motorola, and Harley-Davidson, among others. His first book, Mind the Gaps: The Three Voices of Leadership, is nearing completion.

To Be of Use

In observance of Labor Day in the United States, we offer this poem as a paean to work. Titled To Be of Use, it was written by Marge Piercy and first published in Lunch magazine in 1972.

 

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Toxic Cultures for Leadership

Not every company naturally warms to the art of cultivating the next generation of leaders. Indeed, some companies do an appalling job of it.

Take a look at this article in the September 3 issue of Business Week magazine. The article focuses on companies that headhunters actually avoid, because the managers who emerge from those cultures are said to lack the broad acumen for leadership to succeed elsewhere.

Moreover, the article dishes enough dirt on toxic corporate cultures to be powerfully instructive on leadership development in general.

I cannot vouch for the article’s assessments of any of the companies it cites. Nor can I knowledgeably dispute them. I simply present the article as it is and ask you to read it and think about it.

Here are some discussion questions:

• How would a headhunter—or any outsider, for that matter—describe your company’s leadership culture?

• How would employees characterize the company's leadership culture?

• How, if at all, do you distinguish between leadership and management? By level in the organization? By responsibility? By the purpose of the work that each entails? By their results? 

• What systems and processes do you have in place to develop new leaders?

• How do you measure leadership talent?

• Why does the work of leadership matter to you?

• Irrespective of your level in the organization, in what respects does your own work involve managing, and in what respects does it involve leading?

• To which do you devote more time, energy, and creative thinking?

As a Man Thinketh

There is a little book, first published more than a century ago, that you should read. It just may change the way you think and therefore who you are.

Written by James Allen, an Englishman who was perhaps the intellectual forebear of Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, and Earl Nightingale, As a Man Thinketh asserts that we are what we think. Our thoughts determine our character, for better or for worse.

In its whole, the book is just fifty-seven little pages, perhaps ten thousand words from cover to cover. By way of comparison, that is appreciably less than the posts in this blog for August alone. You can easily read it on an airplane flight. And yet, in such modest dimensions, Allen manages to capture wisdom of the ages.

He writes: “A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”

A little later, he builds on the theme: “Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results. This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing can come from nettles but nettles. Men understand this law in the natural world, and work with it, but few understand it in the mental and moral world.”

Viewed a century later, As a Man Thinketh is anachronistic in some respects: it applies “man” to everyone, and it has rhetorical flourishes that can seem as quaint as a grandmother’s embroidery. In the century since its publication, we now have the benefit of neurological science to call into empirical question such broad claims as Allen’s, too. Nevertheless, the little volume is a clarion call to chart and manage your own destiny, and that is a very good thing indeed.

After you read it, and you are reflecting on its message, ask yourself these questions:

• How might you apply Allen’s thesis to an organization?

• What conclusions can you reach about yourself as a leader? About your organization?

• What is the role of leaders is setting the intellectual boundaries of an organization?

• How might a leader go about that?

• What would be the value of that work? Would it justify itself?

 

Barnes & Noble, Inc., brought out a new version of As a Man Thinketh in 2007.

The price is just $10.00. The ISBN numbers are 978-1-4351-0037-4 and 1-4351-0037-9.

By the Numbers: 'Slow-Motion Train Wrecks'

Several weeks ago we introduced a new regular feature of the Minding Gaps blog, known as By the Numbers. We start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Last week in By the Numbers we presented data linking absenteeism to disengagement. (Scroll down to August 24 to read that post.) Two weeks ago we shattered the myths around the relative impact of verbal and nonverbal communication. (Scroll down to August 17.) Three weeks ago, we took a look at fear of recrimination in the workplace. (Scroll down to August 10.)

Today we explore the prevalence of projects in the workplace that are destined to fail.

According to research by the Standish Group, 78 percent of employees say they are “currently involved” in one or more projects that will fail, and 77 percent of employees agree the phrase “slow-motion train wrecks” aptly describes these projects.

As you reflect on that data, keep in mind the data we presented on August 10 regarding fear of recrimination. It showed that only 19 percent of employees think they can notify management of an impending failure without being blamed for it. Thus, the overwhelming majority of employees won’t speak up.

Now, ask yourself and your colleagues these questions:

• What projects do you now have under way that should be evaluated for their progress?

• What is your process for anticipating difficulties? For troubleshooting?

• What is it about your culture that discourages people from speaking up?

• How much time do you spend wandering around, looking for the unexpected?

• How much of a typical snafu is caused by slow, confusing, inadequate, defensive, mistaken, or outright dishonest communication?

• Does the problem appear to be systemic?

• What, if anything, are you doing about it?

Quick! Counting Your Spouse, How Many People Really Trust You?

 

What's a decent, hard-working business leader to do?

I have been in business a long time, and just about every executive I meet is decent and hard-working, and most of them will call a spade a spade. Dismiss me as a Pollyanna, but that is what I see and experience.

It is not, however, what I read in the newspapers and what I see on television. The story is always the man biting the dog, so the notorious exception gets the headline. If it isn't a rogue CEO looking out for his own pocket at the expense of investors, it's a company or even an industry that says whatever it wants so that it can do whatever it wants.

Even companies that are otherwise well-managed often have an inadvertent problem with credibility. Their key stakeholders—customers, employees, investors, regulators—don’t necessarily believe what they say or trust them to do what is right. That isn't just my opinion. We can point you to objective, confirmative research.

This is a fundamental challenge for business. The catastrophes of Enron and Tyco have faded into the mist of memory, but their ghosts are walking alongside us. Now is the time to get serious about the credibility and trust of business.

It's a tough, tough situation. It won’t be easy. But brick by brick, business can rebuild the ramparts of its credibility. It will take systematic attention to any potential perceived sleight or slight, but it can be done.

The critical first step is to recognize and remember that you are constantly communicating, even and especially when you're least aware of it. There's no getting around it.

Like most business people, you probably think of communication as the totality of what you and your company say and write. It certainly is that. But it is also so much more.

The reality is that you and your company speak in three distinct modes or "voices": the formal, semi-formal, and informal voices. Building and keeping your credibility is largely a matter of avoiding conflicts or gaps among those three voices.

The formal voice is the traditional mainstay of leadership communication. It consists of information and messages expressed in a speech, an announcement, a banner on the wall, a glossy brochure, a Web site and the like. Externally, it includes advertising and public relations.

Its common uses include your vision statement, perhaps a slogan such as "We Love Our Customers," or a promise to customers. Other uses may include an ISO9002 certification, a quarterly earnings release, the "dog and pony show" around an IPO or explicit instructions for a task or responsibility. If it's expressed in words and numbers, it is usually formal communication.

The formal voice is a vital and basic component of leadership communication. However, too many firms rely on it excessively or even exclusively. If asked to do too much, formal communication can fail completely. When it comes crashing down, it can take a company and its leadership down with it. You’ve seen examples of that in the last five years.

The semi-formal voice is different. You can think of it as a steel case of management tools. Few leadership teams regard it as communication at all. That's half the trouble.

Semi-formal communication consists of all those programs, policies, processes and procedures that companies use to manage their affairs. These things truly function as communication because they do what conventional (or formal) communication does: convey information, direction and meaning to employees, establish priorities and concerns and encourage or discourage certain thinking and behavior in response.

Everyday examples of the semi-formal voice include meeting agendas, training mandates, job descriptions, standard operating procedures, Six Sigma processes, lines of authority, accountabilities, sales quotas, cubicle sizes, budgets, personnel choices, spending authorizations, organizational structure, performance evaluations and employee surveys.

Quite a lot, you'll agree. All of it must be managed as communication, because that is what it is.

The informal voice is different still. Not to be confused with body language or the grapevine, it consists of relationships between people in positions of leadership (not really leaders until they actually have followers) and people in positions of 'followership' (not really followers until their putative leaders step up to the plate).

Day-to-day examples of informal communication include presence and accessibility, responsiveness to questions, sharing strategic information, alignment of visible behaviors and ordinary courtesy and respect. Not surprisingly, all bear heavily on workplace relationships, especially those across the boss's desk.

These crucial relationships can be mutually respectful, or mutually spiteful, or anything in between. Their nature and character communicates with power and clarity—often without your knowledge, until it's too late, as when a key employee abruptly resigns or a big customer defects.

The informal voice is driven and defined by routine conversation—comments, questions, complaints, anecdotes—and by all those countless decisions, behaviors, choices, and attitudes on the part of leadership that so often "speak louder than words."

Now here’s the key point.

Only when an organization's formal, semi-formal, and informal voices are all sending much the same message, only when they are facilitating a mutually respectful dialogue with employees, only when they are honoring the nobility of an organization's values, and only when they are encouraging the alignment of behavior with strategy, can the organization reach its fullest potential.

Otherwise, all bets are off. The semi-formal and informal communication will prevail over the formal communication and employees will perceive a lack of integrity and thus a lack of leadership.

The key point to remember is that your formal (or rhetorical and official) voice can never operate in a vacuum. It must either compete with or complement your semi-formal (institutional and programmatic) and informal (individual, relational and behavioral) voices. Your credibility hangs in the balance.

If left unmanaged, the three voices will generate their own messages. Each message may contradict the last, and employees may be left in a state of confusion that sets the stage for cynicism and complacency or even contempt.

That is a recipe for disaster. We all know of companies that unwisely chose it. Some of us worked for them, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

The alternative holds more promise—much more.

If managed well, the three voices can resonate throughout the organization to clarify and reinforce important strategic priorities, not to mention your credibility as a leader. That's a beautiful thing.

Over time, the people in your organization will hear, see, and feel a consistent and purposeful message and they will have the dignity of speaking up and being heard. You will have the benefit of followers who enthusiastically participate. That's a win-win all the way around.

(Written by Thomas J. Lee. Revised and republished from Industry Week Online, 5 November 2006.)

 

The Power of Stories, and the Power of Redemption

The airwaves this morning are filled with remembrances of Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the United States Senate who died late last night at the age of 77.

His 47-year tenure in the Senate is one of the longest ever. Beginning in 1962, he was in the forefront of legislation on social, health, and education issues. Objectively speaking, it is no exaggeration to say that America is a different society because of his work.

I have no special insight or homage to offer on the late senator’s behalf. Many others will fill that need quite ably. I do, however, want to take note of a couple of things that could easily be lost in all the encomia.

First, we would do well to observe the power of stories here. It is only mid-morning as I write, and already I have heard fifteen, maybe twenty stories about something that Senator Kennedy said or did, and that, until now, only a handful of people knew. Think back to the last funeral or memorial you attended, and you will recall the same thing. Eulogies are, after all, stories.

Storytelling is a uniquely powerful forensic device, and it is especially useful for the work of leadership, which depends on a connection to large numbers of people. In the human psyche, narrative has always been a key social dynamic that knits people together. For thousands of years, our ancestors told stories around campfires. That predilection for stories is alive and well today in every John Grisham novel and every Mad Men episode. Every business leader should master the art of telling quick stories to illustrate and buttress an observation or argument.

In the case of Edward Kennedy, laudatory stories are told not just by fellow liberals and Democrats but also by conservatives and Republicans. They seek to capture the essence of the late senator’s personality, compassion, and wisdom. It is important for us to see that, in eulogy, these stories actually become the remembered person. We recall the story, and it is thus that we recall the person.

Second, this is a good place to observe the power of redemption. We live in a society that values any accountability over any forgiveness. Woe to the politician, celebrity, or business executive who commits even the slightest sin. Pass the hatchet, we want his head.

As a young senator, Kennedy had an infamous test of his own character. He didn't measure up. He acted with grievous irresponsibility, and a young woman died as a result. In today’s political culture, he would be forced to resign at the very least. Kennedy survived politically, however, and he went on to storied decades of service that, on his passing, are celebrated by the likes of Trent Lott and Orrin Hatch, two of the most conservative figures of our time. Hearing the tributes today, one finds a theme of profound redemption.

I have a friend who, as a plant manager for a major corporation, suffered through an embarrassing incident with the company’s CEO. My friend offered his resignation the next morning, but the CEO wisely refused to accept it. “If you think I am going to let go of a key executive who just went through a valuable learning experience, you will just have to think again,” the CEO declared. “You are more valuable to this company today than you were yesterday.” The plant manager went on to another ten years of successful service with the company. I personally worked with him throughout that decade, and I can attest to his growth and contribution to the company.

We need to rediscover redemption as a cultural verity; we need to redeem redemption itself, at the very least when hypocrisy is not bringing authenticity into doubt. None of us is as good as the crowd wants us to be, and indeed none of us is as good as the face in the mirror wants us to be. The issue should not always be one of accountability. Some times, we should focus instead on the opportunity to learn and grow. Certainly we all have that need.

Then, when we are old and gone, our friends and fellows will tell stories of our learning and growth, and we can smile from the other side.

The Four Lodestars of Engagement

Nothing of much significance has ever been achieved, and nothing of much value has ever been created, that wasn't, at some time

• the point of someone's single-minded focus;

• the object of someone's bold and intense curiosity;

• the subject of someone's deep passion; and

• the product of someone's unrelenting and persevering courage.

Think of any significant achievement, discovery, invention or development in modern history: setting foot on the Moon, ending apartheid, transplanting a human heart, cleaning the environment. Think of composing a symphony or translating the Bible or climbing Mount Everest or brokering peace in Northern Ireland. Think of beating cancer and then winning the Tour de France seven years straight.

Think of Greg Mortenson, poor but generous, building dozens of schools in rural Pakistan. Think of Ibuka Masaru and Akio Morita co-founding a little business in a bombed-out department store in Tokyo in 1945 and growing it into Sony Corporation. Think of Richard Branson, selling used records out of his car in London on his way to becoming a billionaire entrepreneur. Think of a couple of obscure college dropouts as they set up Microsoft and took it public. Think of Google and eBay and Twitter.

Could any of this, or anything else that rises to that level, have happened without this laser-like focus, this bold curiosity, this all-consuming passion, and this persevering courage?

These four forces—focus, curiosity, passion and courage—are the sine qua non of breakthrough success. They are absolutely essential. What's more, in teams they beautifully build on one another.

Yet, astonishingly and inexplicably, most companies give only lip service to them. In most organizations, these four lodestars are so routinely ignored and neglected as to be mere afterthoughts. Frankly, we cannot recall hearing a single business leader offer a single coherent sentence about all four together.

So let us redefine the engagement of a workforce as a culture with a high and ever-rising tide of focus, curiosity, passion and courage. Imagine the impact that it could have. Imagine the potential of your own people. Imagine the places you could go, the work you could do, the standout company you could finally be.

Now ask yourself:

• What would this look like in your industry? Your organization?

• What did you do yesterday, and what did your fellow leaders do yesterday, to build, sustain and nurture a culture of single-minded focus, intense curiosity, deep passion, and enduring courage?

• What are you doing today?

• What will you do tomorrow?

• What can you do?

• How much focus, curiosity, passion, and courage do others see in your leadership?

Just adding a little focus, curiosity, passion, and courage to your leadership, you understand.

(Adapted and republished from June 20, 2006.)

By the Numbers: The Cost to Business of "Mental-Health Days"

 

Two weeks ago we introduced a new regular feature of the Minding Gaps blog known as By the Numbers. We start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Last week in By the Numbers we exploded the myths around the relative impact of verbal and nonverbal communication. (Scroll down to the August 17 post to read it.) This week we present data on absenteeism.

According to research by the Conference Board, on average, disengaged employees miss 4.05 more days of work per year than engaged employees miss. These are colloquially known as “mental-health days,” and they are a significant cost to business.

After presenting this data point to a global conference in San Francisco this summer, we received an email from a company whose management had difficulty believing it could be true. Yes, it can be. Engaged employees take few if any unjustified days off. So the problem of absenteeism is largely one of disengagement.

It isn’t uncommon for some hourly workers in certain industries to miss one or two days of work per month. In parts of the United States and Canada, nonexcused absenteeism is rampant during hunting seasons or fishing seasons. And in some companies, labor contracts impose cumbersome procedures on accountability for such offenses. It is easier to ignore the problem than to manage it.

The problem is especially pronounced in work environments that are physically or socially unappealing—unkempt, tense, or dangerous, for example—and in organizations with strong unions and a distrustful relationship between management and union. Some labor unions so protect their members that absentee workers are paid regardless, and cannot be penalized. The problem is also common where supervisors seem to think that being a boss means being bossy.

Now keep in mind: This data is for physical absenteeism alone. It says nothing about tardiness, or about employees who come to work without a full night’s sleep or after drinking heavily or after using drugs. Moreover, and especially problematical, it says nothing about employees who are emotionally, socially, and intellectually absent. They come to work, all right, but they may as well be absent.

Now, ask yourself:

• What is the relevant absenteeism figure for your organization?

• In what ways do you inadvertently tolerate or tacitly condone the problem?

• What is the root cause of absenteeism?

• What policies or practices that you have in place contribute to the problem?

• What issues are you neglecting?

• If yours is a union shop, how can you work with the union to change the situation for everyone’s benefit?

• Among salaried employees, how much of a problem is physical absenteeism? Emotional or social absenteeism? Intellectual absenteeism?

• What do you estimate as the economic cost of physical absenteeism?

Rhetoric and Political Debate

Here is a brief and fascinating discussion of the rhetoric involved in the debate (here in the United States) over health care insurance and policy.

(For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, President Obama was elected largely on public support for extensive change in health care. Since the election, however, opponents have managed to whittle away at his support by using emotionally charged phrases to describe the legislation.)

The link features Jason DeSanto, a senior lecturer in communication at Northwestern University. He appeared this evening on a Chicago public-affairs television program to discuss the rhetoric around health care—in particular, phrases like “death panels” and “socialized medicine.” The clip runs about 7 minutes.

One observation that DeSanto makes is especially intriguing.

He asserts that the “the real discussion is the rhetoric.” So important is language to our construction of reality, he maintains, the words and phrases that political rivals use in debate actually define our perception of the issues at stake. In a real sense, the policy debate isn’t so much the difference of perspective and opinion but rather the very rhetoric of communication.

The implications for business leaders are profound. If, as a leader or agent of change, you are not mastering the rhetoric around change, it will very likely master you. You cannot bring about change without the energy of communication in your sails. By further inference, if you complain that change is impossible, the real question may well be your inability to use rhetoric to energize the change you seek.

“We live in a world of words,” DeSanto argues. Language “frames our view of the world. That’s what language does.”

I recommend two books for further reading:

• Don’t Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff (a Democratic Party-affiliated consultant)

• Words That Work by Frank Luntz (a Republican Party-affiliated consultant)

Both are excellent, and business leaders can derive a great deal of insight from them.

Notes on the Privilege of Leadership

What do you think of when you hear someone mention privilege and leadership in the same breath?

Do you visualize chauffeured limousines, their drivers in uniform? Rounds of golf at St. Andrews or Augusta National? Seven-figure pay packages, eight figures with the parachute? Cross-country travel by Gulfstream jet, leaving behind those awful security lines?

Perhaps you do. For the moment, though, set aside all that colorful imagery. It isn't at all the sense of privilege we have in mind. Nor are we concerned only with leadership at the top of the ladder. Organizations should have leadership throughout: up, down, and across the hierarchy.

Instead, think of privilege not so much as bounty but rather as a humbling place and a rare, important opportunity. Think of it as having the privilege of . . . or as being privileged to. . . . Think of it as the nobility of your leadership, the fulfillment of your mission as a leader, regardless of your level and accountability in the organization.

Appreciating the extraordinary importance and opportunity of your leadership is key to making the most of it. If you think of yourself only as a middle manager, you will act out your service to the company as a mere cog, really little more than a paper-pushing bureaucrat. You will miss entirely the potential impact you can have on a person, on a team, on the entire organization.

In short, you will lose sight of the profound difference between the burden of managing and the exhilaration of leading.

Remember what the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead said: "Never underestimate the power of a small group of highly committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Now, with this sense of extraordinary privilege in mind, and with a broad perspective of leadership, ask yourself some important questions about the privilege of leadership. Resist the temptation to dismiss these questions as theoretical interruptions. They deserve your time. Devote good, rigorous thought to them. Go deep.

Ask yourself:

• As a leader in your organization, what are you privileged to do or be? In other words, what is the special value of this place and time? What makes it bigger than you?

• What is the purpose of this privilege? Why is it what it is?

• How have you employed this privilege? How have you not? Where are your couldas, shouldas, wouldas?

• How does the privilege of leadership redound to the benefit of your customers? Your colleagues? Your investors? Have you made the most of it for their well-being?

• As a leader, are you content to influence people? Isn't there something more you should be reaching for? Something closer to inspiration?

• In what ways does the privilege of leadership make change easier? Does it ever make change harder? What are you doing with this privilege?

• Is the privilege of leadership humbling to your spirit? Ennobling to your character? How so? Describe it.

• What does a greater, deeper appreciation of your potential as a leader do to your work as a leader? How will your priorities change? Your relationships? Your message? Your time? Your behavior?

Think about these questions deeply. Your answers will tell you much about the mission of your leadership, about its ultimate potential and impact, and about you.

(Adapted and republished from October 29, 2007.)

NetFlix Gets It Right (Really, Really Right)

There’s only one reason you shouldn’t take 30 minutes to view this slide presentation on the NetFlix corporate culture.

It is not because you have better ways to spend 30 minutes. You probably do not.

It is because you will immediately want to quit your job and go to work for NetFlix.

Click on the link below. It will take you to a slide presentation (intended to be read) on the NetFlix culture. Then come back here for a discussion.

NetFlix's Corporate Culture

When you’re finished, think about these questions:

• How different is the NetFlix culture from your own?

• In what ways is it better?

• In any respect is it not so good, as near as you can tell?

• What do you think of the vacation policy for salaried people?

• What do you think of the “generous severance package” hint?

• What do you think of the emphasis on curiosity?

• What do you think of the statement about Enron's values?

• In what ways can you adopt insights from NetFlix to your own culture?

Feel free to leave a comment. Just click on Comments below or on the headline above.

To Lead, You Must Respect

Have you ever noticed something about successful leaders?

The most respected leaders are always the most respectful leaders. That may strike you as paradoxical. But it’s true. Now more than ever, it is true.

Perhaps there was a time when a leader could garner respect by commanding or insisting on it. Perhaps there was a time when, by dint of position or power, a leader could demand that people respect his judgment, could demand that people snap their heels and fall into line. Perhaps somewhere that is still the case.

If that was ever so, anywhere, it is certainly not so anymore—not here, not now.

For too long, too many leaders have squandered the birthright of their position. Too many politicians have proved themselves not merely mortal but adolescent, not merely cautious but paranoid, not merely ambitious but greedy. Too many chief executives have enriched themselves at the expense of investors, annuitants, and employees. Too many priests and pastors have sinned too grievously. Too many athletes and heroes and idols have shown themselves to be loutish and brutish.

The few genuine leaders that remain are leaders because they respect the sincere commitment of their followers. They earn trust by trusting first. They gain respect by offering respect. They let their dignity rest on their integrity, and they offer a vision that recognizes and affirms the values of people. So people naturally want to follow.

These leaders know that people always have a choice, that followers can choose to follow or not to follow. These leaders never presume that anyone will follow. They can only ask. They can only call. They can only invite.

To lead, you must respect. The more you respect the least among you, the more they respect you. Bullies never have the respect of the bullied. Fear, perhaps. But not respect.

By the Numbers: Fearing Recrimination in the Workplace

Today we introduce a new feature of the Minding Gaps blog to be known as By the Numbers. We'll start each week with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. We begin with data on the fear of recrimination in the workplace. Trumpets, puhlease.

According to research by the Standish Group, 90 percent of corporate employees know in advance when a project will fail to meet its goals and objectives, but only 19 percent believe they can notify management without being blamed for the failure.

Questions for reflection:

• Do these figures strike you as realistic for your organization?

• Is your sense of this a function of your position? Would people at lower levels disagree?

• If that is so, what does it say about your perspective and viewpoint?

• In your organization, who has the courage to bring bad news to the attention of leadership?

• Why should that require courage? What does it say about organizations in general and yours in particular?

• What accounts for the fear of recrimination in the workplace?

• Is it inherent in human nature? Is it nurtured by a management ethic that emphasizes accountability and penalty?

• What does such fear suggest about attitudes toward offering suggestions and ideas for process improvements?

• What is the common reaction of managers to suggestions from hourly personnel?

• How can leaders promote a culture that encourages people to flag imminent problems?