Minding Gaps

A Little Fable From James Thurber

 

By Thomas J. Lee (with apologies to James Thurber)

The late James Thurber crafted many wonderful fables with wisdom for the generations.

Here is one of my favorites. It is short and playful. Titled The Weaver and the Worm, it has a sweet moral on communication for leadership. (Note: The word gudda has largely faded from use. It meant nasty or mean.)

The little fable goes like this:

A weaver watched in wide-eyed wonder a silkworm spinning its cocoon in a white Mulberry tree.

“Where’d you get that stuff?” asked the admiring weaver.

“You want to make something out of it?” inquired the silkworm, eagerly.

The weaver and the silkworm went their separate ways for each thought the other had insulted him. We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean almost anything, for this is the age of gobbledygook, doubletalk, and gudda.

Moral: A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make any sense.

Think of yourself as the weaver, and think of the people in your organization or on your team as the silkworm. Know that what you say and how you say it—especially if you resort to jargon, acronyms, and neologism, and most especially if you don’t know beforehand what you really think or why you think it—runs a high risk of being misunderstood or distrusted, or both, by the silkworm.

The only way around that is first to know what you think, and why you think it, and then to speak in plain, old-fashioned English. Look people in the eye. Take time to understand and be understood. Speak what you truly believe, and explain yourself.

Be empathic. Ask people what they heard, what they think, and how they feel. Listen patiently. Respond with your heart as well as your head. Listen for perspective and purpose as well as simple position. 

Speak the essence of your truth over and over again. Explain yourself over and over again. Draw pictures. Tell stories. Give examples. Then start over.

Remember: A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make any sense.

 

© Copyright 2013   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.

Golf and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

Regular readers with a good memory have requested that we rerun this essay on The Masters, golf, and other bad metaphors for business. We are only too happy to oblige.

TJL                

 

by Thomas J. Lee

This week the best golfers in the world converge on Augusta, Georgia, to compete in The Masters. It is a special event in sports. You need not be a golfer—I myself haven't swung a driver in 23 years—indeed, you need not even enjoy sports to find special beauty in the magnolias, dogwoods, and azaleas of the Augusta National Golf Course and in the glorious traditions of The Masters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2012   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.

Ten Tactics and Tips for Better Power Point Presentations

 

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

Relax. You aren't alone. No one else can understand a PowerPoint slide like this one, either. We have all seen too many of them, haven't we?

Recently I sat through yet another PowerPoint presentation that left me numb. Three weeks later I still don't know what the speaker, an official of a major university, was really trying to say.

He was knowledgeable, to be sure; he certainly had the academic credentials and the impressive position to deserve our attention, and his topic was compelling. But he left just about everyone shaking their head. In particular, his PowerPoint slides were a mess. They were worse than the slide you see above, which is just something I stumbled across on the Internet.

Like many presenters, he apologized for the tiny fonts and cluttered layout, but that didn't solve the problem. The members of the audience were squinting their eyes, and one woman told me she had a migraine just trying to decipher the slides.

This phenomenon is all too common. I don't blame the technology, as some people do. Long before there was PowerPoint, there were boring speakers who used overhead projectors. Long before there were overhead projectors, there were boring speakers who read their speech in a droning monotone.

Rather, I point to priorities. Many executives and managers place a premium on data at the expense of connecting with people. Thus, they see little need to invest in and master the art of speaking.

I have no illusions about changing the world. Still, I am offering ten tips and tactics to help the busy executive or manager with presentations. There's a lot more to meeting this challenge, and I stand ready to help. But this will get you started.

I actually hope these tips and tactics are not helpful to you, that you are already well beyond them. But in my experience, few executives are. Just about all managers and all executives need training in public speaking. Alas, according to data published in The Wall Street Journal, few managers think they need any instruction or coaching in communication.

Here are ten tips and tactics you may find helpful:

1. Know your audience. Make an effort to talk with some of the people beforehand, even if only over coffee or lunch, especially if it's a new or special group. If it's a conference, get there early and mill around. Try to gain a sense of the audience's knowledge of the topic, their disposition toward your subject and toward you, their willingness to learn, their inclination to be influenced, and their overall expectations. Then speak to people where they are, both cognitively and emotionally. Take into account the time of day and whether you are speaking immediately after a meal. If the audience appears lethargic, ask people to stand for a moment before you begin. (If your session is long, take a short break every 75 to 90 minutes.) 
2. Don't speak down to people, but don't use acronyms or jargon that some persons may not know, either. Present your message and explain yourself without patronizing anyone, but remember that members of an audience can vary enormously in terms of education and experience. Give real-world examples that everyone will understand. Here, specificity is your friend.
3. Know that you have the “curse of knowledge” working against you. Because you are expert in your subject, you are probably taking certain facts and logical relationships for granted that other people will not. Look at your presentation with a fresh eye. Ask someone who is unacquainted with the material to glance at it, too.
4. Do not prepare or use your slides as talking points. Rather, have talking points on the lectern if you need them. Use the slides mainly for illustrations and mnemonics: pictures, graphs, simple tables and maps, quotes, oversize numbers, and so forth. Slides should never be a substitute for a Teleprompter.
5. Avoid data dumps. Don't try to capture much detail at all in any one slide. Complexity will smother and overcome your message. If you have detailed information to convey, distribute it on paper at the presentation or, better yet, by email attachment beforehand. Complex diagrams and data-heavy tables are especially toxic. Avoid them. Use your oral presentation to explain, persuade, and inspire. Find one or two on-point stories to tell that capture the essence of your message. People remember good stories for a long, long time. Twenty-five years later, you can probably still recall a couple of stories Ronald Reagan told.
6. Prepare the slides so that people in the back row can read them without squinting and that people in the front row can read them without getting a migraine. That means using a large, sans serif font with colors chosen specifically to be easy on the eyes. My preference is navy blue type on a white or off-white background, at least 18 points, preferably larger. It also means using few bullet points and few words on each line.
7. Face the audience. Never turn your back and read from the slides. Speak loudly and assertively, with your lungs full of air. Present yourself with confidence. Give your voice some energy and range. Before you get up to speak, breathe deeply for two or three minutes. Pause whenever you need to. Vary your tone and timing. Make brief eye contact with individuals as you speak.
8. Avoid the hackneyed opening of saying "Good morning" or "Good afternoon" and then repeating it, only louder. Instead, jump headlong into your material. Give two or three riveting facts, or ask a succession of unsettling questions, or quickly relate a relevant anecdote. By the same token, make sure any technology you are using is ready to go beforehand. You should never be fiddling with it while people wait for you to begin speaking.
9. If it's necessary or expected to distribute your presentation, consider doing so as a narrative rather than a succession of bullet-point slides. This way, people will get your message, and you can freely concentrate on the context and core assertions. Set aside more time than usual for questions and answers. Place a high premium on dialogue. Truly listen to people who ask questions, and show that you appreciate their initiative and even their courage. Be especially welcoming of the "elephant in the room" question that everyone is thinking about but few are bold enough to ask.
10. Finally, remember that your slide deck isn't your message. You are. Make yourself and your thinking, not your slides, the focus of everyone in the audience. Avoid distracting slide transitions or anything else that draws attention away from you and your presence. Remember, connecting with people is more important than delivering information. Everyone will feel it and know it if you succeed, and people will remember it as one of the few good presentations they have ever seen.

One more thing: Be sure you practice, and try to memorize your opening lines.

In all my years in business, I have seen very few truly powerful PowerPoint presentations. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. It can, but it takes discipline, creativity, and work.

Call me if you need further advice. I'll be glad to help.

 

Coming on Friday

Suddenly, a Great Need for Immediate Change

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A client who truly understands the energy that clear, compelling, credible communication brings to leadership has a memorable way of explaining it.

"A funny thing happens to leadership in the absence of communication," Charlene likes to say. "Nothing."

That sums it up fairly well.

Sometimes, though, a leader comes along who has many other important qualities—passion, resolve, intensity, vision, knowledge—but who cannot articulate his thoughts in a coherent sentence. Similarly, sometimes a leader has a knack for saying things that are unintentionally funny, in the manner of Yogi Berra.

Anyone who has lived in or near Chicago for the last 22 years is familiar with the phenomenon. Richard M. Daley, the city's mayor since 1989 who will leave office on Monday, regularly manages to mangle and tangle the English language out of all recognition. Often you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Consider some of the things Mayor Daley has said:

Insisting to reporters that public scrutiny doesn't bother him: "Go scrutinize yourself! I get scrootened every day, don't worry, from each and every one of you. It doesn't bother me."

In the heat of debate over the obligation of railroads to make street crossings safer: "They have a responsibility, they can't get away with it. I mean, they stole the land from the Indians. They took all that land. They got it free from us."

Responding to appeals for a business casual dress code in City Hall: "If somebody takes their tie off, I'm not going to take my tie off. If somebody takes their pants off, I'm not going to take my pants off."

Asked to clarify his position on capital punishment: "I'm pro death! I'm a death-penalty opponent!"

In the wake of concerns about poor sanitation in restaurants: "If a rat is on your sandwich, you hope to know it before. If a mouse is on your salad, it's common sense."

Replying to complaints about police brutality to protesters: "It's just a group of people, yuppies and yippies and hoppies or whatever they call them, I don't know. Who are they? Are they worried about the moon coming out or something? The sun is changing and I don't know. This is unbelievable."

There are countless more.

Daley's father, the late Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley—they were not Sr. and Jr. as their middle names differed—was similarly afflicted. He was legendary for saying: "The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder."

And: "I resent insinuendo." And: "No man is an Ireland." And: "We will reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement."

The thing is, few Chicagoans ever doubted either mayor's loving commitment to the City of Chicago. I didn't live here when the elder Daley was mayor, but I have been here throughout the tenure of the younger Daley. This city is far cleaner, far prettier, far safer, far nicer, and generally far better now than it was 22 years ago. I invite all of you to visit and see for yourself. You'll love it.

I tell business managers: You need not be eloquent, but you must speak, and the more clarity, cogency, and credibility you can bring to your communication, the more energy your leadership will have.

Every rule has the exceptions that prove it. Somehow, both Mayors Daley managed to wreck the English language with abandon, but no one ever doubted what they meant or how much they cared.

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers}     Repeat Thyself. Repeat thyself. 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

 When Leaders Just Cannot Speak Clearly

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Doubt and Fear, the Hobgoblins of Change

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Doubt nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

The Irony of the Non-Essential Boss

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

Accountability versus Opportunity

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

Trumpets, please:

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

Leadership Lessons of I Love Lucy

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

Just as money is the medium of exchange for any transaction, so communication is the medium of exchange for any transformation in business.

Apart from barter, no transaction can take place without money. Apart from fiat, no transformation can take place without communication.

Moreover, just as the money that enables a transaction must be credible and legitimate, so the communication that enables transformation must be credible and legitimate.

In either case, anything that is not is counterfeit.

For leaders, counterfeit currency in communication buys only alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. That's a bad deal at any price.

 

Coming on Friday

Precisely What Is Employee 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 Masters, Golf, and Other Bad Metaphors for Business

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

From Obligation to Opportunity

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What, and Who, Is a Communicator?

by Thomas J. Lee

Who is a communicator? What is a communicator?

The short answer is: someone who communicates. But everyone communicates, for better or for worse. Yet we don't call everyone a communicator, do we?

Maybe we should.

In large companies, communicator is shorthand for all those people in staff positions who bring their talent and skill to bear on communicating for the companies that employ them. They are speechwriters, publicists, editors, designers, producers, Website managers, technicians, photographers, and public-affairs representatives. (Full disclosure: I myself worked as an executive speechwriter for the CEO of a Fortune 25 company some years ago.)

The same word is also used, approvingly, to describe senior executives with a knack for speaking clearly, perhaps even eloquently, to large audiences and to the news media. Just as Ronald Reagan was once described as "the great communicator," so a CEO may be described. Alas, not many are.

But I am going after a bigger point.

Especially in a time when social media can so greatly amplify anyone's voice and so heavily influence public opinion, shouldn't all employees be regarded as communicators? For that matter, shouldn't all stakeholders of any sort be regarded as communicators: customers, investors, suppliers, retirees, employees, and more?

The question, it seems to me, is whether anyone is not a communicator. At the risk of confusing things with a double negative, I think not.

I recall a best-practice benchmarking visit I paid some years ago to 3M, the diversified manufacturing company based in St. Paul, Minnesota. When asked how many communicators the company employed, a senior executive replied: 72,385 or thereabouts (I forget the precise figure, but that's close).

I thought he had misunderstood the question, as I was expecting an answer in three digits, not five. No, he replied emphatically, he had clearly understood the question, he had already given it some thought, and he was standing by his answer.

Of course, the figure he cited just happened to be the number of people employed by 3M. And that was before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were dominating our day-to-day reality.

His point was that all employees communicate with and about the company. Moreover, because the company took seriously the importance of two-way communication, it couldn't very well label as communicators only those few people who communicate officially and professionally on behalf of the company. The people they were communicating with—not just to, remember—had to be communicators as well. If they were not, then the conversation was rather lopsided.

Ever since, I have been bemused whenever I hear the word communicator applied only to staff professionals, and all the more so now that social media are so central to our lives. Every company has a lot more communicators than it pays to communicate. They are already communicating quite well, and all the more loudly today than just a few years ago.

 

Coming on Friday

 What Is Your Company's Change Quotient?

 

(c) Copyright 2011     Thomas J. Lee     All rights reserved.

Engagement and Alignment Are Two Different Things

 

By Thomas J. Lee

There's a lot of confusion, even among senior executives and their advisors who should know better, around engagement and alignment in the workplace.

Everyone speaks approvingly of both engagement and alignment, of course. But many executives and consultants use the terms interchangeably—though in fact they are very different—and don't see the particular nature of their own work as producing one but not the other.

So let's carve out their distinguishing features. To understand these two terms, you need to begin with basic distinctions between leadership and management.

It is only when we unpack leadership and management from each other that we can see the unique challenges, tools, and rewards of each. It's also only when we unpack leadership and management that we begin to understand engagement and alignment as two different, but complementary, things.

For starters, companies make a big mistake when they use the words leadership and management to refer to positions or levels in a hierarchy. We would gain a lot of clarity if we instead understood leadership and management as work—not as persons in a pecking order but as responsibilities, tasks, and especially communication. They do different things, though they certainly leverage each other.

Up, down, and across an organization, anyone in authority must do both. Front-line supervisors must bear some responsibility for collateral leadership, and even the CEO has some basic managerial tasks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two different things they are, managing and leading; and two different things they are, alignment and engagement. In both cases, both are important. Both are necessary. They’re just different. Quite dramatically different, at that.

 

Friday: Facebook and Force Multipliers

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

My Case Against Traditional State of the Union Speeches

 

 

For those of you who are fascinated by the art and process of speechwriting, here is an old speechwriter's argument against traditional State of the Union speeches. It appeared in this space four years ago when George W. Bush was preparing to give the 2007 address, but the sum and substance of its argument remains valid today.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Three or four weeks into every new year, the president of the United States goes before Congress—and, via television, directly before the American people—to deliver his State of the Union address. Year after year, for Democrat and Republican alike, it is a huge missed opportunity.

I'm not picking on President Bush here. Every president I can remember has neglected to make the most of the State of the Union address. Though often well-written, these speeches never rise to their potential as an instrument for leadership. Their shortcomings hold a lesson for leaders in other walks of life, especially business.

Think first of the audience for a typical State of the Union. Arrayed before the president are virtually every member of Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and diplomats from countries around the world. Watching television are probably the vast majority of Fortune 500 chief executives, hundreds of columnists and editorialists, thousands of state and local officials and community leaders, and untold numbers of Internet bloggers, not to mention millions upon millions of U.S. voters.

Not bad, would you agree?

Now think about what all these people typically hear: bromide after bromide, carefully scripted applause lines, a Sears catalogue of policy prescriptions for everything from embryonic stem-cell research to Medicare reforms, and, for the last 25 years, the saccharine introduction and standing ovation for an American hero, a visiting head-of-state, or a poster child for whatever. (This year, at least we’ll hear something we have never heard before, as the Sergeant at Arms intones: “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States!”)

Finally, think of the opportunity that gets away: the chance to focus public discourse on one or two core initiatives or challenges, in a way that enhances the potential for real leadership.

Business leaders frequently make the same mistake. They have so many things on their plate that they sacrifice the opportunity to shine a spotlight on their uppermost priorities. They squander an opportunity for focus.

The State of the Union speech has its roots in the U.S. Constitution. Modeled after the Throne Speech of monarchies, it calls on the president to give Congress information on the state of the Union “from time to time” and to recommend legislation he deems “necessary and expedient.” But it does not require a speech for that process, and there is no constraint on how the president should structure a speech should he choose to give one. Nor does it specify how often or how comprehensive or deep the communication must be.

That allows for flexibility that presidents should use. For more than a century, from Thomas Jefferson in 1801 to Woodrow Wilson in 1913, the State of the Union was a written report without any public oration. Only since 1965 has the speech been broadcast on prime-time television. So the event has evolved, and it can evolve some more.

Here’s what a creative leader would do: Submit the extensive detail on the “state of the union” to Congress in a written report. Accompany that report with another document describing in detail the “necessary and expedient” legislation he wishes to be enacted. Then, use the televised speech itself to focus attention on one or—at the most—two issues or initiatives that he deems particularly important.

Remember, the first step of the leadership process is fixing attention on a challenge or issue. Until people share a common focus, they cannot share a common bond of resolve. The focus is critical.

All of us have an inherent need for noble, visionary, resolute leadership. In calling for an annual message to Congress, the founders were simply sketching out the president's role as a policymaking leader. They would applaud mightily a president who stepped up to the challenge.

Business leaders take note: Convey detailed information in writing, either as narrative or spreadsheet. Use oral presentations and speeches to focus attention. Get to the point and stay on point. Do so often, and you will define your leadership and shape the future. You will lead.

 

(c) Copyright 2007 and 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 a Culture of Engagement Really Looks Like

 
by Thomas J. Lee

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

• the point of someone's single-minded focus
• the object of someone's intense curiosity
• the subject of someone's deep passion
• and the product of someone's enduring courage.

Think of any significant achievement, discovery, invention, or development in modern history: setting foot on the Moon, transplanting a human heart, demolishing the Berlin Wall, ending apartheid in South Africa, negotiating peace in Northern Ireland, or winning World War II.

Think of filming an Oscar-winning movie or tunneling under the English Channel or composing a symphony or climbing Mount Everest. Think of beating cancer and then winning the Tour de France seven years straight.

Think of any successful organization of any sort: a victorious political campaign, a world-class orchestra, a championship sports team, an army on the battlefield.

In business, think of Richard Branson as he sold vinyl hi-fi records out of his car in downtown London—the precursor of Virgin Atlantic and the first step on Branson's road to becoming a billionaire. Think of Amazon.com and its Kindle, or Apple and its iPad.

Think of Sam Walton and Warren Buffet. Think of a couple of obscure college dropouts as they set up Microsoft and took it public. Think of the work that the Gates Foundation is doing in Africa. Think of Google. Think of Facebook. Think of Netflix.

Or think of a simple, humble Albanian nun who begged for food and supplies to begin a mission in the slums of Calcutta, decades before she won the Nobel Prize as Mother Teresa.

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

No. It could not. Of course it could not.

So it is that we recognize these four forces—focus, curiosity, passion and courage—as the common denominator of breakthrough success. All four are absolutely essential to employee engagement. What's more, in business they build beautifully on one another. They bring people together and hold them together. They define the very culture of a high-performance team.

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

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

Now ask yourself: What would full focus, curiosity, passion and courage look like in your industry? How would their presence differ from their absence, from the present state?

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

What are you doing today?

What will you do tomorrow?

What can you do today? Tomorrow?

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

To Communicate a Strategic Focus, You Must First Have One

 

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

In the meantime, here's another little essay that many of you liked when we first published it. Feel free to forward it to your staff and colleagues.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

What do they have in common? They're all splendid examples of successful marketing initiatives, quite obviously. At least here in the United States, virtually everyone is familiar with all of them, and anyone can fill in the two blanks with Deere and Marines. Each phrase takes only an instant to associate with its sponsor.

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, few companies successfully communicate a sharp, compelling focus. It isn't so much a failure of marketing as of leadership. To communicate a shared focus, you must first have a focus, and it must be clear and coherent. You can't communicate what you don't have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

How Clear Is Communication In Your Organization?

 

 

 

(Third 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.)

Beginning today 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 clear. I like to ask these questions about clarity:

• Are the company’s formal statements deliberately written in plain language?
• Are buzzwords common?
• Are acronyms and abbreviations understood by all?
• Is there an online glossary for reference? For employees without computers, is a glossary published on paper or available online at kiosks? Have you thought of using a smart-phone app for this purpose?
• Is industry jargon or specialty terminology well-established? Does the company frequently coin new program names and process terminology and then neglect to define them?
• Is the vernacular such that new employees feel as if they have arrived in a foreign land?
• Does the organization have clarity around its purpose and priorities?
• Are official corporate pronouncements artfully phrased to be inoffensive and polite at the expense of clarity?
• Are mnemonics in use to help employees remember strategic priorities and processes?
• Are metrics and milestones on display for all employees to see?
• Are the metrics in sync with strategies?
• Are leaders regularly reinforcing the strategy in impromptu conversations with employees?  

 

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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The Six Hats of Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Every leader wears six hats, more or less simultaneously. That is to say a leader has six roles to fulfill.

It isn't easy looking after all six. But someone has to do it.

Here are the six hats every leader wears.

• The first role is that of professor. By that I mean the leader is an inveterate teacher. He takes every opportunity to educate the people he is leading, and he does so in ways that are important and memorable. The lessons have to do with the organization's purpose, situation, direction, challenges, and progress. Of course, like any good teacher, the leader is constantly learning, often from the students themselves.
• The second role is that of preacher. By preacher, I don't mean religious evangelist. Rather, the leader as preacher is asking people to think deeply about the meaning of their work, and is looking after the soul of the organization. People who derive great meaning from their work are bound to contribute far more than others who are just along for the paycheck.
• The third role is politician. Bismarck taught us that politics is the art of the possible. As a politician, the leader is striving to maximize the possible. To this end, she must look after constituencies and forge alliances, so as to balance and satisfy the needs of people whose sponsorship is necessary for the organization to succeed. The key constituencies usually consist of entities that provide mission-critical resources: employees who provide talent and time, customers who provide a market, investors who provide capital, and neighbors who provide good will.
• The fourth role is planner. Every leader worth the name must allocate resources in such a way as to enable employees to satisfy the needs of customers and meet the expectations of investors (or donors in a non-profit capacity, or taxpayers in a government, or patrons in an artistic enterprise). As a planner, the leader is also managing expectations and removing obstacles to the work of employees.
• The fifth role is police. The leader must establish and enforce standards of conduct that are relevant and necessary to the organization's mission. No organization that makes commitments to customers can tolerate more than the occasional and accidental lapse. Whenever a pattern of lapses begins to emerge, the leader must lay down the law.
• The sixth role is poet. Somewhat counter-intuitively, every leader must use the power of language to create a deep and powerful connection with people. By poet, I am not referring to a writer of poems, but rather to a person who recognizes the lyrical and magical power of words to motivate and inspire people. If the work of managing people relies on ordinary prose, the work of leading people reaches for extraordinary poetry--words that touch people in ways they may not understand but can never forget.

Recognize and fulfill all six obligations, and your leadership will soar.

 

 

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

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Nonsense on Nonverbal Communication

 

Minding Gaps is taking some time for a 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 is on the widespread nonsense and common misconceptions about nonverbal communication. 

We will return with all-new essays next Monday, September 27. 

 

 

— Tom           

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

“Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe,” Mehrabian said emphatically in a 2009 interview on BBC. “It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he said. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

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

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The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint

 

Here’s a lighthearted post for a listless Friday afternoon in late summer, as the kids go back to school and our colleagues drift home from vacation. Created by Peter Norvig, director of research for Google, it is a brilliant riff on what the Gettysburg Address would have sounded like if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint.

It has been on the net for years, and you may have seen it before. Frankly, I will never grow tired of it. As you view it, click the NEXT button to move through the deck of six slides.

Before anyone writes to remind us of the sanctity of Gettysburg National Cemetery, be assured we are appreciative. A few years ago we spent an afternoon at Gettysburg, and we recommend it to every American.

Trumpets, puhleeze.

 

"And now please welcome Mr. Abraham Lincoln, president of these old United States of ours."

"Good morning. I said, Good morning!

"Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute.

"Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we?

"Oh, is it ready? Okee-dokee, here we go:

 

Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication by Abraham Lincoln

 

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Leadership Lessons From Smith Barney and E.F. Hutton

Have you ever heard a song early in the day and found yourself humming the tune all afternoon and into the evening?

That kind of thing happens to me more than I should admit.

Lately a couple of old TV commercials from 20 or 25 years ago have been ringing in my belfry. Both are from brokerage houses that no long exist. One was Smith Barney. The other was E.F. Hutton.

Smith Barney’s commercials featured the dignified, professorial actor John Houseman. In a bow tie and a snooty, Boarding School English baritone, Houseman would declare of Smith Barney: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.”

E.F. Hutton’s commercials were always set in a loud, crowded room, such as a restaurant or a cocktail reception. Amid the din, a younger man or younger woman would quietly remark to someone, “My broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says”—whereupon the room would abruptly hush, as everyone would strain to overhear what the E.F. Hutton broker had said. After skipping a beat, the announcer would then intone: “When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen.”

Leaders everywhere can learn something from these two slogans.

From the Smith Barney commercials, you can remind yourself that your impact as a leader—the ideas you share, the influence you wield, the inspiration you spread—can only be earned. Your position in the organization may accord you formal and legal managerial authority, but you must earn your stripes as a leader. And the only people who can grant you those stripes are the very people you aspire to lead. They decide for themselves whom they will follow.

To paraphrase the late Mr. Houseman: True leaders gain their influence the old-fashioned way. They earn it.

From the E.F. Hutton commercials, you can remind yourself that a good measure of your impact as a leader is the extent to which people listen to you—not because you occupy a corner office but because you pay attention to people and to their situation, because you respect their bedrock values, because you care deeply about the organization and its stakeholders, because you have a crisp vision of the future, because you usually make sense, because you are sincere, because you are wise, because you are often right, and because when you are wrong, you admit it.

So pay attention to whether, and if so, how much, people are listening to you. If they are listening, then you should endeavor to continue earning their attention and their trust. If they aren’t listening, don’t respond by raising your voice. That's counterproductive. Just go back to the basics you learned from Smith Barney’s commercials, and recommit to earning your stripes as a leader.

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What's the Big Idea?

Facts and figures are the currency of information in any company, but they are not what gives the currency of information its value. The basis of its value—the gold bullion behind the facts and figures, behind the currency of information—is less tangible: a set of ideas that capture the organization’s reason for being, its purpose, its energy, and its value to customers in the marketplace.

Data, by itself, is rarely energizing or ennobling. It excites only those few people already familiar with its context: the research scientist looking for a correlation coefficient, the investor looking for an EBITA, the marathoner looking for her splits at each milepost, the shopper looking for a bargain. Because they have a framework in mind, they already know what some particular new data would mean: a bigger return, a faster mile, a lower price. In plainly recognized contexts like those, facts and figures have undeniable significance.

However, most people are not a priori familiar with the context of data, and in any case that is not where our heart and soul lie. People are bigger than mere numbers. For the most part, we give our emotional energy to ideas that create meaning for our lives. Most people in most circumstances want to understand who they are, where they are going, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they can be of more value: better craftsmen, better parents, better salespeople, better scoutmasters, better friends—whatever their calling or challenge may be.

For most of us, ideas are more influencing and inspiring than facts and figures can ever be. Ideas bring us not mere data but context and meaning for whatever data we come across.

Give me data, yes, but more than data, give me a vision, a dream, a reason, a narrative, a cause, a principle, a story, a purpose. Make it real. Make it the here and now, but also make it big—the kind of propositions and plans that, in Daniel Burnham’s words, can stir men’s souls.

Lest you doubt the truth of all this, just look to the importance of big ideas in the history of humankind. Look at the great documents, the treaties and constitutions and bibles and speeches and songs and stories and beliefs that have long sent people onward to achieve great things.

Facts and figures are essential to the marketplace. There’s no question about that. But they do not, they cannot, make us great. Only big ideas, riding the crest of emotion, can do that.

 

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Strunk and White Can Teach Us All Something About Clarity

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White knew a thing or two about clear writing. Their book, The Elements of Style, remains the classic primer on expository writing. If it isn’t already on your bookshelf, it belongs there.

Strunk was an English professor at Cornell when, in 1935, he laid down a list of simple rules and guidelines for English composition. Though the professor died shortly after World War II, one of his students, E.B. White, went on to write Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. In 1959, a publisher asked White to revise and update Strunk’s primer for publication. The slim volume has since sold more than ten million copies, several of them to me. The names Strunk and White are now eponymous with clear writing.

Never ones to mince words, Strunk and White bemoaned verbal confusion and ambiguity as “a destroyer of life, of hope.” For too many leaders, in both business and government, that is just what happens when acronyms, euphemisms, jargon, and evasion pass for communication.

Just why so many companies and governments prefer to beat around the bush remains a mystery, but there’s no denying they do. They seem perfectly unable or unwilling to say things in a simple way. The more they talk, the more they confuse matters. Ordinary people naturally conclude it is a deliberate attempt to sidestep accountability. In particular, corporate rhetoric around layoffs is infamous, as if soft pedaling Draconian news will ease the blow of a lost paycheck.

Strunk and White have compelling advice to anyone in a position of leadership and anyone who helps leaders communicate: “When you have said something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.”

Indeed.

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7 Myths About Grammar

Here is another terrific essay by Don Ranly, one of America's leading journalism professors, on grammar. He lists seven popular myths about grammar.

Please read it and, if the spirit moves you, circulate it widely.

7 myths about grammar | Article | Homepage articles

Unpacking Leadership and Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just What Is Engagement, Anyway?

People in business talk about employee engagement as if everyone knew exactly and precisely what it is.

They really don’t.

That’s because there is no pat definition.

Many standard dictionaries don’t even define engagement in terms that business would find useful. Dictionaries commonly favor non-business definitions such as a marriage betrothal, or a meeting (as in a speaking engagement or a dinner engagement), or even a military battle or a non-declared war. So if you Google the word, be prepared for lots of extraneous references!

Yet we do seem to have an intuitive sense for the word in a business context. It's a little like the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous dictum about pornography: He couldn't define it, but he sure did know it when he saw it.

A common, casual framing of employee engagement is simply orientation to, preoccupation with, and involvement in the success of the enterprise. High-performance organizations are presumed to have deep engagement, while lesser organizations are presumed to lack much of it.

Thus there is a definition, inasmuch as everyone concerned with it generally agrees on the broad outlines; but there isn’t a definition, inasmuch as no one has ever been able to pin down a precise meaning that everyone is willing to use.

There is also a lot of confusion over three other terms, all commonly used in business, that mean something similar to engagement.

People talk of alignment and commitment in the same breath as engagement. It may be splitting hairs, but we can think of alignment as a physical, nearly mechanical consistency with expectations, such as compliance with an ethics code or a production process, and we can think of commitment as loyalty to an organization, its mission, and the satisfaction of its patrons and stakeholders.

Finally, it is important to distinguish between morale and engagement. Morale is a feeling of happiness or contentment associated with one’s role or situation at work. High levels of morale are naturally desirable, and companies commonly go to some length to ensure high morale for their employees.

However, morale doesn’t reflect the degree to which employees are working in accord with the strategic direction and interests of an organization as defined by its senior management. Happy employees may be happy because they are overpaid, for example, or because they have non-pecuniary benefits that they value (a physically comfortable and appealing place to work, perhaps, or friends on the job, or an after-work bowling league). Moreover, if disengaged employees have high morale, their self-satisfaction can itself be a wrench in the organization’s capacity to deliver on its promises to customers and investors.

Engagement, on the other hand, is an attitude or orientation to the work itself for the sake of the work and its importance. I like to think of engagement as a lot of focus, a lot of curiosity, a lot of passion, and a lot of courage for whatever the job entails. Think of it that way, and we can begin to get our arms around it.

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How Straight Talk Can Backfire on Leaders

 

 

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

 

Beware the Metamessage

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a real hornet’s nest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Exactly Do We Mean by Engagement, Anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The twelve-point Gallup checklist consists of these factors:

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

2. Having appropriate materials and equipment.

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

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

5. Having someone who encourages one’s development.

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

7. Being heard and taken seriously.

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

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

10. Having a best friend at work.

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

12. Having opportunities to grow and learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leadership Is In the Eye of the Beholder

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

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

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

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

Fleshing Out Differences Between Management and Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider this framework:

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

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

• What makes immediate and obvious sense here?

• What don’t you quite grasp?

• What is most challenging to your own style?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic Communication: Getting Back to the Basics

I couldn’t agree more with Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every corporate CEO and every communication consultant and practitioner should think hard about Admiral Mullen’s message, too. It would do business a lot of good.

I’m referring to the admiral’s recent essay on strategic communication. Published in Joint Forces Quarterly, a military journal, the essay is a broadside on facile, fast-talking communication. Mullen is naturally concerned with communication seeking to promote American military and foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But as you read his essay, think in terms of corporate communication. Try to distill the admiral’s thinking to your own business challenges. It will be well worth your while.

Let me pause for a note on terminology. Admiral Mullen and I define “strategic communication” differently. We have our own mental constructs for it, too, and they bear heavily on our thinking. I have long championed strategic communication as a systematic key to authenticity and credibility, whereas Mullen scorns it as so much propaganda. So we’re coming at the issue from quite different points of view, but we’re both striving for greater authenticity and credibility. That's the important thing.

Having said all that, I find the admiral’s thesis compelling. Indeed, in spite of our differences over terminology, his argument is actually in complete alignment with my own thinking.

Before proceeding any further, you should read the essay in full. It’ll take only five or ten minutes.

Now as you can see, Mullen delivers a blistering attack on the use of verbal and visual messages that are out of synch with reality on the ground, and he is critical of mass communication as a substitute for genuine, sincere relationships. He writes: “Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.”

Mullen goes on to define good communication as “having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us; that isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.”

A little further on, he writes: “Most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”

Years ago, I had a mentor who stressed that the secret to good communication was doing the right thing and getting caught at it. To me, that is strategic communication. In the admiral’s view, it’s good leadership. The semantics aren’t as important as the judgment, and Mullen’s judgment is exactly right.

It is indeed a matter of getting back to the basics. Whatever we call it, let’s get on with it.

Communication Is So Much More Than Communications

Just about every large company has a staff department with responsibility for communications. In many such companies this department is known as Corporate Communications.

This department has the resources and talent to produce brilliant communications. Its head is typically a vice president of communications, or, increasingly, the chief communications officer. Its staff comprises directors, managers, and specialists in communications.

All of which poses a little-noticed problem.

The little problem with corporate communications is the s.

Yes, the s. One little letter of the alphabet.

In a perfect world, it would be communication, not communications.

Now why would we ever quibble with a single little s?

Because that one letter insidiously, yet powerfully, reduces our thinking. It pushes us from big to small, from proactive to reactive, from broad to narrow, from complete to partial, from advising to providing, from behoove to behest. It pushes us southward when we should go northward. The best of us resist that push, but the push is there all the same.

In practical terms, this one little letter points our attention to the discrete things that we produce, which we conventionally regard as communications. Things like announcements, speeches, intranet sites, slogans, reports, press releases, newsletters, bulletin boards, Tweets, and the like. It takes us away from the process of strategic communication.

These deliverables are vitally important, to be sure. As a onetime corporate speechwriter myself, I am not arguing otherwise. They can set the stage for employee engagement, which in turn enables organizations to grow and perform. So these deliverables fully deserve the attention and competencies that professionals bring to them. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting abandonment or retreat from that mission, by any means.

It's just that deliverables are only the most visible and tangible artifacts of corporate communication. Although they make themselves known, seen, and heard, they are far from the whole complement of signals that carry information and messages throughout an organization. Communication, you see, is so much more than communications.

Many other communication vehicles convey information and messages just as powerfully, indeed often much more powerfully, than the announcements and speeches that Corporate Communications so carefully prepares. These other vehicles, however, are not conventionally regarded as communication, so they are not usually in the purview of communication professionals. They include such powerful "telegrams" as decisions, the decision-making process, visible behaviors by senior executives, choices, standards and exceptions to them, policies, agendas, programs, sales and production quotas, compensation, the onboarding process, a manager's presence and accessibility, questions and responsiveness—the list goes on and on.

These tools in the toolbox of management are problematic because they are difficult to regard and manage as communication. So it isn't surprising that few companies treat them as communication. That is a significant oversight. Decisions, behaviors, choices, policies and the like routinely confirm or undermine our formal messages. Thus, management is already and invariably saddled with ownership of the information and messages that implicitly flow through these instruments. I argue that management should therefore exercise some determinative control over them as communication, on the advice of communication professionals.

The reality is that communication is continuous and universal. An organization and its leadership are constantly communicating, regardless of whether they are speaking. Their action or inaction communicates. Their behavior communicates. Their silence communicates. Their presence or their absence communicates. Communication isn't so much a series of lectures as a continuing conversation.

Moreover, by dint of their decisions and behaviors and choices, companies are always communicating implicitly as well as explicitly, inadvertently as well as deliberately, haphazardly as well as carefully. Indeed, they are communicating most powerfully when they least believe they are communicating at all.

Communication is not a discrete or episodic thing. It really has no beginning, and it can have no end. Rather, it is constant. We should think of it not as an event, not as an item, not as a thing, but as a never-beginning and never-ending process that is always informing and influencing people, for better or worse.

A well-positioned Corporate Communication department should have a significant role in managing the comprehensive process of communication, not just the communications products that are its bread and butter.

So let’s drop the s—from the department's name, from job titles, from business cards, and most of all from our thinking. The sooner we do, the sooner we will take responsibility for the perceptions and messages that we already own but have yet to begin to manage. And once we drop it, we can use that seemingly insignificant change to have a significant conversation about the very significant value we can add.

Rhetoric and Political Debate

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

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

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

One observation that DeSanto makes is especially intriguing.

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

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

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

I recommend two books for further reading:

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

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

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

By the Numbers: The Truth on Nonverbal Communication

Last week we introduced a new regular feature, By the Numbers, of the Minding Gaps blog. We’ll start each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We’ll accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Today, we present data on nonverbal communication that many otherwise intelligent people believe is true—but isn’t.

Over and over, in books and journals and speeches and videos and websites, some of the most well-known and widely respected experts on communication make the same error. Unintentionally, but nevertheless irresponsibly, they casually misunderstand, misinterpret, and misrepresent certain research data on nonverbal communication and body language.

They get the data correct, but they distort and exaggerate its significance. Their mistake is so common, the misstated information is all but a cliché. Even more troubling, perhaps millions of otherwise intelligent and discerning people have just accepted the mistake at face value, and they repeat it as gospel. So the error, like a viral pathogen, grows and grows into a disease of misinformation.

Everywhere you turn, you read and hear about Albert Mehrabian’s research on nonverbal communication. Mehrabian, it is said, found that only 7 percent of a message is conveyed verbally—through words. The other 93 percent is conveyed nonverbally—38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent by body language.

Before I go any further, for the benefit of readers who only glance at the first few paragraphs of an essay like this and then move on, I must state with perfect clarity that the foregoing description of Mehrabian’s research is false. It is wrong, and anyone citing the data in such a way should stop and correct what they have previously stated. That’s a lot of experts.

It’s impossible to list all the authors and publications citing Mehrabian’s work in error. Brian Tracy, who has few peers among professional speakers, makes the error in his popular book Speak to Win. Tonya Reiman does likewise in a website on body language. So does Carol Kinsey Goman, an author and consultant, in her recent book The Nonverbal Advantage. Peter Block’s otherwise masterful Flawless Consulting cites the data in error. Daniel Goleman refers indirectly and wrongly to the study in his classic work, Emotional Intelligence. The list goes on and on, and it includes some very good company indeed.

Now common sense tells you the data cannot be true as described. If true, you would have no trouble communicating in a foreign land without knowing the local language, for 93 percent of the intended meaning would be clear. You could watch television without the sound. You wouldn’t bother listening to talk radio or a podcast. A game of charades would be over in seconds.

You would dare not sign a contract, as only 7 percent of the mutual commitments would be on paper. Historic documents and speeches like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address would be almost meaningless. Laws would be unenforceable. Email? You certainly wouldn’t go there. And why would you ever read a blog like this or surf the Internet? Why, indeed, would you bother reading anything? Mehrabian's research itself, which he published in two books, would be unintelligible!

The fact is that words account for much, much more than 7 percent of a message. While tone of voice and body language undeniably carry some meaning, they rarely account for nearly as much impact as words. Indeed, many other aspects of nonverbal communication—such as punctuality, patience, courtesies, logic, attentiveness, inquiry, creativity, relevance, authority, accuracy, wisdom, sincerity, depth, research, etiquette, dignity, and interpersonal regard—are vastly more important than posture and a handshake.

The research itself was legitimate. Albert Mehrabian, now retired, was a professor at UCLA when he conducted two studies in the 1960s. The studies were quite modest, and their scope was very narrow. He found that, in personal relationships, a message of emotional commitment could easily be confused by conflictive vocal tone and facial expression. That’s the extent of his findings. Period. End of story.

In the decades since, his findings have been repeatedly construed more broadly. Today his name is virtually synonymous with the urban myth that words generally convey only a tiny fraction of meaning. Mehrabian himself has been frustrated by the misrepresentations, and also by the extrapolated meaning. He counts those two studies as a minor part of his decades of academic research, and he is quick to point out their narrow scope.

Just last week, in an interview on BBC Radio 4, “More or Less” host Tim Harford asked Mehrabian whether words accounted for only 7 percent of meaning. “Absolutely not!” Mehrabian replied emphatically. “Whenever I hear that misquote or misrepresentation, I cringe. . . . It should be so obvious to anybody who would use any amount of common sense that that’s not a correct statement.”

Mehrabian cited an everyday example of giving directions. “If I were to tell you that the pencil you are looking for is upstairs in the desk drawer of the bedroom, three drawers down, I couldn’t do that nonverbally,” he told Harford. “I mean, I could try to point, but that would hardly locate the pencil, whereas I could do that very precisely with words.”

He concluded: “There’s no question you can’t extrapolate my findings to communication in general.”

So there. Have we cleared things up? I certainly hope so.

Memo to "experts": Stop saying this!

 

Notes on the Privilege of Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Adapted and republished from October 29, 2007.)

Words as Tripwires in a Minefield

The impact of words on thinking, and of thinking on leadership and followership, is a frequent theme of this blog. So is the need to appeal to potential stakeholders regardless of their demographic, social, or political profile. Leadership is, above all, a connection, and every follower counts.

I want to believe that the words I use are respectful of all people. However, I have to confess that I had never thought of several common phrases as insulting or denigrating to gays and lesbians.

A simple phrase such as or “sexual preference” or “alternative lifestyle,” for example, while innocuous to straight people, can be very demeaning for gays and lesbians. After all, sexual orientation is anything but a preference or a lifestyle.

In a blog post this week, Ben Finzel, senior vice president at the global public relations firm of Fleishman-Hillard, and the founding co-chair its gay and lesbian communication practice, offers eight words and phrases to avoid in leadership and organizational communication on sexual orientation.

For years, I have used several of these words and phrases unthinkingly. No more.

Even if you regard yourself as progressive and sensitive—especially if you regard yourself as progressive and sensitive—you should familiarize yourself with these words and phrases and then assiduously avoid them.

How to Be a Mensch of a Leader

I found pearls of insight in this interview with Bruna Martinuzzi, a Canadian consultant and expert in emotional intelligence. Her thinking on these issues is consistent with my own.

Ms. Martinuzzi is the author of The Leader as a Mensch: Become the Kind of Person Others Want to Follow. In this interview, conducted by Guy Kawasaki, she explains how to be a mensch in business.

 

Question: What qualities define a mensch?

Answer: A mensch is an individual who is decent and honorable in all of his undertakings—he or she is the same person privately and publicly. This is a person of high integrity, someone that you would feel totally comfortable doing business with. A mensch’s word is as good as his signature. One of the hallmarks of a mensch is empathy and compassion, a genuine caring for his fellow man. A mensch will always look for an opportunity to do good in life, to be of help to the community. When you are in the presence of a mensch, you feel good about you—you sense a total absence of artifice, you know that you are in the presence of a genuine human being, one who will not deceive you, undermine you or try to diminish you in any way.

Question: Are mensches born or made?

Answer: Some individuals have a natural capacity for being a mensch. They learned this at their mother’s knee—they cannot be anything else because the seed for menschhood was planted and nurtured early on in life. They may be catapulted into menschhood by some significant life experiences like experiencing a loss, surviving an illness, going through a betrayal by a business partner—all events that become a healthy trauma, that awaken one to the need to be a better human being, to function on a higher evolutionary plane. Still for others becoming a mensch evolves from a motivation to be a good leader, to do well while doing good. All of us have in us the capacity to act as mensches—it’s a part of being human. We just need to raise our awareness of how we show up in our dealings with others and ask ourselves, "Am I proud of who I am or who I have become as a person? Do I strive to do the right thing?" Self-awareness precedes self-management.

Question: What is the acid test to separate the true mensches from the smooth pretenders?

Answer: There are two things at play here. The first is: Consistency. While some people can succeed at counterfeiting who they are for some of the time, if you spend enough time with them, you start to see some cracks in the veneer. You get a glimpse of the person behind the mask. It is very difficult to go through life, in all circumstances, trying to keep the mask in place. It will slip at some point. The other thought that comes to mind is that, deep down, most of us have a well-developed gut feel that sends signals to us that not everything we see is at it seems. But many choose to ignore the whispers for a variety of reasons. As Goethe put it: “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” It may not be convenient or in our self-interest to believe otherwise, and, therefore, we ignore the small integrity slips, the little things we see that tell us all is not right with that person.

Question: Who are some examples of mensches in business?

Answer: There are many. One, for example, was mentioned last month, by President Obama at his Address to the Joint Session of Congress. He spoke about Leonard Abess, a bank president in Florida who took his $60 million cash out bonus, and distributed it to all 399 people who worked for his bank, and not only that, he tracked down another 72 who used to work for him. When he was asked why he did it, he said: “I knew some of these people since I was seven years old. I didn’t feel right getting the money myself.”

Another example is Ted Forstsmann, CEO of IMG and the senior founding partner of Forstmann Little & Co, a leveraged buyout firm. Forstsmann co-founded The Children’s Scholarship Fund, the U.S.’s largest charity devoted to helping parents send their children to the schools of their choice. He continues to do work to improve the lives of children both here and abroad. Peter Peterson is another one. He is senior Chairman of the Blackstone Group, an alternative asset management and financial services company. Peterson gave $1 billion to his new foundation, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to help solve some of the U.S.’s biggest economic problems.

But it doesn’t just have to be about giving money: Christoper Avery, an international lawyer, founded Business & Human Rights Centre to track the positive and negative impact of over 4,000 companies worldwide. Chris Harrop, a marketing director for Marshalls, a UK stone company. He devoted his time for energetic campaigning to reduce child labor in the quarrying of Indian sandstone. Daphne E. Jones, Vice President, Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Johnson & Johnson, is committed to helping women succeed and works to increase the number of women who work in science and technology. Linda Hunt, the Chief Administrative Officer at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix is a strong advocate for diversity, and the elimination of racism and discrimination. She has devoted herself to a hospital where she has an opportunity to also serve the poor and underserved in a part of the city with an ethnically diverse population. And, of course, we all know about Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their mantra is: "Don’t be evil," which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. As Page put it: “So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.” A wonderful thing, indeed, if every businessperson approached their work with this mind-set.

Question: Many business people are very successful and rich and the antithesis of mensches, so why should we aspire to be mensches?

Answer: First, let’s define what the antithesis of a mensch is. This would be someone who lacks empathy, compassion and integrity—an individual who is self-serving, focused only on his own needs to succeed and acquire wealth. One would argue that those who accomplish their goals despite this way of doing business, might find success, but not significance. I love Peter Drucker’s exhortation to make your life your end-game, to ask yourself frequently: “What do you want to be remembered for?” Significance is making a positive difference in the world. Success without significance is hollow. Rabbi Hillel’s beautiful words say it best: “…if I am only for myself, then what am I?”

Question: In tough times like these, is menschhood possible in businesses?

Answer: It’s not only possible, it is essential. People are increasingly more anxious about job security and the effect that the slumping economy will have on them. It’s much easier to run a business or lead teams when the economy is thriving but it is in these tough times that business people have a golden opportunity to rise above the din of the crowd as a true mensch and show leadership and ask themselves: “How can I make a difference?”

Question: Can a young person, say under forty, be a mensch or does it only come with age?

Answer: Absolutely, anyone at any age can be a mensch—even a child can be taught to grow up as a mensch. And if you are a young entrepreneur for whom this concept has not been foremost on your mind, you can start right now. Develop a framework of principles and strong values that can help steer you in your daily choices and the decisions you make, a moral compass to guide you in your efforts to be a good human being, to use your many gifts to give something back to society.

Question: Suppose that a person wants to become a mensch, what are the steps to take?

Answer: Here are eleven quick tips:

1.   Consistently act with honesty. Watch the small integrity slips.

2.   When someone has wronged you, continue to treat them with civility.

3.   Are you in the habit of making hasty promises that you know, from experience, you are unable to keep? Think back on what promises you made, to whom, and see if you can fulfill some of these.

4.   Help someone who can be of absolutely no use to you.

5.   The next time something goes wrong on a project, suspend blame and ask: “What can we learn?”

6.   Hire people who are as smart or smarter than you are—whose talents surpass you—and give them opportunities for growth. Not only is it the smart thing to do but it is also a sign of high personal humility.

7.   Improve the way you communicate with people: don’t interrupt people; don’t dismiss their concerns offhand; don’t rush to give advice; don’t change the subject. Allow people their moment.

8.   Resolve to do no harm in anything you undertake. If you are certain that you don’t have the competence to take on something that is offered, consider that you might be doing harm to someone by accepting it anyway.

9.   Become aware of your stance at business meetings. Are you known as the devil’s advocate—the one who is quick to shoot down others’ ideas? Jumping in too quickly to negate an idea can derail the creative process for others. Often, valuable ideas are the result of the initial “crazy” thought.

10. Resolve to become a philanthropist of know-how. What knowledge, expertise or best practices can you share with colleagues, customers and other stakeholders as a way to enrich them?

11. At the end of each day, when you clear your desk before you head home, take a few minutes to mentally go over your day. Think about significant conversations you had, meetings you attended, emails you sent, and other actions you undertook. Are you proud? Could you have done better? Getting into this habit of introspection will pay dividends in the long run.

Question: Would a mensch ever refer to himself or herself as being a mensch?

Answer: A mensch doesn’t normally refer to himself or herself as being a mensch. Generally, it is others who notice that quality about a person and might be inclined to say: “You are a mensch” or “That was a mensch thing to do.” in which case, this is humbly acknowledged. For example, last year, I was reading a tribute to Sam Sane, a distinguished businessman in Australia, celebrating his 90th birthday, during which he was referred to by those assembled as being a mensch to which he replied: “I’ve always believed I was born on this earth to be a mensch. And I’ve tried to be one.”

So the $64,000 question for all of us is, “What do you want to be remembered for?”

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Bruna Martinuzzi is a certified leadership, emotional intelligence and presentation-skills facilitator and consultant. Her articles have appeared in The Leader’s Edge, Human Resources Management, The H.R. Reporter, H.R. Online, The Personnel Journal and Business Ethics Magazine. Ms. Martinuzzi's web site is here. This interview initially appeared on the web site of American Express Open.