Minding Gaps

The Birthplace of Cynicism Is an Iceberg

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Companies and other large organizations—agencies or administrations of government, universities, non-profits, hospitals, museums, and the like—typically go to great lengths to craft their formal strategic messages.
 
These organizations appreciate the importance of carefully defining their mission and regularly communicating with key stakeholders like customers, employees, investors, and others who want to be kept abreast of their progress. That's what the formal voice is for.
 
It can veer off course, however, and sometimes it does. Leaders may neglect or ignore communication outside and beyond the realm of formal messages. Two other voices—the semi-formal and the informal—account for well over half of all the messages that key stakeholders receive. These messages can wreak havoc if left unmanaged.
 
The semi-formal voice consists of explicit and implicit messaging from the institutional management tools an organization uses to operate: things like budgets, procedures, policies, its hierarchy, agendas, requirements, quotas, and more. For example, who gets hired and who gets promoted send loud signals as to what kinds of behavior are expected and rewarded.
 
The informal voice (not be confused with water-cooler chitchat) consists of explicit and implicit messaging drawn from workplace experiences touching on integrity, respect, dignity, pride, teamwork, inclusion, trust, and so forth. These experiences define the employee's social relationship with the employer. As a practical matter, they commonly involve the interpersonal relationship with one's manager and with his or her manager.
 
Like the submerged bulk of an iceberg, the semi-formal and informal voices can sink the ship if they are not managed. For when the formal voice is saying one thing, and either or both the semi-formal and informal voices are saying something else, the formal voice instantly loses credibility. It's never a tie. It's never close to a tie. The ship always lists to the same side.
 
Moreover, the louder the formal voice is, the more noticeable the erosion of credibility is. That's often the case, because the formal voice alone has the amplification of marketing, publishing, broadcasting, and web presence.
 
At the risk of mixing metaphors, you can think of an iceberg as the birthplace of cynicism in large, complex organizations. When the semi-formal and informal voices fail to confirm and corroborate the formal voice, the distance between them is a credibility gap.

In the military, the difference between the formal voice and the semi-formal and informal voices is known colloquially as the official truth and the ground truth. Whenever the difference rears its head, the cynicism of the troops is bound to grow. No successful organization can tolerate that cynicism more than minimally.
 
To ward off such cynicism, it's imperative to include the semi-formal and informal voices in strategic communication planning, and it's imperative to include communication planning for key stakeholders in any strategic planning process.
 
Think of it this way. You can keep the upper hand by doing your best to manage the communication about your organization—formal, semi-formal, and informal—or you can let unmanaged communication gain the upper hand. Which makes more sense?

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Leaders Can Learn from the Best TV Commercial Ever

 

By Thomas J. Lee

You may be too young to remember the best TV commercial ever. If you’re not, don’t blame me for reminding you of the fact.

As far as we’re concerned, the best TV commercial isn’t necessarily the cutest or the funniest. It isn’t necessarily titillating or provocative. It doesn’t necessarily have terrific cinematic or artistic qualities. It didn't necessarily run during a Super Bowl.

It’s the best TV commercial ever simply because it makes its point so well. As proof of that, just about any American old enough to remember it can, almost 25 years after it first aired.

And it’s the best TV commercial ever because it hammers home a business case for the service it is selling, which, for our purposes, just so happens to reinforce important insights of value to any manager or leader. Even today, you occasionally hear people citing that TV commercial in business discussions. Nothing rivals face-to-face human contact, they’ll say, and they’ll be right.

Here it is, and here is a little background to it. Do you remember it?

The best TV commercial ever was produced by the legendary Chicago advertising firm of Leo Burnett for United Airlines, and it began airing in 1989. It was filmed in dramatic hues of black and white to intensify the warmth of the characters. It featured Ben, a beleaguered manager whose company was just fired by a longstanding and highly valued client.

The spot has Ben, in shirtsleeves and vest, convening a quick management meeting to announce the news. His message is blunt and compelling. The company is losing touch with its clients. It has to reinvigorate its lifeblood of relationships.

An assistant hands Ben a stack of United tickets—back then they were on card stock—and Ben begins handing them out to the individual managers. A manager objects: "But Ben, that's more than 200 cities." Ben is unmoved. Someone asks Ben where he’s going, and he replies: “To visit that old friend who fired us this morning.”

You’re smart enough to draw your own conclusions and applications from this commercial for your work. What are they?

Here are mine: Don’t lose touch with people. Don’t rely on email and telephone. Don’t think of social media as synapses or nutrients of relationships; they are neither. Remember that human beings thrive in community with other human beings. The more you nurture and strengthen that sense of community, the better your leadership will be.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

Trust Is Foundational to People Engagement

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Lest any corporate executive, department head, plant manager, team leader, or any other administrator believe they can do whatever they damn well please with no adverse consequences on the engagement of people, consider some stunning correlations turned up by a St. Louis market research firm:

• Among people with strong trust in the management where they work, 63 percent would be happy to spend the remainder of their careers with that organization; among employees with weak trust, only 7 percent would.
• Among people with strong trust in management, 51 percent would invest their own money in the organization if they could. Among people with weak trust in management, the corresponding figure is only 6 percent.
• Among people with strong trust in management, 50 percent look forward to coming to work every day. Among people with weak trust in management, only 3 percent do.

Those are dramatic and determinative correlations. They are well beyond any statistical test of significance.

These numbers do not mean that executive authority must or should shirk difficult decisions that people will find hard to accept. That is not the point.

Rather, they mean that decisions must be accompanied by a great deal of honest and forthright communication, both verbally and behaviorally, explicit and implicit, and, more than anything, decency and sincerity of intent. You cannot and must not assume that people will understand and accept a decision that you haven't explained and justified, morally as well as legally or strategically.

Maybe there was a time when fast talk and double talk could fool people, and maybe there was a time when no talk was acceptable and expected, but that was a long time ago. People are far too sophisticated today, and they insist on being treated with respect.

Always remember that the talent and skills on which you depend are in bodies with legs. Those legs can walk.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Important Reading on Servant Leadership

 

By Thomas J. Lee

I don’t often use this space to trumpet articles from the general news media, but this is an exception.

For any and all of you with an interest in servant leadership, this article is must reading.

In our Master Class workshops, we devote a great deal of attention to servant leadership. As a closing summary, I like to ask each class how many people like to think of themselves as go-getters. Invariably, almost everyone raises a hand.

Servant leadership challenges that ethic. Instead of championing go-getters, it celebrates go-givers. It recognizes and rewards the act of giving, especially among managers to and for the people on their team.

The linked article, by Susan Dominus, will appear Sunday (31 March 2013) in the magazine of The New York Times. Do read it, and let me know what you think. (Then, sign up for Master Class!)

 

 

'Just kidding—I was fired today'

 

By Thomas J. Lee

There's so much gobbledygook and doubletalk spewing forth from corporations every day, you get in the habit of blithely ignoring it—in spite of the fact that it demeans and insults all the most important stakeholders: customers, employees, and investors, all both actual and prospective.

Thus, when an executive of a publicly traded company has the courage, self-awareness, and humility to tell the truth with self-deprecating humor, it grabs your attention. Just such a thing happened a few days ago.

No, we’re not speaking of Warren Buffet, whose annual shareholder newsletter was published Friday, although Buffet has been refreshingly telling the truth for decades. He is a happy exception to the rule. We expect plain talk from him.

Rather, the executive whose truth telling was startling and invigorating was Andrew Mason, who was deposed Friday as CEO of Groupon, Inc., the e-commerce company he co-founded.

Usually in an executive shuffle, the dearly departed say nothing. They just disappear, and the company’s mouthpiece issues some verbal pabulum to explain the change. The worst of these anodyne comments asks us to believe that the executive wants “to spend more time with his family” or has chosen “to pursue other opportunities.”

Mr. Mason needed no corporate mouthpiece. He could speak just fine for himself. In a farewell letter to employees, he began with a nod to the cliché and then—well, read it for yourself:

After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding—I was fired today. If you’re wondering why, you haven’t been paying attention. From controversial metrics in our S1 to our material weakness to two quarters of missing our expectations and a stock price that’s hovering around one quarter of our listing price, the events of the last year and a half speak for themselves. As CEO, I am accountable.

That alone was refreshing. Mr. Mason went on to pay tribute to the company’s employees and to voice support for both the board’s strategy and the board’s decision to fire him. “It’s time to give Groupon a relief valve from the public noise,” he wrote.

Then he used a metaphor to help people understand. Metaphors are often terrific rhetorical devices. Never underestimate the value and power of an apt metaphor. In this case, he invoked the old video game Battletoads and poked fun at himself:

I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first-ever play through. I am so lucky to have had the opportunity to take the company this far with all of you. I’ll now take some time to decompress (FYI I’m looking for a good fat camp to lose my Groupon 40, if anyone has a suggestion), and then maybe I’ll figure out how to channel this experience into something productive.

He closed by reminding his former employees always to think first of the customer, something that seems increasingly foreign and hostile to the priorities of so many CEOs, who pay obeisance to investors first and everyone else a distant second. Then he said something truly phenomenal.

This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness—don’t waste the opportunity!

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew

Did you see that? He used the L word: love. In a business letter!

Frankly, I have long had my doubts about Groupon and its business model, but now I’m thinking that I will keep an eye on young Mr. Mason. Go lose those 40 pounds, sir, and keep us posted as to your whereabouts.

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Yahoo's New Remote-Work Policy Needs Flexibility

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Yahoo’s new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has moved quickly to turn around the company’s stolid culture and position it for change. Within days of her celebrated arrival last summer she purchased thousands of new iPhones for employees. That was only one of several initiatives intended to make the company more innovative and productive.

So perhaps we should cut her some slack on Yahoo’s new policy regarding remote workers. Like many other large companies, Yahoo has encouraged employees to work part of their time or all of their time from home. That has had a number of people-affirming consequences. It has enabled couples to balance two careers more readily, and it has facilitated child care for working moms. It has also saved corporate funds on real estate.

Yahoo’s support for remote working will end in June, according to reports on All Things D, a website devoted to the technology and digital industry. (You can read the two stories here and here.) Citing the need for more and better collaboration, and in the hope of nurturing more innovation, Ms. Mayer is requiring all Yahoo employees to work physically in offices alongside their their colleagues.

While there is an argument for people to work together in the same space, Yahoo’s new policy strikes me as overreach. I say that for four reasons.

First, any large company has multiple offices—not uncommonly in an array of countries and time zones—and therefore remote collaboration is already a way of life. Yahoo itself has offices in Bangalore and Beijing. The drawbacks of remote working are part of business in the 21st century, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Second, a significant number of high-value employees have made major life decisions on the basis of the prior policy. Home ownership, spousal employment, and court-ordered child-care arrangements are not easy things to change in a matter of several months. Moreover, as a matter of simple equity, some employees have undoubtedly left prior jobs and joined Yahoo in part because of the flexibility and freedom of its remote-working policy.

Third, like a layoff or any other management decision with tectonic consequences, this policy shift is likely to divert the focus of Yahoo employees away from business strategy and operations to the policy change itself, at a time when Yahoo can least afford the diversion. In some cases that kind of collateral damage is unavoidable, but when it can be avoided or minimized, it should be.

Fourth, in my own experience, remote working is every bit as productive as office-based working is—perhaps even more so. I personally work with several executives of Fortune 100 companies who maintain home offices, and they are some of the most efficient, productive people I know.

There is some potential middle ground here, and if my voice were heard in Sunnyvale, it would say this: In-office work arrangements are indeed conducive to collaboration and innovation, as opposed to sheer efficiency and productivity, which seem to thrive in remote arrangements. When people work together, they run into one another and share ideas in the cafeteria, washrooms, corridors, and elevators. People also develop more appreciation for one another’s special expertise by working in their presence. All that is good.

But that can be accomplished equally well by bringing remote-working teams together for a few days every month or every quarter, by having regular online conferences in between, by coming together for sophisticated professional-development programs, and by using several new programs and apps to facilitate remote collaboration. As an aside, companies should be budgeting more for airline travel and meetings anyway. That is money and time well spent.

By modifying the new policy, Yahoo can avoid the trauma of forcing high-value employees to choose whether husband or wife is able to keep a job or remain on track for an MBA, and it can demonstrate that new policies need not take the form of Draconian reversals that rattle everyone.

Just my two cents.

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Related articles

Silicon Alley Insider: Why Marissa Mayer Told Remote Employees To Work In An Office ... Or Quit (YHOO)

'A giant leap backward': Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer under fire for banning employees from working from home

No more remote work at Yahoo

On working remotely

Yahoos Can No Longer Work From Home

Master Class: Communication for Servant Leadership

 Venue for Master Class: Communication for Leadership

 

 “Communication is the real work of leadership,” says Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria. We emphatically agree.

We have been saying it for years: Successful leaders communicate their vision or concern or priority with clarity, with coherence, and with credibility. People know what the leaders think, what they feel, and what they believe. There is no doubt, no confusion, no vacillation.

Think of Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Think of Abraham Lincoln himself at Gettysburg. Think of Nelson Mandela emerging from 27 years of imprisonment. Think of England's legendary King Henry V, memorialized by Shakespeare, rallying his outnumbered and outgunned troops at Agincourt.

Think of any coach or teacher, any sibling or parent, any doctor or writer, any volunteer or political candidate, any manager or entrepreneur, anyone at all who influenced and ultimately inspired you to want something or do something or become something more.

Think of any influential, inspirational leader—at any time, in any place—and you will probably envision that leader in the act of speaking with conviction, clarity, and credibility.

Successful leaders communicate with whatever mechanism they can. They have a message they passionately believe in, and they speak it. Their message is one of aspiration, of need, of confidence. They describe, they declare, they demand. They cite examples. They tell stories. They ask questions, a litany of them, one after another on a single theme. They craft memorable aphorisms, little ditties, or clever quotations. They cajole. They persuade. They needle.

More importantly, they engage in dialogue—lots and lots of dialogue—and they repeat themselves over and over and over again.

Finally, and most importantly, they live their message. They are their message. They offer themselves as a working example of the leadership they preach. Their behavior and their decisions are part and parcel of their communication. They become their own first follower. 

It's for this very reason—the fact that communication, both explicit and implicit, both verbal and non-verbal, sometimes even latent, is the real but difficult work of leadership—that we throw such a bright spotlight on communication in our Master Class workshops, and it is why we offer a system to ensure that your leadership messages are clear, compelling, and credible.

 

*          *          *

 

Master Class: Communication for Servant Leadership is a sophisticated, high-level look at the real energy of leadership. Far from typical training, it delves deep into relationships: the live-wire connection that makes leadership possible. Appropriate for any experienced manager or executive, regardless of level, it will reawaken and reignite the leader in you.

What makes Master Class stand out?

First, it approaches leadership not as a position on the org chart, and not as a function of static traits, but as hard work that anyone with responsibility for the work of others should do. The hard work focuses on the clarity, credibility, and cogency of communication—its substance, its style and tone, its frequency, its practical applicability, and its stickiness, or memorability.

Second, Master Class recognizes communication as anything that conveys information or creates meaning for people. That includes many kinds of silent, or behavioral, communication, as well as conventional, verbal communication. It’s up to every manager to manage not just the messages he or she is sending, both spoken and silent, but also the metamessages that people are receiving. As any manager knows, they may or may not be the same.

Third, Master Class takes a close look at people engagement. If there is one thing that enables a company to define the future, it’s the full focus, curiosity, passion, and courage of employees. That's engagement, and it is NOT the same thing as alignment, morale, loyalty, or commitment. Engagement is the deliverable, or work product, of leadership. You must know how to cultivate and grow engagement if you are to lead people to a new and better tomorrow.

Fourth, Master Class introduces and explores the powerful concept of servant leadership: the doctrine that leaders lead best by serving first, as opposed to expecting to be served. We call it 5th Degree Leadership. Modeled on the late Robert K. Greenleaf's trailblazing work, Master Class broaches difficult challenges of empathy, humility, self-awareness, vulnerability, and more. We're no longer surprised that this chapter is among the most memorable and well-received of the entire session, even among technically trained managers such as engineers and scientists.

Fifth, Master Class shows the hidden differences between communication for the sake of managing people and communication for the sake of leading them. The two differ profoundly in terms of their purpose, their content, their style, and their tone, yet few leaders understand or appreciate it. Use the wrong kind of communication, and you get the wrong result. This is a common phenomenon in business, and it goes a long way toward explaining why so many change initiatives fall flat on their face.

Finally, Master Class is filled with case studies and practical examples that will rivet your attention. People tell us they remember our stories for years and years, and that they share the stories with friends, colleagues, and even relatives. One of the highest compliments we receive, and it comes to us surprisingly often, is that our course even helps families come closer together. That isn't our strategic intent, but we're glad to be of help.

Master Class is taught by Thomas J. Lee, an expert on leadership communication who has been working with companies of all sizes for more than twenty years. A former journalist and executive speechwriter, he has benchmarked nearly 30 major corporations for their best-practice secrets. He has spoken and taught throughout the United States, across Canada, and in a dozen other countries in Europe, South America, and Africa. He blogs at www.MindingGaps.com.

Master Class has been a staple of corporate training programs at many Fortune 500 companies. Now, on a trial basis, we are offering it by open enrollment. You can register by yourself, or you can sign up several of your colleagues as well, for a fast-paced, two-day immersion or for a three-day session with a special chapter on leadership for introverts.

We have seats available in Master Class sessions scheduled for the following dates:

• July 24-25, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• August 7-8, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• September 11-12, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• October 15-16, 2013 (two-day immersion)
• October 22-23-24, 2013 (three-day with a special unit on leadership for introverts)

In addition, we occasionally schedule executive briefings over breakfast to introduce the program to corporate executives. Reserve a place or two at the next breakfast by calling us at 650-464-1770.

All sessions (including the executive briefings) take place in a charming, old Tudor-style hotel in an affluent, lovely North Shore suburb of Chicago. It's as far-removed from a cookie-cutter chain hotel as you can imagine, and we have negotiated favorable lodging rates just for you. The site is easily accessible by car or commuter train from the Loop, and it is just 45 minutes from Chicago's O'Hare Airport or 60 minutes from Milwaukee's Mitchell Field. Registration for Master Class includes continental breakfast and lunch both days, so you'll have additional opportunities to get to know your peers at other organizations.

Take a moment to read this course description of Master Class. Then let us know (by emailing us directly at info@arceil.com or by telephoning us at 650-464-1770) how many places we should hold for you and on which dates.

The two-day Master Class immersion has these benefits:

Bottom Line Value. Research shows that between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost to the active disengagement of people. That’s as much as $2.5 million for every $100 million of revenue, and it is just for active disengagement. (Passive disengagement is more pervasive and adds still more to the cost.) Recover it, and it goes straight to the bottom line. Few such professional-development programs pay for themselves so easily. This one clearly does.

Big Ideas, Big Impact. Leadership and management are two different things. So are engagement and alignment. The communication that drives leadership and engagement is different from that which drives management and alignment, too. Use the wrong one, and you get the wrong result. Master Class brings clarity and explanation to these critical distinctions. Executives will come to understand the importance of distributive leadership—after all, no one can be everywhere—and managers will learn why they must stand as collateral leaders of the enterprise.

Case Studies. We have scoured top-tier companies for best practices, and we bring them to you. You will see practical examples from companies like Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, BP/Amoco, Federal Express, and many others. You'll remember the vivid stories for years to come.

Analysis of Engagement. Master Class identifies five levels of engagement—creative engagement, active engagement, passive engagement, passive disengagement, and active disengagement—and then analyzes each for its consequences, behaviors, and antecedents.

Simple, Powerful Models. Our flagship models, the Rainbow and the GearBox, have been used by major companies to get a fix on their level of staff engagement. The Rainbow Model identifies unintended, and previously unnoticed, credibility gaps: mixed messages, muddled messages, mute messages. The GearBox serves as both a structure and a self-assessment tool at the intersection of strategy and employee engagement. We guarantee you will find them both enlightening.

Managing the Metamessage. Master Class acknowledges the obvious: what people hear you say isn't necessarily what you said. It's one thing to choose your words carefully, and you certainly should do that. But if you neglect to manage your implicit communication, you still have a problem, and you haven't begun to address it. We'll show you how you are communicating 24/7 through your semi-formal and informal voices as well as your formal voice.

Quantitative Data. Master Class presents hard, factual, quantitative data to explain the power and value of communication around business strategy. You and your managers will get facts and figures on change, trust, engagement and disengagement, perceptions of managers by employees, ROI, message clutter, employee frustrations, rumors, and so much more. Most importantly, we realize that data always tells a story. Discerning the stories in the data is critical.

Trust in Leadership. Remember trust? Everyone pays lip service to it, and yet compromises to trust are all too common. Surveys show that senior management teams routinely and dramatically overstate the level of trust in their organizations. For leaders, trust is the product of their personal and institutional honesty, their professional competence, their presence and accessibility, and the affinity that people on their teams perceive in terms of common interests, needs, and concerns.We'll show how tenuous all these factors can be, and what you can do about it.

Practical, Proven Strategies. We have distilled our teaching down to neat lists of strategies and tactics. They all make abundant good sense, but many of these strategies never occurred to managers beforehand. Master Class puts them in your hands.

 

Our alumni include executives and managers from top-tier companies whose products you see and use every day. Evaluations of these workshops are consistently high. After sitting in a class for two or three full days, more than 95 percent of participants recommend Master Class for their peers and superiors.

Here’s what past participants have said about Master Class:

 

“This was a top-notch program directly geared [to] the success of managers. It was a continuing education program among peers.”

—a senior manager of a Fortune 100 consumer-products company

“I have worked for this agency for 25 years, and I have never had a day of in-service training as valuable as today’s.”

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

“Excellent presenter, measured pauses, superb, enthusiastic, thought-provoking, excellent material, first-rate, will definitely recommend.”

—a guest participant

“I have gone through a lot of leadership training. This is one of the two best. The other was at Carnegie Mellon, and this workshop is more applicable to my day-to-day work.”

—senior engineer, aerospace company

“Tom is terrific! Original, enthusiastic, motivating . . . the lessons are applicable, useful, and real.”

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

 

Tuition for the two-day programs is just $1,695 per person (or $1,495 by the early-bird deadline, 30 days prior to a class); add $500 for a three-day session. Registrations are non-refundable but fully transferable to a later date or to a colleague. We offer substantial scholarships for schools, for non-profit organizations, and for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Also, be sure to ask about our attractive packages, which offer substantial discounts for groups of five or more registering at the same time (they may attend different sessions).

Call us (at 650-464-1770) or write to us (at info@arceil.com) to indicate your interest, and we'll get back to you right away. (Note that payment can only be made by credit card over the telephone, as our web presence is not yet secure.)

 

Sonia Sotomayor Offers Powerful Insights on Persuasion

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I was lucky enough to be first in line at my local public library to borrow Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir, My Beloved World. In a word, it’s fabulous. After starting it late Saturday afternoon, I raced through it and turned the last page over coffee this morning, scarcely 36 hours later.

Sotomayor, for the benefit of our readers abroad, is the first Latina to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Growing up with diabetes in the hard-scrabble poverty of South Bronx, she found escape in the books and rigorous expectations of a parochial school, and she won a full scholarship to Princeton. She graduated at the top of her class, and she went on to Yale Law School, where she earned a prestigious seat on the law review.

Impressive as all that was, it wasn’t enough for a judicial clerkship or an offer from a white-shoe law firm. So she settled for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. That turned out to be the proverbial cloud with a silver lining. Soon she had a couple of mentors and several dear friends who taught her important lessons in law and in life. All the while she held her real ambition to herself: She wanted to be a judge. Fortunately, one thing led to another, and today she is at the pinnacle of the American judiciary.

Two of the important lessons she learned as an assistant DA are relevant to anyone who aspires to lead other people. Both involve the art, even the alchemy, of persuasion.

First, she learned that a prosecutor must acknowledge that juries are reluctant to convict a criminal defendant. Jurors realize that a conviction and consequent imprisonment will very likely wreck a family. So they need a powerful reason. Providing that reason requires the prosecuting attorney to see the situation as fluid through the eyes of the jury. Although the law doesn’t demand a motive for conviction of a crime, a jury often does. That means the prosecutors must meet this need, and they must do so in a way that jurors can accept.

Second, she learned that persuasion is as much a matter of emotion as of logic. Perhaps any car salesperson or Madison Avenue copywriter knows as much, but for an attorney whose Ivy League education stressed documented facts and impeccable, linear reasoning, it was a startling revelation. Once the young assistant DA came to these realizations, she never again lost a case. That’s saying something, right there.

I suspect these insights will come as a surprise to many MBAs as well. Quantitative analysis undergirds so many strategies in business that companies regard data-driven decisions as self-evidently conclusive. But strategic decisions aren’t necessarily self-evident to the employees who must make them come alive. People need to feel viscerally the importance of the workplace priority or policy.

My Beloved World is heartwarming, gritty, tender, inspiring, authentic, even eloquent. It is a celebration of family, work, and love in a world of despair, drugs, death, and disappointment. I cannot recommend this book enthusiastically enough. Do, do, do read it.

P.S. I just learned that My Beloved World will break onto The New York Times Bestseller List next Sunday as No. 1. Frankly, that doesn't surprise me in the least.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: Grizzly Bear or Teddy Bear?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Mensa, the high IQ society, just lost one of its brightest stars. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf died this evening at the age of 78.

Schwarzkopf was best known for commanding the Western coalition that invaded Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, which came to be known as Operation Desert Storm. Long before that, however, he was earning a reputation the hard way as an officer who served his men, while other officers expected to be served by their men.

The difference, of course, is huge. It goes to the heart of what we mean when we talk about servant leadership.

The general described his approach to leadership in a memoir, It Doesn't Take a Hero. He recounted an incident in Vietnam that severely tested his commitment to his men.

One day in 1970, on learning that troops in his battalion were pinned down by land mines, he rushed to the scene. There he found soldiers still trapped in the minefield. He urged them to move out slowly, just inches at a time, but one soldier took too big a step, and another mine exploded. Schwarzkopf, a lieutenant colonel at the time, crawled through mines to the men and helped them escape. 

Blessed with genius-level intelligence, Schwarzkopf had two character traits in particular that I admired, and neither had anything to do with his intellectual candlepower.

One trait was his appreciation of emotion as a driving force of leadership. For him emotion could cut both ways, occasionally as anger but more often as love.

As anger, it earned Schwarzkopf a reputation for a hot head. As love, it earned him a reputation for genuine accessibility and dedication. He was both a grizzly bear and a Teddy bear. Indeed, he kept a Teddy bear on his Army-issue cot while on deployment in the Persian Gulf, perhaps to encourage himself to err on the side of softie.

The other trait was integrity. In an era when so many leaders disappoint, Schwarzkopf was ever there: a rock when we needed one. He was the epitome of character, always doing the thing that needed doing. Moreover, he spoke the truth regardless of whether you wanted to hear it. At least you knew where things stood: where he stood, and where you stood with him.

If he sometimes saw things in black and white, with no gray hues of nuance, he was rarely if ever misunderstood, for he was plain and clear. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said.

Nor did he brook excuses. "The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do," Schwarzkopf liked to say. "The hard part is doing it."

Indeed it is, and it always will be. Yet in Schwarzkopf we had a living, working model of the hard part, of the courage and perseverance and self-discipline it takes to be the person we say we are, or the person we want to be.

The general may have departed, but his example will live on.

 

  © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How Do Great Leaders Communicate?

By Thomas J. Lee

A couple of weeks ago in this space we expounded on the fundamental differences between managing people and leading people, and we pointed to corresponding differences between the deliverables, or work product, of management and leadership: people alignment for managing and people engagement for leading.

Now let's turn our attention to the differences between communication for the sake of managing people and communication for the sake of leading people.

These two things, both nominally communication, differ greatly in terms of purpose, substance, style, and tone.

Other differences can also come into play, depending on the urgency of a situation, the sophistication of the people involved, the culture at play, the familiarity of the manager or leader, the degree of opposition to change, and other factors. We don't have the space here to explore all this in depth, but we can offer an overview.

Before we dig in, we should take a moment to recapitulate the differences between management and leadership.

It's very, very important to view them both as work—not as a function of position, title, or status; nor as a matter of traits or attributes; nor as a kind of trophy for success. Both are essentially work, and anyone who does the work of managing or leading can rightly be regarded as a manager or a leader, regardless of their position (chief executive or team supervisor, for example) or their traits (salt-and-pepper temples, an air of self-certainty, perhaps an echoing baritone) or their trophies (the large corner office, say, or the stripes on a uniform).

Managing is the hard work of meeting pre-determined expectations of acknowledged stakeholders: customers, investors, employees, senior officers, perhaps government regulators. These expectations may take the form of quality standards, sales quotas, budgets, deadlines, year-end bonuses, compliance with the law, and more. Managing sets out to ensure predictable consistency. When it is effective, managing creates the alignment of people.

In contrast, leadership is the hard work of inventing or reinventing the future. It articulates an ideal future and inspires people to strive to achieve it, often in spite of uncertainty, self-sacrifice, risk, or even despair. It's all about change, either operational or cultural. When leadership is effective, it creates engagement of people.

With this fundamental distinction in mind, we can proceed to the differences in communication for managing and leading in terms of their purpose, substance, style, and tone.

In terms of purpose, communication for the sake of management seeks to control or influence the day-to-day activities of people, so that the expectations of stakeholders will be met with certainty. Communication for the sake of leadership seeks to excite and inspire people to attempt more than they ever dreamed or thought possible: literally and figuratively to travel to the Moon or abolish apartheid or dismantle the Berlin Wall, or, on a smaller scale, to lose weight or go back to school or give up smoking.

In terms of substance, communication for the sake of management is typically detailed, explicit, static, and pedagogical, inasmuch as it teaches people what they must do to meet the expectations of stakeholders. Communication for the sake of leadership is more general, implicit, dynamic, and homiletic, inasmuch as it encourages people to come along on a journey of change.

In terms of style, communication for the sake of management is all about compliance and constancy, and it is incremental. You are seeking to replicate something you have done well or to refine something you must do a little better. Communication for the sake of leadership is all about large change. Because it depends on the discretionary involvement of people, you set out to build a high level of focus, curiosity, passion, and commitment to a big ideal, for those are the stepping stones to the engagement you need.

Finally, in terms of tone, communication for the sake of management is often impersonal, authoritative, and commanding, and it often uses the second person ("You must do this now.") Communication for the sake of leadership is usually personal and collaborative or collective, and it usually uses the first person plural (though not always: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is a famous exception).

Both are commonly in the imperative mood, but the imperative differs; for managing, it reflects a looming accountability, whereas for leadership it offers opportunity and hope.

There's a lot more to this topic, and that is all the more reason you and your colleagues should join us for a Master Class.

 

© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

A Worm In the Apple: Tim Cook's Apology for iPhone's Lousy Maps

 

By Thomas J. Lee

By now surely everyone knows that Apple's new iPhone 5 has a map function that leaves something to be desired. The Washington Monument is on the wrong side of Constitution Avenue, for one thing. The Battersea Bridge in London looks eerily like the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed in 1940. Satellite views everywhere are obscured by cloud cover.

But an odd thing happened Friday. Apple's CEO apologized for the mess. Even more astonishing, he recommended that iPhone 5 buyers use online maps from rivals Google and Microsoft until Apple fixes things. It was a little like that scene in Miracle on 34th Street, when Kris Kringle advises Macy's shoppers to see if Gimbels has the item they want.

Now a few weeks ago we devoted this blog to the problem of executives who say the wrong thing in very public ways. In passing, we briefly discussed the public apology: whether and how executives and other well-known persons should fess up.

The standard is: Are their apologies prompt? Are they voluntary? Are they sincere? Are they humbling? Are they reassuring? Are they credible?

The acid test for any apology is whether the offended person (the apologee, to coin a word) accepts it on its face. That question usually answers itself intuitively and emotionally: whether the apologee wants to have anything more to do with the offending person.

This question is always for the apologee, never for the rest of us, to answer. It is only the apologee who can weigh the pain of the offense against the relief of the apology.

A widely cited example was Hillary Clinton's acceptance of Bill Clinton's apology after the Lewinsky scandal. Many people believed at the time that she should not have accepted the apology as she did. But it was not their decision. It was hers and hers alone. Only she could decide.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, a leader who is apologizing for saying or doing the wrong thing must remember that he is never the judge of his own apology, any more than he is the judge of his own leadership. Rather, it is the people with whom he is communicating who cast judgment on his communication; just as it is would-be, could-be followers who decide whether to recognize or reject the leader’s leadership.

The apology from Apple CEO Timothy D. Cook is a case in point. Last week, in an effort to make amends for bringing the iPhone 5 to market with an inadequate and inaccurate maps function, Cook publicly apologized and suggested that consumers try alternative services from Google and Microsoft. "We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers," Cook said. "We are doing everything we can to make Maps better."

My own sense of things is that Cook's apology met the standards that people need an apology to meet. It was prompt, not delayed. It was voluntary, not forced. By recommending services from competitors, it certainly was sincere. It struck me as humbling and reassuring, too. All in all, pretty good.

I'll let my money do my talking, though. My current cellular contract is expiring soon. I have been inclined to get an iPhone 5. If the Maps function appears to be improving, then Cook's apology will be self-evidently credible, too. So will my acceptance of it.

What do you think?

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

Every business manager, government official, and aspiring entrepreneur should sit up and pay rapt attention to the ordeal that Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén is going through this week—and then remember to choose her words very, very carefully.

A native of Venezuela, where he still has a home, Guillén has enjoyed a long and successful career as a baseball player and manager. He managed the Chicago White Sox to a World Series championship. After leaving the White Sox last autumn, he signed with the Miami Marlins, who have just built a shiny new stadium in the Little Havana section of Miami. The city's million-strong community of Cuban Americans is the heart of the Marlins' fan base.

After only five days as Marlins manager, Guillén is interrupting a road trip to fly back to Miami and apologize after telling Time magazine of his admiration for Cuba strongman Fidel Castro. Guillén had gone so far as to say he loved and respected Castro for remaining in power so very long. No mention of machine guns, firing squads, 30-year prison terms, or anything of the sort.

You can read all about it for yourself in these dispatches from the Miami Herald, Bloomberg, and the Associated Press.

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that I generally advise leaders in business, government, and any other sphere to "say what you think, and think what you say."

However, there are five important boundaries on that advice. I call them the 5Rs. You should speak only when your thoughts are "5R Ready."

So before you say what you think, make sure it is:

• real, which is to say based on observable facts and familiar experience;
• relevant to the challenge at hand;
• respectful of people and their feelings;
• relationally constructive, not destructive; and
• reasonable and rational, by which we mean both within the bounds of reason and logically derived by reasoning.

If it isn't, you should be asking yourself some tough-love questions as to why you're even thinking such things. They're toxic to you and everyone else. Before you speak, get your head together.

Ozzie Guillén's remarks to Time magazine met none of these five tests. They didn't come close.

If I were advising Guillén, I would suggest not going before a bank of microphones. Rather, he should be sitting down with Miami's ex-pat community and just listening to its voices. Then, after coming to a better understanding of Castro, he should apologize without using the words "if I have."

Maybe, just maybe, he can survive. No bets though.

 

© 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.

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.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 4 of 4)

  

(Fourth of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

We come to the end of the our series of essays on how leaders should manage themselves.

Regular readers of Minding Gaps are familiar with our basic distinction between managing and leading, and with our argument that good managing is at the core of good leadership.

We define both managing and leading as a function not of position but of work. For both, their nature derives from their purpose. But that is where the similarity ends.

You can think of managing as the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. Typically it involves meeting deadlines, coming in under budget, complying with standards or procedures or requirements, or producing or selling a sufficient number and quality of something.

Leading is quite different. You can think of it as the hard work of bringing about big change or a breakthrough performance—first recognizing and identifying the need for it, then envisioning it, then championing it, then supporting it, and then driving it.

Now to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. That's right: you.

Only by managing yourself can you lead others. That's because only those leaders who embody the change they advocate will be taken seriously by the people they wish to lead. Wannabe leaders who cannot or simply do not embody the change will be unable to lead. Their would-be leadership will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which we began on July 11, we have broken down the day-to-day implications of managing yourself. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. The second installment was on managing your thoughts. The third installment was on managing your attitude and energy. For the final piece, we turn to managing your own behaviors.

 

*     *     *

Last week we asked you to imagine a big circle in the sky with three equidistant points at 2 o'clock, 6 o'clock, and 10 o'clock. You were to label the 2 o'clock point Attitude, the 6 o'clock point Behavior, and the 10 o'clock point Consequences. Along the rim of the circle, we asked you to draw curving arrows between the points clockwise, such that Attitude points to Behavior and so forth.

We initially used this model to highlight the importance of attitudes. Today we will use it to throw a spotlight on your own behavior. Everything you do sends a message of one sort or another to other people.

Here's an example from one company, certainly not atypical. Senior executives have gone hoarse talking about the importance of safety. They are genuinely concerned about the physical well-being of employees. But they have also maintained aggressive financial and operational targets. That sets up an inevitable conflict.

One senior manager told me how it plays out. Mid-level managers, knowing they will be held to account for their performance, tend to cut corners to save money and speed production. Those corners can impinge on safety. A common scenario in such circumstances is directing a worker to use broken equipment, perhaps having been set aside and waiting to be repaired, "just this once" in order to complete something on time and under budget. Workers have a right to refuse such assignments and to blow the whistle on the manager, but in practice few do so. They don't want a reputation for whining.

Similar conflicts can arise over all kinds of cultural and operational vectors: product quality, customer service, process improvements, innovation, design, and so much more.

Here are some strategies to use in managing your own behaviors on the job:

• Translate your business strategy to actionable behaviors that apply to everyone, and to behaviors that also apply only to managers, and to behaviors that also apply only to executives. Make certain you are visibly and consistently demonstrating those behaviors, especially when you are in a hurry and tempted to neglect them "just this once."
• Scrutinize your day-to-day behaviors for the implicit messages they send, especially messages that run counter to formal and verbal strategic messages that establish direction, norms, and priorities. Neglecting to do examine your routine behaviors is all but inviting to be perceived as a hypocrite, though that's the last thing you want to be or to think of yourself as.
• Pay particular attention to patterns of incidental behaviors, such as showing up late for meetings, frequently going to lunch with the same colleagues, rolling through stop signs, and so much more. These things can be grist for griping by the people on your team. Violating rules is never permissible simply because someone of high rank is doing the violating. Think goose and gander. 
• Adopt a new rule for yourself: no multitasking when it involves anyone else's time, voice, or dignity. That means not checking your email in anyone else's presence, and it means not searching for anything online while someone else is speaking. You must be careful about even taking notes on a computer, as it will appear to others as though you aren't paying attention.
• Consider challenging cultural conventions in your organization to send an implicit message that you appreciate doing things differently. For example, if you are a relatively senior manager, and subordinate managers always go to a senior manager's office for meetings, switch it around. Better yet, commit to spending most of your day out and about rather than closeted in your office.
• Make strategic communication a routine, day-to-day priority rather than a weekly, monthly, or quarterly event. After all, if the people throughout your team or operation don't know what you're thinking, how can you possibly expect them to act on it?
• Control your temper. Yes, work is stressful, but that is never an excuse to lose it. If you have frequent difficulty with this, get some help. If you don't, it can derail your career or worse. In the 21st century, even the frequent use of profanity is out of place.
• Be sure you are present and accessible physically (that's the easy part), intellectually (that's more difficult), socially (that make require a personality transplant for some of you), and emotionally (that's especially difficult for many of us). You must show up for work as a complete person, simply because it is easier for other people to relate to a whole person than to an empty suit.
• Remember that the single most powerful means of communication you have is the decision. Which decision, you ask? That one. And that one, and that one, too. Every decision you make defines your character in the eyes of other people.

Gandhi's essential message for posterity was: You must be the change you seek in the world. Any leader who wants to leave a legacy of change must take the first steps. That means managing himself.

 

Coming on Friday

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 3 of 4)

 

(Third of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

Minding Gaps is midway through a series of essays on how leaders should manage themselves.

In order to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. Only by managing yourself can you lead others. Pretenders who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which we began last week, we are breaking down the day-to-day implications of managing yourself. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. The second installment was on managing your thoughts. Now we turn to managing your own morale: your attitudes toward yourself and others.

 

*     *     *

Imagine a big circle in the sky with three equidistant points: one at 2 o'clock, another at 6 o'clock, and the third at 10 o'clock. Label the 2 o'clock point Attitude, the 6 o'clock point Behavior, and the 10 o'clock point Consequences. Along the rim of the circle, draw curving arrows between the points clockwise, such that Attitude points to Behavior and so forth.

The clockwise direction is important. It makes plain that attitudes do have consequences. It also establishes that behaviors are a critical link between our attitudes and the consequences we experience, and it acknowledges the force of consequences on our attitudes.

We use this simple A-B-C construct as a template for identifying the drivers of performance, both in terms of building people engagement in a team or enterprise and in terms of managing one's own performance. We'll use it today in the latter sense, as we analyze the role of managing your attitude. So we will home in on that 2 o'clock point on the circle.

To get started, think first of the broad categories of attitudes you can have in the workplace. Probably the most obvious category is attitudes toward your own boss. Another obvious category is attitudes toward your peers. Still another obvious one is attitudes toward the people on your team.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some others, a little less obvious: your atttitudes toward your work, toward travel and relocation for your job, toward work-life balance, toward customers, toward competitors, toward your accomplishments, toward the missed opportunities of your career to date (don't kid yourself, we all have them), toward personal and professional growth, and toward the future.

Perhaps the least apparent of all attitudes is your attitude toward yourself. Are you ashamed of yourself? Proud of yourself? Is your attitude toward yourself closer to recrimination or forgiveness? Closer to applause or humility?

Together, all these attitudes can define us through the day-to-day behaviors that they naturally bring about. An attitude of gratitude leads us to say thanks. An attitude of greed leads us to demand more.

Attitudes even have an effect on our health. An attitude of patience lowers our stress and hence our blood pressure, while an attitude of impatience increases both.

One of the critical fulcrums of attitude is empathy: the degree to which we understand and appreciate the perspective and point of view of other people unlike ourselves. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? Are they inclined to trust or distrust us? To be patient or impatient with us? To believe or disbelieve us? To give us the benefit of the doubt, or insist on zero-tolerance accountability? Then we can ask the same questions of ourselves toward them, and we can apply the Golden Rule or ignore it. Big differences in all these.

As you reflect on attitudes, you may wish to wrestle with these questions:

• Just what are your most common attitudes in the workplace toward your boss, your colleagues, and the people on your team?
• Is your atttitude toward your work one of pride or disappointment? Toward its requirements and impositions one of burden or opportunity?
• Do you view your career to date mainly with pride or regret?
• How do you regard your customers? Do you see their requests as interruptions of your work or as the purpose of your work? Are your customers more often irritating or satisfying?
• What about competitors? If you could, would you want to drive them out of business?
• Do you regard your company's professional-development requirements as a burden or an opportunity? Do you think of the future as basically exciting and potentially glorious, or as basically depressing and potentially disastrous?

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

 (Fourth of Four Parts)

Publisher's Note:

We'll be off Friday and Monday for a family wedding.

We will return on Wednesday the 28th.

 © 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.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 2 of 4)

 

(Second of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

As regular readers know, Minding Gaps defines managing and leading in terms of the work they involve, not in terms of positions on an organization chart. Anyone with responsibility for the work of the other people wears the hats of both manager and leader. That's especially true in an organization that recognizes the need for and embarks on a course of change, growth, or improvement.

As we explained a couple of days ago, the two roles are different but closely related. Managing is the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. Leading is the hard work of bringing about big change or a breakthrough performance—first recognizing and identifying the need for it, then envisioning it, then championing it, then supporting it, and then driving it.

In order to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. Only by managing yourself can you lead others. Pretenders who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

In this four-part series, which began Monday, we are breaking down the day-to-day implications of this concept. The first installment was on managing your words: what you say, how and where and when you say it, and what you choose not to say. Now we turn our attention to managing your thoughts.

 

*     *     *

 

As we explained Monday, the first thing you must manage is your mouth: your words. The second thing you must manage is your mind and the access to it. What you think has a powerful bearing on what you say and do. People who pollute their minds with cynicism, falehood, scorn, and prejudice invariably emerge as pitiful. No one admires them, and few follow them of their own accord.

My late grandmother had a pillow with this aphorism in needlepoint:

Mind your thoughts, they are the words you say;

Mind those words, they are your deeds from day to day;

Mind those deeds, they are your habits, hard to break;

Mind those habits, they are the soul you ‘lone make.

There's truth as well as rhyme in this verse.

Here are some specific suggestions for managing your mind:

• Cultivate intellectual curiosity. Just as Albert Einstein valued imagination over knowledge, so we should value curiosity over insight. It is more important and of more value to ask good questions than it is to know and remember things, simply because imagination and curiosity are critical to the knowledge and insight of tomorrow. (If you're still not convinced, ask yourself whether you would rather own shares in a company that makes slide rules or a company that makes tablet computers.) Encourage your colleagues and staff to probe deeper and to challenge one another, including yourself.
• Set a good example; question your own assumptions constantly and relentlessly. Assume that you have less information than you need to come to the conclusion you are already at. Ask yourself what additional information you should have and where you can find it. Also, think rigorously about your reasoning process. You can find plenty of online resources that will teach you about errors in logic and reasoning.
• Challenge yourself to think at a higher plane. Sports and hobbies are good and even important parts of your life, but find time also for serious reflection and conversation. I favor journaling. You'll rarely find me without my leather-bound journal within reach. I reserve it for serious observations, thoughts, excerpts and quotes, ideas, and questions to which I want to give more thought. I also keep a date-ordered Word file that functions as a chronicle of my business life. 
• Give yourself regular intellectual nourishment. Read books, serious books—biography, literature, essays, history—as well as magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair. Make a point of reading the editorial and op-ed pages of at least one well-regarded and internationally recognized daily newspaper.
• Especially if, like me, your Myers-Briggs score tilts the N side of the iNtutive/Sensory scale, be skeptical of the ideology you bring to any issue. Question your beliefs and the framework of assumptions and expectations you have. Search for data that either supports or undermines them. All of us weave a narrative about people, institutions, and issues. If yours is bereft of objective, provable facts to support it, then it's probably a product of your presumption—or perhaps of someone else's agenda.
• When you feel yourself rushing toward a conclusion, stop and ask yourself (a) what you know for sure about the situation, (b) what you think you know but aren't quite certain, (c) what you have been told but have no independent reason to believe, and (d) what you don't know at all. By thinking a little about those four questions, you'll slow yourself down and refrain from jumping to conclusions.
• Take pride in having not just an open door but an open mind. Make it easy for anyone at any level of the organization to approach you with information or a perspective that challenges your thinking. When someone does approach you, pause to admire her courage, and be predisposed to accepting and believing the information or point of view, if only for the time it takes to investigate.
• Finally, exercise regularly, eat right, and drink moderately. The healthier your body, the healthier your mind.

Just as Grandma Lee's needlepoint suggested, our thoughts are powerful precursors to our words, and our words largely determine our actions and the actions of others within our sphere of influence. Bring a high standard to your thoughts, and the rest of your job suddenly becomes much, much easier.

 

Coming Next Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming Next Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How to Manage Yourself (Part 1 of 4)

(First of Four Parts)

by Thomas J. Lee

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog are familiar with our basic distinction between managing and leading, and with our argument that good managing is at the core of good leadership.

We define both managing and leading as a function not of position but of work. But that is where the similarity ends.

Managing is the hard work of ensuring performance to the expectations of stakeholders. It usually involves meeting deadlines, coming in under budget, complying with standards or requirements, or producing or selling enough of something.

Leading is the hard work of bringing about big change or a breakthrough performance—first recognizing and identifying the need for it, then envisioning it, then championing it, then supporting it, and then driving it.

Now here's the crux: In order to lead successfully, you must first be able to manage, and no one is more important to manage than yourself. That's right: you.

Only by managing yourself can you lead others. That's because only those who manage themselves effectively will be taken seriously as leaders. Those who cannot or do not manage themselves will be discounted and discredited by the people they seek to lead. As potential leaders, they will be lifeless.

But what does managing yourself mean in practical, day-to-day terms? What exactly are we saying when we are urging you to manage yourself?

In today's post and three more than follow this week and next, we'll break it down for you.

 

*     *     *

 

The first thing you must manage is your own mouth. It is not true, and never has been true, that you should feel free to say anything that occurs to you. Nor is it true that your role as a manager anoints you as an expert in all things, that your opinion should trump everyone else's.

Sometimes, and probably rather often, you, like anyone else, are wrong. Keep that in mind before you offer your opinion as if you enjoyed the divine right of kings and anyone who would dare disagree is a knave or a jester.

It then follows that you should:

• Develop a judicious sense as to what requires your voice. Speak up on the important things, both strategic and personal, especially when remaining silent would implicitly convey a false or a counter-strategic message. On strategic matters, it's especially important to speak up often on the fundamentals: the organization's core purpose, strategic intent, values, vision, and operating priorities. On personal matters, it's especially important to acknowledge (sometimes privately, sometimes publicly) life-changing events such as a surgery, a graduation, and the like.
• By the same token, recognize the value of stifling thyself. You don't have to be the first to speak and the last to speak. You don't have to talk louder than others. You certainly shouldn't interrupt. Get in the habit of letting others enjoy the spotlight. 
• On the other hand, do use casual conversation as a social lubricant that can break down barriers and bring people together. The weather, vacations, sports, movies, hobbies, and recipes all reach across the hierarchy. Never pass anyone in the hallway without greeting, unless you're passing them constantly and it would be awkward to greet them repeatedly. 
• Apart from an appropriate level of casual conversation, minimize diversionary topics that compete for strategic focus. Most workplace communication should involve work processes, product quality, customer expectations, improvement suggestions, scheduling changes, and so forth. Use this formula: 5/95, or 5 percent of conversation for non-business matters, 95 percent for business-related topics.
• Especially if you live or work in a small or midsize community, remember that you are constantly on display. If you are curt with or dismissive of someone in a service capacity—a waitress or grocery clerk, for example—you can expect to be noticed by someone you don't recognize but who knows who you are.
• Refrain from uttering anything of a cynical nature, regardless of the target. When someone else waxes cynical, call them on it. Here's what I say: "If you have evidence of wrongdoing, by all means offer it up. Let's see it and examine it." (If it's evidence of criminal wrongdoing, it should be presented to the authorities.) "Otherwise let's grant people the benefit of the doubt. Isn't that the Golden Rule at work?"
• Stop rumors in their track. Don't pass them along. Let people learn over time that they can expect to hear reliable, strategic information from you first.
• Avoid subjects that demean people or that polarize them for no reason. Don't bring up politics, religion, or any hint of sexuality or sexual orientation. Don't even think personally or professionally disparaging thoughts, in either content or tone. It goes without saying that adolescent behavior, such as off-color humor or mimicry of ethnic accents or disabilities, is absolutely verboten.
• As a general rule, offer praise in public (unless something about the environment tells you otherwise) but criticism only in private. Even then, seek out details and attenuating circumstances before criticizing, and keep your criticism brief and tightly focused.
• Learn to rely more on questions than commands, but make certain your expectations are clear and agreed upon. Favor open questions—typically how, what, and why—over closed questions. Avoid short-circuiting discussions by offering your own opinion too early.

Not infrequently, the comment that most damages your reputation is a loose, thoughtless, impulsive remark that reveals the character at the core of your being. I'm not asking you to pretend to be someone else. I am asking you constantly to be the best of the person you are. Bring the best you to the party.

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Second of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Rod Tidwell on Primitive Communication

 

It has been a while since we published 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.

Today we turn to Rod Tidwell, the fictional National Football League wide receiver in the 1996 Cameron Crowe movie "Jerry Maguire," which starred Tom Cruise in the title role, along with Cuba Gooding Jr. as Tidwell and Renée Zellweger as Dorothy Boyd. To my thinking, "Jerry Maguire" should have won the Oscar for best picture that "The English Patient" did win.

by Thomas J. Lee

In "Jerry Maguire," the 1996 movie that Cameron Crowe both wrote and directed, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays Rod Tidwell, a self-centered professional football player, to Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire, his agent.

Crowe gave Tidwell several powerful lines, one of which is among the most memorable in the history of movie making, for it was Tidwell who said: "Show me the money!"

But another of Tidwell's line's in the same movie is even more relevant to the subject of this blog and to your work as a manager and a leader: 

 

Talking is just a primitive form of communication.

 

One of the fundamental points we have made repeatedly in Minding Gaps over the years is that your words count, but your intent, behavior, and decisions count as much or more. They are your identity, your character. They are you.

Moreover, nonverbal communication is far more than it is conventionally thought of. It is the totality of what you think, say, and do.

To our thinking, many companies (and even more so, politicians) are preoccupied with what they say at the expense of what they intend and do to bring meaning and import to their words. 

Reflect on Tidwell's line about primitive communication, and then consider the following questions:

• Why does he call talking "primitive communication"?
• What are the limitations of talking in business? (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?
• What other kinds of nonverbal communication communicate far more than body language or facial expression?
• What does your own nonverbal communication say about you? In what ways?
• Is it deliberate or accidental?
• How specifically are you working to improve your nonverbal messages?

Coming on Monday

The Vision of a Celebration

 © 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.

Ten Strategies for Straight Talk in the Workplace

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the past week or so we have been exploring ten “talk traps” and their alternative. Talk traps are conventions of internal communication (for leadership in companies or other organizations) that often prove problematic.

The ten talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

As we explained, some of these talk traps work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they can backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

We also took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can often pose its own challenges, few of which are obvious to the leader.

Here are ten strategies to make sure that Straight Talk, not one or more of the common talk traps, is undergirding your leadership communication in the workplace:

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. Discuss the business from multiple perspectives. It’s important to view reality from the point of view of customers, investors, hourly employees, even competitors.
3. 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.

Coming on Wednesday

 Four Rules for Growing Engagement

(We will be off Monday for a national holiday in the United States.)

 

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

Eight Common Scenarios When Straight Talk Backfires

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days we have explored ten “talk traps,” or conventions of communication in business that often prove problematic for managers. Many of them work just fine in the right place and the right time, but they backfire in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are always ill-advised.

The talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about these common talk traps.

Then a couple of days ago we took a long look at some difficulties that beset Straight Talk, the preferable alternative to those ten talk traps. It turns out that Straight Talk can be difficult indeed.

Not only can Straight Talk be difficult, but occasionally it backfires altogether. If you have ever watched Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, you know what we mean. Straight talk can turn into a mess. 

Here are eight scenarios we have seen, even when leaders have the best of intentions:

• Perhaps a leader has been taciturn in the past and then realizes she must communicate a new business strategy. She may assume that employees have a depth of knowledge about the company’s competitive situation that they actually do not. She speaks about the strategy as if it is a foregone conclusion, and she fails to explain its rationale. Employees can only wonder what she is talking about and why the particular strategy has found favor.
• Or the leader sets out to communicate about the organization’s direction and priorities using words and phrases that are foreign to employees. The leader is speaking naturally and forthrightly, but employees perceive attempts to manipulate and spin the information.
• Sometimes a new leader comes on board from another department or even another company in another industry. He wants to “hit the ground running,” as they say, so he lays out a vision before taking the time to fully appreciate the situation he has inherited. That leaves employees mystified over his selection in the first place.
• The leader wants to set a high standard, so he invokes values that put a premium on integrity and team spirit. In the weeks and months that follow, decisions on policy and day-to-day management are seen as conflicting with, or only nominally conforming to, those values. Employees decide the leader is weak.
• Not uncommonly, a leadership team relies on cascading to “get the word out” about a new policy, program, or priority. 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 never works, and worse, it teases leadership into thinking that it has communicated when it actually has only miscommunicated.
• Senior management devotes weeks or even months to crafting a new strategy, and the strategy is a glorious thing. But it exists only at the level of the enterprise or the division. It has not been translated or interpreted to its practical implications, so employees and their supervisors don’t know what to do with it. Mystified, they naturally ignore it. It’s dead on arrival, but management doesn’t realize it for months to come. So leaders continue talking about something that is a mere historical footnote in the minds of employees.
• In harsh economic times, employees have reason to worry about their own economic security. Many are naturally fearful. The organization needs everyone’s full involvement, but only those people who like to hear themselves talk are willing to speak up. The need for open dialogue has yielded to a cacophony of the loud.
• Having just read the latest best-seller from Harvard Business Press, the leader is pursuing a new management fad that employees think is just plain silly. Having seen so many fads come and go, they’re naturally resilient. They let the leader talk, of course—no one in her right mind will interrupt or fall asleep—but they’re thinking about their own projects and deadlines. The leader is serious but irrelevant.

If you have been around a while, you have seen scenarios like these more than once. None of them is the product of the ten talk traps. All of them involve leaders who think they are talking straight, and yet their very straight talk is actually part of the problem.

On Friday we will look at some strategies and tactics a leader can use to keep straight talk straight. 

 

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Six Reasons Why Straight Talk Is Difficult

by Thomas J. Lee

A few days ago in this space we explored ten “talk traps,” or conventions of communication that managers often fall into. Some of them can work in the right place and the right time, but don't work in the wrong place or the wrong time. Others are ill-advised all the time. Each of them poses its own challenge, and they all are tricky.

The talk traps are Small Talk, Sunny Talk, Scare Talk, Sweet Talk (or Smooth Talk), Smart Talk, Simple Talk, Song and Dance Talk, Slick Talk, Snarky Talk (or Surly Talk), and Self Talk. We identified an eleventh, too: Snarl Talk. You can click here or scroll down to read all about talk traps.

By far the best overall approach to communication in business is Straight Talk: just speaking the truth—gently and respectfully, of course—and letting the chips fall where they fall. But even it is difficult, and occasionally it, too, can backfire.

I can think of six powerful reasons why Straight Talk is often difficult.

First, it isn’t always clear what the "facts" are. What you see often depends on what you’re looking for and on what you have seen before. Moreover, the facts of a situation can change rapidly and repeatedly, nowadays with blinding speed. What was true yesterday isn’t necessarily true today or tomorrow.

Second, it isn’t always easy to distinguish between fact and opinion. Again, where you stand often depends on where you sit. For example, try to find some factual ground that politicians on the left and right both acknowledge to be true. Not so long ago, my older brother, whom I have always admired, and I got into a little tiff over the telephone because we happen to disagree on politics. It happens.

Third, the facts can be very unpleasant, to the point that you may not want to face them. Probably all of us have something or someone in our life that we are avoiding. Unfortunately, ignoring or neglecting these simmering problems just lets them fester. Eventually, they are bound to explode like Mount St. Helens.

Fourth, not all facts have an equal claim on your judgment. The facts that you think mitigate your own decisions and behavior are usually, and systematically, ignored by others, and vice versa. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature that people can excuse themselves for a mortal sin but rush to condemn others for every venal sin imaginable.

Fifth, the facts can force you to confront your own vulnerabilities: perhaps a professional competency that you should have mastered, or a relational skill that has proved elusive, or a loose command over your own time and resources that threatens to undercut your effectiveness. In those situations, it is tempting to look the other way, isn't it?

Sixth, the facts can challenge and bring into question the values you claim, and even undermine your integrity as a leader. No leader exercises such total and abject control over an organization that it fully lives up to the leader’s aspirations. But when the organization falls short, everyone looks to the leader for an explanation or accountability. For the leader, those moments are not enjoyable.

Not only can Straight Talk pose difficulty, but it can backfire. Wednesday, we’ll explore some of the ways it backfires.

Coming on Wednesday

When Straight Talk Backfires

Coming on Friday

Ten Strategies for Talking Straight

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Like It or Not, You Are Your Message

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked: "What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say."

Probably all of us react knowingly to that insightful statement, yet all of us are its intended target, as well.

If you think it is only apt for the other guy, think again. It is you, and I, and he, and Emerson himself, whom Emerson had in mind. We are all our walking message.

Some of the work I do involves communication troubleshooting. Typically, a company will ask me to determine why it has so much misunderstanding or so many rumors. Or it will bring my methodology to bear on issues around open and honest communication. Or it will ask me to work
with eight or ten or twelve particular managers whose technical expertise is great but whose communication skills are not.

On arriving at the scene I often find complicating factors. The process of disseminating information may be creating all kinds of problems. Not uncommonly, the communication competencies of the senior executives who hired me also contribute to the problem. Their own messages may not be entirely clear or credible or cogent, and that leaves other people wondering what they meant or even whether they are serious and sincere.

You can hardly blame the others, then, for interpreting a message for themselves, or for patching it together on the basis of what they think they know to be true.

One common problem is something I call rogue communication. These are just the messages that we send implicitly and usually obliviously. They can be verbal or non-verbal. Typically we are clueless that we are sending them at all. But they are no less powerful because of that. They can have severe consequences, even derailing or prematurely ending a career.

Here are a couple of real-life examples. A former colleague was meeting with the chief executive officer of a Fortune 100 company. The CEO leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. A moment later, my colleague did the same thing. That was a mistake. Deliberately or not, he was communicating his own sense of parity with the CEO, and the executive most certainly did not share it.

Come to think of it, I wonder whatever happened to Ben.

Another time, the board chairman of a major corporation made some unprepared after-dinner remarks to a weekend retreat for the company's senior executives. Afterward the executive vice president rose to cap the evening's proceedings and send everyone on their way. In referring to the chairman's remarks a moment earlier, he said: "I think what John was trying to say was . . . " A few weeks later Fred decided to retire early.

More commonly, we send messages day in and day out about our priorities, concerns, and values. Calling someone or not calling someone can send such a large message to that person that it overwhelms whatever was said on the call. Positive messages such as a token of friendship or appreciation, a gentle word of reassurance, a note of gratitude or consolation, or an appropriately light tough on the elbow can be remembered for years.

By the same measure, unfortunate messages such as a sharp tone of voice, delays without explanations, an ill-timed smirk, offensive humor, a pattern of excuses, evasive eye contact, the hurried neglect of etiquette, or an appearance of boredom can all send messages that are taken very seriously. They are rarely thoughtful and intended, and they may not even be real. But their mere perception makes them real.

Here's the thing: The people who are doing the reading, listening, or observing get to decide what the message is. For all intents and purposes, the message as sent is immaterial. The message as received is what counts.

All of us are, as Emerson observed, what we do as well as what we say. When the two collide, what we do speaks the loudest. And all of us—you, I, and the other guy—need to keep that in mind.

 

Coming on Friday

Beware These Ten Talk Traps

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Big Lessons in Leadership from 'I Love Lucy'

 

Madelyn Pugh Davis died on Wednesday, April 20, at the age of 90. Together with her collaborator Bob Carroll Jr., she wrote every episode of the legendary television comedy I Love Lucy. Original episodes of the Emmy Award-winning program aired from 1951 to 1957. Sixty years after it premiered, reruns of this pioneering situation comedy continue to be broadcast around the world.

For the uninitiated, I Love Lucy depicted the misadventures of a wacky New York City homemaker whose husband was a Cuban-American bandleader. It starred Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo, Dezi Arnaz as her husband Ricky, and Vivian Vance and William Frawley as their neighbors and landlords Ethel and Fred Mertz.

In 1998 I wrote an essay for the Journal of Employee Communication that celebrated I Love Lucy and teased out some truths about leadership and organizational communication from three of its episodes. Here, in commemoration of Ms. Davis, is a condensed and updated version of that essay.

—TJL                

 

 

  
 

by Thomas J. Lee

Probably everyone remembers the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and her pal Ethel go to work on an assembly line in a candy factory.

Their job is simple. As candy comes down a conveyor belt, they must wrap each piece of chocolate in paper and place it back on the conveyor.

Their boss is a humorless drill sergeant of a manager with no tolerance for mistakes. The dour supervisor warns that if even a single piece of unwrapped candy gets past them, they’ll both be fired. Then the boss bellows: “Let ‘er roll!”

Suddenly the conveyor belt begins moving, and it rapidly picks up speed. Trying to keep up, Lucy and Ethel work faster and faster. But they fall further and further behind.

Growing desperate, they clumsily hide the evidence. Unwrapped candies go in their pockets, under their caps, into their mouths, down their blouses—anywhere they can think of.

The scene is hilarious, and untold millions of viewers have chortled over it. First broadcast in 1952, the episode has frequently been rerun ever since. Other Lucy shows are equally precious, the work of comic genius.

So novel and popular were those early episodes of I Love Lucy that Manhattan traffic actually fell quiet each Monday evening when Lucy came on. Telephones around the United States went silent. Marshall Field’s, the grand Chicago department store, shifted its evening hours from Monday to Thursday. “We love Lucy, too,” the sign on its doors said.

Today only the eggheads among us would dare attribute anything remotely philosophical or high-minded to such a wonderful, light-hearted program. Yet it must be said: I Love Lucy was truly more than comedy. Between its lines lay bright little nuggets of wisdom on issues of leadership communication.

Indeed, more than a half-century after Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the live-audience situation comedy, a selection of I Love Lucy episodes can be viewed not solely as terrific television comedy, which they surely were, but also as provocative reflections on how people in organizations attempt—and so often fail—to communicate for some higher purpose. 

Several well-known episodes of I Love Lucy offer lessons in this regard, though many of the situations are dated and, by today’s standards, arguably sexist or at least quaint. Here is a look at some insights or lessons you can draw from three of them: "Kleptomaniac," "Lucy Tells the Truth," and "Job Sharing."

 

"Kleptomaniac"

First broadcast in April 1952, “Kleptomaniac” has Lucy concealing from her husband, Ricky, the fact she is chairman of the annual bazaar and in charge of holding onto prizes prior to the event.

Ricky discovers a wad of currency in her purse and a closet full of valuables. Later, he and Fred catch Lucy apparently red-handed in the act of stealing. Without any other information, they conclude that she is a kleptomaniac.

Of course, Lucy could just as easily have told Ricky she was chairman of the bazaar. Instead she decides that he doesn’t really need to know, and she appears oblivious to any sense of risk associated with withholding the information.

Forgetting the wad of currency, she even tells Ricky to check her purse for cab fare, whereupon he discovers the money. Then she proceeds to lie about it.

Her gambit is necessary to set up some television laughs, of course. But for us, decades later, it’s terrific grist for some second-guessing about "need to know" communication.

The episode raises a number of issues. Why, and why not, should people share information? Who ought to know information of what kind? What compels a person with information not to share it? What happens when people glean incomplete information for themselves? How does one form impressions on the basis of incomplete information? What happens when people reach too far in attempting to verify a hunch?

 

"Lucy Tells the Truth"

Another episode, “Lucy Tells the Truth,” raises issues such as applying spin, dodging the bullet, and telling the complete truth even to the point of hurting people.

In this episode, which first aired in November 1953, Lucy enters into a $100 bet with Ricky, Ethel, and Fred that she can tell the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth, for 24 hours. (Two movies—Nothing But the Truth (1941) starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard and Liar Liar (1997) starring Jim Carrey—were based on a similar premise.)

Of course, that isn’t easy for a gal like Lucy. Telling the whole truth at bridge club the next day, she roundly insults each of her partners. They get revenge by forcing Lucy to confess her age, weight, and original hair color. Lucy complies but offers: “It feels good to tell the truth. You should try it. We’d all be much better friends if everyone told the truth.” To which Ethel retorts: “Somehow I doubt it.”

Sure enough, Lucy, having already unburdened herself of the truth, becomes brutally frank and nearly loses all three friendships. The particular issue raised by this show, and I think worth discussing in a management team, is the appropriate role of truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth—in organizational communication.

Naïve appeals for complete candor imply there are no circumstances warranting discretion or self-restraint, and we certainly know better. On the other hand, the rule in most organizations seems to be excessive reticence, even to the point that, at one large international corporation, the director of employee communication learned of a billion-dollar merger involving her company as she drove to work one morning, listening to her car radio. The question is: Who should know what? When? How?

Moreover, does “spin” really serve any legitimate purpose? Some would argue that, by selectively reporting or distorting facts even a little, it invariably backfires. Every manager should remember that employees are always there to see the truth for themselves. Indeed, they are constantly on the alert for any sign of hyprocrisy, and when they find it, they do not soon forget it.

 

"Job Switching"

I save the best for last. “Job Switching”—the episode that puts Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory—is surely one of the funniest ever, and it offers more grist for discussion than Lucy and Ethel’s shenanigans alongside the conveyor belt would suggest.

Dating back to September 1952, the program raises questions of communication in teams and of misunderstandings about the work and contributions of coworkers.

In this episode Ricky and Fred exchange roles with Lucy and Ethel. The two men begin cooking and keeping house while the two women go to work in the candy factory. Ricky and Fred, obviously too self-confident to bother reading written instructions and follow directions, turn out to be terrible housekeepers and even worse cooks.

Ricky makes sure he uses “plenty of starch” in laundering Lucy’s hosiery. Fred’s seven-layer cake comes out less than one inch tall, and the two men agree that a pound of rice per person is “just about right” for dinner that night. The volcano on the stove erupts just before Lucy and Ethel get home. The women don’t fare any better. Lucy is assigned to make chocolate dough balls alongside a stoic, stone-silent coworker. Obviously unskilled, Lucy cannot get the assistance she needs, for want of any communication.

At one point, spotting a fly buzzing around, she slaps her chocolate-laden hand first into the chocolate dough, then against the face of her coworker, who goes tit-for-tat. More than hilarious, the slapstick underlines the importance of collaboration.

Lucy and Ethel, having each failed at other assignments, get one last chance, wrapping candy. The speed of the conveyor belt is a little metaphor for the increasing expectations that management holds out for workers. At first, Lucy and Ethel are able to keep up appearances, if only by hiding the evidence.

The supervisor returns, judges everything all right, and declares: “Fine. You’re doing splendidly.” Then she calls to the conveyor belt operator: “Speed it up!”

By day’s end Lucy and Ethel have eaten more chocolates than they ever wanted. Before the credits roll, Ricky and Fred predictably acknowledge a newfound respect for Lucy and Ethel’s work, and vice versa.

Though formulaic, the story works; and it prompts us to ask whether, in the workplace, we truly do appreciate the contributions made by other individuals and departments. What with all our silos and rivalries, the answer is plainly no.

There’s another moral to this story, too. Lucy and Ethel must feel the way that contemporary employees feel as they are constantly pushed to produce more and perform better without adequate or appropriate training, support, or understanding. Better and more communication can bridge that gap between the needs of employer and employee. So it should. So it must. 

You could take a similar analytical look at many other episodes of I Love Lucy (or of other television programs, movies, and plays) and find many more insights on organizational communication and leadership. Or you could just sit back and watch these comedies for the purpose they were intended: as harmless fun.

Either way, it's reason enough to rediscover the many reasons we all loved Lucy.

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

My Love-Hate Relationship With Wikipedia

by Thomas J. Lee

If anyone should love Wikipedia, it is someone like me. I have long had a passion for reference books in general and for atlases, dictionaries, and encyclopedias in particular.

Moreover, as a blogger and an author, I am constantly consulting reference works. I used to be on first names with a reference librarian at my local library. Now I have Wikipedia to keep me company.

But it's time I come clean. I am addicted to Wikipedia, in a dysfunctional way, but I actually hate it. It is true. I loathe it, even if I use it all the time. I curse it constantly. The best you can say is that I have a love-hate relationship with it.

Wikipedia is admittedly easy to use. It does serve as a nice, quick reference. It has far more entries than any other reference work. But it is replete with errors of fact and with glaring omissions in material that I know well—more than the news media and vastly more than any other reference work. You simply cannot rely on Wikipedia for accurate or complete information. Moreover, it is probably the worst-written, worst-edited, and worst-organized reference resource ever published.

For these reasons, Wikipedia is extremely frustrating. The world needs a resource that is equally comprehensive in subject matter and instantly accessible, but that is also well-written, well-edited, well-organized, and, above all, accurate and complete. Wikipedia isn't it, and I doubt it ever will be.

For the last few weeks I have been collecting excerpts from Wikipedia to document my argument. It has been easy. Probably every other entry I check has a grievous error or omission of some sort, or an editorial tic that is weird or exasperating or both. Here are just a handful:

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}   Approval Ratings of Silicon Valley CEOs

 

© 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.

Sydney Lumet (1924-2011) and My Favorite Movie

by Thomas J. Lee

Sidney Lumet, the legendary Hollywood director whose 12 Angry Men is nothing less than an American masterpiece, died today at the age of 86. His passing gives us the occasion to comment, once again, on a magnificent movie that should be studied by everyone with an interest in leadership.

I have watched 12 Angry Men dozens of times, owing to the fact we often use it in a workshop on leadership communication. Even after so many viewings, I continue finding more nuances and insights on leadership whenever I watch it again. It is my favorite movie of all time.

Regular readers may recall my 2009 essay on 12 Angry Men. Of the 400-plus essays residing on this blog, it is easily the most frequently accessed of all. Every day, people all over the world read it.

Allow me to quote myself: 

To my thinking, no film captures the challenge and opportunities of leadership better than 12 Angry Men, especially the original 1957 black-and-white movie, based on the play by Reginald Rose, directed by Sydney Lumet, and starring Henry Fonda and a cavalcade of other stars: Martin Balsam, Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Klugman, E.G. Marshall, and a half-dozen more.

This taut drama—from start to finish, it runs only 96 minutes—is set entirely in a sweltering jury room of the courthouse in a big American city. The story itself is thrilling, and the acting is masterful. But best of all, 12 Angry Men is a case study in Socratic leadership—in other words, leadership by means of asking provocative, probing questions that compel people to rethink their assumptions and beliefs. . . .

The movie is all about leadership through effective communication. Indeed, many organizations use it to facilitate discussion around these issues. (One shortcoming is the exclusively white male cast. At the time this movie was filmed, U.S. trial juries were commonly so selected.) I strongly recommend viewing it.

When you watch the movie, notice that Juror No. 8 has no official authority beyond that of the other jurors. He isn't even the foreman. Yet he persuades his peers to reconsider. That is a good reminder that leadership doesn't require a title.

Then observe that the strength of his argument arises not from overbearing, omniscient certitude but rather from intellectual humility. What he doesn’t know is every bit as important as what he does know. His earnest reservations, rather than his earnest presumption of guilt, give energy to his argument and cause the other jurors to think more critically. His rhetorical technique consists largely of questions. We term this approach “inquiry-led dialogue.” It comes to leaders as a counterintuitive but powerful tool.

Lumet's production of 12 Angry Men is especially compelling for its illustration of empathy, an underappreciated but critically important instrument of leadership. Empathy enables a leader to understand the position, perspective, and ultimately the purpose of people who may choose to acknowledge and follow a leader—or not. It is no exaggeration to say that the deepest connections between leader and led absolutely require empathy. 

Lumet knew that the first duty of any moviemaker was to entertain, and he did that splendidly. But he also preferred to produce movies that went "one step further," as he put it. They are movies that force viewers to examine their own conscience in search of greater truth. No one did that better than Sydney Lumet.

Do, do, do watch 12 Angry Men again soon, and if you have never seen it, do, do, do make it a high priority.

 

Coming on Monday

The Hidden Barrier to Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Core Competencies in Communication for Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

For years now, many large organizations have devoted the time and money it takes to figuring out just what successful leadership looks like to them. They have carefully listed, described, and in some cases also determined the metrics and value of particular traits and activities they believe account for success as a leader.

I have looked over quite a few of these leadership competency frameworks, and to my thinking they come up short on a key variable: communication. Many of them reduce everything that goes into effective communication to a single, curt phrase. They define it in colorless, prosaic terms, and they gloss over the specific challenges, talent, and even the soulful sensitivity it demands. Astonishingly, some leadership competency frameworks ignore communication altogether. They don't even mention it.

Good communication is the very life energy of leadership. Take away communication, and leadership withers and dies. Leaders can accomplish nothing without clear, compelling, credible messages that inform, influence, inspire, and involve people.

Moreover, as most of us intuitively know, communication is far more than speeches and PowerPoint presentations. Many of the most important messages in an organization are unspoken, implicit, and behavioral. They reinforce or undermine what the leader is saying verbally. They are also commonly unintended, entirely inadvertent, and therefore unmanaged. Still, they are powerful. So if we are going to take communication seriously, we need to address the subject comprehensively.

Finally, as any self-aware leader fully understands, communication that energetically engages people around a coherent vision is very, very difficult. Many try; few succeed. If it were easy, there would be no such thing as Dilbert comics, and companies would routinely report employee engagement scores at levels they only dream of. The pervasive reality of mixed, muddled, and mute messages would be the exception rather than the rule.

For all these reasons, I am offering here a fuller list of competencies that together account for effective communication as the all-important energy of leadership. You should know that I am thinking mainly of leadership in the context of business, but my framework would probably apply just as well in a governmental agency, a nonprofit association, a fraternal organization, a political campaign, a sports team, or something like a museum or orchestra or military battalion.

You will notice that certain competencies on our list go well beyond conventional, verbal communication. That's because of something we have learned over and over in focus groups with rank and file employees.

These workers repeatedly told us that they derive important messages from what they observe and experience firsthand, and that they are constantly on the watch for clues to the sincerity or hypocrisy of their leaders. The old adage that actions speak louder than words is never truer than in leadership communication. So we treat these clues, these implicit messages, as very real communication, and we regard the ability to manage them as a competency itself.

I list the competencies by level—basic, intermediate, and advanced—reflecting not the hierarchy of leadership in an organization but rather the maturity and depth of leadership typically associated with a particular competency.

Regular readers will recall two convictions I have written about in the not-too-distnt past.

One, I argue that any organization needs good leadership up, down, and across its management, not just at the very top. Few have it. Most organizations need to develop solid collateral leadership in their secondary ranks of supervising authority: middle management and the front line.

Two, I assert that leaders cannot be perfect, and that we err in insisting on strict accountability for perfection. That's just unrealistic. So the framework that follows is an ideal. The closer you get to it the better. But don't be yourself up for falling short. We are all on a journey.

I welcome your comments; please address them to me at tom@arceil.com.

 

Basic Competencies

All leaders should demonstrate these basic competencies:

Nature of Leadership. Knowing how the work of leading and the work of managing resemble and differ from each other. Accepting the opportunity to both manage and lead as necessary. Seeing engagement as the deliverable or work product of leadership, and seeing alignment as the deliverable or work product of management. Choosing an appropriate style and determining the appropriate substance of communication for optimal engagement.

Value of Communication. Understanding and appreciating communication as the energy of leadership. Devoting the time and resources necessary to communicate the strategic vision, direction, priorities, and progress to that part (or whole) of the organization for which you are responsible.

Intellectual Patience. Regarding effective communication as a richly collaborative dialogue. Refraining from interrupting others and from multitasking while others are speaking. Making appropriate eye contact in conversation. Listening to other viewpoints before volunteering your own opinion to avoid intimidating or pressuring others into voicing a similar view.

Affirmative Listening. Listening with the sincere intention to learn and take action. Encouraging subordinates to speak up without fear of favor or reprisal. Granting good faith to people bearing a challenge to authority. Concentrating on what is being said even in chaotic circumstances.

Dignity and Respect. Conducting yourself with dignity in all circumstances. Acknowledging presence of others, even in passing. Initiating conversation whenever possible and appropriate. Showing respect for diverse viewpoints. Delivering unpleasant or unfortunate news with candor, dispatch, and sensitivity. Avoiding or objecting to humor at the expense of demographic minorities, underprivileged, or otherwise challenged people. Never ridiculing other people inside or outside the organization.

Balanced Temperament. Being slow to anger and quick to praise. Thinking carefully before reacting to bad news. Never blaming the messenger for the message. Demonstrating equanimity in the face of provocation. Maintaining composure in trying situations.

Ethical Compass. Speaking and behaving in accord with the organization's values and with commonly accepted norms of decency. Refusing to take shortcuts that compromise or appear to compromise ethical principles. Giving credit where credit is due, even when it is due to competitors or stakeholders with opposing priorities. Assuming more than your fair share of accountability when things go wrong.

 

Intermediate Competencies

Maturing leaders should increasingly demonstrate these intermediate competencies as well as all the basic competencies:

Immediate Relationships. Building, nurturing, and sustaining close working relationships with immediate colleagues and direct reports to ensure frequent, prompt, and candid feedback. Appreciating the courage required to speak truth to power. Receiving criticism as an opportunity to refine your style and enhance your impact as a leader.

Straight Talk. Favoring substantive straight talk over common "talk traps" that leaders often fall into: small talk, sunny talk, scare talk, sweet talk, smart talk, simple talk, song and dance talk, slick talk, snarky talk, or self talk. Showing confidence in the dedication and decency of the people in the organization by treating them as the colleagues they are and as fellow employees who, like any good leader, want the best for the organization.

Robust Credibility. Appreciating that the credibility of leadership is large because the commitment a leader asks of people is large. Embracing a threefold construct—the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and the bond of affinity—of credibility lest the flame of leadership begin to flicker.

Implicit Communication. Recognizing that many leadership messages are perceived by people as implicit and often inadvertent. Managing time, visible behaviors, day-to-day decisions, and other elements of the informal voice as important implicit communication that bears heavily on the judgments, perceptions, and conclusions of people. Recognizing that yours own day-to-day choices reveal your genuine priorities and are at the heart of leading with integrity and impact.

Presence and Accessibility. Appreciating importance of physical, intellectual, social, and emotional presence and accountability. Frequently making yourself visible and available to people for casual and spontaneous conversation. In group settings, making sure that large numbers of people can approach you.

Focused Inquiry and Dialogue. Initiating dialogue with stakeholders that brings attention to high-priority strategic issues. Asking creative questions to drive broadly collaborative thinking. Demonstrating receptivity to ideas from anyone. Listening patiently to diverse points of view. Freely giving credit to worthwhile ideas and observations regardless of their source.

Style and Substance. Understanding the differences between the work of leadership and the work of management, and seeing engagement as the deliverable of leadership and seeing alignment as the deliverable of management. Recognizing the differences in both style and substance between the kind of communication that works for leading people and the kind of communication that works for managing people.

Empathy with Constituents. Demonstrating keen sensitivity to the organization's impact on others. Assuming sincerity and decency of other people regardless of their place or orientation on issues. Eagerly soliciting feedback. Avoiding assumptions that marginalize and minimize others. Reaching out to offer support. Asking open, reflective questions. Allowing for silence to give people time to think deeply.

Servant Leadership. Searching out problems and opportunities to provide support or remove barriers to high performance. Regarding a leader's highest calling as service to others. Striving to serve more than to be served. Constantly looking for ways to enable people to perform better, to identify a rich future for themselves and the organization, and to make them feel better about themselves.

 

Advanced Competencies

Veteran leaders should demonstrate these advanced competencies as well as all the basic and intermediate competencies:

Healthy Culture. Nurturing a healthy culture of communication that prizes clear, credible, coherent, constructive, candid, civil, and concise discourse. Recognizing the importance of robust credibility requiring high degrees of trust, respect, and affinity as support for a leadership vision.

Inspiration. Regarding leadership not merely as influencing people to behave in a predetermined way, but as inspiring them to think for themselves and to act constructively on behalf of a central purpose without frequently consulting with management.

Visualizing the Future. Imagining a different, bigger, and better tomorrow. Describing the vision in colorful, visible terms that people can see and embrace. Avoiding clichés and boilerplate rhetoric that reduce the vision to banal platitudes.

Narrative, Metrics, and Metaphor. Constructing an overarching narrative for the organization that first identifies its unique principles and fundamental purpose, then charts a path to realizing those principles and purpose, and finally makes choices for their application. Using creative metaphors to convey the narrative with impact. Identifying metrics to measure progress. (Note: Financial gain is never part of the narrative's fundamental purpose and should not be a metric. It is rather a result that is necessary to sustain the fundamental purpose. Go deeper than material considerations here.)

Eloquence and Oratory. Being able to speak with confidence, grace, and clarity before sizable groups, both internal and external, especially under pressure. Responding to interruptions and antagonistic questions without losing composure.

Importance of Emotion. Appreciating affirmative emotion as conducive to change and action. Presenting a leadership agenda in terms of its emotional as well as its factual and rational appeal to people.

Humility and Self-Deprecation. Balancing your own dignity with humility and self-effacing tribute to others. Taking yourself and yours work with utmost seriousness but also occasionally laughing at yourself. Selectively and gently offering yourself as a case study in development.

Distribution and Inclusion. Recognizing that an organization of any appreciable size and complexity requires collateral leaders throughout. Eagerly sharing the role and responsibilities of leadership with others. Working to create a culture of inclusion. Remembering that your success depends on people more than their success depends on you.

 

Think of this as a working paper. I expect to modify it from time to time, so it may not be precisely the same when you check back weeks or months from now. Feel free to suggest any additions, deletions, or refinements. I will take all suggestions under serious consideration.

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}  We Have the Data on Teamwork

 

Coming next Wednesday

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Robust Credibility Requires Respect, Affinity, and Trust

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

By now you understand that the challenge of building leadership credibility goes well beyond walking the talk. Simple credibility—doing what you say you will do—is enough for most people, but not enough for anyone who aspires to lead.

Leaders must reach for something greater: robust credibility, or the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and the bond of affinity. Over the preceding ten days, we have explored each of these three cornerstones in greater depth; just scroll down to read those essays.

Robust credibility acknowledges that the credibility of leadership is large because the commitment a leader asks of people is large. It isn't enough that people believe their leader. They must also believe in their leader—in her ability and in her nobility—lest the flame of leadership begin to flicker.

To appreciate the importance of all three components—trust, respect, and affinity—ask yourself what attitude would predominate in the absence of each. So visualize a big Venn diagram in the sky with three circles that partially overlap. In the middle, where all three circles converge, we see the robust credibility that is the product of all three. One or even two of these three cornerstones is not enough. Leaders need all three.

Let's take a moment to review these three fundamental components briefly.

By trust, we are thinking of just the veracity of a leader's word. If you trust someone you believe that the person is telling the truth. The truth may be a factual depiction of reality. Or it may be a sincere statement of intent, or a frank and honest description of one's opinion, values, or perspective.

By respect, we have in mind a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: his ability, energy, initiative, and perseverance. 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. This shared well-being takes the form of mutual interests, needs, and concerns. What is important to the leader must be, or must become, important to the people she would lead, and vice versa.

Now in the absence of trust, people who would otherwise be inclined to follow a leader are left in a state of doubt. In the absence of affinity, they are left in a state of opposition. And in the absence of respect, they are left in a state of skepticism.

Many organizations have such weak and ineffectual leadership that they are running low on all three. Thus their people are in a state of full rebellion: doubt, opposition, and skepticism. In the last few weeks alone, I have worked with three companies that recently received low engagement scores on employee surveys. When we begin digging into those surveys, I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of doubt, opposition, and skepticism.

But even just one of those three is a reflection of less than robust leadership credibility. It alone can stymie the force of leadership, and it often does. Leaders require robust credibility: trust, respect, and affinity, and they cannot get any of it by ordering people to show it.

 

Coming on Monday

March Madness and Leadership Communication 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires Authentic Trust

 

 

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Now we come to the issue of trust. As we have already seen in this series, trust is not the whole of leadership credibility. Two other cornerstones of credibility—organic respect and a bond of affinity between leader and led—are also critical.

(We addressed the bond of affinity last Friday, March 18, and we addressed organic respect last Wednesday, March 16. Just scroll down for both.)

We call the intersection of all three cornerstones robust credibility. It recognizes that the credibility of leadership is larger than everyone else's ordinary, garden-variety credibility, simply because the commitment a leader is asking of people can be so great. It isn't enough that people believe their leader. They must also believe in their leader—in the leader's ability and in the leader's nobility. Otherwise, the spark of leadership goes out.

But just because respect and affinity play key such roles does not mean that trust is unimportant. To the contrary, trust is the granddaddy of all three cornerstones. It enables the other two to be of consequence.

In a sense, trust is a little like the Golden Rule. Both are all-purpose bromides that everyone pays honor to, and well they should, but that sooner or later everyone also honors in the breach.

For most of us, the violations are few, sporadic, mundane, and incidental. We miss a deadline or exceed a budget or run late for a meeting—that kind of thing. Even these misdemeanors can be problematic, however, for they may be a harbinger of relational difficulty, and they may be perceived or regarded with outsize significance. Remember, the first and final judge of trust is always the person who was made vulnerable by trusting, never the person who was emboldened by an investment of trust.

For some other few, and fortunately only a few, the violations rise to the frequent, the routine, the material, the notorious, or even the criminal. These are profiles in deceit, their names familiar headlines of the last decade: L. Dennis Koslowski, Jeffrey Skillings, Bernie Madoff, Richard Scrushy, Joseph Nacchio, Bernard Ebbers, and too many others.

Certainly in the bruising battles of board rooms, trust can inadvertently be the first victim of a power play. Management, after all, must do what it must do, and managers are naturally concerned first and last with their own self-preservation.

The same is true in politics. Rare indeed is the politician who fulfills every campaign promise. (The last U.S. president to do so was James K. Polk, who made only four promises on the 1844 campaign trail—yes, the 1844 campaign trail.) Instead, candidates and officeholders promise what they need to promise, regardless of whether they mean it and regardless of whether they can fulfill it. In contemporary American politics, we would remind Republicans of Medicare Part D and Democrats of Guantanamo.

Moreover, anyone who has been close to the action at a senior level, in either business or government (or, for that matter, any other sector), knows all this to be true. Often, the clash of interests leaves someone else to clean up the mess, and it isn't unusual for that person to walk straight into one of the five classic talk traps. 

So let's bring some clarity to the challenge of trust—first as a general notion, then specifically with regard to leadership.

Generally speaking, trust is just a high regard for the veracity of one's word. It is the confidence and belief that someone is telling the truth. The truth may be objective or subjective; but in either case it must be real. It may be a list of facts about something, or a straightforward description of something. Or it may be a candid statement of intentions and capabilities, or it may be a frank and honest expression of opinion, values, or perspective. Preferably, it is consistently all this.

With regard to leadership specifically, trust is an open window to the soul of the leader. It reveals where the leader is coming from and where the leader is going. It anchors the purpose of the leadership, and it gives real meaning to the work that people are doing. It strips away the mask of command that so many ersatz leaders wear, and it takes everyone, including the leader, to a place of authenticity, humility, empathy, and reality.

Getting to trust is not always easy, for a wide array of pressures conspire against it. Some of them are in the environment: insufficient information, cultural constraints, procedural or legal requirements, poor training. But others, as for Brutus, are in ourselves: pride, greed, shame, fear, insensitivity, arrogance, expediency.

How often have you retreated from speaking truthfully because you didn't want to hurt someone's feelings? Or because you didn't want to reveal your true motive? Or because you sensed duplicity in yourself? Or because you pitied a person? Or because you feared losing face or authority? Or because you didn't want to take the time to explain complex reality? Or because you didn't believe it necessary to justify yourself to someone your junior?

So you paraphrased, you reached for euphemism, you danced the old two-step, you retreated to silence. If there is comfort in numbers, take solace, for you are not the only one.

No leader is perfect, and none has perfect trust. We err when we expect any leader to have it. At best, we merely tease ourselves into believing that a leader who commands our support does have it.

It is especially easy to look past the flaws of leaders with a charismatic appeal: a John F. Kennedy or a Pierre Trudeau, for example. By the same token, it is easy to dwell on the flaws of leaders without that charismatic appeal—a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon, for example—in spite of the fact that both Johnson and Nixon proved their mettle as leaders by compiling records of prodigious accomplishment, even as both proved morally wanting. 

Organizations and their leaders can go a long way toward building or rebuilding trust by following a few simple precepts:

• Demonstrate trust in the first place by realizing that employees can handle the truth, prefer the truth, and want the truth. So give them the truth. (Another contemporary case study: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose straight talk is popular YouTube video.)
• Recognize that, for yourself as for all of us, the first and biggest step toward relationships of trust is a brutally honest self-examination and commitment to change oneself.
• Abandon the level-by-level cascade of information through the organization, and put the dissemination of strategic information on autopilot. Better yet, at the risk of really mixing metaphors, prefer a rain forest of constantly sharing incremental information so that the work force is always well-informed and always expecting to learn truths about the business from the mouth of senior leadership.
• Appreciate the importance of implicit as well as explicit communication. By implicit communication, we do mean nonverbal messages, but body language is the least of it. Rather, acknowledge the powerful messages implicit in decisions, behaviors, routines, priorities, schedules, agendas, budgets, and so much more.
• Question the smooth talk of any consultant or advisor who suggests you say things that are not completely true. Almost always, you will find yourself or your company in greater difficulty by choosing gentle evasion over hard truth.
• Express yourself and train managers throughout the company to express themselves with simplicity and directness. That is not to say you must dumb down information before sharing it. But certainly remove unnecessary jargon and ambiguity.
• Make few promises, but do everything humanly possible to keep promises that you and your predecessors have made. (Yes, a promise made by your predecessor is your burden to keep.)

Finally, if you are accepting all this as banal, but telling yourself the real problem is the other guy—the CEO, the labor union, the regulatory agency, the news media, the clamor of investors, the recalcitrant employee, the cheap customer—then you have found the real problem, and you have found the one person who is most responsible for the real problem.

You can begin an important conversation with that person first thing tomorrow morning. And we do mean first thing tomorrow morning: gentlemen, when you shaving; ladies, when you are applying your makeup. Be sure to speak up, and be sure to ask the tough questions.

 

Addendum on Friday, 25 March 2011:  A reader in Copenhagen, Denmark wrote to ask whether there was any kind of trust other than authentic. Wasn't "authentic trust" redundant? I replied: "You would hope authentic trust would be redundant, but to so many companies, trust is something they think they can buy through public relations, advertising, media spin, catchlines, smooth talk, etc. I have heard executives say their companies are "trusted by millions" because millions buy their products. Well, yes, but that doesn't mean their leadership is trusted by employees. So that's where I am going with 'authentic.' "

 

Coming on Friday

Why Robust Credibility Requires All Three Cornerstones:

Organic Respect, a Bond of Affinity, and Authentic Trust

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

For a Leader, Credibility Is More Than Just Trust

 

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

By the very nature of leadership, a leader must work in murky territory.

Leadership is all about big change that often requires significant risk amid great uncertainty. A leader asks people to do extraordinary things that they are not otherwise inclined to do. In order to emerge from their comfort zone and take on the burden of doing extraordinary things, people must believe in the leader.

We call that belief credibility. Ordinarily, most of us associate the word credibility with the word trust. Someone you trust is said to be credible, and someone who is credible is thought to command your trust. For the sake of leadership, however, credibility goes beyond trust. Leaders must reach for something more than it alone.

Trust is a cornerstone of credibility, to be sure, and indeed it may be the most important element. But two other components are also important: respect and affinity. Together, we call the intersection of all three of these cornerstones robust credibility. Every leader needs it, and every leader should devote a great deal of effort to building it.

Let's look briefly at all three components today, in the first installment of this five-part series. In the second, third, and fourth installments, we will examine each of the three more closely, one by one: first respect, then affinity, and finally trust. In the fifth and final installment of this series, we will explain why all three cornerstones are necessary.

Here is what we mean by each of these three terms: trust, respect, and affinity.

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

By respect, we're referring to a high regard for the leader's command, control, and competence: his ability, energy, initiative, and perseverance. 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. This shared well-being takes the form of mutual interests, needs, and concerns. What is important to the leader must be, or must become, important to the people she would lead, and vice versa. Remember, it is always the potential follower, never the putative leader, who judges the nobility of intent.

Imagine a Venn diagram with three circles that partially overlap. In the middle, where all three circles converge, we see the robust credibility that is the product of trust, respect, and affinity. One or even two of these three cornerstones is not enough. Leaders need all three.

 

Coming on Wednesday

A Closer Look at Respect 

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   Arceil Leadership Ltd.

Leaders Need Followers More Than Followers Need Leaders

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The popular revolt across the Middle East—from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Yemen and now to Libya—holds a compelling lesson for leaders everywhere, in business no less than government.

It is just this: As a leader, you need followers. Indeed, you need followers more than they need you. Without followers, you cannot lead.

Think about it. A leader without followers has no one to lead. Therefore she is not able to lead, and thus she is not a leader in any meaningful sense of the word. She may retain the official title of leader—chief executive officer, general manager, site leader—and she may have the compensation and perquisites of the office, but she has no functional consequence as a leader, because no one is choosing to listen and to heed her.

Let's personalize this for you. If your own putative followers decide to follow someone other than you, then the person they begin to follow—another executive, a junior manager, a Six Sigma black belt, perhaps even a union steward or organizer—becomes their de facto leader. You become irrelevant. Leadership, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

All this means that leadership itself is a matter of work, not position. It is what you do. It is not the title on your business card. Your position or title does not make you a leader. Your work does. Not the work that earned you a promotion, but the work of connecting with people.

Moreover, to lead successfully, the work you do must predominantly be the work of reinforcing, sustaining, and energizing your connection with the people you seek to lead. If the connection is weak, the relationship is weak, and if the relationship is weak, then there is no real recognition of you as a leader.

That in turn means you must relate to people effectively as a leader—informing them of core truths, influencing them to think differently, inspiring them to want something more, and instilling them with the courage and drive to get it.

If you are unable to do that, you will never be able to touch the hearts and minds of people, and you will never be able to change anything.

It's pretty much that simple.

 

Monday

A template for prioritizing issues

 

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

Miscommunication and the Shuttle Challenger, 25 Years Ago Today

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Twenty-five years ago this morning, New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six astronauts settled into the Challenger space shuttle for what they expected would be a seven-day orbital mission. It lasted instead 73 seconds.

We pause today to remember the heroism of the crew, their sacrifice to science, and the sad role of miscommunication in the disaster.

The subsequent investigation established beyond doubt that if only officials and engineers had spoken with clarity and cogency and had listened with intellectual curiosity and good faith, the disaster would likely not have occurred because the Challenger would not have been launched.

Today most people attribute the cause of the Challenger disaster to the technical failure of O-rings on a solid-fuel booster, as a result of sub-freezing temperatures at Cape Canaveral the morning of the launch. Nominally, that was indeed true. But the root cause involved an institutional culture that thwarted communication and led to decision making that was oblivious to the real danger.

Sometimes it takes a disaster to teach a lesson, and sometimes it takes the anniversary of a disaster to remember the lesson.

 

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

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. He made a lot of money on a 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 a bad track record for a few concise words.

So I like good theories. Especially in business, we need more of good theories, 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 truly a good theory.

 

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

What You Say Isn't Necessarily What They Hear

 

We're back from a brief hiatus, but we're reprinting a few of our favorite posts for two weeks while we go through a year-end strategic review. We will return in full force, with completely new essays, on Monday, January 10, 2011. (The following day will be 1-11-11. It will be a good time to begin anew.)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

Messages are plainly important, but focusing on them exclusively as they’re stated plays a nasty trick on management.

It is too easy, altogether too easy, for management to believe that a message as stated is a message if and as received, if and as understood, if and as believed, and if and as applied—when, in fact, it may not be any of those other things.

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

The trouble is, no one tells management, because no one knows what the intended message was. It’s a real hornet’s nest.

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

In business, employees commonly filter messages through their own lenses. Each employee’s lens is unique. So the “rays” of a message bend this way for one employee and that way for another employee. The message as bent is the metamessage. Meta, as a prefix, means changed or changing, beyond, transcending, over and above. The metamessage, then, is a message that has undergone some change that takes it away from its intended meaning. It's a kind of parallel universe of communication. We ignore it at our peril.

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

All those things refract the message to render it somewhat different. If the firm’s environment is stable and prosperous, a particular message will have one meaning. If the environment is unstable and uncertain, the same message may have a dramatically different reading.

The same is true of experiences and expectations. Each bends the message. The beam of light as refracted through the prism is the metamessage: the message as heard or not, as understood or not, as believed or not, as applied or not.

Unless you are acknowledging the metamessage, you are not communicating as you intended to. It’s the metamessage that counts. Beware the metamessage.

 

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

How Constructive Is the Communication in Your Organization?

 

(Sixth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

Two weeks ago we introduced the concept of a culture of communication. (Click here to read the November 24 post).

Then we explored each of the eight hallmarks of a healthy communication culture: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. (Click here to read the November 26 post.)

Since then, we have been presenting lists of diagnostic questions a company should ask itself to gauge its culture on each of the eight hallmarks.

Today we take up constructive purpose and effect. Strategic communication should help grow the enterprise. It should build, not diminish, the organization and the people of the organization.

Here are some of the questions I like to ask to get a sense of these issues of communication around strategic direction and work-place priorities:

 

• Is a communication process an integral part of any business plan?
• Is good communication regarded as essential to the success of any new strategy, initiative, policy, or program?
• Does the company properly distinguish between alignment and engagement of employees?
• How well do senior executives rise to the challenge of sharing a vision, of conveying news about the marketplace and competition, of inspiring camaraderie and performance through the ranks? Is it a claim on their time?
• Is the vision of the enterprise unique to the industry and products? Can employees relate to it? Does it waffle about commitment? Does it use grandiose, impersonal language that renders it remote and abstract?
• Are negative words--no, not, never, nothing, nowhere, none, neither, nor--common in formal discourse, or does the company try its best to be positive?
• Are employees reluctant to speak up about issues and problems for fear of recrimination by management?
• Does the company convey substantive information about its competitors?
• Is the attitude toward competitors one of respect or hostility?
• Are relevant metrics of performance widely shared?
• Does communication have enough of the big picture to be inspiring and enough detail to be instructive and helpful?

 

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.

How Credible Is the Communication in Your Organization?

 

 

(Fourth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

Last week we introduced the concept of a culture of communication. (Click here to read the November 24 post). Then we explored each of the eight hallmarks of a healthy communication culture: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. (Click here to read the November 26 post.)

Since November 29 and continuing through December 15, we are devoting eight posts to diagnostic questions that a company should ask itself to gauge its culture on each of the eight hallmarks.

Today we take up credible. Here are the questions I like to ask about credibility: 

• Do communication plans systematically address the formal voice, the semi-formal voice, and the informal voice? Do they look for gaps and make a concerted effort to close the gaps?
• Does the company understand and apply principles of integrated strategic communication? Is any effort made to identify counter-strategic communication and replace it with pro-strategic communication?
• Are leaders careful to account for the implicit communication of their own decisions, choices, and conduct?
• Is credibility seen as the intersection of trust, confidence, and affinity?
• Is the visible behavior of leaders regarded as powerful communication capable of affirming or undermining formal messages?
• Does the organization engage in happy talk or scare talk to manage employee behavior?
• Is spin common?
• Do strategies, initiatives, programs, and policies explicitly link back to foundational statements (mission, purpose, vision, values)?
• Do the company's publications and intranet sites have an unrealistic optimism?
• How well does the company walk the talk? Are decisions, visible behaviors, a spirit of collaboration, and other informal tools of communication managed as communication?
• Or are they left as an afterthought and allowed to interfere with strategic messaging?
• What kinds of communication are just completely unmanaged and thereby allowed to send unintentional messages?
• What kinds of misconceptions are contaminating the truth of the company and its future as perceived by key stakeholders?
• How does management inadvertently contribute to the rumor mill?
• Does the company measure and assess its credibility with key stakeholders? If so, what has it found and how is it responding? If not, why not, and when will you begin? 

 

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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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.

 

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

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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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Management Has a Rose-Colored View of Communication

 

 

 By the Numbers                                               

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Ask a typical executive how well his or her company communicates important business information to employees, and you will very likely hear a song of praise: Quite well, thank you for asking.

You shouldn't settle for such an answer, and neither should the executives offering it. Almost always, there is more to the story.

According to data collected and synthesized by the Organizational Research Forum, a respected survey research firm based in Vernon Hills, Illinois, the regard for communication within an organization varies according to grade level.

ORF has found that managers at high levels of a company naturally tend to have high opinions of communication, while hourly workers at low levels have low opinions of it. These findings are consistent with my own observations from focus groups and discussions with people at client companies.

ORF has asked a simple question of people at all levels of numerous companies in a wide range of industries: Are you satisfied with communication in this company? The firm tracked and analyzed the responses by level of hierarchy. The percentages replying yes at each of five main levels appear in the graphic above.

 

While 85 percent of senior managers say they are satisfied with communication in their organizations, only 66 percent of supervisors agree, and only 42 percent of non-exempt employees agree.

 

Part of the problem is reliance on cascading: disseminating strategic information through an organization one level at a time, from the management committee to vice presidents to site leaders and so forth. Cascading teases senior managers into thinking they have communicated, when in fact they rarely have. For a good analysis of cascading, see our July 28, 2010 post on the subject.

For more information on the ORF data, contact Andrew Mosko at 847-816-8611 or write to him at amosko@orf-usa.com. For more information on solutions to the problem, contact me directly at 847-247-2241 or write to me at tom@arceil.com.

 

By the Numbers is a twice-monthly 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. By the Numbers appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception in mid-2009, By the 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, 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 atop the right column.

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

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The True Story of a Dead Man's Election (With Help from Uncle Owl)

 

by Thomas J. Lee

You've all heard the mantra of successful people: "The difficult we can do immediately. The impossible will take a little longer."

From time to time leaders are called upon to do the impossible, and to do it immediately. Electing a dead person to public office, for example.

A few weeks ago in Long Beach, California, for example, supporters of State Sen. Jenny Oropeza had only 13 days to rally voters to re-elect her after she died of cancer. Determined to defeat her rival, they were angling for a subsequent special election. They succeeded with ballots to spare. The late senator garnered 56 percent of the vote. Now there will be a special election with two candidates, both alive.

Something like this once happened in Wisconsin, where I grew up, too. In fact, my beloved Uncle Owl presided over the election of a dead man in 1986, and he had only nine days to do it. I kid you not. As always, everything you read here is true.

Well, one minor detail isn't quite true. Uncle Owl's name was not, technically, Owl. It was Alpheus. He was the three-term mayor of Chilton, Wisconsin, a Lake Wobegon kind of town that you can find on any Lake to Lake milk carton about halfway between the lakes.

(Actually, they don't produce Lake to Lake milk anymore, so you'll have a hard time finding a Lake to Lake milk carton. That's okay. Just use a map. Chilton hasn't moved, and you can still find it on Highway 57 between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan.)

Anyway, to the people of Chilton my uncle was the Honorable A.W. Larson. To his nephews he was Uncle Al, until one of us stretched it into Owl. Because he was wise like an owl, it fit and it stuck. Ever since, all of us have always called him Uncle Owl.

Now the honorable Uncle Owl presided over generally tranquil times. Chilton was so small, I don't even recall that it had a stop-and-go light. Maybe there is one now. Of course the farmers were always complaining about the weather and commodity prices, and recently the upperclassmen of Chilton High School had climbed the water tower with cans of spray paint. The next day "CHS '86" screamed at everyone within eyesight.

Still, life was generally tranquil and decent. The streets were clean, the schools were above average, and every Labor Day weekend the Calumet County Fair drew a big and festive crowd.

In March 1986 the people of Chilton were downright ecstatic. The CHS Tigers had clinched the Class B state championship. For a small Midwestern town, life doesn't get any better. More than one-third of Chilton's population traveled to the state capital to cheer on the Tigers. The city was thrilled for the boys and filled with civic pride.

Like everyone else, Chilton's city clerk was looking forward to a festive homecoming the next day, a Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, the excitement proved too much. Though only 37, he suffered a fatal heart attack that morning.

His death couldn't have come at a worse time. It was bad enough he was so young and the town was celebrating. But municipal elections were coming up in only nine days. He was unopposed in his bid for re-election.

It also happened that City Hall was heading into a period of transition. Uncle Owl was retiring as mayor, so his successor would be new. The public works director was recently hired, too. Now the city clerk was dead. In such a small town, the only person who knew what was going on was the deputy clerk, Sue.

Then the aldermen realized what could happen. Anyone could mount a write-in campaign for city clerk, which paid a five-figure salary. One alderman remarked, "Say, if the wrong person should become clerk, we could lose Sue!" In fact, two women, a bank teller and a school cafeteria cook, had already begun campaigning for clerk.

Uncle Owl called a special meeting of the common council. The aldermen all hoped that the deceased clerk would still win re-election, so that they could declare the office vacant, interview applicants, and select someone who was qualified to fill his shoes. But they couldn't use public funds to campaign.

It fell to Uncle Owl to use his own resources to urge voters to rally behind the deceased clerk. He bought an advertisement in the weekly Chilton Times-Herald and ran commercials on a local radio station. "Please, I urge you," the newspaper ad declared. "Do not take this job lightly. It is a highly sensitive keg of dynamite, so think twice before using a hasty write-in vote." It closed: "Thank you, folks, you always use good judgment."

Uncle Owl's campaign on behalf of the dead clerk drew angry rejoinders from the two write-in candidates. But the townspeople heeded his plea. The late clerk won re-election with 80 percent of the vote. It was a clear mandate for reincarnation.

The council met and selected a qualified successor. Then Uncle Owl turned over the keys to City Hall, and he and Aunt Loraine, with time on their hands as never before, took a vacation out West.

Scout's honor, all this happened just shy of 25 years ago; and if this isn't a lesson in leadership I don't know what is.

Uncle Owl and Aunt Loraine each went to their heavenly rewards in the late-1990s. Needless to say, I still miss them.

 

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

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Let's Begin to 'Mind the Gap' on Credibility

 

by Thomas J. Lee

One of the many little charms about London is the stern, disembodied voice in the Tube that booms forth whenever the doors of a subway train open. "Mind the gap," the voice reminds us. The gap, of course, is the few inches between the subway car and the platform. Catch your heel in it, and you can sprain your ankle, or worse.

I use the word gap to describe the chasm of credibility that afflicts, burdens, and undermines so much corporate rhetoric. Continuing the metaphor, Minding the Gap is my way of reminding you to look after your credibility as a leader, regardless of the position you hold. It is critical to your leadership.

No one needs to be told that the last five or ten years have seen more than their share of frontal assaults on credibility. It isn't just a matter of Enron and Tyco. The real wars over integrity play out in little offices and cubicles. It is there, day in and day out, that compromises can so easily occur. It is there that we can fall short of our promise, and short of our potential, in so many ways.

Often it seems we lose our way because we have no compass to point us northward. So we have developed a little diagram that can help companies map their own integrity. They can use it to analyze how their credibility was damaged in the first place, or they can use it to avoid damaging their credibility in the future, or both. Moreover, in support in a leadership vision, it actually enables the achievement of the previously unachievable.

We call this model the Rainbow™, because it looks like one. It identifies three distinct modes or “voices” of communication, and it brings them together. We have designated these three voices formal communication, semi-formal communication, and informal communication.

Be careful: formal communication has nothing to do with tuxedos or taffeta, and informal communication has nothing to do with denim or dungarees. Rather, they are both terms of art. Each voice has a specific meaning and role associated with it. Like the Three Musketeers, they need to work together -- all for one, and one for all.

Let's get more specific:

Formal communication is the traditional mainstay of organizational communication. It consists mainly of information and messages expressed in newsletters, banners across factory walls, glossy brochures, closed-circuit television, announcements, and bulletin-board postings, along with their high-tech kin such as intranet sites and interactive kiosks, and through external communication such as advertising, press releases, investor advice, and government filings. All these are vital and basic components of a communication system. However, too often organizations rely on them excessively or even exclusively. When asked to do too much, they ultimately fail even in their modest efforts to build awareness.

Semi-formal communication is commonly thought of as a management toolbox. It consists of all those programs, policies, processes and procedures that companies use to manage their affairs. These things function as communication because they do what conventional communication does: convey information, direction and meaning to employees, establish priorities and concerns, and encourage or discourage certain thinking and behavior in response. Examples of the semi-formal voice include meeting agendas, training mandates, job descriptions, standard operating procedures, ISO 9000 processes, spending authorizations, accountabilities, sales quotas, cubicle sizes, and employee surveys. The semi-formal voice is always sending either complementary or inconsistent messages. It primarily facilitates both understanding and acceptance, but it can thwart them just as easily.

Informal communication is a live-wire interpersonal connection. Not to be confused with the rumor mill or body language, informal communication consists of relationships between leaders and the led, driven and defined by routine conversation -- comments, questions, complaints, anecdotes -- and by all those countless decisions, behaviors, choices, and attitudes on the part of leadership that so often “speak louder than words.” It is the bond or connection between a leader and her followers. When this connection is strong and resilient, great things can happen. When it is weak and fragile, they cannot. Informal communication is always there whether it is recognized as such, and whether it is integrated into the whole system, or not. It is the fulcrum of commitment.

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

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

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

If left unmanaged, the three voices will generate their own messages. Each message may contradict the last, and employees may be left in a state of confusion that sets the stage for cynicism and complacency or even contempt. That’s a recipe for disaster. We all know of companies that unwisely chose it. Some of us worked for them, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

The alternative holds more promise -- much more. If managed well, the harmony of the three voices can resonate throughout the organization to clarify and reinforce important strategic priorities.

The bottom line is just this: Organizations are wise to develop a broadly integrated, widely decentralized system of communication as a vital management tool to deploy strategy and to leverage change. Semi-formal communication and informal communication, by fostering relationships of sincerity and respect, of integrity and mutuality, build understanding and acceptance as an indispensable foundation for commitment.

Employees hear, see, and feel a consistent and noble message, and they have the dignity of speaking up and being heard. Leaders have the benefit of followers who enthusiastically participate. It’s a win-win all around.

 

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

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To Show the Way, You Must Know the Way and Go the Way

 

by Thomas J. Lee

On any given day, the people you seek to lead may or may not hear, understand, believe, remember, or appreciate what you have to say. Nevertheless, you must say what you believe, and you must say it often.

On any given day, the people you seek to lead will always notice, observe and remember what you do and how you do it. Never forget that people are constantly comparing what you do and what you neglect or decline to do with what you say and what you said. That's accountability, and you like accountability.

Finally, on any given day, the people you seek to lead are determining for themselves whether to follow your lead. The decision is theirs alone. It is not yours. It will rest largely on whether they regard you as a person of noble purpose and integrity, and as a person of principle, intellect, competence, standards, and wisdom.

So speak up, and speak up often, about what matters most, and then be your own first follower. To show the way, you must first know the way and go the way, for leading is all about following first.

 

 

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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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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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The Pitfalls of Talking Straight With People

The essay you are seeking has been revised and rewritten. You can read the new version here.

 

--Tom                     

Leaders, You Must Manage These Five Talk Traps

 

The post you are seeking has been extensively revised and expanded.

 

You can read the revised post here.

— Tom                                      

 

How Can Hewlett-Packard Enforce a Non-Compete Agreement Now?

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Everything a company says and does should support and reinforce the achievement of its strategic goals. All its statements and actions send messages to key constituencies: employees, customers, investors. When a company does something that contravenes something it has said, it begins spiraling downward.

That is the basic precept of what we call integrated strategic communication. It is at the foundation of our approach to leadership and to the communication, both implicit and explicit, that energizes and drives leadership.

Surprisingly often, you don't see it in practice. Our object lesson for today is Hewlett-Packard. Surely the iconic Silicon Valley company has insisted that all its knowledge workers sign non-compete agreements. After all, NCAs are a basic component of management. They have been for many years.

But over the Labor Day weekend, Oracle announced it was hiring as co-president Mark V. Hurd, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive who was ousted early last month for violating HP's business standards. Oracle's hiring of Mr. Hurd wasn't surprising; it had been rumored in Silicon Valley for weeks. Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle, had rushed to Mr. Hurd’s defense. Nor was that surprising, as Messrs. Ellison and Hurd are personal friends and tennis partners.

Here's the rub. For many years Oracle and HP were strategic partners. In some respects they still are. But last year Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. With that acquisition, Oracle is now active in some of the same markets as HP, such as servers, systems, and services. Thus, the one former HP executive with the greatest strategic knowledge of its business is now in the employ of an HP competitor. (Here is a fuller description from an industry newsletter. You may also wish to refer to this post and this post, our own two prior comments on this case.) 

What is so surprising is that HP apparently either negated Mr. Hurd’s non-compete agreement when it dismissed him last month or never required him to sign a non-compete agreement in the first place. That is just astounding.

The obvious question that all Hewlett-Packard stakeholders must be asking is how HP can possibly require other employees to sign a non-compete agreement in the future, and how HP can enforce any NCAs it already has in place. More broadly, how does HP expect to be taken seriously on anything it says?

I am sure we haven't heard the last of this. In the meantime, though, many of us will be waiting for answers.

Update 8 September 2010: Hewlett-Packard wasted no time in filing suit to prevent Mr. Hurd from revealing proprietary information to Oracle. Good. Let's see how this plays out.

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

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