Minding Gaps

Eight Archetypes of Dysfunctional Listening

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Here's an important question: Does anyone really listen to what you say?

Here's another, even more important question: Do you really listen to what other people say? Really, really listen?

Be honest with yourself. For objectivity, ask a colleague, a partner, a spouse. Believe what they say.

None of us wants to admit it, but few of us listens as well as we should. For many readers of MindingGaps, a big part of the problem is your intelligence. When it comes to listening, you can be too smart for your own good. We dealt with the problem of intelligence in an earlier post, which you can read here.

We have identified eight types of dysfunctional listeners. We describe them more fully in our Master Class workshops. Here's a sneak peek:

The Brick Wall. This dysfunctional listener (also known as the "Teenager") is often impassive and shows little eye contact. You really don't know whether he is listening at all. Because he is so detached, he rarely connects with other people, and so he feels isolated and removed. Talking to him is like talking to a proverbial brick wall.

The Donald Trump. The brash, outspoken real-estate mogul is an ideal archtype for another kind of dysfunctional listener. He is a screamer's screamer, constantly peppering people with loud, aggressive questions and never waiting for a thoughtful response. Like his persona on television's "The Apprentice," he is more interested in belittling people than in learning anything.

The Bobblehead. These dysfunctional listeners are eager to convey their interest by nodding their head and interjecting verbal tics ("Hmmm" and "Yes, I see") at the appropriate moment. But ask them what was said or how they feel about it, and they'll find a creative way to have the statement repeated for their benefit. (Note: In the Bobblehead's defense, he is often in conversation with the Auctioneer, described below.)

The Stephen Colbert. Like the comedian's television persona, a Stephen Colbert listener manipulates the words that other people speak to his own needs and expectations. He is quick to interrupt and quick to misinterpret, so that whatever other people say will serve only his own interests. Alas, other people don't have an opportunity to clarify their message. He doesn't have time to really listen.

The Auctioneer. The Auctioneer is really a non-listener because she is talking all the time. She doesn't pause long enough to hear anything that anyone says, except perhaps a single word of confirmation. When she takes a breather, and others are getting a word in edgewise, she may abruptly speak up with a new topic, apparently without realizing that she is changing the subject. That's possible only because she wasn't listening to the conversation before she spoke up.

The Sgt. Joe Friday. Most of our readers are too young to remember Sgt. Friday from television's "Dragnet" series, but even they will recognize his legendary refrain: "Just the facts, ma'am." As dysfunctional listeners, the Sgt. Fridays of our world believe that they know what information they want, and they only want factual data that fits their framework. Thus they don't hear anything unexpected, and they don't hear any expressions of emotion.

The Search Engine. The Search Engine is the person who is a little (or a lot) remote from a conversation until she hears mention of her own name or responsibility. Then she is all ears. Like a Google algorithm, she is programmed to notice only those things that matter to her. That's usually herself or her job.

The Multitasker. This dysfunctional listener deserves its own essay, because it is perhaps the biggest listening problem in business. People are so busy they believe they must do more than one thing at a time to get everything done. When it comes to listening, that is a fool's paradise, because it creates more, and more serious, problems than it solves. Smart executives have stopped trying to multitask in conversation.

There you have it, eight types of dysfunctional listener.

Do you see yourself in any of them?

If so, you now have some idea of how to change.

If not, you certainly aren't alone. In fact, that's the real problem for so many of us.

 

Next: Three Myths of Leadership

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

More Employers Ask Job Applicants for Facebook Passwords

by Thomas J. Lee

I am not the least surprised, but I certainly am flabbergasted, that more employers are asking job applicants for Facebook passwords.

It isn't surprising, because many companies have long misunderstood the concept of trust in the workplace. They have assumed that employees should just naturally trust them, without themselves first earning the trust of employees or first investing the same kind of trust in employees.

Life just doesn't work that way. Trust is and always has been a two-way street. It must be earned, and it must be shown. He who doesn't trust is only rarely and briefly accorded any trust. That is as true in our professional lives as in our personal lives.

Trust is far too precious and far too tender to be treated as if it can be presumed or commanded.

If not surprising, these policies are nonetheless flabbergasting. They set the tone for brazen disregard for employee dignity. What company would want employees who are so deferential, so servile, as to tolerate that? 

If I were in charge of the hiring at these companies, I might actually ask for a Facebook password just to see which job applicants would refuse to provide it despite expecting that it would cost them the job. Those are the applicants I would be inclined to hire. In the long run, they will stand up for integrity and for their own dignity. How refreshing.

Give me an employee who knows right from wrong, smart from stupid, trust from mistrust, decent from indecent. I can build a fine company with people like that.

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs Replies to Mr. Smith

 

Here is a response from Goldman Sachs to the essay by Greg Smith published in this morning's editions of The New York Times and referenced in my own blog post (just scroll down).

Backlash Against Goldman Sachs Op-Ed Writer Begins in Earnest - Business - The Atlantic Wire.

In the interest of fairness, I recommend reading it as well as Mr. Smith's essay.

TJL

Greg Smith's Very Public Resignation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Until today, Greg Smith was executive director and head of the U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Goldman Sachs.

He resigned out of disgust—that isn't too strong a word, as you will see—with Goldman's culture of putting profits before customers. Moreover, he submitted his letter of resignation to The New York Times, which obliged him by printing it today. Online and in print, it's fair to say that millions of people will ultimately read it.

You can read it for yourself here: Greg Smith resigns from Goldman Sachs. Don't miss it.

Reasonable people can debate whether Mr. Smith should have gone public with his thoughts. The fact is he did. It's done, and his thoughts are out there.

In his shoes I wouldn't have done the same thing, but if it compels Goldman and other large investment banks to rethink and change their culture, then it may be worth it.

Here are some questions for any business leader to think about:

• Do you think Goldman's senior management has viewed its culture the same way Mr. Smith describes it?
• Do you think Goldman's executive team regards the firm's culture as "the secret sauce" of its success, to use Mr. Smith's phrasing?
• How important is your own firm's culture? How would you describe it, and how do you think others in the company describe it? How do customers describe what they see of it?
• Does your organization truly put the customer before the profit? In what ways do you see this as the reality?
• How should you change the culture of your organization? How can you?

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Three Essential Components of Any Leader's Credibility

by Thomas J. Lee

Back in the 1980s a onetime IBM salesman and singing cowboy by the name of Robert Fulghum wrote a little book that became a worldwide sensation. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten stayed atop the best-seller lists for two solid years. It was translated into 27 languages and sold in more than 100 countries.

As the title suggests, this marvelous book asserted that the really important verities of life we learn as young children. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in communication, especially for the sake of leadership.

Consider what we learned about communication as youngsters on the playground:

• Thou shalt not lie.
• Practice what you preach.
• Actions speak louder than words.
• Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.
• Seeing is believing.

In other words, we learn early on that credibility is the currency of communication. We learn that we cannot get away with just saying whatever we want, when we really don’t mean it. Other people resent and dislike that, and they will resent and dislike us.

As we grow into adults, we come to appreciate the significance of this. We realize that all the fast and fulsome talk in the world cannot buy the allegiance and dedication of people: our kids or our employees or our constituents. Only our credibility as leaders can do that. Without credibility, our communication is like counterfeit money.

Moreover, we realize that the measuring rod of credibility does not belong to us as leaders. It rather belongs to the people we seek to lead. They and they alone measure our credibility. If they find it in our leadership, we and they can go anywhere. If they don’t, we and they can go nowhere.

Those of us who think a little longer about the challenge of credibility also realize that, when we begin to assert ourselves as leaders, credibility becomes more elusive and difficult. It begins with simple trust, for sure, but it also seems to demand more than trust alone. It also requires respect and affinity with people.

By trust, we have in mind a high regard for the veracity of one's word. People who trust someone believe the person is telling the truth. The truth that he tells may be a factual depiction of reality. Or it may be a sincere statement of intent, or a frank and honest description of his opinion, values, or perspective. Whatever path it takes, it must square with reality.

By respect, we're referring to a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: his ability, energy, initiative, resources, and perseverance—in short, his authority. In the colloquial, this quality is often referred to as "street cred." People must recognize and respect a leader's capacity for situational authority in order to believe he is capable of accomplishing that which he is setting out to accomplish.

By affinity, we mean a high regard for a common bond of interests, needs, and concerns. Apart from someone under the hypnotic spell of a cult, no one willingly follows a leader whose purpose runs counter to their own well-being. Rather, people look for nobility of intent: an honorable purpose that aligns with their own well-being. What is important and valuable to the leader must be, or must become, important and valuable to the people she would lead, and vice versa.

One or even two of these three cornerstones is not enough. Respect and affinity in the absence of trust leaves a residue of doubt. Affinity and trust in the absence of respect leaves a residue of skepticism. Trust and respect in the absence of affinity leaves a residue of opposition. Leaders need all three: trust, respect, and affinity with people.

Now most of us didn’t actually learn this part in kindergarten. Those who never learn it at all will never capture the hearts and minds of people. They will never lead.

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Leaders Must Know and Respect Internal Gatekeepers

by Thomas J. Lee

It's natural, perhaps even inevitable, for managers and leaders to assume that they hold the authority in an organization. After all, even a junior manager commonly has the power to hire and fire, and senior management can merge, sell, or even shutter a company. That is real authority.

Alas, it is only one kind of authority: the legal authority to run the company. There are other kinds of authority, distributed throughout the organization, that also bear heavily on whether, when, and how anything gets done and on whether, when, and how anything really changes.

Managers who neglect these informal centers of authority often delude themselves into thinking that their mission or strategy is fully deployed, that people up, down, and across the company are acting in accordance with the strategic direction. The managers are surprised when the results don't bear out the promise of their strategy, and they wonder why things apparently just hit a wall.

Savvy, successful leaders approach things differently. They look for these gates of leverage and then recruit the gatekeepers to support the strategy. They realize that each gatekeeper can determine whether a strategy slows, stops, or proceeds through the gate. The more gatekeepers a leader has in the fold, the more likely the strategy will move through these gateways.

Here are four kinds of authority—each its own strategic gatekeeper, if you will—well beyond the legal authority that managers already have:

Economic authority is the power of the purse. Externally, economic authority rests with customers who decide whether to buy the product of a change. Two legenday case studies in business school are the decisions by Ford Motor Co. to introduce the Edsel in 1958—it would last only three years—and by Coca-Cola Co. to change the recipe of Coke in 1985. In both instances, customers rejected the new products. Internally, it is whoever exercises practical control over spending, which typically depends on the size of an organization, its controls, and its authorization levels. It can reside with the receptionist who holds the key to the petty cash drawer, or it can be the auditors who wave a flag on p-card abuses. 

Technical authority resides with holders of any unique competency that a strategy or change requires. It can range from engineering (the design of packaging or manufacturing equipment, say) to supply chain to legal counsel, and more. Any of these gatekeepers can open or close their gate. When it closes, so do the prospects for a strategy or change initiative.

Functional authority belongs to anyone who is in an informal position to close a gate and thereby stymie a change. Some years ago I stopped at a high-tech store—one of a nationwide chain—only to discover a complete absence of sales personnel on duty. Customers were just milling about. The sales team was upstairs in the store manager's office loudly protesting a new compensation system. All afternoon, customers came and went without buying anything, as there was no one to make a sale. The sales personnel were exercising their economic authority. It's little wonder the company declared bankruptcy shortly afterward.

Social authority is informal influence among others that rests on personality, social order, and networks. Some people have outsize influence over the thinking of their peers. When it comes to a business strategy or change initiative, they can put the brakes on without the leader's knowledge. Generally speaking, it isn't the office cynic who has the most influence, as many employees just discount that person's constant quibbling. Nor is it the office cheerleader, whose enthusiasm grates on nerves. Rather it is the sober, thoughtful person in the middle whose voice others seek out and respect. 

There are other kinds of authority, as well: moral authority, political authority, and strategic authority, just to name a few. The wise manager is alert to all of them.

The need to recruit these critical gatekeepers comes back to the crucial differences between managing and leading. Managers have official command of their team as a matter of the organization's hierarchy; people are assigned to a team and to a manager. Leaders must earn their influence, because the people they would lead have a choice as to whom they will follow. To lead successfully, leaders must enroll as many supporters as they possibly can.

 

Coming on Friday

Climbing Ice-Covered Mount Rainier

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} New Managers Get Little or No Training in Leadership

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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 appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business and in management, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

American companies have not consistently been rising to the challenge of cultivating the next generation of leadership, it appears.

According to a nationwide survey sponsored by CareerBuilder, promotions to management usually come with little or no formal training, and many managers continue to flounder in their new roles.

Some 26 percent of managers said they were not prepared to take on their new challenges, and 58 percent said they received no training at all to meet the responsibilities of leadership.

Managers identified their biggest challenges as resolving issues between co-workers on their team, motivating team members, and reviewing employee performance.

Primary concerns that employees have about their manager are playing favorites (23 percent), not delivering on promises and not listening to concerns (both 21 percent), not providing feedback (20 percent), not motivating (17 percent), and providing only negative feedback (14 percent).

 

Coming on Wednesday

Leaders Must Know and Respect

Other Kinds of Authority

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

Recently we resumed publishing a feature we call Quote / Unquote, which offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, change, or engagement in business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion. Occasionally, however, the quotation stands alone.

Previous posts in this category have included, among others, Peter Drucker on regarding employees as volunteers, Charles Osgood on responsibility, Margaret Mead on teams, Jim Nordstrom on employee engagement, Andre Agassi on decisions, Carl Jung on accountability, Albert Einstein on curiosity, Bejamin Disraeli on the great paradox of leadership, Charles Dickens on electronic communication, and Eric Hoffer on change. For any of those posts, or for any of the other 400 essays in our archives, just enter a keyword in the search box to the right.

Our quotation today comes from the leading voice of American Transcendentalism in the 19th century. The wisdom of this quotation is as valid and as relevant today as ever.

by Thomas J. Lee

Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, laid the cornerstones of Transcendentalist thought in the United States. A reaction to both stolid religious doctrine and objective intellectualism that found no room for intuitive faith, Transcendentalism offered a path for spirituality that resided in the individual's heart and mind. It required no confirmation from either ecclesiastical or academic authority.

A prolific essayist and frequent lecturer, Emerson had a silver tongue for aphorisms, many of which have survived more than a century since his death in 1882. You may recall one from ever-present dorm posters in college: "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail." You can easily find many others in a quick online search.

One of my favorite Emerson quotations speaks to every business manager and, for that matter, any leader in any walk of life:

 

What you do speaks so loud I cannot hear what you say.

 

We have often used this venue to explain that words count, for they set expectations, but that decisions and behavior count even more as communication, for they either validate or invalidate the words.

Moreover, we have asserted that nonverbal communication is far more than it is conventionally thought of: body language, facial expression, and vocal intonation. It is actually the totality of what you think and do. 

To our thinking, many companies (and even more so, politicians) are preoccupied with what they say—to employees, to customers, to shareowners, and to regulators—at the expense of what they intend and do to bring meaning and import to their words. All too often they devote more time to crafting just the right words than to committing themselves to following through.

Take a few moments to reflect on Emerson's quotation, and then consider the following questions:

• Why is it so common to say one thing and do another?
• What are some inherent difficulties in seeking to speak with authority and influence?
• Why can it it be especially problematic to say the "right thing"?
• How often do you fail to live up to your own words? Who is usually the first to notice it? Do you sometimes not notice it at all?
• What built-in constraints can you identify to talking? (You may wish to refer back to our essay of May 20 on ten talk traps.)
• When you think of nonverbal communication, do you think mainly of body language? Facial expression? Vocal intonation? Or something bigger?
• What other kinds of nonverbal communication communicate far more?
• What does your own nonverbal communication say about you? In what ways?
• How are you working to lead with more integrity?

Coming on Monday

Data on Leadership Training

Coming on Wednesday

Types of Authority

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Workers Trust Managers More Than Executives

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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 appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

Corporate employees trust their own managers more than they trust their company's senior executives, according to a survey of more than 7,000 employees at all levels of American companies.

Only 20 percent of people strongly trust the top management of their organization. Some 36 percent moderately trust their top management, while the remaining 44 percent range from not trusting to strongly distrusting their top management.

The same study, conducted by Leadership IQ, found that people were more trusting of their direct boss than top management.

It concluded that 34 percent of people strongly trust their direct boss, 35 percent moderately trust their direct boss, while the remaining 31 percent range from not trusting to strongly distrusting their direct boss.

As you reflect on these numbers, ask yourself:

• What do you think can account for the difference?
• In your company, is the CEO's communication too polished, too artificial?
• Does your company promise more than it delivers to employees?
• Have company policies trampled over high-minded corporate values?
• What can companies do to restore trust? 

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given issue, people may or may not hear what their leaders say. But they will always see what the leaders do, and seeing is believing.

Does that strike you as true? It certainly does me.

And yet there's a problem with such a facile analysis: The opposite is also true.

Believing is seeing, too. That's right. Just as seeing is believing, so is believing seeing.

Think about that. We're not just playing with words here. It's an important if complicating point for leaders and for anyone who counsels leaders on communication.

Not only do people believe what they see with their own eyes (that's the seeing-is-believing part), but they tend to see mainly that which they already believe (the believing-is-seeing part).

Their eyesight—yours and mine, too—is naturally selective. We see things first, notice things most, and remember things longest that conform to our own perspective and that confirm our own judgment.

It's certainly no secret that two intelligent, reasonable persons can experience the same event—a concert, a movie, or a dinner in a restaurant, say—and come away with sharply divergent impressions.

How often have you and a friend read the same book and disagreed on it? Listened to the same political debate and disagreed on the candidates? 

The fact is that each individual processes new data through his own lens of preconceived expectations, needs, experiences, opinions, and concerns. This frame of reference changes slowly, if at all.

That basic dynamic holds as well for news and announcements about the workplace. What people already know and believe bears heavily on their reaction to additional information and messages.

Does that make leadership communication in the workplace pointless? Not really, no. It does make it more difficult though.

As a practical matter, it underlines the need to educate employees constantly on the company's strategic reality. The more that people know, the more likely their beliefs will reflect the company's real-world environment.

Moreover, it reminds us that, as the best comedians and orators have long understood, we are always speaking to an audience of one. Never to a crowd, but always to each individual person in the crowd.

The distinction is critical. Ever notice how a riveting speaker works a room? She fixes her eyes on one person at a time. Afterward, almost to a person, people say: "I felt as if she was talking just to me." That's what we mean.

What are the implications of all this for business leadership? Even in the largest organizations, any leader must keep uppermost in mind who it is that he is hoping to lead, and must address their issues as they see them.

He should ask: How much do people already know about the situation, the direction for the future, the organization's progress? What do they think of it? What is their emotional state? Exactly what are they worrying about, fearful of, concerned about, hopeful for?

That—even more than the nuts and bolts of the message—is the most important consideration in leadership communication. In it lies the secret of great communication. Speak to the human heart and what lies inside, and you cannot go wrong.

So just remember this: It is always, always the who before the what. Never the other way around.

 

Coming on Friday

Be Your Own First Follower

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Suddenly, a Great Need for Immediate Change

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

One balmy evening after dusk I was relaxing on the patio with my legs outstretched. Crickets had begun to sing, and Venus was slipping toward the western horizon. I had enjoyed another productive day. Everything was perfect. I wanted nothing to change.

Just then I noticed a small animal of some sort off to the right. It was already dark, so I couldn't quite make out what it was. Slowly approaching me, the furry thing waddled right up to my shoes and stopped.

You can imagine my horror when I realized the animal wasn't a neighbor's kitten, and it wasn't a squirrel. Nor was it a raccoon or an opossum. It was a skunk, a polecat. I kid you not. For minutes 

 

that seemed like hours, it sat on its haunches just inches from my feet. I was never so perfectly still in my entire life. I didn't breathe. I didn't swallow. I didn't blink.

In an instant I went from wanting nothing to change to wanting everything to change, immediately and radically. Yet I could do nothing. If I had so much as burped, this little beast would have fouled the entire neighborhood. Everything within a quarter mile would have stunk for days. I could only wait it out, in perfect stillness and utter silence.

Eventually the skunk moved on, and I could exhale and blink again. Five minutes later I felt a sneeze coming on, and I prayerfully thanked the heavenly stars that I had not sneezed while my uninvited guest was sniffing at my feet.

This incident occurred two or three autumns ago. I recalled it this week when the subject of change came to mind. I've noticed that, for some people and some companies, the thought of change can bring about such anxiety they react with terror and paralysis.

That isn't a problem in the presence of a skunk, figuratively or literally; the paralysis suits you just fine. But if the challenge you are facing requires that you change for the sake of innovation, or personal growth, or subject-matter mastery, or credibility, or a behavioral correction, or relational empathy, or anything else of importance or value, it most certainly is problematic. Your paralysis is part of the problem.

Regular readers will recall that a couple of my recent posts (here and here) focused on helping people to identify the need for change and to muster the will to change. Indeed, change is a continuing theme of the MindingGaps blog, for change is the currency of leadership.

In my own experience, most companies do want to change either their culture, or their operations, or their performance. Yet few actually change as much or as fast as they wish.

It is true that some recognize no need to change, so they never even set out to change. Others say they want to change when they actually do not. Many others genuinely want to change but do not know how. And many, many others seek to control and constrain their path of change, rather than create a culture of self-energizing and self-sustaining change that can redefine their marketplace. Over-engineering change can have the effect of stifling it altogether.

In any case, companies that are most in need of change but refuse to do anything about it are those that most risk being forgotten or marginalized in the years ahead. Anyone my side of 40 can name brands or products that are scarcely known to young people today—CompuServe, the Sony Walkman, Oldsmobile, Pan-Am, Schlitz, the DC-10, Zenith, Gourmet, camera film and slide projectors, DEC computers—and dozens of companies that are now subsidiaries or mere historical footnotes: Maytag, Gillette, TWA, Amoco, McDonnell Douglas, NCR, Ameritech, Warner-Lambert, A.G. Edwards, and so many more.

Even among extant companies, the tales of coulda-woulda-shoulda read like ghosts from a Dickens novel. I think of Xerox, whose share of the copier market plummeted from 90 percent in the 1970s to just 20 percent in the 1980s after Japanese manufacturers began selling better machines at lower prices. I think of IBM, which was so busy selling Selectric typewriters that it took a pass on the operating system and applications for personal computers, and instead let a couple of college dropouts start a cute little company they called Microsoft. I think of Blockbuster and Sears and Border's, whose stores today are almost empty.

On the other hand, there is Apple, which has changed radically, and there is Google, whose culture is all about innovation, and there is Ford Motor Co., which is leading a resurgence of American auto manufacturing, and there is Amazon, which is becoming an online main street. American Express and Wells Fargo both got their start running stage coaches across the West, and today they are vibrant and dynamic. Even IBM has learned from its mistakes and reinvented itself.

The CEO of a Fortune 25 company put it well in an inspiring 1993 speech to his senior leadership team: "We need to embrace change—not for its own sake but for our sake. We must understand that the world isn't standing still and that we can't stand still either. People and organizations that delude themselves into thinking they do not need to change are on a course of self-absorption and self-destruction. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company, history is full of giants that failed to adapt."

The choice we face isn't merely between changing and not changing. The choice is between changing and dying. Indeed, in these times of rampant mergers and acquisitions, the choice is as much between changing and being eaten alive for breakfast by a competitor.

It's just that sometimes, the mere thought of change is so intimidating, it is paralyzing. I know. I have been there.

 

Coming on Monday

Finding Strength in Uncertainty

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Leadership Lesson from Elvis

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I'll take a lesson in leadership wherever I can find it. The other day, I found one while listening to a golden oldie on my iPod, and it came from Elvis Presley.

The song was "Suspicious Minds," written by Mark James, who also wrote "Hooked On a Feeling" for B.J. Thomas and "Always On My Mind" for Willie Nelson. Of course, Elvis burned "Suspicious Minds" into our collective consciousness. It is one of the truly great popular songs ever produced.

You can probably sing the lyrics from memory:

 

Why can't you see

What you're doing to me

When you don't believe a word I say?

We can't go on together

With suspicious minds

And we can't build our dreams

With suspicious minds. . . .

 

Now, plainly these lyrics have to do with a rocky romance. But with a little imagination you can see striking parallels to a dysfunctional corporate culture, too.

In many industries, the collapse of the implied contract after decades of widespread downsizing and offshoring, along with sporadic instances of financial malfeasance and chicanery, has decimated the trust, confidence, and affinity in business that everyone took for granted a couple of generations ago. (Other institutions, particularly government, have fared even worse. That's another issue altogether.)

Perhaps your industry and your company have emerged relatively unscathed. Nonetheless, the social carnage that other companies have left in their wake is problematic for you. All companies find it difficult to enlist the enthusiastic support of employees who suspect they are getting, or who expect to be getting, the short end of the stick. (Note: Whether or not employees are actually being shortchanged is irrelevant, for perceptions and expectations are everything. The only objective reality is someone's subjective reality; the perception or expectation of distrust is the fact of distrust.)

Any organization whose culture is characterized more by suspicion than by trust, confidence, and affinity is not likely to succeed for long at much of anything. In a strong economy, it can float on a rising tide. But when times turn difficult, or when competition or innovation redefines the marketplace, the same company will very likely encounter more than its share of difficulty.

Further, for a couple of very compelling reasons, a culture of suspicion can readily grow out of the managerial process itself. It's a little like noxious weeds sprouting in a well-tended garden of rich, fertile loam.

For one thing, good managers will focus on meeting pre-determined expectations: a budget, a quota, a deadline, or a standard. So they are usually on the lookout for any early sign of failure, in order to correct it in time. But their constant, anxious vigilance can be seen by employees as doubt or even distrust in them. Some employees will take it personally and return the volley with doubt and distrust of their own. Their distrust can become a contagion.

For another thing, many managers rely on the legal authority of their position, and the asymmetrical power it reflects, for their moral authority. These managers are often disinclined to invest the extra time and attentiveness it takes to nurture relationships with subordinates, especially at the ground level. Goodness knows, managers are already too busy. But the absence of frequent, casual, authentic face-to-face conversation is another dynamic that can breed a sense of distance and suspicion among employees. Again, what goes around comes around.

Managers and employees alike would both be better off to acknowledge the difficulty but also the enormous value of trust in the workplace. As the song goes, you can't build your dreams with suspicious minds. In a culture of distrust, everyone loses.

Elvis may have left the building, but his voice is ever echoing off the walls.

 

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Four Rules for Growing Engagement

 

We will be on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Here are four important rules any organization can follow to build a culture of engagement, so that employees welcome change and can break on through to the next level:

• Make sure everyone on your staff knows and understands the strategic direction, customer expectations, competitive pressures, operating sensitivities, and day-to-day priorities. Insist on clear line of sight between everyone's job and the organization's strategies. Use the word "customer" only in reference to the ultimate, external customer, and make certain that the customer's reasons for choosing your organization over a competitor in the marketplace are clear. Share metrics and strategic information promptly and directly.
• Create an atmosphere of critical and creative thinking about the business. Encourage collaboration and the open, free exchange of ideas and suggestions. Be certain there is a safe harbor for tough questions that can even strike you as impertinent. Ask deep, probing questions about the business, and invite everyone to a dialogue around them. Above all, avoid any implication of punishing the messenger for the message.
• Recognize that people find motivation both in reasons that reach their mind and emotions that touch their heart. Communication that enables an organization to meet its commitments is usually the stuff of prose: dry, factual, logical. Communication that enables people to reach their full potential is often the stuff of poetry—not of poems per se, but an inspiring and evocative narrative that celebrates and encourages ordinary people to go to extraordinary lengths for something important to the soul. People want and need this.
• Prize fresh thinking. Maintain a safe harbor for suggestions and tough questions about the business and even your own leadership. Welcome unorthodox ideas. Teach everyone how to build on someone else's kernel of creativity. Ask not just why something should be done by why it couldn't or shouldn't be done. Encourage people to experiment. Remove barriers to the casual, quick exchange of information and insights. Always be looking for the next big thing.

By following these four rules, you will find yourself creating much more focus, curiosity, passion, and courage in the workplace. That's important, for, as we have said over and over in this space, nothing of much significance has ever been achieved, and nothing of much value has ever been invented or developed, without a lot of focus, a lot of curiosity, a lot of passion, and a lot of courage.

 

Coming on Friday

A Leadership Lesson from Elvis Presley

(c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

What Is a Meme, Anyway? And Why Should Leaders Care?

by Thomas J. Lee

Yesterday I was going through a cardboard box of old clippings, which I was saving for a very important but (ahem) very forgotten reason, when I came across an 11-year-old Wall Street Journal article headlined "The Words of Tomorrow." It offered definitions for words and phrases that we would need to survive in the 21st Century.

Some of these words and phrases have rapidly come into common use in the decade since: identity theft, time suck, and Frankenfood. Others were near misses: blosphere, for what we now refer to as the blogosphere. Still others deserve wider usage, such as voice novel, for an endless voice-mail message, and 404, for clueless (from the Internet error message). Of course, the article could make no mention of words or phrases that were yet to be coined—app, smart phone, or social media—that would become part of our vernacular with lightning speed.

One entry caught my eye. It is a word I see with irritating frequency online, usually on sites devoted to technology and media—but only online. I have never seen the word in print—on paper, that is—other than in this Wall Street Journal list. Apparently that is because I never read Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which is now on my Kindle wish list, and which introduced the word to readers who apparently saw no particular need to adopt and use it. Thirty-five years later, maybe they still don't.

The irritating word is memes, which the Journal's glossary defined as "building blocks of culture, similar to genes but passed on by imitation, not heredity." The Journal cited examples of memes such as "tunes, ideas, catch phrases." A meme may be technology (a way of building arches, for example) or a belief (in life after death, for example), or any other concept, preference, habit, or what have you—in other words, it is anything that can be copied from one person's mind to another's person's.

For a long time, whenever I came across this word online I winced. Though short and arguably useful, it struck me as pretentious and obnoxious. Maybe that's because it was never accompanied by a brief definition. It was just there, an ugly verbal scar. I didn't quite understand it, and I saw no need to try.

I have gotten over that, and I now do see some use for this word. Not that I will begin using it—especially without defining it—but I do think it can be useful in certain contexts, one of which is gaining insight into leadership.

For anyone interested in the management and leadership of large organizations, applying the concept of memes to leadership helps us understand the importance of leadership development up, down, and across an organization.

Altogether too many people, many of them managers and leaders themselves, are walking around with an outdated meme of leadership. They think of leadership as the sole responsibility of executive-level administration, and conversely they see management as the province of middle tiers and front-line supervision. This coarse distinction shows up even in the pages of the Harvard Business Review.

The outdated meme creates two problems. First, it tends to remove senior management from the gritty, day-to-day reality of the company. Not that all senior managers become remote, but many of them do. Second, it absolves the middle and lower tiers of a company's administration from active responsibility for change, for they are likely to see themselves not as engines of change but as mere cogs on the gears.

A newer and better meme of leadership is to think of it not in terms of a hierarchy or a pecking order at all, but rather as work—as responsibilities, as tasks, and especially as communication. The rival responsibilities of leadership and management leverage each other, but they are fundamentally different.

In this meme, the work of management is all about ensuring steady, reliable, consistent performance. A manager who is managing well is ensuring the performance of a team to certain predetermined expectations.

If the expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing something or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety. When it involves making or selling or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges around production processes, contractual obligations, legal procedures and requirements, ethics standards, cultural imperatives, and much more.

When successful, management creates alignment. Alignment is the deliverable or work product of good management. It is the equivalence of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of leadership. It is the product of management.

Further in the same meme, the work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. Leadership is all about change. A leader who is leading well is successfully bringing about a particular, big change, either culturally or operationally.

Leadership entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and supporting change—attitudinal or behavioral—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people, and often in an environment of uncertainty and risk to oneself.

The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.

When successful, leadership creates engagement. Engagement is the deliverable or work product of good leadership. It is the predicate of change. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership throughout the organization.

This, then, is the new meme of leadership we need to spread: Good leadership creates people engagement. Good management creates people alignment. Both are important. Companies need engagement to change, and they need alignment to fulfill their commitments. Clarifying and exploring that distinction, it seems to me, should be the first task of any leadership development initiative.

 

For the few of you who want to read more on the concept of memes,

here is the Wikipedia entry, and here is a link to amazon.com, where you can buy

a copy of Richard Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.

 

Coming on Friday

 When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

The Irony of the Non-Essential Boss

by Thomas J. Lee

Whenever a snowstorm paralyzes the U.S. capital, the word goes out that non-essential government workers should stay home.

That begs a few questions. What makes an employee non-essential? Why is the government even employing anyone who isn't essential? And how does it feel to be labeled anything less than essential?

I can't imagine it feels very good. Even recognizing that the non-essential workers plainly get the better part of the deal on a snow day—they can take their kids skating and sledding—who would want to be labeled non-essential?

Isn't that akin to be called trivial? Unimportant? Insignificant?

Here's the irony for managers and team leaders in the private sector—or, for that matter, in the public sector and the social (or non-profit) sector. Managers and team leaders should actually strive to be non-essential. They should take pride in becoming non-essential.

For a manager or a team leader, becoming non-essential means that the people on their team have the priorities, competencies, attitude, and initiative to do what their manager or team leader would want them to do anyway. There is no difference in the work they do. It is the same as if the boss were present. If anything, it is even a tad better because it is more adaptive to new circumstances.

That doesn't mean the managers or team leaders are suddenly irrelevant. To the contrary, they are all the more vital to the process, because they are using their own position and leadership more comprehensively and more proactively. They are free to think and work more strategically, too.

So if you're a manager or a team leader, commit yourself to becoming non-essential. You will be doing your people and your organization a big service.

 

Coming on Wednesday

Why Do Memes Matter to Leaders? 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Doubt and Fear, the Hobgoblins of Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Mr. Doubt and Mr. Fear were hitchhiking alongside the highway. They looked forsaken: dirty, dreary, dangerous. Car after car passed them by.

After only a few minutes Mr. Doubt declared: "I doubt that we will get to the town where are going. We may as well give up and begin walking there."

Mr. Fear replied: "I am afraid it is too far for us to walk. We should stay put."

An hour went by. Then another hour, and another hour. Gradually, the traffic thinned, and the sun began to set.

Finally, Mr. Fear declared: "I am fearful of staying out here much longer. We are cold, and we are getting hungry."

Mr. Doubt nodded.

So they picked up and bags and unhappily headed back to where they had come from, never to reach their destination.

Not once did they look at each other or at themselves and ask the obvious question: Who would stop to give such awful looking characters a ride?

M any of us wrestle with doubt and fear at some point, but few of us realize the damage these nefarious travelers can do.

Doubt and fear are the hobgoblins of change. They invite defeat and failure. They see barriers that do not exist. They preach mediocrity and stagnation. They reach for nothing, and they achieve nothing. They offer succor to cyncism, for they teach the expectation of cannot.

Because they expect they cannot, they do not; and they never realize why not.

Individuals who are filled with doubt and fear are their own barrier to success. Organizations that tolerate too many such persons will risk developing a culture of doubt and fear. Their best days will soon be behind them.

If this sounds like a person or an organization you know, the first thing to do is recognize the situation for the danger it poses. Point out the toxicity of cynicism, and campaign for hope and confidence. You may or may not succeed, but at least you will have a chance that you otherwise would not.

 

Coming on Monday

The Irony of the Non-Essential Boss

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Does Accountability Actually Thwart Your Potential?

by Thomas J. Lee

Probably every business manager regards accountability as an invisible but veritable whip, which ensures that people actually do what they're supposed to do.

Without accountability, the assumption holds, managers would have no way of enforcing standards of any sort. Things would be a big mess.

That certainly seems logical. But what if we were to substitute an ethic of opportunity for our reliance on accountability? What if we were to make more use of the carrot and less use of the stick?

On a large scale, what if we were to think and talk more about our potential and less about our problems? If we were to get away from "the burning platform" and instead dream more of "the promised land"?

Would people necessarily ignore deadlines, budgets, blueprints, recipes, parameters, or instructions of any sort? Would they refuse to change?

For now, it's just a hypothetical. But give it some thought.

My instinct, and perhaps yours, is that it would indeed create some real headaches. It would complicate and confound things.

But here's the thing: My experience is different. I have a hunch my instinct is wrong.

In my experience, people want to be about solutions. They are drawn to big opportunities. Daniel Burnham once declared: "Make no little plans, for they have no magic to stir men's souls." That does indeed seem to be true, and it holds important lessons for anyone who aspires to lead.

In the workshops I run, we always ask the managers in the room to describe the coolest project or team they ever worked on. They are free to cite any example from their entire life, as long as it is true. It can be something in business or something in their personal life.

Their examples are fascinating. Most of them are from business, but some are from coaching Little League teams, or singing in a church choir, or starting a business of their own, or raising up a child, or earning an advanced degree, or serving in a military conflict or on an emergency rescue.

The thing that all the best stories have in common is a large, quasi-spiritual reward, a huge emotional return that people experience from accomplishing an ambitious goal, or from being of service to the community, or from finding an inner fortitude they didn't realize they had, or from simply working on an important project with other dedicated, talented people.

They remember these experiences in detail forever. Forever!

Moreover, few managers use negative words to describe the experience. Few dwell on the problem they encountered and set out to solve. Nor do they cite the application of technical expertise or the availability of ample resources. They don't talk about those things. It would be too small, too mundane.

Rather, they choose to speak of the achievement itself, of the resourcefulness or creativity or perseverance of the team, or of the collaboration they experienced on something so big.

Maybe, if we were to focus more on opportunity and less on accountability, we would all go a lot further together. Just maybe.

 

Coming on Monday

25 Years of Incredible, Exhilarating Change

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

by Thomas J. Lee

As companies come to recognize the importance and value of the full engagement of their employees, they are increasingly inclined to measure it, chiefly by means of surveys.

However, unless and until they agree on a workable definition of engagement that ties it to their strategic priorities, companies cannot be certain just what it is they are measuring. That must change.

I favor a four-part definition of engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. Further, I regard engagement as the deliverable, the work product, of good leadership.

Thus, when we measure engagement properly, we are measuring the extent to which the people of an organization:

• are recognizing, acknowledging, and focusing on a leadership direction
• are exploring, thinking through, and grasping the implications and repercussions of that direction on their work
• are embracing and championing that direction, and
• are adopting it as their own responsibility, their own mission, their own opportunity, and eventually their own legacy.

Ultimately, we are thus measuring the extent to which the people of an organization are engaged in the strategic work of the enterprise.

To my thinking, a survey instrument that doesn't return data on these four variables isn't really doing the heavy lifting that a company needs. Just my two cents. 

 

Coming on Friday

Accountability versus Opportunity

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Precisely What Is Employee Engagement? And What Isn't It?

by Thomas J. Lee

Many companies have begun to take the engagement of their employees as a serious strategic imperative, and that's a good thing.

I fear, however, that quite a few companies regard engagement as just another kind of "positive mental attitude," in the words of the late American insurance magnate W. Clement Stone. These companies are not yet perfectly clear as to just what people engagement is, how it resembles and differs from other kinds of PMA, and why it is so very, very important.

Until we gain clarity around the definition and singular importance of engagement, the imperative of engagement won't sink its roots deep into the work and ethic of leadership. Rather, it will be widely regarded and marginalized as "soft" stuff, not truly material to the company's success. It will likely be seen as the next closest thing to a fad, and it will be in danger of fading as quickly as it arrived. That will be tragic.

So as a public service, we are here to clear up the confusion. Today we will distinguish between engagement and other kinds PMA—all of which are better than their opposites, of course. In particular, we will distinguish engagement from commitment, loyalty, morale, satisfaction, and especially alignment. They're all good things, but they aren't the same.

Trumpets, please:

• You can think of real commitment in the workplace as doing whatever it takes, and perhaps more, to satisfy the customer and therefore the enterprise within the constraints of safety, the law, fairness, and ethical decency. People who demonstrate commitment make sure they follow through. They do what they say they will do—no excuses.
• In contrast, loyalty is the disposition of employees to continue serving the needs of their employer in an honest, productive manner in exchange for agreed-upon compensation. It is the unwritten workplace contract. Employees who are loyal are generally not devoting much time and energy to looking for new opportunities, unless they have a reason (a pending merger or staff reduction that imperils their job security, for example).
• For our purposes, employee morale and employee satisfaction are synonymous; if there is a distinction between them, it is so subtle as to be meaningless. We think of both morale and satisfaction as the degree of happiness or contentment that employees derive from their employment. That may be a function of their compensation, benefits, workplace conditions, stress, personal and professional relationships at work, employment security, and the opportunity to learn new skills and take on more responsibility. It may also reflect their personal circumstances such as financial security, home life, health, activities, spirituality, and fitness.
• By employee alignment, we mean the reliable performance of duties necessary for the organization to meet the expectations of its customers, most commonly in terms of product quality, delivery and service requirements, production and sales quotas, and work processes. We think of alignment as the deliverable, or work product, of good management.
• Finally, we define people engagement as the discretionary effort—the focus, the curiosity, the passion, and the courage—that employees may or may not bring to their work in support and service to the organization's purpose and its customers. When we see commitment in action, we often call it "going the extra mile." We think of engagement as the deliverable, or work product, of good leadership. Often, and most significantly, the work of leadership involves asking and inspiring employees to mount this discretionary effort in times of great uncertainty and in circumstances of considerable risk to the employee's personal security and well-being.

To grasp fully the distinction between alignment and engagement, we recommend you read our February 16, 2011 post. You will find it here, or just scroll down a few pages.

To appreciate the importance and value of building employee engagement, we recommend you read our posts on March 7, 2011, on January 14, 2011, and on September 3, 2010. 

 

Coming on Monday

Leadership Lessons of I Love Lucy

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Microvision Statements for Collateral Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

Many of us regard vision statements as the province of the CEO and the board of directors. That's only natural, as vision statements set forth an ideal future state for their entire enterprise. 

But collateral leaders throughout the organization can use microvision statements to advance their own leadership, too. By microvision statement, we just mean a vision statement with a tight field of view. It paints a vivid picture of an ideal future for only a part of an organization.

Any leader at any level of any organization can use a microvision statement to describe an ideal future state for a subset of the enterprise, be it a division, a department, a team, even an individual—perhaps for the leader himself or herself.

Don't confuse microvision with micromanagement. Microvision is useful and conducive to leadership, and the best people on your team will generally appreciate the effort. Micromanagement—a manager's overbearing and distrustful meddling in the day-to-day work of individuals—is destructive and corrosive to leadership. The best people on your team will resent it.

Micro or macro, a good vision can be worth gold. While the worst vision statements are riddled with clichés and rhetorical flatulence, the best are noble, inspiring, even glorious. They are very, very powerful, too.

For one thing, a well-crafted vision statement brings everyone together on the same page, and it gives everyone a mental image of success. That imagery enables people to order their work around a crystal-clear picture that energizes and directs them. It's like having a compass, a battery pack, and a talking map all in one.

A good vision does more than that though. It gives you a means of testing your stated values against a picture of the future. Does your vision rest on the bedrock of your values as applied in the real world? It should. If it doesn't, then it's just counterfeit currency.

Moreover, a good vision lets you deduce the appropriate strategies and tactics that can make the vision a reality, and it inspires you and your colleagues to go to extraordinary lengths on its behalf. Finally, it serves as a useful landscape for milestones that help you measure and assess your progress.

To do and be all that, a vision must be specific to its business and social context. It must get beyond the boilerplate that so many organizations settle for. It must reach for the stars, but more than that, point to the North Star as a beacon. That is true for macrovision and microvision statements alike. 

Microvision statements need not be florid or evocative, and they most certainly should not be replete with clichés, as many of their bigger siblings are. Indeed, these small-bore vision statements may not be narratives at all. They may come closer to a matrix, a little spreadsheet, or even a Gantt chart than to a descriptive narrative.

To begin thinking about a microvision for just a piece of the enterprise, take the bigger enterprise vision statement (the macrovision) and extract its essence. List its key phrases and translate them to real day-to-day work. Look for parallels here to the work you and your team do or can be doing. Then imagine, or envision, what the result of that work would be. Describe it in detail. Now give some thought to exactly how you and your team make it real. In other words, what does the enterprise vision become in your hands?

See? It's easier than you thought.

Before you go too far, make sure you understand the difference between a vision, a goal, and an objective. To borrow a metaphor from sports, the vision is tantamount to the visual image of players hoisting a trophy and parading down Main Street after winning the championship. In contrast, a goal is winning more games than the other team. The objective is winning today's game or even just scoring a point.

Now some of you may prefer a structure to the traditional narrative of a vision statement. That, too, is fine. Here's a structure you can use for a microvision.

On a single sheet of paper, draw a 3x3 matrix with each of the nine cells large enough for 25 to 35 words. Across the top, label the three columns with years. Choose the years that make sense for you and your team. Young people and mature organizations (trust me, that isn't the paradox it may appear to be) will want long-range years—say five, ten, and twenty years out. Older people and startups or turnaround companies will want short-range years—perhaps one, two, and three years out.

Down the left side, label the three rows Have, Do, and Be. Thus the top row captures what you or your team want to have (that you do not already have) by each of the years you listed. The middle row describes what you want to do or be doing (again, that you have not already done) by each year. The bottom row identifies who you want to be (that you are not yet) by each year.

Invest a lot of thought in this. Let it evolve. Give yourself permission to change it over time. As it does change, however, be sure to think critically about why you are changing it. Is it because you are growing? Because you have shrunk from your challenges? Because your interests have changed? Because other people have come into your personal life or joined your team at work? Because new opportunities have opened up?

One final point. Allow your vision, even a microvision, to be large. Let it be big. Let it be grand. That is what a vision should be and must be so that it can inspire. Small things are just small, but something big must be reckoned with. It demands to be.

Just be sure to do the work that follows, the work of bringing your vision down to earth. Give it legs. Then get on with the work of making it real.

 

Coming on Friday

My Love-Hate Relationship with Wikipedia

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Hidden Barriers to Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Many business leaders have convinced themselves that real and sustainable change is impossible, that people just won't change.

Fortunately, they are wrong. People will change. They do change.

The evidence is all around. Any of you who are parents of high-school seniors know just how eagerly they were awaiting word on admission to their first and second choice of colleges last month. Any of you who have found yourselves a little chubby weeks before a class reunion are familiar with that four-letter word d-i-e-t. Any of you who have fallen in love have looked forward to your wedding day.

People take up new hobbies and sports. They take out 30-year mortgages for a house. They earn graduate degrees in the evening and on weekends. They quit smoking. They buy used cars. They have children. They sign up for Facebook.

That doesn't mean large-scale change in business (or other organizations, for that matter) is easy. It does mean that change is possible and even within reach.

Still, there are hidden barriers to change. So very often, those barriers lie within us.

They are the reluctance to let go, to delegate, to trust. They are the refusal to listen to unpleasant information. They are overweening confidence, bordering on arrogance. They are the inability or unwillingness to manage ourselves in such a way that we authenticate the change we have articulated.

If, and when, we identify and overcome these hidden barriers, we will finally be able to connect with people and engage them on a journey of change. We will, that is to say, finally be able to lead. 

 

Coming on Wednesday

Microvision Statements for Collateral Leaders

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Road from Obligation to Opportunity

by Thomas J. Lee

Whenever you feel burdened by an obligation, simply reframe it as an opportunity.

Set aside your misgivings about the obligation. Disregard any questions as to whether this obligation really belongs on your shoulders.

Instead, view the situation as an opportunity to make a lasting impression, to lend a helping hand, to rise to the occasion, to be someone special, to make the world a better place for us all.

You will find it to be a liberating experience. It removes the oppressive weight of must, and it lifts your spirit with can.

Suddenly, as if by magic, the burden and weight of obligation disappears, and a bequest, a fortune, of glorious opportunity presents itself. You quickly realize that the world is indeed a better place, in no small part because of you.

 

Coming on Monday

The Hidden Barrier to Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Masters, Golf, and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

by Thomas J. Lee

This week the best golfers in the world converge on Augusta, Georgia, to compete in The Masters. It is a special event in sports. You need not be a golfer—I myself haven't swung a driver in 22 years—indeed, you need not even enjoy sports to find special beauty in the magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas of the Augusta National Golf Course and in the glorious traditions of The Masters.

There's just one problem with major golf tournaments and with golf in general. They give license to so many executives to use this wonderful game as a metaphor, absurd though it is, for business performance.

Sooner or later almost every manager will find himself in a town-hall meeting or a skip-level luncheon or an after-dinner speech when a senior executive—his own boss, perhaps—begins to wax eloquent on golf as the perfect comparison for business. Maybe the speaker will even step away from the lectern and pretend to size up that 20-foot putt for a birdie on the 18th hole, and then go on to expound on the parallels between golf and business. That's what we mean by using golf as a metaphor for business.

By metaphor we are not referring to clichés, which are another problem altogether. A cliché is just an overused and typically tin-sounding word or phrase that has lost whatever zest it once had. Business is full of clichés, too: walking the talk, win-win solution, thinking outside the box, synergy, paradigm shift, pushing the envelope, today's highly competitive marketplace, proactive, a perfect storm, leverage—and we're just getting started. There are hundreds of them, Lord help us all.

In contrast, metaphors can be good or bad. A metaphor (and its like-as cousin, the simile) is a comparison for the sake of shedding light on something. Executives who use golf as a metaphor for business success are trying to be creative, and that is fine. We like creativity.

Some common metaphors in business work well. Low-hanging fruit refers to easy, early solutions. A well-oiled machine suggests an operation running smoothly. Tip of the iceberg conjures up a superficial observation. What these metaphors lack in creativity they make up in clarity and color.

Golf, however, is a perfectly awful metaphor in business. It is awful because there are no real parallels between performance in business and performance in golf. What matters in business has nothing to do with what matters in golf. Looking for parallels between business and golf is like looking for similarities between mollusks and molecules. 

I do realize that millions of people enjoy golf, and that is certainly their privilege. They may think of it as a social sport because they golf in twosomes and foursomes, and afterward they enjoy lunch or drinks and dinner. Moreover, many parents (including my own) have taken delight in teaching their children to golf, and it becomes a wonderful family activity. All good.

But the sport of golf is a solitary enterprise. It requires intense concentration, hushed silence, and perfect form, and it is so very leisurely. It isn't noisy or messy, and it certainly isn't fast. It does not require collaboration or innovation or engagement or teamwork or agility or communication of any sort—all of which are essential components of business performance. Conducting an orchestra comes closer to running a business than golf ever can. For that matter, a Saturday night jazz quartet is more like a business than a Saturday morning foursome is.

Another bad metaphor is "human capital." Companies commonly refer to the people who work for them as human capital. Please.

I understand the different kinds of capital: economic, physical, intellectual, social. But something repugnant, thoroughly repugnant, happens when we juxtapose the words "human" and "capital."

Substitute the word "chattel" for the word "capital" and you begin to see it. Then take another small step to "indentured servitude" and—well, you can see where I am going with this. As every youngster in the United States learns in school, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were supposed to put an end to thinking of people as capital. It's about time business caught up.

Similarly, many companies think they are saying something good and decent and noble when they tout employees as "our most important asset."

I am all in favor of declaring that people are important, but they are not and never can be an asset. An asset is something you own and control. No business owns its people, and when a company thinks it can control people, it is in for a rude surprise.

The fact is that any employee can quit and go to work for the competition any day of the week. A machine or a forklift or a trademark cannot do that. They are assets. People are people. People have legs and pride and souls, and they can walk across the street. They do, too.

One other metaphor, so innocent and even noble in its intent, is actually problematic as well. It is likening the people of a business to a family. "We're just like a family around here," so many CEOs are in the habit of saying.

This metaphor has the same issue as golf has: It just isn't true. An office or a factory may feel like a family because you spend so much time with the same people, and perhaps everyone even has everyone else's back. That is fine as far as it goes, but sooner or later the similarities end.

Here's the bucket of ice water: Families are forever. Companies are not. Families thrive on love and devotion. Companies thrive on revenue and income.

It is true that divorce can ruin a family just as bankruptcy can ruin a business. But companies must make tough but honorable decisions that can have devastating repercussions for some employees. Families make tough but honorable decisions so they can stay together, laugh together, love together. The two are not and cannot be the same.

I probably sound like a curmudgeon today, and that is not my intent. I applaud anyone who struggles with articulating a vision or values or the essence of a workplace. It isn't easy, I know.

But all four of these metaphors are bad because they are emphatically untrue or because they inadvertently undermine the dignity of people or because they promise something they cannot always deliver. With just a little more thought, you can do better.

So enjoy The Masters this week. Enjoy as much golf as you can this summer. Just don't think of this wonderful sport as a metaphor for anything in business, especially performance and success. And the next time someone uses one of those other metaphors, give him a link to this blog.

 

Coming on Friday

From Obligation to Opportunity

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Are You More Controlling or Collaborating?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Some of you are the type of managers who want to make sure everything is just so. You know better than anyone else, or at least think you do, how things should be, and you insist on making them just that way. Nothing out of place. Nothing awry. Everything perfect.

Others of you are the type of managers who recognize you cannot possibly attend to every detail, and you cannot possibly know everything about every situation anyway. You make sure other people know your vision, your values, and your priorities. From there you trust them to use their good judgment.

If you put the first type of manager at the left end of a spectrum, and the second type of manager at the right end, which are you closer to?

What does that say for the impact and resilience of your leadership?

 

Coming on Wednesday

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved. 

Few Companies Have a Bias for Innovation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In your personal and professional relationships, are you more inclined to look for excuses to say yes or reasons to say no?

In my experience, too many business people look for reasons to say no. They say no to customers. They say no to suggestions. They say no to innovation.

Largely because of their propensity to say no, they don't try out enough new ideas, and they keep on doing the same old thing in the same old way.

What a shame. Hubris never opens the door to tomorrow.

 

Coming Wednesday

A Closer Look at Trust

 

© Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} The Tyranny of Meetings

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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. Formerly known as By the Numbers, it appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception in mid-2009, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The popular humor columnist Dave Barry once remarked that if you could summarize in a single word the reason civilization hasn't made more progress, the single word would be meetings.

Probably almost everyone with a job would agree. Many people spend much or even most of their day in meetings, and few meetings have the satisfying air of getting something, anything, done.

In fact, Bain & Company research has found that two out of every three meetings end before participants can make important decisions, and 85 percent of business executives say they are dissatified with the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings in their organizations.

I like to remind myself that some of the most important things in history happened in meetings: writing the Magna Carta, signing of the Declaration of Independence, and adopting the Bill of Rights. Granted, that's only three meetings in a thousand years, but it's a start.

 

Coming Wednesday

A Closer Look at Trust

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires Affinity With People

(Part Three of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility)

 

by Thomas J. Lee

You can slice and dice leadership in a lot of ways. One useful way is to distinguish between transactional and transformational leadership. This distinction is both important and instructive, for it helps shed light on the role of affinity in the work of leadership.

As you will recall from the first two articles in this series, a bond of affinity is one of the three cornerstones of robust credibility, which is essential for leadership. The other cornerstones are organic respect and authentic trust. We addressed respect last Wednesday, and we will look at trust next Wednesday. Today we will examine affinity.

Transactional leadership is a quid pro quo: You, as a leader, are asking me, a potential follower, to do (or refrain from doing) this thing in exchange for that thing: either a reward or a penalty as the case may be. It is a transaction, like a purchase or a barter. It is based on the classical behaviorist thinking of B.F. Skinner. Rational, thinking people do that for which they are rewarded, and they avoid doing that for which they are punished.

Usually, transactional leadership has a specific purpose and a tightly focused bore. It often reaches for changes in personal behavioral patterns: earning a sales commission or losing weight or doing household chores as a child. Still, in certain circumstances it can be highly productive on a large scale. A few prominent examples are offering the GI Bill of Rights for World War II veterans, or persuading people to quit smoking, or inoculating millions of people against a disease. 

Transformational leadership is different. It is an inspired, emotional journey of change. It is big, and it is all about a better tomorrow. It doesn't offer anything in compensation for the dedication to a cause, because the cause is its own reward. Think of people flocking to the polls on Election Day in support of a candidate, or donating money to a favorite charity, or protesting a government policy, or boycotting a company's products.

The thing of it is, even transformational leadership must address the WIIFM question: what's in it for me? If the only or the primary beneficiary of the change is the leader, and if the potential follower is out in the cold, then people will be much less willing to go along on the journey. Rather, the transformational leader must demonstrate that he appreciates and shares the interests, needs, and concerns of the people he seeks to inspire and lead. He can lead only if, and to the extent that, he does.

All this is the fodder of what we call affinity. By affinity, we mean an important bond between leader and followers that recognizes and respects their individual interests, needs, and concerns, even and especially in transformational situations. The hand is never far from the head and heart.

Apart from someone under the hypnotic spell of a cult, no one willingly follows a leader whose purpose, passions, and priorities run counter to their own. Rather, people look for a leader who is compatible with their own well-being. What is important to the leader must be, or must become, important to the people she would lead, and vice versa.

Moreover, the mutuality of interests, needs, and concerns is the foundational clay of something we call nobility of intent. In the context of transformational change, followers decide for themselves whether a would-be leader is a person of noble intent and thus worthy of following. It is important for any transformational leader to realize that followers, and followers only, pass judgment on the leader's nobility of intent. It is never, and it never can be, a matter for leaders to decide.

Now a word of caution. My thinking on leadership is decidedly Western, and it is heavily imbued with an American and (lower-case d) democratic frame of reference. It does not necessarily hold true universally, as I am reminded from time to time.

Once I spoke to a conference in Africa. Afterward, a well-dressed gentleman from Nigeria (if memory serves) approached me and explained that, in his country, leaders are strongmen who rule by fear. No strength, no fear. No fear, no leadership.

I acknowledged the limits of my thinking. On further reflection later, I had to admit that, certainly in extenuating circumstances, the Nigerian gentleman's equation can prevail even in a Western environment.

In a turbulent situation—a pitched clash of factions in a street gang, perhaps, or a tussle on a school playground, or the violence of an urban riot, or an insurrection, or a military battle—power and ultimately the mantle of leadership can accrue to whoever is perceived the strongest. In those circumstances, though, people are choosing more as a matter of survival. It is the rawest kind of transactional leadership: You get to reign, I get to live.

But all that just proves the rule, it seems to me. Far more often than not, we are seeking to lead or deciding whether to follow in a transformational context, and that requires an alignment of interests, needs, and concerns that enable people to acknowledge the leader's noble intent and to choose to follow in part because of it. Leaders who ignore this will be unable to forge or sustain a leadership direction. 

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} We Have the Data on Meetings

 

Coming next Wednesday

A Closer Look at Trust

 

© Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   Arceil Leadership Ltd.

What Is Your Change Quotient?

by Thomas J. Lee

Everyone is familiar with IQ, and anyone who keeps up with popular psychology is familiar with EQ, a parallel calculation based not on cognitive ability but on emotional intelligence.

Today we are introducing another, similar metric. We call it CQ, for change quotient. It reflects neither intellectual capability nor emotional strength. Rather, it measures capacity for change.

You apply it not to individuals but to whole organizations. It measures how much and how well your entire company (or association, or team, or batallion, or garage band, or whatever) is changing, not how well a particular person is doing.

It is only intended as a rough, quick measure. What it lacks in academic rigor, it makes up in ease and convenience.

Here is how it works.

Just poll a cross-section of managers and employees. Ask them all to give the entire organization three subjective scores between 1 and 5—whole numbers only, the better their assessment the higher the number—on how fast it moves through change, how much it needs to continue or begin changing, and how wise or prudent its present course of change is.

Add the three numbers together; the sum will be a whole number between 3 and 15. Multiply it by 10. We'll call it A. This is your numerator.

Now invite the same people to answer the same questions about your competition generally. Ask them to assign a single score to all the entities in your marketplace (despite the likelihood of variability among them), giving any benefit of the doubt to better and faster-changing companies, as they are setting the pace for the future. You are seeking a composite score for the entire marketplace.

Calculate it similarly (taking care to multiply the sum by 10, just as you did before) and write it down. Let's call it B. This is your denominator.

Now divide A by B and multiply by 100. The result is your CQ, your change quotient.

Theoretically, it can be as little as 20 and as high as 500. We expect most companies to score somewhere between 50 and 200.

A score of 100 would mean that, in the view of the employees you polled, your company is just keeping up.

The higher the score, and especially if it is well into the triple figures, the faster you are already changing relative to your competitors, the more your people recognize the need to change, and the more likely your change is on course.

The lower your score, and especially if it is mired deep in the double digits, the less all that is true, and the more work you have to do.

Try it out and let me know how it works.

 

Coming on Monday

Part One of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Just What Is Executive Bearing, and Why Does It Matter?

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever noticed an odd thing about highly successful leaders? A great many of them have something in common. Not all of them, certainly, but enough of them to be noticeable.

A curiously high percentage of senior executives, retired generals, three-term U.S. senators, judges, network television anchors, Cabinet secretaries, college presidents, law-firm partners, diplomats, and McKinsey consultants just seem to have the ineffable bearing of leadership.

They may not have the drop-dead good looks of Jon Hamm on Mad Men, or the gentility of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., or the captivating beauty of Julianna Margulies on The Good Wife, or the silver hair of U.S. Senator Dick Lugar, but they definitely stand out.

Something about them proclaims they aren't typical. Women and men alike, many of these leaders just stand an inch closer to the polished, the classy, perhaps even the distinguished.

Whatever it is that sets them apart, it is much more than appearance or posture or anything else so insubstantial. By bearing, I have in mind a sense of being that reaches for something profound, something important. After all, anyone can put on a neatly pressed suit and a polished pair of shoes, but not just anyone can invoke values, describe a necessary future, and inspire people to do the extraordinary. What so many highly effective leaders have in common is a way of talking, behaving, and relating to other people that enables, drives, and sustains their impact as leaders.

Before we go any further, let's stop and quickly admit the obvious. I am not suggesting that these leaders are perfect or even uncommonly close to it. No leader is, and in any case that is not the point. Indeed I have argued previously that the popular expectation of perfection in leaders is unrealistic. We need to back away from it.

Moreover, it is equally true that thousands of good leaders lack this bearing, so it must be a nice-to-have thing, not a must-have. For every Mitt Romney stepping out of the pages of a Brooks Brothers catalogue and striding to the board room, you can find a Mark Zuckerberg in T-shirt and jeans and in need of a comb. We know that.

Still, this executive bearing is seen so often that only the cynical and the blind among us would deny it. So let's explore it. Here are nine cornerstones of executive bearing that I believe set the highly effective leader apart from the rest:

 

• Communication (Verbal). Communication is the energy of leadership. Nothing is more important than the ability to speak with clarity and to listen with interest and sincerity. Regardless of position, a putative leader who lacks this capability is merely keeping the chair warm. You cannot expect people to read your mind, and you cannot expect to read anyone else's mind. You need not be as eloquent as Ronald Reagan or Winston Churchill, but you must learn how to express yourself and how to listen with genuine concern, intensity, and curiosity.
• Communication (Nonverbal). By nonverbal communication, we are referring to far more than body language and facial expression. They can send messages, for sure, but they pale in comparison with the nonverbal A-B-C-D-E communication of attitudes, behaviors, character, decisions, and empathy. Every leader must become fully aware of the myriad ways she communicates implicity and unintentionally, every day, all day long. Behaviors so incidental as where and with whom you eat lunch are apt to send important social cues that ricochet through your organization.
• Appearance and Image. This part is about the visual, insubstantial as it may be. The basics are good grooming, neat and clean attire, generally looking nice enough to meet with the CEO. Impeccable manners are elementary, too. For gentlemen, that entails opening doors, yielding on entering and exiting elevators, even pulling out chairs. And don't even think of disrespecting or disregarding anyone in a position of service: waiters, chambermaids, customer-service personnel, custodians. To the contrary, be sure to greet everyone with a smile and pleasant acknowledgement. This is the ethic of recipocity as it applies to leadership.
• Conviction and Confidence. Leaders deal with complexity in many forms: ambiguity, nuance, multiplicity, change, and uncertainty. A leader's self-confidence helps followers cope with that complexity. While there is a fine line between self-confidence and arrogance, the former is a strength when borne of conviction to core principles, whereas the latter is a severe character flaw that has doomed leaders for millennia. The thing to recognize and remember is the importance of core principles as the only true foundation for conviction and confidence.
• Respect and Humility. Leaders have to be accountable for the work of the organization they lead, but no leader deserves full credit for the organization's success. Indeed, without the earnest support of your people, no leader is a leader. It follows that any leader worth the title must fully respect the work of the team. You can accomplish just about anything as long as you accept all the blame and give away all the credit.
• Congruence and Authenticity. It's one thing to pay rhetorical tribute to lofty values, another thing to think through their implications and then honor those values consistently. Take diversity. Does it merely mean putting an African-American on the cover of your annual report or in your TV commercials? Or does it mean making certain that your senior management team has diversity of color, gender, and nationality? Still better, does it extend also to project teams, promotions, succession planning, and restructurings without regard to age, educational pedigree, current assignment, employment grade level, shift, and so much more? 
• Presence and Accessibility. There are four types of presence and four types of accessibility: the physical, the intellectual, the social, and the emotional. Leaders need to understand and appreciate all four. Each of the four conveys powerful messages of inclusion or exclusion.
• Clarity of Purpose. In the private sector, most senior executives will tell you their primary purpose is to ensure a substantial return to investors. That is an essential thing, needless to say, but the organization's purpose must be viewed through the lens of the customer, not the lens of the investor. It must drive the repeated decisions of customers to start or continue to do business with this organization. Without that, the return to investors is moot.
• Support and Servancy. Unfortunately few managers are familiar with the concept of servant leadership. It is the notion that the leader serves the followers, not the other way around. It is President John F. Kennedy's famous dictum—"Ask not what your country can do you; ask what you can do for your country"—applied to leaders with regard to the people they would lead. 

There's more to the puzzle, of course, but these are the cornerstones. Devote time and attention to these nine attributes of executive bearing, and you will be well on your way to greater impact as an exceptional leader. 

 

Coming on Friday

Our Growing Attention Spans

 

(c) Copyright 2011     Arceil Leadership Ltd.     All rights reserved. 

The Sensitive Issue of Romance in the Office

 

 

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet                                                   

 

by Thomas J. Lee 

If it's Valentine's Day—and it is, so consider yourself reminded, mister—you can probably look out from your cubicle by mid-afternoon and see a vase of red roses on someone's desk. Maybe even two or three. Maybe a box of Godivas, too. If you're really lucky, your sweetheart will send you some of your own. (Why yes, I will have a piece. Thank you.)

People naturally celebrate romance, and they should. Anyone who has ever felt its tug is grateful for the experience. But if Mr. Right and Ms. Right are working together—and especially if one is subordinate to the other—the human resources manager and legal counsel may have rose thorns on their hands.

Not always and not necessarily, of course. An innocent romance between two junior colleagues is one thing. Even if they are giddy with glee—even if they are longingly, cloyingly, sickeningly holding hands in the cafeteria—most of us would look kindly upon it.

The rub comes when the romance involves the wrong hearts, in our world as much as in the world of Romeo and Juliet. In her soliloquy, Juliet declares the problem lies in Romeo's surname. For us, it is typically a matter of titles, of our roles and responsibilities in the workplace.

A liaison involving a manager and her subordinate and implying favoritism is not so benign. Nor is one involving a senior executive and an intern, nor involving two colleagues who frequently travel together, nor involving a manager and a vendor whose services he approves, nor involving a high-level executive of a competitor (the Montague Company, perhaps), nor involving anyone who feels that the tryst is a condition of employment, nor involving one or both colleagues who are married to lonely hearts at home. In any of these circumstances, the flame is already a conflagration.

There's Nothing More Valuable Than a Good Theory

 

by Thomas J. Lee

How often in business have you heard someone dismiss an idea as "just theoretical"?

They'll say something like: "Well, that's all well and good in theory, but I can't imagine it will work in practice." Or: "That's all theoretical. Just give me the facts, and keep it straight." Sometimes their words will make no reference to theory, but the sentiment is the same: "It looks good on paper," someone will say, "but will it fly?"

In truth, nothing is more valuable than a good theory. A theory with its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon can change the way you look at things forever.

By good, I have two criteria in mind. One, it has emerged from clear-eyed observation of reality. It has not simply been invented out of someone's wild imagination. Two, it has a great deal of explanatory power. It explains why something is the way it is. It helps people understand.

We rely on good theories extensively in other disciplines. Medicine has its germ theory. Geology has its plate tectonics theory. Physics has the theory of relativity. Chemistry has the atomic theory. Statistics has the theory of probability. Economics has the theory of markets. Political science has game theory. Mathematics has chaos theory. Astronomy has the Big Bang theory.

All those theories and many others have powerfully changed the way we view the world.

Until they have a good theory to guide them, people wander in a desert. They don't know how to make sense of things. They are easily confused and frequently mistaken.

When someone finally arrives at a good theory, people are able to get their bearings. They know which way is which, and they know where they are. They finally have the means to regard their past in perspective, to see the present with clarity, and to imagine a realistic future. They can see a path from where they are to where they are going.

You can even make money on theory. Portfolio theory guides the investing decisions by many Wall Street mavens. You don't even need a portfolio. Just learn how to tell a story. After all, Malcolm Gladwell based his wildly successful book The Tipping Point on diffusion theory.

Of course, it is true that theories can take you down the wrong path, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In the 20th century, for example, many people believed in a conspiracy theory for President Kennedy's assassination. Marxist theory led to the oppression of many millions under communism. The domino theory pitted the great powers against each other in Asia, and hundreds of thousands of people died.

But when theories go awry, it is the particular theory itself that is at fault. The problem is not the overarching fact that it is a theory. As the other examples demonstrate, we can explain everything from disease to earthquakes, energy, wars, and supermarket prices by the application of good theories. That isn't bad for a few concise words.

So I like good theories. Especially in business, we need more of them, not fewer. Just make sure that a theory has its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon. Just make sure that it is a truly good theory.

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Job Titles Can Be Barriers to Teamwork and Collaboration

 

We're reprinting a few of our favorite posts for two weeks while we go through a year-beginning strategic review. We will return in full force, with completely new essays, next Monday, January 10, 2011. (The following day will be 1-11-11. It will be a good time to begin anew.) In the meantime, here's another little essay that many of you liked when we first published it. Feel free to forward it to your staff and colleagues.

by Thomas J. Lee

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 or that function 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, and whether 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. In effect, we should think of our role as a verb, not as a noun.

The difference is partly a question of focus. By reframing our place in an organization, we can throw 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 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 a dumb thing to do, 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.

 

 (c) 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Eight Hallmarks of a Healthy Communication Culture

 

 

(Second in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

In Wednesday's column, we established that every company has not only a corporate culture—with many subcultures—but also its own culture of communication. By culture of communication, we mean the particular way people customarily share and interpret information and ideas.

We further established that a healthy communication culture has eight hallmarks that just coincidentally begin with the same letter: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise.

Let's briefly explore each of those eight hallmarks.

Clear. You may think it is a simple thing to say what you mean. Unfortunately it is not. Strunk & White, the great arbiters of English composition, warned writers they were probably being unclear even when they thought they were being perfectly clear. (That's why you should always let an important document or email "age" for a day before editing it and sending it.) This is especially true of corporate communication, which can be filled with jargon, spin, and arcane abbreviations.

Credible. The legendary George Burns once advised young actors: If you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything. For many companies, credibility is something either to fake or to ignore and neglect altogether. It is one thing when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing; that happens. A deliberate and coordinated sleight of both hands is something altogether different, and not nearly so forgivable. When the deception involves employees, whose work is critical to any organization's mission, it is a self-inflicted wound. 

Compelling (or Cogent). Official corporate pronouncements often strive to be inoffensive and polite. That's fine as far as it goes, but if they achieve that goal by deliberately being indirect and ambiguous, it isn't fine at all. That comes at the expense of coherence. Moreover, they frequently resort to the passive voice, which drains much of the energy out of communication. Because good communication functions as the energy of leadership, this represents a huge sacrifice.

Constructive. The whole point of strategic communication is to support the execution of a strategy (or the implementation of a program, a policy, a process, or a priority). It is all about getting things done, about creating something new or bigger or better. Thus the communication should be constructive, and to do that it must be inclusive and relevant. It should have enough of the big picture to be inspiring and enough detail to be instructive and helpful.

Continuous. Communication around business strategy should look, sound, and feel more like a rain forest than a cascade. It should be a steady drizzle or mist of information, punctuated by occasional thunderstorms. There should be few, if any, moments when employees feel they are kept in the dark. It is especially harmful to put front-line supervisors in a position where they are learning about an impending decision or policy by the grapevine or from subordinate employees. 

Collaborative. The best communication is a dialogue and a discussion, not a monologue or a lecture. It is an exchange of information, intuition, and ideas. Senior management in particular should be receptive to learning what employees in ground-level positions (the factory floor, the retail showroom, the warehouse, the R&D lab) are observing and experiencing. This information is gold.

Civil. People who spend so much time together, day after day and week after week, need to respect one another. There are big differences between delivering a message with an air of respect and reason and delivering the same message with disrespect and intimidation, fear, or arrogance. By the same token, there is a big difference between employees who speak up and share their observations—again, with respect and reason—and those who would just as soon deny that information to management out of spite.  

Concise. This is just a matter of getting to the point. Everyone is busy. Good communication respects time, so that people can meet their commitments and still get home to their families and activities. That isn't to say there is no place for impromptu conversations or for non-strategic, water-cooler chit-chat about families, hobbies, and so forth; to the contrary, there is, and those conversations will properly meander. But the presentation of business information should be straightfoward, timely, and compact. Incidentally, there is only one way to begin meetings on time, and that is to begin meetings on time. 

So that's it: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. Make certain your communication culture incorporates these eight hallmarks, and you will notice and like the results.

Over the next few weeks, we will present some diagnostic questions about cultures of communication.

 

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What Is Your Organization's Communication Culture?

 

(First in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee 

Just about everyone takes corporate culture for granted. It is a well-established concept. No one disputes that their company has a culture, for better or worse.

But you may be surprised to learn that, less than a generation ago, corporate culture was unheard of. Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy introduced the term in their trailblazing 1982 book, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.

The concept was initially controversial. Companies resisted the notion they were about anything more than their numbers. Since then, of course, many 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, norms, 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, for example. Similarly, there are significant cultural differences between Toyota and General Motors, between Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines, between Nordstrom and Macy's, and between Bank of America and Chase Bank. The list could go on.

Just as cultures vary from company to company, so do cultures within a single company. Each corporate culture consists of many smaller subcultures. The closer you examine subcultures, the more variability you see. Some experts believe there is more cultural variability within companies than among them.

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 grizzled veterans and young turks, between teams supporting a growth product and teams supporting a cash cow, between the day shift and the night shift, between manufacturing and sales, between legacies of an acquired company and legacies of the acquiring company, and so forth.

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

Another kind of subculture, equally important, gets even less attention. It reflects particular processes, such as quality or planning. Of special importance to me, not surprisingly, is the culture around communication of business issues and information.

Think about it. All the variables around communication are powerful determinants of culture and subculture. In some key respects, communication is culture. And the culture of communication is critical to everything.

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. Here it's important to remember that communication is more than just words, numbers, pictures, and images; it is anything that conveys information or creates meaning for people, and it is often unintentional, implicit, and unmanaged.

Now corporate cultures and subcultures of any sort are very, very powerful. They are tantamount to being "the judge, jury, and jailer" of strategy. In other words, whenever companies adopt a new strategy or policy or initiative or program, their culture can make it or break it.

Any strategy (or any policy or initiative or program) depends on compatibility with the culture for survival and growth. If the strategy and the culture are compatible, then the strategy can survive (not that it necessarily will, just that it can). If they aren't compatible, then all bets are off, and the strategy is probably doomed.

That's especially true of the culture of communication. Because communication is the very energy of leadership, the culture of communication determines to a large extent whether leaders will be able to lead.

Ideally, any company's culture of communication has as its hallmarks eight descriptors that just coincidentally begin with the same letter: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), 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 easily see just how critical communication is to performance.

On Friday, I will explore the eight attributes of a healthy culture of communication. Then over the next couple of weeks, I will post some diagnostic questions for each attribute that a company's leadership should ask itself to recognize and improve its communication culture.

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

its culture of communication. Just call us at +1-847-247-2241

 or write to us at info@arceil.com.

 

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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By the Numbers: How Employees Regard Their Managers

 

By the Numbers is a bimonthly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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.

Since its inception a year ago, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button in the right column.
 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the vital relationship between employees and their bosses has become quite strained.

According to the 2010 Spherion Bosses Day Workforce Survey, nearly half (45 percent) of all employees say the recession affected the relationship. Three-quarters (74 percent) of that subset said the recession had weakened the relationship.

Transparency and respect are at the heart of any relationship, and in the workplace they have suffered. One out of four workers (25 percent) said their boss is "somewhat or very dishonest" about job security, and more than half (53 percent) feels professionally disrespected by their boss.

Moreover, a substantial minority of workers (37 percent) said their boss has "thrown [them] under the bus" to save himself or herself, and an even larger minority (45 percent) say their boss has unduly taken credit for their work.

The survey also found that 46 percent of workers said they couldn't discuss issues of workplace ethics with their boss, and that 44 percent said they couldn't confide in their boss.

 

 
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Four Rules for Creating More People Engagement

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Here are four important rules any organization can follow to build a culture of engagement, so that employees welcome change and can break on through to the next level:

• Make sure everyone on your staff knows and understands the strategic direction, customer expectations, competitive pressures, operating sensitivities, and day-to-day priorities. Insist on clear line of sight between everyone's job and the organization's strategies. Use the word "customer" only in reference to the ultimate, external customer, and make certain that the customer's reasons for choosing your organization over a competitor in the marketplace are clear. Share metrics and strategic information promptly and directly.
• Create an atmosphere of critical and creative thinking about the business. Encourage collaboration and the open, free exchange of ideas and suggestions. Be certain there is a safe harbor for tough questions that can even strike you as impertinent. Ask deep, probing questions about the business, and invite everyone to a dialogue around them. Above all, avoid any implication of punishing the messenger for the message.
• Recognize that people find motivation both in reasons that reach their mind and emotions that touch their heart. Communication that enables an organization to meet its commitments is usually the stuff of prose: dry, factual, logical. Communication that enables people to reach their full potential is often the stuff of poetry--not of poems per se, but an inspiring and evocative narrative that celebrates and encourages ordinary people to go to extraordinary lengths for something important to the soul. People want and need this.
• Prize fresh thinking. Maintain a safe harbor for suggestions and tough questions about the business and even your own leadership. Welcome unorthodox ideas. Teach everyone how to build on someone else's kernel of creativity. Ask not just why something should be done by why it couldn't or shouldn't be done. Encourage people to experiment. Remove barriers to the casual, quick exchange of information and insights. Always be looking for the next big thing.

By following these four rules, you will find yourself creating much more focus, curiosity, passion, and courage in the workplace. That's important, for, as we have said over and over in this space, nothing of much significance has ever been achieved, and nothing of much value has ever been invented or developed, without a lot of focus, a lot of curiosity, a lot of passion, and a lot of courage.

 

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Sometimes, the Thought of Change Can Be Paralyzing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

One balmy evening after dusk I was relaxing on the patio with my legs outstretched. Crickets had begun to sing, and Venus was slipping toward the western horizon. I had enjoyed another productive day. Everything was perfect. I wanted nothing to change.

Just then I noticed a small animal of some sort off to the right. It was already dark, so I couldn't quite make out what it was. Slowly approaching me, the furry thing waddled right up to my shoes and stopped.

You can imagine my horror when I realized the animal wasn't a neighbor's kitten, and it wasn't a squirrel. Nor was it a raccoon or an opossum. It was a skunk, a polecat. I kid you not. For minutes 

 

that seemed like hours, it sat on its haunches just inches from my feet. I was never so perfectly still in my entire life. I didn't breathe. I didn't swallow. I didn't blink.

In an instant I went from wanting nothing to change to wanting everything to change, immediately and radically. Yet I could do nothing. If I had so much as burped, this little beast would have fouled the entire neighborhood. Everything within a quarter mile would have stunk for days. I could only wait it out, in perfect stillness and utter silence.

Eventually the skunk moved on, and I could exhale and blink again. Five minutes later I felt a sneeze coming on, and I prayerfully thanked the heavenly stars that I had not sneezed while my uninvited guest was sniffing at my feet.

This incident occurred two or three autumns ago. I recalled it this week when the subject of change came to mind. I've noticed that, for some people and some companies, the thought of change can bring about such anxiety they react with terror and paralysis.

That isn't a problem in the presence of a skunk, figuratively or literally; the paralysis suits you just fine. But if the challenge you are facing requires that you change for the sake of innovation, or personal growth, or subject-matter mastery, or credibility, or a behavioral correction, or relational empathy, or anything else of importance or value, it most certainly is problematic. Your paralysis is part of the problem.

Regular readers will recall that a couple of my recent posts (here and here) focused on helping people to identify the need for change and to muster the will to change. Indeed, change is a continuing theme of the MindingGaps blog, for change is the currency of leadership.

One reader objected to those columns. A successful business consultant, and a friend whose tone belies abundant personal warmth, he impetuously dashed off an email to me, which I reprint verbatim:

 

what the hell is all about this  "CHANGE" crap...

why do I need to change ?

I am successful and know what I am doing - why do YOU insist on changing me?

It's like women who hook onto a man and then want to change him?  WHY?

I'm satisfied with my life and work and manage my team without being overbearing or micro-managing - I motivate each team member and treat everyone that way I want to be treated.

NOW - my Government wants change !  Why, because they think if they need to change themselves, (because they are screwed up) it might be easier to CHANGE everyone around them first.  Kinda f***ed up if you ask me.

 

Well, that's one viewpoint, I told myself.

On the other hand, in a meeting a few weeks ago with a pair of executives of a large company, one of them asserted that every company wanted to change; no company did not want to change. I had to admit, that's another perspective.

In my own experience, most companies do want to change either their culture, or their operations, or their performance. Yet few actually change as much or as fast as they wish.

It is true that some recognize no need to change, so they never even set out to change. Others say they want to change when they actually do not. Many others genuinely want to change but do not know how. And many, many others seek to control and constrain their path of change, rather than create a culture of self-energizing and self-sustaining change that can redefine their marketplace. Over-engineering change can have the effect of stifling it altogether.

In any case, companies that are most in need of change but refuse to do anything about it are those that most risk being forgotten or marginalized in the years ahead. Anyone my side of 40 can name brands or products that are scarcely known to young people today—CompuServe, the Sony Walkman, Oldsmobile, Pan-Am, Schlitz, the DC-10, Zenith, Gourmet, camera film and slide projectors, DEC computers—and dozens of companies that are now subsidiaries or mere historical footnotes: Maytag, Gillette, TWA, Amoco, McDonnell Douglas, NCR, Ameritech, Warner-Lambert, A.G. Edwards, and so many more.

Even among extant companies, the tales of coulda-woulda-shoulda read like ghosts from a Dickens novel. I think of Xerox, whose share of the copier market plummeted from 90 percent in the 1970s to just 20 percent in the 1980s after Japanese manufacturers began selling better machines at lower prices. I think of IBM, which was so busy selling Selectric typewriters that it took a pass on the operating system and applications for personal computers, and instead let a couple of college dropouts start a cute little company they called Microsoft. I think of Blockbuster and Sears and Border's, whose stores today are almost empty.

On the other hand, there is Apple, which has changed radically, and there is Google, whose culture is all about innovation, and there is Ford Motor Co., which is leading a resurgence of American auto manufacturing, and there is Amazon, which is becoming an online main street. American Express and Wells Fargo both got their start running stage coaches across the West, and today they are vibrant and dynamic. Even IBM has learned from its mistakes and reinvented itself.

The CEO of a Fortune 25 company put it well in an inspiring 1993 speech to his senior leadership team: "We need to embrace change—not for its own sake but for our sake. We must understand that the world isn't standing still and that we can't stand still either. People and organizations that delude themselves into thinking they do not need to change are on a course of self-absorption and self-destruction. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company, history is full of giants that failed to adapt."

The choice we face isn't merely between changing and not changing. The choice is between changing and dying. Indeed, in these times of rampant mergers and acquisitions, the choice is as much between changing and being eaten alive for breakfast by a competitor.

It's just that sometimes, the mere thought of change is so intimidating, it is paralyzing. I know. I have been there.

 

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"Suspicious Minds": A Leadership Lesson from Elvis

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I'll take a lesson in leadership wherever I can find it. The other day, I found one while listening to a golden oldie on my iPod, and it came from Elvis Presley.

The song was "Suspicious Minds," written by Mark James, who also wrote "Hooked On a Feeling" for B.J. Thomas and "Always On My Mind" for Willie Nelson. Of course, Elvis burned "Suspicious Minds" into our collective consciousness. It is one of the truly great popular songs ever produced.

You can probably sing the lyrics from memory:

Why can't you see

What you're doing to me

When you don't believe a word I say?

We can't go on together

With suspicious minds

And we can't build our dreams

With suspicious minds. . . .

Now, plainly these lyrics have to do with a rocky romance. But with a little imagination you can see striking parallels to a dysfunctional corporate culture, too.

In many industries, the collapse of the implied contract after decades of widespread downsizing and offshoring, along with sporadic instances of financial malfeasance and chicanery, has decimated the trust, confidence, and affinity in business that everyone took for granted a couple of generations ago. (Other institutions, particularly government, have fared even worse. That's another issue altogether.)

Perhaps your industry and your company have emerged relatively unscathed. Nonetheless, the social carnage that other companies have left in their wake is problematic for you. All companies find it difficult to enlist the enthusiastic support of employees who suspect they are getting, or who expect to be getting, the short end of the stick. (Note: Whether or not employees are actually being shortchanged is irrelevant, for perceptions and expectations are everything. The only objective reality is someone's subjective reality; the perception or expectation of distrust is the fact of distrust.)

Any organization whose culture is characterized more by suspicion than by trust, confidence, and affinity is not likely to succeed for long at much of anything. In a strong economy, it can float on a rising tide. But when times turn difficult, or when competition or innovation redefines the marketplace, the same company will very likely encounter more than its share of difficulty.

Further, for a couple of very compelling reasons, a culture of suspicion can readily grow out of the managerial process itself. It's a little like noxious weeds sprouting in a well-tended garden of rich, fertile loam.

For one thing, good managers will focus on meeting pre-determined expectations: a budget, a quota, a deadline, or a standard. So they are usually on the lookout for any early sign of failure, in order to correct it in time. But their constant, anxious vigilance can be seen by employees as doubt or even distrust in them. Some employees will take it personally and return the volley with doubt and distrust of their own. Their distrust can become a contagion.

For another thing, many managers rely on the legal authority of their position, and the asymmetrical power it reflects, for their moral authority. These managers are often disinclined to invest the extra time and attentiveness it takes to nurture relationships with subordinates, especially at the ground level. Goodness knows, managers are already too busy. But the absence of frequent, casual, authentic face-to-face conversation is another dynamic that can breed a sense of distance and suspicion among employees. Again, what goes around comes around.

Managers and employees alike would both be better off to acknowledge the difficulty but also the enormous value of trust in the workplace. As the song goes, you can't build your dreams with suspicious minds. In a culture of distrust, everyone loses.

Elvis may have left the building, but his voice is ever echoing off the walls.

 

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By the Numbers: A Correlation Between Trust and Enthusiasm

By the Numbers is a bimonthly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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.

Since its inception a year ago, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button in the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

The differences in attitude between those employees with a great deal of trust in management and those employees with little trust in management shows a stark correlation, according to a recent survey by Maritz Research.

Among those with strong trust in management, 63 percent would be happy to spend the remainder of their careers with the company; 51 percent would invest their own money in the company if they could, and 50 percent look forward to coming to work every day.

Among those with weak trust in management, only 7 percent would be happy to spend the remainder of their careers with the company; only 6 percent would invest their own money in the company if they could, and only 3 percent look forward to coming to work every day.

 

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Be a Goldilocks Manager in a World of Papa Bears

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Most of us are familiar with the children's fairytale of Goldlilocks and the Three Bears. The story involves a little girl who is wandering through the forest. She comes across an empty cabin where three bears live—Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear.

Noticing three chairs of varying sizes, Goldilocks tries them all. The first one is too big. The next is too small. The third chair is just right, but when Goldilocks sits on it, she breaks it to pieces.

Then she notices three bowls of porridge on the table. The first bowl is too hot. The next is too cold. The third is just right, and Goldilocks eats all the porridge in that bowl.

Having eaten so much, Goldilocks is tired. She goes upstairs and discovers three beds. The first bed is too hard. The next bed is too soft. The third bed is just right. Goldilocks climbs in and falls fast asleep.

You know the rest. The story teaches several lessons, not the least being that extremes are unpalatable but that moderation has its own appeal. Think of moderation as the Goldilocks approach.

The personalities that managers bring to the workplace are like that.

Some managers are too loud and abusive. We call them Aggressives. They are too eager to speak up and speak out. They raise their voices and intimidate other people. Sometimes they use profanity or pound their fists on the table. Aggressives recklessly suck the energy out of other people. No one enjoys working with them. Please, don't ever be an Aggressive manager.

Other managers are too meek and weak. We call them Passives. They avoid conflict, and they are inhibited and nervous. Often their declarative sentences end in rising notes, as if they are asking questions or seeking approval for every little thing they say. They frequently shy from raising a troubling point or asking a profound question. Passives don't suck the energy out of their colleagues, but they don't pump energy into people, either. They are ciphers. Most people wish that Passives would do more to carry the ball forward. Please, don't be a Passive manager, either.

Then there are the Goldilocks Managers. They are just right. We call them Assertives. They are neither aggressive nor passive in their communication, neither overbearing nor diffident, neither too loud nor too reserved. Rather, they are knowledgeable and confident but respectful and civil.

These managers communicate with honesty and substance, but also with appropriate tone and deference. They are forthright and direct but not pushy. They wait their turn and then speak their mind, without seeking to control or manipulate. They have appropriate levels of self-esteem and self-confidence: not too much, but not too little. This is the kind of manager all of us should aspire to be.

In the fairytale, the three bears come home and discover Goldilocks asleep in the bed upstairs. She wakes up, jumps out the window, and escapes to freedom.

In my ideal workplace, the Goldilocks Manager—assertive but not aggressive or passive—becomes every CEO, every vice president, every manager, and every employee.

I know business is a world of Papa Bears, but I can dream, can't I?

 

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Road Rage, Catcalls, and Online Flaming

by Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever noticed the parallel between road rage, catcalls, and online flaming?

There certainly is a parallel. Moreover, it has implications for your leadership.

All of us have seen road rage and heard its cousin, the earsplitting volume of heavy-metal music bursting from a huge pick-up truck, its driver revving the engine in the next lane. I swear, some of those speakers have woofers that can vibrate ten inches of steel-reinforced concrete pavement.

Anyone who's attended a ballgame with a losing hometown team or with a Mr. Magoo in a striped shirt has heard profanity-laced catcalls, too. Sometimes, it can be so bad you have to feel for the family with kids at the game. They surely don’t want to hear all those f-bombs, and they shouldn’t have to.

And sooner or later, anyone who subscribes to an online bulletin board—or even just reads the comments posted to articles on politics at the web site of any newspaper—will come across flaming, too. Hardly a day goes by that you don’t see an abusive, caustic comment. The comments rarely carry the writer’s real name and email. They are usually anonymous and gratuitous insults.

Now beyond the mean spirit and disregard for the dignity of others, all these assaults share one other thing: a wall of anonymity. All three occur primarily because their perpetrators enjoy a kind of shield that keeps them anonymous and protects them from the consequences of their actions and statements.

For road rage, the shield is the sheer tonnage of vehicles and the driver’s intent to squeal his tires when the light turns green. For catcalls, it is the numbers of people and the noise of the crowd. For online flaming, it is the virtual reality of the Internet.

What does all this have to do with leadership and communication in your company? Just this.

The "social distance" between people is their perception of anonymity and aloneness. Where it is high, it creates a wall of separateness, of isolation. This wall can breed cynicism and incivility. The greater the social distance, the taller the wall, and the more isolated people feel.

Social distance comes in three types. It can be affective, in which case it determines how groups of people feel about one another. It can be normative, where it bears on attitudes of exclusion and inclusion. Or it can be interactive, a reflection of the interpersonal contact that groups have with one another.

Businesses should do everything they can to reduce social distance. The more inclusive a culture they build, the more cohesion and teamwork they will experience.

Frequent face-to-face, eye-to-eye communication helps tremendously. When people talk in the physical presence of each other, and look into each other's eyes, they cannot hide behind their own anonymity, for they are suddenly revealed to one another. Intentionally creating a culture in which people speak their truth with calm civility can go a long way, too.

Remember, any organization—be it a business, an association or foundation, an agency or bureau of government, a symphony or an army or a team or a congregation or even a family—is fundamentally a collection of people, very often working together under pressure.

The more that people require of themselves to get along with one another, the more productive an organization will be. If no one makes an effort to get along, the organization is probably on a road to ruin. Part of making an effort to get along is holding accountable people who are unwilling to make any such effort, who think they can say and do whatever they damn well please, just because they can.

Getting along is a straightforward thing, and it is absolutely critical to achieving whatever we are seeking to achieve by working together.

It's pretty much that simple, isn't it?

 

 

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By the Numbers: Employee Perceptions on Walking the Talk

By the Numbers is a bimonthly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, 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.

Since its inception a year ago, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button in the right column.

 

by Thomas J. Lee 

Years ago there was a Disney cartoon character who appeared in Pinnochio cartoons. Jiminy Cricket was a dapper little bug who wore a top hat and often carried a gentleman's umbrella as a cane. He usually stood on Pinocchio's shoulder and, in a raspy voice, whispered the right thing to do. Listening to Jiminy Crickett was the same as listening to your conscience.

Jiminy Cricket's avuncular advice was a cautionary reminder to shore up your integrity -- not merely by "walking the talk," such a hackneyed phrase that is -- but by speaking the truth, embodying a noble purpose, and doing right by people.

Now few executives ever deliberately set out to compromise or undermine their own credibility. But few seem able to command the confidence of employees.

According to a recent survey by Maritz Research, only 11 percent of employees said they strongly agree that their managers show consistency between their words and their actions. Perhaps worse, only 7 percent of employees said they strongly agree that senior leaders of their company look out for their best interests.

 

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The Creativity of Leadership

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may ask yourself:

• What is the place you are at now?
• When you cast away your own biases, what exactly is this reality?
• Can you describe it so objectively that everyone agrees on the description?
• In what ways could and should this reality be different?
• How can you yourself behave differently so as to make it so?

 

 

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Decoupling Leadership and Management

 

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post explores disengagement that is hiding in plain site. We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom      

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee 

It is essential to distinguish the work of management from the work of leadership.

 Anyone in any position of authority in any organization has the burden—and the glorious opportunity—for both.

But it is only when we unpack the work of leadership and the work of management from each other that we can see their unique challenges, tools, and rewards.

The work of management is all about steady, reliable performance. The manager ensures the performance of a team to certain predetermined expectations.

If the expectation involves spending money, we call it coming in under budget. If it involves completing a project by a specific date, we call it meeting a deadline. If it involves doing something or producing something within acceptable parameters, we call it complying with a standard—quality, perhaps, or safety. When it involves making or selling or issuing enough of something, we call it clearing a quota. There are many other kinds of similar challenges.

When successful, management creates alignment. Alignment is the equivalence of expectation and performance. Alignment is a good thing; misalignment is bad. But remember: Alignment is not the product of leadership. It is the product of management.

The work of leadership is altogether different from the work of management. The work of leadership is all about change. It entails envisioning, articulating, inspiring, and ensuring change—often attitudinal or cultural—or a breakthrough performance of some sort, typically requiring the discretionary and self-sacrificing efforts of people.

The change or breakthrough may involve launching a new product, or expanding geographically, or merging cultures after an acquisition, or fending off a unionization vote, or adopting a new technology, or meeting the changing needs of customers. There are many kinds of such challenges.

When successful, leadership creates engagement. Engagement is a good thing; disengagement is bad. But engagement is not the product of good management. It is the product of good leadership—up, down, and across the organization.

Alignment is critical to meeting the needs of the present. Companies and other organizations—associations, governments, universities, charities, teams—make commitments they must fulfill. Alignment is necessary to fulfilling those commitments.

Engagement is critical to meeting the needs of the future. Companies and other organizations must always adapt to changing circumstances, environments, and opportunities, lest they wither and die as so many erstwhile giants that failed to adapt have withered and died before them. Without engagement, organizations cannot survive long into the future.

It is a big mistake to use the tools of one to accomplish the goals of the other. Companies often try that, and they routinely fail, whenever they launch another “change management” initiative while overlooking the need to lead change, which is something entirely different. Similarly, an energetic leader without an eye for detail can lose sight of the basics.

Management and leadership differ most dramatically in the substance, style, and tone of the communication that supports each of them. Communication for the sake of managing is authoritative, directive, and influencing. It carries an implicit "stick" of accountability. Communication for the sake of leading is visionary, collaborative, energizing, and inspiring. It carries an implicit "carrot" of opportunity.

I like to draw two concentric circles to illustrate. I label the inner circle management and the outer circle leadership, to convey the point that good management is at the core of good leadership. That is because good managers must lead themselves, and paradoxically they do so by managing themselves. Good leaders are their own first followers. They lead the way so that others can follow.

Many companies and other organizations are well-managed. They meet the needs of the present just fine. But they are not necessarily well-led. Thus they are duly anxious about the future. They are anxious not because they are unable to predict the future—everyone is unable to predict it—but because they are not ready for whatever it may bring. They are not ready because they know so little about change, about engagement, and ultimately about leadership.

Two different things they are, managing and leading. Both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different, at that.

 

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Ten Strategies for Better Straight Talk

 

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post offers strategies for straight-talking leadership. We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom           

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Last week we explored five “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic. The five we discussed are small talk, sweet talk (or happy talk), scare talk, slick talk, and snarly talk (or surly talk).

As we explained, some of these five talk traps works just fine in the right place and the right time, but they all backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset straight talk, the preferable alternative to those five talk traps. It turns out that straight talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader. (To read those posts, just scroll down.)

Here are ten ways to make sure that straight talk is serving the purpose of your leadership:

1. Lay a good foundation. You cannot begin talking about your business environment early enough. If you’re not in the habit, start now. You needn’t talk about future plans that are not yet finalized. Just talk about the past and the present. If you don’t begin now, people won’t be prepared when you do. The straight talk you eventually offer will very likely come as a shock to the system.
2. Establish a broad context. Address the weaknesses of your processes and products as well as the strengths. Talk about changes in technology, customer expectations, and speed to market. Deal openly with your culture, its advantages and its disadvantages.
3.  Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors. Consider forming a small communication council consisting of articulate individuals at various levels of the organization or team, both non-management and management, who can provide diverse perspectives on what’s going on.
4.  Recognize the fact that senior management has the luxury of time and typically a sophisticated educational background to help it absorb the need for change, while rank-and-file employees typically do not. By the time a new policy or strategy comes down, its imperative is clear to senior managers but can still be a mystery to ground-level employees.
5. Be sensitive to the words and phrases you use to describe the business landscape and to establish the direction and the case for change. Jargon and acronyms that are part of your own day-to-day vernacular can be meaningless to others, especially to employees who must execute your strategy. Language that has no meaning cannot possibly have any credibility or impact.
6. Test your stated values against the real drivers of your decision making. It’s easy to invoke a list of pretty values and nominally pay homage to them. It’s quite another thing to recognize the powerful impetuses that truly direct and shape policy. What really matters? That’s what your values are, like it or not. (One good test: Ask yourself whether you're willing to fire a senior manager you personally like but who violates a value.)
7. Set a high bar on standards and accountability, but acknowledge that none of us is perfect or perfectible. Make clear what rises to a capital offense and what doesn’t, and underscore the hard importance of aspirations. Don’t be impetuous or fickle. Do insist on common rules. If you expect an hourly employee to pay a parking ticket on company time out of his own pocket, the same rule has to apply to a senior vice president.
8. Appreciate the problems inherent in cascading. By cascading, we mean disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time. Cascading spawns rumors and creates a tangled web of misinformation and misunderstanding. It is a big problem in a lot of companies, yet it is routinely accepted as necessary and even desirable. It’s neither.
9. Take emotions into account. Emotions are a big part of everyone’s personality. Ignore them at your peril. Probably no emotion is more ubiquitous at work than fear: the fear of speaking up, the fear of questioning authority, the fear of offering an idea. If you’re not dealing with it, you’re being victimized by it.
10. Get into the nitty-gritty of specifics. It is one thing to lay out a grand strategy. It is quite another thing, and much more difficult, to translate that big strategy into detailed implications for rank-and-file employees. You must do this; the failure to do it is all but an abdication of management in support of leadership.

There’s more, but that’s enough to give you pause as you move forward. Don’t let it paralyze you, and certainly don’t allow it to keep you from speaking the truth. Honesty is still the best policy. Just be careful out there.

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved. 

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In Honor of Work and Working

Minding Gaps is taking a few weeks of respite to rejuvenate, write, and plan. During our absence, we are reprising some of our own favorite posts from the past year. Today's post, in recognition of Labor Day in the United States, is reprinted from last year’s holiday. It is on the importance of hard work.

We will return to this space with all-new essays on Monday, September 27.

— Tom

 

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.

 

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The Jiminy Cricket Test for Decisions

What is the minimal threshold for a good decision in your company?

How low is the bar set?

If managers often make decisions that set your organization on a course to do things that are dangerous or illegal or unethical, then it is set too low.

Just look at the litany of companies whose managers have made disappointing decisions: This year alone it has included such iconic names as Hewlett-Packard, BP, and Toyota. In recent years it has included Enron, HealthSouth, Tyco, and many others on a lesser scale.

Some of these decisions looked innocuous at the time, but they rocked the companies to their core. It goes to show you that decisions at any level of a company can ultimately cost billions of dollars, the confidence of investors and customers, and the good name of the enterprise.  

I believe every organization should put all its managers through rigorous training on how to make basic decisions that accord with responsible conduct.

Here is a simple template you can use. We call it the Jiminy Cricket Test for Decisions.

(If you were deprived of Walt Disney cartoons as a child, you may be wondering who Jiminy Cricket was. He was a dapper little guy who served as Pinocchio’s conscience. If you have to ask who Pinocchio was, you’ll just have to look it up.)

The idea behind the Jiminy Cricket Test is to hold every decision, no matter how small, to a set of clear minimal standards.

Here it is. Just get in the habit of asking yourself these six short questions before you say or do anything of consequence:

• Is it safe? If what you are about to say or do endangers anyone, now or in the future, it doesn't pass this test. If it encourages anyone to act dangerously or take unseemly risks, it doesn't pass this test. If it ridicules safety standards or procedures, it doesn't pass this test. If it relegates safety to anything other than your No. 1 concern, then it doesn't pass this test.
   
  
• Is it legal?  Ask a good attorney whether your comments and conduct comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law, here and in any other jurisdiction that is involved. Ask also whether your course of action respects everyone's legal rights. If not, don't do it. If you are unclear or uncertain, gain clarity and certainty before proceeding. If it “pushes the envelope,” you should have serious reservations.
   
  
• Is it ethical?  In other words, does it do right by all parties? Is it inherently honest and fair? Or, truth to tell, are you trying to trick or deceive anyone? Are you fully living up to all your obligations, explicit and implicit? Are you honoring the Golden Rule?
   
  
• Is it strategic?  Only now, after clearing hurdles on safety, lawfulness, and ethics, do we get to a standard business issue. By strategic, we simply mean “of or relating to strategy”—nothing more. But that’s enough. In most companies, altogether too many activities are undertaken that have little or nothing to do with the firm’s business strategy. Anything you are doing or managing should be connected to one or more components of your organization’s strategy. If it isn’t, question the need for it.
   
  
• Is it smart?  Does it have a foundation in factual research, and is it the consequence of rigorous thinking that frankly tests assumptions and looks for bias? Or is it the whim of an executive who is convinced he or she is always right? Does it reflect the advice of experts you have consulted? Does it incorporate all relevant data you have available?
   
  
• Is it wise? Does it look down the road to its likely consequences? Is it respectful of all constituencies and stakeholders? Does it reflect the values your company espouses? Does it take account of all the organization’s responsibilities and its full purpose? Is it farsighted rather than shortsighted? Is it noble? Does it make you proud to be doing the work you are doing for this organization?
  

That’s it in a nutshell. Just six short questions that every manager would do well to ask before saying or doing anything that matters.

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How BP Can Change Its Safety Culture: A Case Study in Leadership

A Special Report and Comment

BP’s new chief executive, Robert Dudley, states that his top priority is changing the company’s culture around safety. That’s a tall order. Behemoths the size and complexity of BP don’t change overnight.

Fortunately, Mr. Dudley has a remarkable, highly successful case study in his own company’s archives. He should dig out the musty file and look it over.

One of the companies that BP purchased in its heady 1990s expansion was Chicago-based Amoco Corporation, itself the product of a 1950s merger of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) and the American Oil Co. of Baltimore. Indeed, Mr. Dudley cut his professional teeth at Amoco. He worked there from 1979 until BP acquired Amoco in 1998.

Amoco once faced a grave safety problem of its own. Through a comprehensive intervention, in which I played a role, that company dramatically changed its safety culture. If Amoco can do it, so can BP. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Amoco's Safety Challenge

As a matter of public record, from 1986 to 1996, Amoco lost 121 lives of employees and contractors worldwide. That's an average of one death per month.

For most companies in most industries, such a rate of fatalities is unimaginable and intolerable. BP’s numerical death toll over the last five or six years is roughly similar, though BP is larger than Amoco was, so its rate is somewhat less.

For a long time, Amoco's management looked the other way. Eventually, however, the senior leadership got fed up with the drumbeat of fatalities. Larry Fuller, the company's change-minded CEO, finally declared that creating a new culture of safety was his No. 1 priority.

He formed a cross-functional team to address the issue. The team was headed by Richard Spies, who subsequently worked with Mr. Dudley in BP Russia. As an internal consultant, I lent support to the Amoco team. (I have never had a connection to BP.)

The first thing the team did was to examine the causes of all 121 fatalities. That was important, because oil industry lore held that many fatalities were inevitable due to the flammability and lubricity of its products.

As one executive told me, “You have to remember that almost everything we make is fully designed and intended to explode sooner or later. We just want it to explode inside an engine.”

The inevitability assumption was a balm to the conscience of executives. But it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The team’s rigorous analysis showed that only a minority of the 121 fatalities worldwide were even the nominal result of explosions or fire. Most, by far, were actually the result of carelessness. Undoubtedly most employees were usually working carefully, but the tragic toll pointed to serious problems.

The Real Causes Come to Light

In fact, the analysis found the real culprits to be a pattern of haste, neglect, and flagrant disregard for safety. More than anything, there was a pervasive and wrong-headed culture that gave priority to production over people. The company never intended to create that culture. It just happened. 

Day in and day out, too many employees and contractors were failing to take routine safety precautions: attaching fall-protection equipment, tying down ladders, locking out and tagging out valves, buckling seat belts, insisting on hard hats and steel-toe shoes, respecting no-smoking areas, and even simply obeying traffic laws.

In focus groups with employees, we came across vivid anecdotal evidence that gave color and immediacy to the problem. The conclusion was inescapable. To altogether too many managers, other things mattered more than safety. A litany of their day-to-day decisions said so.

The analysis and its conclusions were bracing but not shocking. As a company, we had given only lip service to workplace safety. Our ongoing business conversation back then was all about exploration, production, and marketing. The prevailing message to employees, both explicit and implicit, was straightforward: Success was measured in dollars.

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

None of that would do any longer, and we knew it. Looking for solutions, we took a bold, comprehensive approach. In ways large and small, we set out to create a new culture that would truly put safety first. We were successful.

Words had to come first, but words alone would not suffice. In a three-page letter to staff signed by all the company’s top executives, senior management emphatically said that financial results would henceforth take a back seat to safety. The leadership had to be just that blunt; otherwise, employees would continue to believe the opposite. In a culture dominated by engineers, the company also appealed to an engineer’s ethic of process control. They imposed individual goals and plans for safety performance.

Then came resources. The company created a process-driven safety management system. Thousands of managers underwent training in the system, so that everyone was on board. It included an in-house investigative agency, modeled after the U.S. government’s National Transportation Safety Board. Our trained experts, deployed around the world, would speed to the site any serious mishap, fatal or not. They would determine the fundamental “root cause” and share it with management.

The final ingredient was the visible commitment of leaders. Employees wouldn’t believe the new culture until they saw it, so they had to see it, day after day after day.

Here, management pulled all kinds of levers. Executive promotions would rest heavily on safety records. All operations around the world were to stand down so that personnel could focus on safety issues. In a company that lived in meetings, every agenda of every meeting was henceforth to begin with discussion of workplace safety—even the meetings of the board of directors and the annual shareholders meeting. 

Many other interventions and policy changes reinforced the central message. Together, all these things sent a powerful, persuasive message that safety finally did matter more than anything else.

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

In the months and years that immediately followed, the company's safety performance improved noticeably. Fatalities and injuries plummeted. Today, we can confidently say that somewhere, people are alive because of the work we did.

I left Amoco in 1997, prior to its acquisition by BP. For a while afterward (BP also acquired ARCO about the same time), the toll of fatalities for BP as a whole was approximately what Amoco alone had been experiencing in the 1980s and early 1990s. It continued declining for several years.

Then, something at BP changed. I don’t know what. It does appear to be systemic, as evidence of serious problems long predated the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe this spring.

Persistent issues with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a crisis on another Gulf of Mexico platform known as Thunder Horse, and the disastrous explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 are corroborative.

(Just last week, BP was fined $50.6 million for safety violations at the Texas City refinery in 2009, four years after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers. The company has also committed to spending $500 million on safety at Texas City alone.)

Plainly, the safety culture that Amoco went so far to establish in the late 1990s is long gone. It desperately needs to be brought back.

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

If, as former Shell USA president John Hofmeister maintains, the industry has “earned the right” to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by dint of its 30,000 successful wells over the course of decades, it will absolutely require a culture that truly values safety above production. For the sake of human life, nothing else is more important.

Turning around the BP safety culture will plainly be a formidable challenge. It won’t happen soon or quickly. But, as Amoco’s experience convincingly shows, it can be done. Mr. Dudley should just ask around.

— TJL          

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Steven Slater Is Just a Whiner

Steven "Slider" Slater’s take-this-job-and-shove-it resignation from JetBlue Airways a few days ago has quickly become the stuff of legend. People regard him as a folk hero. His Facebook page has 200,000 fans. Someone is writing a song about him.

Though charged with three felonies that could put him behind bars, Mr. Slater is already mentioned as a candidate for a television reality show or five-figure keynote speaking gigs on workplace stress. Public comments on JetBlue’s blog are running heavily in favor of giving Mr. Slater his job back.

To my thinking, all this reflects a society that has lost its moorings. Mr. Slater deserves none of this adoration. If not in jail, he deserves to be unemployed for a long, long time. He most certainly shouldn't be rehired by JetBlue.

For the record, Steven Slater is the flight attendant who lost his cool during a 46-minute flight from Pittsburgh to Kennedy Airport in New York City. After suffering a slight laceration from a mishap while passengers were boarding the aircraft, he seemed to go into a meltdown, passengers said.

He bumped into passengers without apologizing. He appeared unkempt, his shirt unbuttoned and paunch visible. He rushed through the pre-flight safety demonstration, and then he petulantly flung a life jacket and oxygen mask to the floor. He refused to offer assistance to passengers who asked. He appeared morose and hostile.

Finally, after the plane landed, he became irate at a passenger who inquired where her bag was. He cursed at her, and then he commandeered the airplane's public-address system.

With an F-laced tirade, he declared he was fed up and he told passengers where to go. Then he grabbed two beers, activated the emergency slide release, and slid down to freedom. The whole thing was like a satiric cartoon, a meeting of Lenny Bruce and Jim Carrey.

Let's stipulate that flying is not the joy it once was. We can all agree on that, and we can parcel out the blame in equal measure to airline management, short-fuse passengers, the legacy of terrorism, corporate travel purchasing algorithms, and perhaps even airline deregulation.

None of it excuses behavior like this. Romanticizing an obnoxious boor like Steven Slater just encourages everyone else to act like whining, adolescent brats. We already have enough of that, thank you. It isn't cute anymore. It's pathetic.

Yes, being a flight attendant has its pressures. But it is nothing compared with the monotony and the dirt and the danger and the dehumanizing neglect that millions upon millions of workers around the world experience day in and day out.

If a Steven Slater goes bonkers because of a little stress, on an airline with leather seats and expansive leg room for passengers no less, it is a sad reflection on him. He deserves not folk-heroic celebration or even Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame. He deserves lifelong obscurity as a nobody, for that is what he is.

Next case.

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Should Hewlett-Packard's Board Have Fired its CEO?

Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors demanded and received the resignation of CEO Mark V. Hurd last week after an internal investigation, prompted by a complaint of sexual harassment from a vendor, uncovered irregularities in his expense account.

The allegation of sexual harassment proved unfounded, and the amount of money in question for the expense reimbursement was reported to be between $1,000 and $20,000. Mr. Hurd said an assistant had prepared his expense vouchers, but he took responsibility and offered to reimburse the company for the difference. The board insisted he go.

By all accounts, Mr. Hurd was performing very well as chief executive of HP since 2005, when he took over from ousted CEO Carly Fiorina. Investors enjoyed an average annual total shareholder return exceeding 25 percent. Many employees were chafing, however, under his cost-cutting regime. Pay cuts were the order of the day even as the company was making a great deal of money.

A few more complicating details: Under terms of his contract, Mr. Hurd is walking away with a stipend of $12.2 million; counting stocks and options, his total package may approach $40 million. The company's employees are, for the time being, without a leader. Investors suddenly lost billions of dollars in valuation, perhaps temporarily, as the stock plummeted. The woman who filed the complaint turns out to have a checkered history, and she has stated publicly it was not her intent to have Mr. Hurd dismissed. Shortly before she filed the complaint, HP had decided not to renew her contract.

Here is a report from The New York Times that describes the board’s decision making. The article points out that the board was primarily concerned with public-relations damage control. Here is an Associated Press account, and here is another report, from Venture Beat, a Silicon Valley newsletter.

There are two schools of thought here.

One school is zero tolerance. It holds that the CEO must set the ethical tone for the entire organization. Any deviation from propriety—indeed, any appearance of impropriety—condones ethical laxity. This perspective argues that it’s unreasonable to hold other employees accountable for standards that senior executives only wink at. By this thinking, the board was fully justified in firing Mr. Hurd. Indeed, any other course of action would be unimaginable.

The other school of thought is minimal deviation. It recognizes that all people are imperfect, and it acknowledges ambiguity and complexity, so it expects rigid perfection from no one. It still expects leaders to set the moral example, but often in a gray cloud of uncertainty. By this thinking, the board should have taken into account the complexities of the situation. Instead of dismissing the chief executive, it might instead have imposed a penalty of some sort, taken the reimbursement, and perhaps responded in other ways as well, short of dismissal.

Jack Welch, the iconic CEO of General Electric in the 1990s, had the practice of using a 2 X 2 matrix for evaluating managers on both their demonstrated values and their business acumen.

For those managers in the northeast quadrant, who consistently both honored the values and performed well, Mr. Welch said the future was clear and bright: onward and upward. For those managers in the southwest quadrant, who did neither, the answer was equally obvious, if not so pleasant.

The difficulty came in the northwest and southeast cells: managers who did one but not the other.

Mr. Welch suggested that managers who honored the values but didn’t perform well should be given a second chance in a different role, perhaps even a third chance. If they consistently failed to perform, they would have to leave on that reason alone.

He further suggested that managers who performed well but ran roughshod over the values be counseled as to the importance of the values. If, over time, they continued to flout the values, then they, too, would have to leave for that reason alone, in spite of their good business performance.

In the case of Hewlett-Packard and Mark Hurd, one could argue that a serious financial penalty coupled with intensive values-based coaching might have served the company and its stakeholders better than outright dismissal.

Mr. Hurd’s friend Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, was quoted yesterday in The Times as essentially taking that point of view. He was critical of the Hewlett Packard board. But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor of management at Yale University, argued just the opposite. He applauded the HP board's decision last week, though he also had harsh words for the contract that Mr. Hurd negotiated with the board.

What do you think? Why do you think the way you do?

Here are some questions to ponder:
 

• Have we created a kind of third rail in business, such that any chief executive demonstrating errant judgment is automatically dismissed, with a large payout to boot?
  
  
• Should the company's public image in a situation like this be the board's most important concern? If not, why not?
  
  
• Can we reasonably expect perfection from any leader?
  
  
• What ethical transgressions do justify a zero-tolerance policy? What issues require something less?
  
  
• What do you think of executive contracts that provide for substantial payouts on dismissal?
  
  
• Should the executive's business acumen and performance be taken into account here, at all?

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