Arceil on Leadership

Passion: Strategic Engagement of the Heart

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Half the things you take for granted wouldn't exist if it were not for someone's deep, consuming passion for them in the beginning.

The things wouldn't be, for the simple reason that no one had the zeal or enthusiasm to create them. Their invention or discovery required passion. The passion was much more important than any immediate potential for profit. Of course, someone else would eventually find a way to scale and monetize them, otherwise they wouldn't be widespread today. But the passion had to be there from the start, or there would be nothing to scale and monetize.

• You wouldn't have Gmail, for one thing. Far from a grand corporate strategy, Gmail was a sidebar, the passion of one Google programmer by the name of Paul Buchheit, who wrote the code for it in his spare time. 
• You wouldn't have iPhones or iPads or iTunes. Steve Jobs spoke frequently about the importance of bringing passion to new products, and it showed. "The only way to do great work is to love what you're doing," he often said.
• You wouldn't have icons, a cursor, and a mouse on your computer. They were the products of Alan Kay, Norman Cox, and other creative, driven engineers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). These guys quietly but passionately made computers friendly to the rest of us.
• You wouldn't have your choice of fonts and you wouldn't have WYSIWYG, either. In the early days of computing, every computer screen looked alike. The font was a weird, glowing, monospaced, 8-pixel techno thing. It was Jobs, again, whose passion for typography led to your choice of Trebuchet or Verdana or a hundred other fonts, and it was a Reed College professor, Robert Palladino, whose passion for fonts inspired the young Jobs. The engineers at PARC added WYSIWYG.
• You wouldn't have a million apps to choose from, though with no thanks to Jobs on this one. It was Apple board member Art Levinson who was so passionate about mobile applications for the iPhone that he harangued Jobs to let independent developers take a crack at their own. Jobs was opposed to the idea. In just six or seven years, the apps industry has exploded to $27 billion.
• You wouldn't have Facebook. Recall that it was developed by Harvard undergraduates working late at night in their dorm rooms, not to make money but to meet girls.

And all that is just passion around computers!

We could talk about the passion that Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly bring to their television commentaries, or the passion that BMW engineers bring to each new model, or the passion that environmentalists bring to saving a species like the bald eagle, or the passion that Rotary International volunteers bring to the fight against polio in developing countries.

We could talk about the passion of the United States SEALS, or of the Grateful Dead and their fans, or of the Tea Party, or of local first responders, or of the Metropolitan Opera, or of medical researchers, or of the Harley-Davidson Owners Group (HOG), or of the long-suffering Chicago Cubs fans who have gone a hundred-plus years without a World Series championship, or your own son or daughter's passion for a science fair or soccer game or merit badge or homecoming dance.

We could go on and on. Wherever you look, you find that passion is central, not peripheral, to creative human endeavor. It is at the core of your uniqueness, your soulful individuality. It is who all of us can be on our best day and want to be every day.

Is money involved? Don't be silly. Of course it is. People need to be paid and want to become rich if they can. Eventually, as in an IPO or a labor impasse or a shareholder revolt, money can dominate. But someone's burning passion—in combination with a laser-like focus, endless curiosity, and the courage that shows up as discipline, initiative and perseverance—must have been there from the beginning. It is what got them started and kept them going.

As we have argued before, these four things are the stuff of full, creative engagement in the workplace: focus, curiosity, passion, courage. With a culture of all four, organizations can accomplish just about anything. Organic growth will come naturally, almost inevitably. Without them, success is and always will be elusive.

Now it is an unfortunate fact of life that few companies are truly eager to do the work of nurturing them, and that is especially true of passion, what we call the engagement of the heart. Most companies choose instead to snuff out the passion that new employees bring to the workplace. They subject new ideas to the deadly routine of "devil's advocate." They delay things so much that people tire of offering new suggestions and solutions.

I attribute this instinct to Snapping Finger Syndrome, the tendency of so many managers to snap their fingers and insist on something. It's easy for them to rely on the authority of their position—the stick of their legal, official authority—to exert their will. It's more difficult to use the authority of their person—the carrot of their moral and exemplary authority—to reach people where they are and take them to a different place. The choice of stick over carrot may produce immediate, short-term results, but it is often at the expense of cultural sclerosis.

As a result, in many industries what you commonly see are stagnation and resistance to real and sustainable change. What change you do see is usually concentrated in one or more of five incidental areas: (1) the introduction of a new technology such as ERP or CRM systems; (2) the reorganization or rearrangement of divisions and departments; (3) reductions in force that leave everyone trying to do more with less; (4) the roll-out of new programs with attendant bells and whistles; and (5) the acquisition of other companies or the spin-off or sale of business units. Together we refer to these as the Small Five, not because they are small in scope (an ERP can be huge, for example) but because all five are small diversions and distractions, and because none of the five offers real, organic growth. None is the horsepower that takes a company to a bigger, better, brighter tomorrow on its own.

Let's assume you want to be different. You want organic growth, and you appreciate the importance of focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. In particular, and in whatever role you have, you want to instill more passion in the culture. Where do you begin?

Here are just a few things you can do. With a little brainstorming you'll be able to add to this list. Ask yourself: How many of these things do you and your peers make a habit of?

• Show your own passion for the things that matter. Do that by talking about the things that matter, by thinking out loud about them, by drawing pictures of them on the white board for all to see, and by finding and sharing quotations and anecdotes that inspire.
• Make a deliberate effort to avoid playing devil's advocate. Instead, play angel's advocate. Stop trying to kill new ideas. Rather, treat them with loving care. Don't expect every new idea, or any new idea, to come with the gift wrap of perfection. Every new idea will be imperfect. But for heaven's sake have the good sense to savor it, to give it sunlight, to grow it.
• Favor creative collaboration over single-point control. Here we have a powerful example from Steve Jobs of what not to do. He was such a control freak that he terrorized people. As recounted by his biographer Walter Isaacson, his autocratic style drove good people away from Apple and kept good people from coming to it. Don't do that.
• Integrate your three voices—formal, semi-formal, and informal—and appreciate the importance of all four aspects of the robust credibility that leaders must cultivate: integrity, affinity, presence, and competence.
• Point to what is already working, and play on people's strengths. As any successful parent knows, a partly deserved compliment to a youngster is worth much more than a fully deserved complaint. People just naturally want to live up to high expectations. It begins with kids. Give them the gift of letting them live up to your expectations.
• Grow people, just as you want to grow the company. After all, companies are people, much more than they are processes, pipelines, products, and profits. Make decisions in such a way that the people on your team or in your unit become more tomorrow than they are today. Their growth in passion will pay your investment forward.
• Discover the power of servant leadership. If it has worked for organizations as diverse as the U.S. Marine Corps and the Ritz-Carlton, for Nordstrom and for Chick-fil-A, for a top-notch retailer like the Container Store and for a top-notch manufacturer like Toro, it can work for you and your organization. Besides, you'll discover things about yourself that will make you a better spouse and a better parent.

There are many other such strategies you can bring to bear on behalf of passion. We discuss them in our Master Class. Just click on the tab above for more information.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

 

Four Score and Seventy Years Ago Today

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Four score and seventy years ago today, Abraham Lincoln delivered the most famous speech in American history. In it he proved both his humility and his humanity, for, contrary to his prediction, the world immediately noted and long remembered what was said at Gettysburg, in commemoration of the sacrifices in battle the previous summer. Said Sen. Charles Sumner in Lincoln's eulogy eighteen months later: "The battle itself was less important than the speech."

Let's take a moment to re-read Lincoln's 270-odd words and burn them into our heart, to remind ourselves both of the central meaning of the United States of America and of the central importance of words in the work of leadership:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Class dismissed.

Focus: Strategic Engagement of the Eyes

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Regular readers may recall the story I first told in this blog several years ago, about my next-door neighbor who was a wide receiver in the National Football League. One night, while we were both cooking out, we got to talking. He told me what it was like to play football in front of 75,000 screaming fans.

One thing he said during that conversation struck me dumb. I couldn't believe it, but he insisted it was true. Since then, I have confirmed it in conversations with several other professional football players. All of them told me the very same thing.

The astounding thing that all these professional athletes said was this: During the execution of a play, they cannot hear the stadium crowd. They can hear the crowd in the huddle and on the line of scrimmage, indeed so much that the noise can make it difficult to hear the quarterback. But once the play begins, and especially if they have an instrumental role in the particular play, the crowd may as well be silent. It ceases to exist.

My neighbor, the wide receiver, went further. He said that as he is running to catch a pass, and after he catches it and is running with the ball, he can hear his own heartbeat, he can hear his breathing, and he can hear his footsteps on the turf. He can also hear a tackler coming up behind him. He just can't hear the crowd.

I found that absolutely phenomenal, and after sharing the story with a number of business executives, we all had the same reaction: Just imagine what a business could achieve with all its people at that level of focus. Certainly a great deal more than it is presently achieving.

We do occasionally see such focus, if perhaps from a distance. Our kids may have a particularly talented teacher or coach who exhibits it. We may hire a master craftsman and marvel as he polishes his work. We may have occasion to see it in first responders or ER personnel, or in soldiers heading to the front, or in a salesman closing a deal, or in an Oscar-winning performance at the movies. We may see it in a high-school valedictorian, or a Silicon Valley startup, or a victorious political campaign. Tragically, we may also see it in the crazed eyes of terrorists.

The problem is we do not customarily see it at work; we don't even see it often. It is the exception, not the day-to-day rule. In most of our routine experiences in business, we see quite the opposite: neglect of safety precautions, undisciplined PowerPoint presentations, casual inattention during conversations, last-minute workarounds, silly excuses for mistakes, extraneous conversation, interruptions, and a great deal of multitasking—even to the point of texting in meetings, training, and driving.

Strategic focus is too important to be left to happenstance. It is the first of four essential elements of full, creative engagement in the workplace. With it—along with curiosity, passion, and courage—organizations can accomplish just about anything, and organic growth comes naturally. Without it, success will be elusive.

But instead of sowing the seeds for such focus and then cultivating a garden where it can grow, many businesses (and other organizations, as well) seem hellbent on doing their best to reduce or destroy focus. Here are just a few of the things that actually cause or aggravate the problem. How many do you experience?

• A constant succession of new programs, usually from headquarters and often dreamed up by someone in human resources.

• The rolling thunder of reorganizations, with or without reductions in force, that raise questions of continued employment or the need for a transfer or the possibility of new reporting relationships, job titles and descriptions, and office locations.

• For large or publicly traded companies, news-media stories that have everyone talking about all the wrong things.

• A revolving door of executives, such that employees don't have the time, and eventually no longer have the interest, to pay close attention to what the executive is saying in terms of direction or strategy.

• Reliance on cascading, or disseminating business information down through the organization one level at a time, thereby causing leaks and speculation that together morph into rumor.

• Withholding information about strategy and business performance from rank-and-file employees, forcing them to make assumptions and fill in the gaps on their own—often to the detriment of the business.

• Sheer obfuscation, using words and phrases that ordinary people neither intuitively understand nor want to make sense out of.

For any company with dreams of a bigger and better tomorrow, strategic focus is far too important to tolerate this. You want to do everything you can to grow more focus, not to suffer with less. For many companies, it's time to wake up and change.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

 

15 Signs of Poor Strategic Communication with Employees

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Short of an exhaustive audit, there's really no quick and simple means of objectively evaluating a company's business-strategy communication for employees. Still, it's important to try.

So just how can you take a rough measure of a company's clarity, credibility, and coherence of communication around business strategy and priorities?

One way is to look for signs of dysfunction. It isn't pretty, but it tells you what you need to know.

Here are 15 alarms to keep an eye out for. Each is a flashing red light. If you see any of them in your organization, you have work to do. If you see more than a few, you have lots of work to do. If you see most or all of them, you may want to run for the hills.

Alarm No. 1: The terms "leadership" and "management" are used interchangeably. We have discussed this distinction often here at Minding Gaps (just scroll down), so we won't belabor it again. Less understood is the fact that the difference between management and leadership bears heavily on communication in terms of its purpose, content, style, and tone. Use the wrong one and you get the wrong result.

Management concerns itself with meeting the pre-determined expectations of stakeholders. It seeks the alignment of work with strategy and priorities. It is all about complying with standards. Control and authority are paramount; deadlines and budgets are common metrics. Communication for the sake of management is thus specific, directive, and narrow.

Leadership, on the other hand, is about inspiring change or breakthrough performance through the discretionary efforts of people. It seeks the engagement of people in rising to a big challenge. While framework and direction are important, the real leverage for change is the focus, curiosity, passion and courage of the troops. It follows that good communication for leadership is enlightening, inspiring, and empowering.

Because the distinction is so often overlooked, companies commonly default to directive, commanding communication that can undercut or even stymie innovation and change. That's a loud siren of its own.

Alarm No. 2:  Communication is regarded as verbal messages and data only. Everyone knows that "actions speak louder than words" and that "the facts speak for themselves." Yet few companies regard communication with employees as anything beyond words and numbers. Do they honestly think employees are wearing blinders?

A company's internal-communication process should concern itself not just with the "official truth" (verbal messages, as articulated by leadership) but also with "ground truth" (the perceived reality as expressed by policy decisions, visible behaviors of executives and senior managers, cultural forces, the organization's evident purpose, etc.). Otherwise, the company's credibility with its own people will be highly questionable.

Alarm No. 3:  There's a tendency for positive spin on negative news. Let's leave spin to the politicians and their handlers. In business, we are who we are. More than anyone else, our employees know it. That's the simple truth. When bad things happen to good companies, good companies acknowledge it. They own up to their own responsibilities, and they get busy. They don't try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes. That's why good companies are good companies—and it's also one reason why good companies are good places to work.

Alarm No. 4:  Upward information is stifled and choked. Remember what your mother told you. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason: to listen twice as much as you talk. Why then do we continue to think of communication as the dissemination  of information and ideas, not as listening? Why then do we think of good communication skills as the ability to persuade, not the inclination to listen? When was the last time your senior leadership team fanned out on a "Listen and Learn" tour of your facilities? Face it, ground-level personnel usually have a wealth of information about production difficulties, customer preferences, and their own frustrations. Ignore it at your peril.

Alarm No. 5:  Your executives and senior managers think they know everything they need to know about communication. In my experience, few do, and the exceptions prove the rule. Most executives and senior managers would do well to undergo advanced training in organizational and leadership communication and then see to it that all managers and supervisors have a similar experience. The time and money invested will pay for itself within weeks and then for months and years afterward, many times over.

Alarm No. 6:  Communication is an afterthought, not a forethought. Stephen Covey taught you to begin with the end in mind, remember? In business, that means crafting a strategy with an eye on its execution. That in turn means preplanning the communication of any strategy or strategic initiative. Never leave communication to an afterthought. Incorporate an integrated, strategic communication plan within your overall strategic plan. Devote the resources (time, money, attention) to it at the front end, and you will have fewer emergencies at the back end.

Alarm No. 7:  Little or no effort is made to educate employees on the industry and competition. We know from focus groups and surveys that employees everywhere want to contribute more to their company's success. To do so intelligently, they need more information about the industry and the competition. Why not share it? Doing so has a couple of side benefits: It reflects confidence and trust in people, and it creates more readiness for change. All around, it's a win-win.

Alarm No. 8:  Silos predominate, and they have missiles. Companies that foster or tacitly condone a kind of sibling rivalry among staff departments or line operations (such as manufacturing plants, sales regions, or service teams) are asking for trouble. Information will invariably be hoarded, and other units will deliberately be kept in the dark. Worse, an environment of hostility will take root. Customers will notice, and they won't like it.

Alarm No. 9:  Acronyms and buzzwords obscure reality. Everyone knows this drill. The language of business is buzzwords. But don't be too quick to condemn all of them out-of-hand. Some are helpful as shorthand for complex programs, products or initiatives. The difficulty arises when acronyms and jargon intentionally obscure reality or even distort reality. Remember, you can't fool employees for very long, and you shouldn't ever want to. They are on your team, aren't they?

Alarm No. 10:  Useful information is withheld from employees. Just as you wouldn't mislead employees, you should have no need or desire to keep them in the dark. Think of strategic information as currency for growth. Its rapid exchange increases everyone's intelligence. In turn, intelligence increases alignment, and alignment makes customers happy. One more thing: If you keep useful information from ground-level employees, you can expect them to do likewise—from you.

Alarm No. 11:  People are doing lots of non-strategic work. Here's another red flag. If your business vision, strategy, and goals are well-understood and widely accepted, then virtually everyone should spend their days and weeks on strategic challenges. If people are doing lots of non-strategic work, either they don't have a full appreciation of the strategy and its attendant priorities, or their time isn't being well-managed.

Alarm No. 12:  Your company relies on cascading to "get the word out." There are two things you need to remember about cascading: (1) It doesn't work in organizations of any real size, and (2) it tricks you into thinking it does work. Better to disseminate vital information and messages by group meetings, group voice mail, and group email in one or two steps. Use managers and supervisors to flesh out the implications on day-to-day work and to listen, then listen some more, and finally to really listen (did we say listen?) to rank-and-file employees.

Alarm No. 13:  Employees complain about the latest "program of the month." This is a real red flag, and it's a common one. A revolving door of management programs suggests a skittish leadership, eager to jump on every bandwagon that rolls into town, and lacking strategic ballast of its own. How can any company develop intensity of strategic focus when its eyes are jumping from one thing to the next every few weeks? It can't, and without focus, it cannot achieve lasting success.

Alarm No. 14:  Publications or web sites gloss over hard reality. If your company's web sites, magazine, or plant newsletter has loads of personal or marginally strategic material (bowling scores, articles on unusual hobbies, classified ads, pictures of the summer picnic, service anniversaries), you're missing a terrific strategic opportunity and reinforcing secondary concerns and priorities.

There's a place for all that stuff, but it's by pull (i.e., something that employees seek out, perhaps through a web portal or on an old-fashioned factory bulletin board), not push (i.e, something sent to everyone). Use the push media for business issues, challenges, and priorities. While you're at it, call a spade a spade. Talk openly about a competitor's strategic advantages. After all, that's how you talk to your peers in management, isn't it? Why should ground-level employees be any different?

Alarm No. 15:  Managers communicate mainly by email, even to colleagues in the same office a few steps away. Email has its worthy uses, but it should never be a crutch or a substitute for routine face-to-face conversation and dialogue. Take an otherwise sane, decent human being (even an engineer!), put him behind a computer, and he can morph into a cyberpath.

The quasi-anonymity of our silicon cocoons has an effect not unlike road rage. Simple but important mitigating effects of facial expression, tone, humor, hand gestures, and eye contact disappear. Words lose their supple roundness. They become atonal and harsh. Relationships suffer. Trust, respect and dignity go out the window. Is that what you want?

All these alarms are actually dysfunctional syndromes. They exact a real toll on your organization and its prospects for breakthrough achievement.

To the extent any company tolerates these habits, it erodes its own shared vision and common purposes, it opens itself to turf wars and infighting, it becomes subject to cynicism and denial throughout the organization, and it can paralyze itself with fear. At best, people will just go through the motions, lacking any real commitment to the company's future.

How many of them is your organization tolerating? What are you doing about it?

We can help. Call us. The number is 650-464-1770.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Two Case Studies in Corporate Hubris and Sclerosis

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Here's a must-read column by Joe Nocera that ran in the New York Times today. The next time someone in your company belittles the importance of cultural change, remember this article and have the link handy.

Mr. Nocera, who specializes in business and finance, recounts the sad history of two tech giants who came to their knees because of corporate hubris and sclerosis. Both thought they were too good to be humbled by any competitor. Both soon realized they were wrong. By then it was too late.

One company you may have forgotten about, or perhaps you are too young to have known about. It was an early player in the computer business: Wang Laboratories. There was a time when almost every corporation relied on Wang word processors. Today, it is an archival footnote.

The other company is still in business, but it is gasping for air. As much as anyone, it invented the smart phone: BlackBerry, formerly Research in Motion. Less than a decade ago it controlled almost half the market for smart phones. That was before the iPhone and Android. It was before apps. Today, BlackBerry has a tiny share of the market, and it has basically put itself up for sale.

As you read the column, ask yourself whether you would have done anything differently, what evidence you can cite to support that belief, and what challenges you and your organization face today that could be your own undoing, sooner rather than later.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the wavelength of the technical universe is short, and it reaches constantly for innovation. Ignore it, and you die.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

About Those Employee Engagement Surveys

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Even for successful, well-run companies, annual employee surveys can turn up festering issues. I know of companies that celebrate their inclusion on lists of best places to work, but whose surveys show that employees are less than fully engaged.

The litany of wake-up calls can be long: a lack of open and honest communication, managers who say one thing but do another, too much micromanaging and too little face-to-face dialogue, never-ending programs of the month, and more.

In altogether too many companies, these alarms ring with yearly regularity. Year after year, the same issues come up. Management always frets and furrows its brow. Then the anxiety passes, and nothing changes. A year later, another survey goes out, and the same results come back.

What should companies do about the results? In a few words, get serious about people engagement and about the systematic, fully integrated, strategic communication that enables and supports it. Recognize the connection between engagement and communication, and then work it.

That goes for all companies, even those on a list of best places to work. The quickest way to lose that vaunted status is to do nothing. It will surely slip away.

Of course, companies with low engagement should be especially concerned. Sooner or later we will move into another cycle of mergers and acquisitions. Companies with low engagement are often the first on the block, and they typically fetch prices that management thinks too low but that shareholders are happy to accept.

Call me biased, but I believe it's important to find external expertise in people engagement and workplace communication, and then to devote the time and money it takes to improving things. Don't wait for the entire enterprise to act. Instead, act locally. Create a reputation for yourself and your team.

At a minimum, take a sober, morning-after look at the survey results. Wean yourself from the natural habit of celebrating the good numbers and pooh-poohing the disturbing data. If necessary, find a bucket of ice water and dump it over your head.

Resist the temptation to compare your company with external norms or your team with internal norms. That's a powerful lure, but what does it really tell you? If you're a little better, it's a balm that reduces the urgency you should feel for continuous self-improvement. If you're worse, you may conclude that the uniqueness of your situation justifies your score. Either way, it's apples and oranges.

Better to compare your organization—be it an enterprise, a division, a site, a department, or a team—to itself last year and the year before. Known as a longitudinal assessment, this alone compares apples with apples, and this alone is an accurate representation of improvement or deterioration.

Then ask yourself a simple question: What is the story these survey results are trying to tell?

It may be a story of confusion, of too many priorities competing for attention. That often happens when management is trying to do too much, or when it's more in touch with fads than with customers.

Customer expectations are usually fairly constant, much the same tomorrow as today, but fads can change by the week. For every new bestselling business book, there's a new fad.

Or it may be a story of anxiety and fear, of managers who intimidate and even threaten. That happens in workplaces without a culture of broad, ground-level participation and involvement. It's especially common in industrial settings with legacies of rigid, my-way-or-the highway management.

It may be a story of exhaustion, of short staffing and minimal support. That happens in companies serving generic markets, where price is the only competitive advantage, or where management is preparing for a formal restructuring.

Or it may be a story of uncertainty, of a revolving door of programs and priorities, here today and gone tomorrow. That happens when management continually adopts new programs and issues new edicts. Employees need a continuity of focus.

It may be a story of frustration, of wanting to contribute in a meaningful way, and only being allowed to do what higher-ups say. That happens in traditional work environments with patterns of infrequent or insufficient innovation.

Or it may be a story of cynicism, of being told one thing only to see quite another in the weeks and months that follow. That happens everywhere.

These are only a few of the many stories that employee surveys tell. The numbers themselves can easily be misunderstood or unappreciated, easily be ignored, and easily be forgotten until the next survey, next year. Stories, not so much.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Leaders Can Learn from the Best TV Commercial Ever

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

Trust Is Foundational to People Engagement

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

When Strategy and Culture Collide

 

By Thomas J. Lee

As most of you are aware, Ronald B. Johnson was sacked Monday as chief executive of J.C. Penney. A retail marketing wunderkind whose high-profile credits included Target and Apple, Mr. Johnson was hired in 2011 to lead a turnaround of the venerable middle American department store.

Instead of turning it around, however, he sent it reeling. In just seventeen months the chain's annual revenue plummeted from $17.7 billion to $12.9 billion, and its net income dwindled from a profit of $1.63 per share to a loss of $4.49 per share. Not surprisingly, the company's ticker teetered and tumbled from the mid-30s in early 2012 to the mid-teens this week—all during a bull market in which its rivals Kohl's and especially Target have been performing quite well.

Now I do not present myself as either a stock analyst or an expert in retail sales, and I do not pass judgment here on Mr. Johnson's turnaround strategy. However, I do know a thing or two about leadership and its challenges in large, complex organizations. One of the things I know is this: When strategy and culture collide, one of them will win and the other will lose. The same one always wins: culture. If there are exceptions to that rule, they are few and far between.

In our Master Class workshops, we put it thus: Culture is the judge, jury, jailer, and janitor of strategy. No strategy, however well designed, can survive a clash with a culture than doesn't embrace it. No amount of shouting and demanding by senior management can change that, either. Instead, senior management must begin with the culture. Ignore that reality and you ask for failure.

Now I am a big fan of both Target and the Apple stores that Mr. Johnson helped create. According to experts on retailing strategy, his approach to reviving the fortunes of J.C. Penney was creditable. He wanted to upgrade the merchandise and make the store something of a first among equals in its category. That kind of a strategy has worked elsewhere.

Mr. Johnson's big mistake seems to be a condescending attitude toward the people of J.C. Penney and their values. He often ridiculed them, and he quickly replaced many of the senior managers he inherited. He never moved to Plano, Texas, the company's headquarters, but instead spent long weekends back in California. Soon the sarcasm that frequently came flowing out of the corner office was volleyed back at it. The strategy didn't stand a chance.

A smarter approach to leadership is to begin with the culture. Initiate a discussion as to who we, the people of this organization, are: what we know to be true, how we think, what we value and believe, and how we behave, especially in times of stress. Explore the legacies we inherited, and build a consensus around our destination. Show everyone what is possible, and then bring them along on a journey of change.

It will take longer, but it will pay huge dividends in cohesion. You can ignore that hard work of leadership, but you cannot expect to reap the benefits without doing the work.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

'Just kidding—I was fired today'

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will miss you terribly.

Love,

Andrew

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

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

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Yahoo's New Remote-Work Policy Needs Flexibility

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just my two cents.

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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As a Leader, Be Like Mike

by Thomas J. Lee

As alumni of our Master Class will recall, we identify three general models of leadership—transactional, transformational, and a hybrid of those two—each with four common faces. One face of the transformational model is the heroic leader.

Heroic leaders do their leading by example and then some. They offer themselves as paragons of discipline, rectitude, or restraint. Their behavior speaks for itself. Note: We’re not asking for perfection here; heroic leaders are fallible like the rest of us. But heroic leaders rise to the challenge of offering a splendid role model in one or more facets of their personality and character. That is the gist of their heroism as leaders.

Some of history’s greatest names were, or are, heroic leaders: Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Joan of Arc, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Oskar Schindler, Aung San Suu Kyi, George Washington, Liu Xiaobo, and Jaime Escalante, to name a few. Others are less well-known or even obscure. All around, you can find parents, coaches, teachers, and clergy who are genuinely heroic leaders.

Against such a spectacular firmament, it may seem odd to nominate a professional athlete. But I think it is justified, especially in an era when so many professional athletes have compromised themselves and their sport by the scandalous use of performance-enhancing drugs, and in spite of the fact that most of them are extremely well-compensated. The few who succeed by dint of hard work and self-sacrifice deserve the fanfare of trumpets as well as their paycheck, and we can learn from their example.

Tuesday is Michael Jordan’s fiftieth birthday. For the three persons on the planet who cannot place the name, Jordan is the best basketball player of all time. He played for the Chicago Bulls from 1984 to 1998, with three years out to follow a fantasy of becoming a major-league baseball player. On the basketball court, he led the Bulls to six world championships.

Few of us have our first AARP cards so publicly noted as Jordan’s fiftieth birthday has been. Sports Illustrated’s latest edition is devoted to the 50 issues on which he has graced its cover. Blogs, radio, television, and newspapers are similarly preoccupied with this milestone.

The testimonials to Jordan’s work ethic and his devotion to his teammates are legion. A couple of them stand out.

In the National Basketball Association championship series of 1993, the Bulls took a lead of three games to one into the fifth game, at home, but blew the opportunity to close it out right there. The next day they had to fly back to Phoenix for the sixth game and, if they lost again, the seventh game. The coaches and all the other players packed for a four-day trip, just in case. Not Jordan. He boarded the plane with a small valise. “Gentlemen, this is all the clothes I brought,” he told his teammates. “We’re not going to be there long enough for me to have to change.” Sure enough, the Bulls won the sixth game and came right home with the trophy. 

Four years later, on June 11, 1997, Jordan awoke with a serious bout of the flu before the fifth game of the NBA championship series. The Bulls were tied with the Utah Jazz at two games apiece. The trainers told Jordan he was too sick to play, but everyone knew that his absence would imperil the team’s chances. Jordan insisted on going in. His presence alone inspired his teammates. Jordan scored 38 points that night, 17 of them in the fourth quarter, including the game-winning three-point shot. At the buzzer he collapsed into teammate Scottie Pippen’s arms. Two days later the Bulls won the next game, as well, to take the championship, four games to two.

Anyone who knew Jordan, or who played with him or against him, seems to have stories like this. I never met the man, but I did watch him play pick-up games with ordinary middle-age men like me at a Chicago gym where I used to work out. He was always a paragon of propriety, always a gentleman.

So yes, athletes can qualify as heroic leaders, and I can think of no athlete who better qualifies than Michael Jordan. Happy birthday, sir.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

John Kerry and the Diplomacy of Valentine's Day

 

By Thomas J. Lee

John Kerry, the new U.S. secretary of state, appears to know a thing or two about diplomacy—on the home front. Bosses everywhere should take heed.

According to Politico, the new diplomat-in-chief issued a warning to his team this week. "Thursday is Valentine's Day," Kerry said, "and I want you all out of here" at a reasonable hour. No late meetings!

That was Tuesday. Wednesday, in another staff meeting, Kerry forgetfully suggested  a meeting for this evening, Valentine’s Day.

Someone called his attention to it, and he scratched the idea. "Can't break my own rule," he said.

In all seriousness, our work lives would be a lot more successful if we paid just a little more attention to things like being home on the evening of Valentine’s Day.

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

After 54 Years on the Job, She Is Finally Retiring

Carole DiSalvo

 

By Thomas J. Lee

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

I recalled that wise old aphorism on reading the wonderful Dallas Morning News story of Carole DiSalvo, an American Airlines flight attendant who finally retired two weeks ago after 54 years on the job.

You read correctly. Ms. DiSalvo joined American in 1958 at the age of 20. Only now, at the age of 75, is she turning in her wings. In an era when people commonly have several careers and multiple employers, she remained in a single job with a sole employer for more than one-half century.

When, as a young woman, she began flying, American Airlines had a fleet of airplanes with propellers. Its first jet aircraft, the Boeing 707, wouldn’t be delivered to American until the next year. Non-stop coast-to-coast and trans-Atlantic flights were still in the future. Commercial aviation was heavily regulated: everything from connecting cities to departure times, from ticket fares to pilot salaries, was determined by federal bureaucrats. Flying was a special experience, so passengers wore their best suits and dresses for a flight. They lit up cigarettes after the pilot turned off the no smoking sign, and they got decks of playing cards just for flying.

Flight attendants were called stewardesses in those days. Women had to be attractive, single, and young to be hired. Becoming a wife or a mother was cause for termination. So was reaching the age of 32. Prior to submitting an application to American, Ms. DiSalvo applied for a job with rival TWA, but that application was declined because her nails were too short.

Expecting to marry at some point, Ms. DiSalvo was looking forward only to a couple of years as a stewardess.  One-by-one the rules changed, just in time for her to continue working. Her seniority kept rising, so she could lay dibs on better flights. Her final flight, in mid-January, took her to Shanghai, an unthinkable destination for her first fifteen years on the job.

There were good days and bad days in her long career. Her passengers included Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Marlon Brando, and Neil Diamond, who sang “Sweet Caroline” to her on a short layover. Two tragedies still haunt: the 1979 crash of an American flight on takeoff at O’Hare Airport, and, of course, the hijackings of two American and two United flights on September 11, 2001.

Reading between the lines, we notice something atypical about Ms. DiSalvo. Through most of her career, she was probably working not so much for the financial compensation as for the psychic and social satisfaction. Her husband was a well-paid patent attorney, and she has qualified for both Medicare and Social Security for ten years now. So she was apparently working for the joy of it, and thus she must have brought joy to many.

Now obviously most of us need to earn a living, and work is the honest way to do it. No money, no work. But in the unrelenting urge to make more money, we tend to lose sight of the sheer joy of work. Given a choice of working with someone who is on the job only because he has to be, and who will stay only as long as he has to stay, or working with someone who would be there even if he didn't have to be, I'll always take the latter.

There's something to be said for stability and continuity, and all the more to be said for it in an age of instability and discontinuity; and there's something to be said for psychic satisfaction, and all the more to be said for it in an age of money, money, money and gimme, gimme, gimme.

We take a bow to Carole DiSalvo. Congratulations. You are a paragon for a society desperately in need of paragons like you.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: Grizzly Bear or Teddy Bear?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

  © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

How Do Great Leaders Communicate?

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2012 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" Has Big Lessons on Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

More books have been written and more movies filmed about Abraham Lincoln than anyone else in modern civilization, and for good reason. His life and his presidency offer timeless lessons in leadership, character, and communication. Steven Spielberg’s new, eponymous movie captures it all with color and verve. The film is excellent, and I urge everyone to see it.

Lincoln opens nationwide on Friday, but it is already showing in a handful of cities, including here in Chicago. So a few days ago I took time out of my workday to see it. My commute to the theatre included a Chicago River “water taxi” ride, which floats right past the site of the old Wigwam (on the river at Wacker Drive and Lake Street) where, in 1860, the nascent Republican Party nominated the Illinois prairie lawyer for the presidency. Of course, little could anyone at the time imagine the historic repercussions of the selection.

Like many of you, I have long been fascinated by Lincoln. This year alone I have read two full biographies of him, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald and A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White, both of which are masterful (if you read only one, choose the White volume), as well as three lesser works about his presidency and assassination. Anyone who studies leadership as a calling should devote a great deal of attention to Lincoln.

Spielberg has said he wanted to make a movie about Lincoln for more than a decade, but he didn’t know how to squeeze so much material into a couple of hours. He got his answer when he read Team of Rivals, the marvelous book on Lincoln’s bipartisanship by Harvard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The final two chapters of that book focus on Lincoln’s single-minded advocacy, in early 1865 just weeks before his assassination, of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would ban slavery. (As a point of history, the constitutional amendment was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had been a wartime measure, and therefore it would be of dubious legality after the war’s end.)

But here’s the crux of the matter: Lincoln’s re-election in November 1864 had long coattails. He would enjoy larger majorities in Congress beginning in March 1865. The commonsense thing to do was wait till then, when approval of the Thirteenth Amendment would be easier. Lincoln refused. He insisted on moving quickly. As he declares in the movie (portrayed exquisitely by Daniel Day-Louis), he wanted Congress to act “now, now, now!”

That is one of six insights on leadership that I drew from the Spielberg production: Bring a sense of urgency to the important. If it’s important to do tomorrow, it’s important to do today. Do whatever you can now. Don’t wait, even when waiting would make things ostensibly easier. Do what you must do, do what you can do, and do it now.

Here are five other lessons I took from the Spielberg movie:

Communicate through storytelling, analogies, example, and anecdotes of personal experience whenever possible. Lincoln, like other leaders before and since, relied heavily on storytelling. Stories are powerful tools, because they give people a vivid way to remember a theoretical point. Our ancestors have been telling stories for millennia. We are hardwired to love stories. Lincoln knew it. Spielberg and Goodwin know it. As a leader, you must know it.

Go to the people whose support you need. Listen to them first, and then appeal to their nobility. Do not wait for people to come to you. Do not expect them to come to you. You must go to them, and you must listen before you speak. Then speak to their concerns and issues. As a general rule, when you speak publicly, invoke their values and beliefs. People want to be about something larger than themselves. (It is true, as the movie illustrates, that Lincoln was not above scratching backs for votes. He knew his power, and he used it when he had to.)

Recognize and accept practical limitations, and work within them. “Politics is the art of the possible,” Lincoln’s contemporary Otto von Bismarck would say a few years later. That is not a license to do nothing. Rather, it is worldly acknowledgement that the perfect can be the enemy of progress. In the movie, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), who knows that people are inherently equal, is forced to say in House debate that he favors equality of legal rights only. Had he claimed more, the Thirteenth Amendment might very well have lost.

Know that ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be grave. The movie is filled with poignant scenes. One of them involves the president’s son Robert watching soldiers dump a barrow of human limbs in a mass grave. Another shows the president on horseback touring a battlefield of human carnage. There are more. For us, too, even in our day-to-day business, even in comparatively modest endeavors, ideas can have consequences from livelihoods to security in retirement to more. Never dismiss an idea as “merely a theory.” Ideas matter.

Abandon the pretense of perfection. We are all human. Few historical figures rival Lincoln for integrity, but even Lincoln was an imperfect man. There is evidence he fudged on an expense account as a congressman, and he could stretch the truth when he wanted. He pulled rank as commander-in-chief to discourage his son Robert from joining the military; and when he lost that argument, he inveigled General Ulysses S. Grant to give Robert a safe sinecure. This is not to excuse or justify such behavior, only to acknowledge the imperfectability of the human animal.

As you watch Lincoln you will doubtless come to your own insights. Please capture them in a note to me (at [email protected]), or click on Comments below and share your thoughts with other readers. Whatever you do, don’t miss this movie. Be sure to take your kids, too, and talk about it afterward.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Imagine If Everyone Were As Focused as This Young Man

by Thomas J. Lee

My old next-door neighbor was a wide receiver in the National Football League. One evening, while we were both grilling out, he and I got to talking about football. He began describing for me what it was like to play professional football before thousands and thousands of people. Then he said something I will never forget.

Carl had so honed his craft, so thoroughly ingrained it, that when I asked how it feels to catch a pass in a game, he had to take himself physically through the motions to be able to respond. It was comical in a way.

At one point, standing on the patio, he had his arms outstretched, as if he were catching a pass over his left shoulder. He remarked that, as he is running to reach the pass, he cannot hear the stadium crowd.

That just stunned me.

I found that incredible. Think about it: Fifty thousand, sixty thousand, maybe seventy thousand fans in the stadium, most of them screaming their throats dry, and he cannot hear them.

Carl went on. He said he can hear his own footsteps, and he can hear his own breathing. But he cannot hear the crowd. As the ball falls gracefully into his arms, almost in slow-motion, his only focus is on wrapping his fingers around it, pulling it in and keeping it close, and then reaching the goal line with it. Those are the only things that matter. Everything else, including the crowd, ceases to exist. It just isn't there.

Now that's focus.

Imagine, just imagine, if the dozens or the hundreds or the thousands of people in your organization all had such extraordinary intensity of focus around your business goals and strategy. Most certainly they, and you, would be performing at a level you have only dreamed about.

There are tools and techniques to build that kind of focus. But the master key that unlocks it is your own focus. For you cannot ask of others what you have not demanded of yourself. If you yourself, as a leader, are not truly focused on strategic imperatives, no one else will be.

Begin with this simple question, and answer with a bucket of ice-cold honesty: What is it that you are most concerned about? Let's agree to net out the personal stuff: your kids, house repairs, aging parents, weekend plans. As you come to work each morning, what is it about the business that is most on your mind?

If you're like many managers, and probably most, execution of the business plan isn't front and center. Nor is realizing a long-term vision. Living out the company's values isn't close. While your monthly nut and year-end bonus are probably right up there, chances are your day-to-day focus any given morning is on a personnel issue, or a conference call at 9, or a dysfunctional staff department, or a draft marketing plan, or an OSHA inspection, or performance reviews, or squeezing another 1 percent from next year's budget, or any of a thousand other things that compete for your time and attention. That's the reality of life in management.

Because your focus is on these front burners, it is only natural to put truly strategic issues on the back burner. We quietly tell ourselves it is only for a day, only for the week. We'll get to the important stuff next week, next month.

Meanwhile, anyone and everyone with whom we come into contact immediately senses our real priorities, our real focus. We cannot hide. Every question we ask, every comment we make, betrays our real interest, our real concern. Because our real priorities and real focus are something other than the organization's strategic vision and long-term goals, the vision and the goals slip to second place, and then to third, and then off the grid altogether.

We all know that the hardest person to manage, and the hardest person to lead, is one and the same. You say hello every morning in the mirror. Only you can change that person's priorities, and therefore it is you who must.

Tomorrow morning, and for just one day at a time, shift your focus. Throw a spotlight on the strategic. Let the little things fall into place on their own. They will, after all.

For just one day, focus on the truly important things. Govern your questions and comments so that most of what you say, all day, creates energy around your strategic imperatives. Don't neglect or even diminish the lubricants of human relationships, of course. But let any substantive remark about the business revolve around the organization's vision and strategic intent.

Imagine you are Carl, running out and in. Reach out your arms. Look for the ball. Run to it. Listen to your own footsteps, your own breathing. Let the ball fall into your arms, as if no one is watching. It's just you, the ball, and the goal line.

Chances are the game will change.

 

  © Copyright 2004-2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Servant Leadership: The Secret Sauce of Extraordinary Cultures

 

By Thomas J. Lee

The concept of servant leadership has been around for more than a generation now, but too few businesspeople understand and embrace it. That's a shame.

I like to think of servant leadership as the secret sauce that accounts for the towering differences between shopping at Macy's and shopping at Nordstrom, between flying on United and flying on Southwest, between having lunch at McDonald's and having lunch at Chick-fil-A.

Nordstrom, Southwest, and Chick-fil-A have all publicly declared servant leadership as a pillar of their cultures. They have woven it into their leadership fabric. So have SAS, Wegmans, AFLAC, Zappos.com, Marriott, the Container Store, REI Outfitters, U.S. Cellular, Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, A&W), Herman Miller, Kaiser Permanente, Darden Restaurants, and the U.S. armed forces, among others.

In a nutshell, servant leadership turns the tables on the relationship between leaders and the led. It moves from command to collaboration, from control to stewardship, from narrow accountability to broad opportunity. It lights a fire not underneath people but inside them.

Perhaps the best way to approach servant leadership for the first time is to recall President John F. Kennedy's famous words in his 1961 inauguration address: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

Now tweak those words just a little. Substitute your people or your employees for your country: "Ask not what your people can do for you. Ask what you can do for your people."

Servant leadership will admittedly rub old-school, 20th century managers the wrong way. They will bristle at the thought of it. They will regard it as an abnegation of their rights and duties as managers.

In fact just the opposite is true. I have had the pleasure of working for a couple of genuine servant leaders over the course of my career, and I can attest to its power. Because they were serving me, I was able to accomplish things that otherwise would have remained beyond my grasp. The companies grew and prospered as a result, while our competitors were stagnating.

The 21st century is not the 20th century. Times have changed. People are different. They want different things. Companies that don't realize this core truth, and respond to it, will continue to have difficulty finding the right people and attracting them to their organization.

Our new Master Class features a robust introduction and overview of servant leadership in business. Scroll down three posts (or just click on Master Classes above) for more information, and then join us on June 26 for a special one-day seminar.

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

University of Illinois President's Stormy Tenure Is A Sad Case Study

by Thomas J. Lee

Michael Hogan's stormy tenure as president of the University of Illinois, and his resignation yesterday after only twenty months on the job, offers yet another case study on the importance of humble, servant leadership and on the critical role of respectful, mutual communication as its energy and light.

Here are a few articles for background: the Chicago Tribune's account of the resignation, the Chronicle of Higher Education's report, and the Chronicle's earlier piece (from March 8) on Hogan's communication problem with faculty at the University's flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. It is a sad case study indeed.

My main question is intended to spark more intellectual curiosity than anxiety, but I cannot help expressing it with a tone of frustration: Just when will leaders learn?

If anyone should have had some sensitivity to the challenge of real leadership, you'd think it would be a historian of diplomacy like Hogan. But no, even he committed some of the most egregious blunders we have seen in quite some time. Read the three articles to see for yourself.

Last month the University's faculty protested. More than a hundred of its senior professors, the big names the University of Illinois cannot afford to lose, called for his ouster. Their complaints were classic: micromanaging, arrogance, bullying, insularity, and more. Above all, the complaints zeroed in on a profound lack of respect and empathy for the people Hogan sought to lead. Like too many leaders, he seemed to think it was all about him.

The situation boiled over this week. Hogan said he had had enough, and he decided to quit.

I fear that many putative leaders in business are in similar situations, but in their case, people don't speak out for fear of retribution in an uncertain economy. (The senior professors who called for Hogan's resignation are protected by academic tenure.) 

Hogan, and leaders everywhere, would do well to heed the words of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British leader: "I must follow my people," Disraeli said. "Am I not their leader?"

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

More Employers Ask Job Applicants for Facebook Passwords

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs Replies to Mr. Smith

 

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

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

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

TJL

Greg Smith's Very Public Resignation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Case Study in Poor Executive Communication

Here is an unfortunate but instructive case study on executive leadership that underestimates and undervalues the challenge of communication as the energy of leadership.

It involves the troubled president of the University of Illinois, and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune today.

U. of I. president says he did poor job of connecting with faculty.

 

Of Champions and Leaders

Two years ago in this space we waxed eloquent on the amazing final holes of the British Open. Any weekend duffer who has ever pretended to hear the roar of the gallery while approaching the 18th green will recall the thrill that ageless Tom Watson, then 59 years old, gave us that July weekend in 2009. Here is what we wrote:

by Thomas J. Lee

If love like youth is wasted on the young, as Sammy Cahn wrote, so perhaps is sport. Yes, everyone savors the thrill of victory. Yes, everyone feels the sting of defeat. But only the properly aged among us can bask in the warmth of an ever-flickering candle of one more time, just one more time.

For anyone of a certain age or better, watching 59-year-old Tom Watson on the final holes and then in the playoff of the British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, today was to indulge in a little reverie.

Watson had earned his first Open championship in 1975, years before some of the other professional golfers of today were born. But here he was again, where he wasn’t supposed to be. Hadn’t he graduated to the senior tour a decade ago?

In the end, Watson squandered a one-stroke lead on the 72nd hole to end the four rounds in a two-way tie. Then, in a four-hole playoff, he drove into the rough and finally lost to Stewart Cink.

The victor is a relatively unheralded American, but he is no youngster himself. Winning his first major championship today at the age of 36, Cink is already three years older than Watson was when he won the last of his eight majors, 26 years ago.

Nevertheless, the story of the day belonged to Watson, still in the hunt after all these years.

“It would have been a helluva story,” Watson said afterward. “It would have been a helluva story, but it wasn’t to be.”

The spectacle took me back to a triathlon in St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago. I was competing in the 40-something age group. Having swum a mile in Tampa Bay and ridden the 25-mile bike course through the streets of old St. Pete, I was running strong only a couple of miles from the finish line.

My legs still felt fine, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience when a pretty young woman, probably half my age, pulled up alongside me. For a few minutes, our banter made me feel as if I were in my 20s again.

Then she casually remarked, “You know, when my dad gets to be your age, I sure hope he is in your shape.”

Her well-intended words were like a brick wall in my path. Could I actually be older than her dad?

Nah. You don't think, do you? Suddenly I felt like walking, or crawling.

My legs slowed. I felt weak. Keeping the same pace we’d both been running a few seconds earlier, she sprinted ahead.

Age, it now seems to me, is permission to reflect and appreciate in ways we couldn’t, or just didn’t, when we were rushing headlong into life. Tom Watson seems to know that intuitively.

Reflecting aloud today in the clubhouse after the last hole, he asked himself what impressions or insights he would take away from the week’s experience. He thought a moment and answered: “A lot of warmth, a lot of spirituality.” It was scarcely the answer of a brash young man.

The ageless golfer is a gentleman who knows what it means to be a gentleman. He has always let his integrity do the heavy lifting of inspiration.

No one should forget his courageous decision in 1990 to resign from a Kansas City country club after it refused membership to a Jewish couple. He explained his reasoning only privately, but when the club reversed its policy, he rejoined immediately and publicly. There was no loud grandstanding, and yet there was no mistaking the message.

Stewart Cink won the British Open today, and my hat is off to him. He deserves to be congratulated. But in my book Tom Watson is the real champion. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a marvelous weekend of golf, and thank you for the splendid example you continue to give to us all.

 

*     *     *

Two years later, Tom Watson, now 61, is competing in the British Open again this weekend, and as of today he is only nine strokes off the lead at Royal St. George in Kent, England. [He would finish the tournament eleven strokes off. The winner was 42-year-old Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland.]

Of equal note, Watson was coincidentally paired with his namesake, Tom Lewis, a 20-year-old amateur whose parents so loved golf and so respected Watson they named their newborn son after the golfing legend. Imagine the thrill it must be for the youngster to be sharing the fairways with him.

Some things get better with age, and Mr. Watson is one of them. 

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

My Dad, a Humble Profile in Leadership

 

We are 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.

A year ago this weekend, the Chicago Tribune published my Father's Day tribute to my late dad. We reprise it today.

 —TJL                         

by Thomas J. Lee

A fellow blogger posed an interesting question online, in anticipation of Father's Day. He asked: What kind of leader was your father?

I had to think a moment. My dad, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 93, was a wonderful man. But probably most people did not regard him as a leader. He wasn't an elected official. Nor was he a high-powered executive. Nor was he active in politics or community affairs.

Yet leadership is not only for the powerful and the prominent. Millions of people offer profoundly inspirational leadership in their everyday lives. So it was with my father. He lived a life of humility, decency, authenticity, and commitment.

Naturally outgoing and happy, he exercised quiet self-control even in the face of considerable adversity. He didn't lose his temper. He didn't curse or cheat or lie. He didn't gamble or drink to excess. He hated war, but he went, and his unit liberated Dachau. In 75 years of driving a car he never had an accident, not even a fender bender. He never even got a traffic ticket. In short, he was a rock, always there when it counted.

Most important, he knew how to love, and he did. The late Ann Landers, who could tell us a thing or two about families, often wrote that the greatest gift a father can give to his children is to love their mother completely, deeply, and unconditionally.

My four brothers and I were the beneficiaries of just such a gift. For more than six decades, probably from the moment he first noticed her at another soldier's wedding in Chicago, my dad loved my mom, and he let it show. He loved her completely. He loved her deeply, and he loved her unconditionally.

I have a particularly warm memory, framed like an old faded photograph in my mind's eye. When I was 10 or 12, I would wander into the kitchen before dinner, only to find my dad and my mom in a bear hug of an embrace while potatoes simmered on the stove.

Such a warm sense of security washed over me. Some of my friends had parents who yelled at each other. Others had parents who brooded in silence. Not I. Not my brothers. We had a security blanket up over our shoulders and snug under our chins. We had the luxury of never, ever worrying.

My dad always loved my mom, and my mom always loved my dad, and that's the way it was. It was just that simple and it was just that wonderful and it was always just that way.

Only a few weeks before my mother died in 2004, I visited the two of them in their apartment in Florida. What I witnessed on that visit was like a scene out of an old black-and-white movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson or Donna Reed.

My mother sat at the kitchen table, her days so very numbered, and yet with a smile of calm, divine peace across her face, as my dad, a gifted tenor who had once aspired to the operatic stage, sang love song after love song to her. He must have sung for an hour, maybe two, and he sang from his heart. He sang: "Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't love nobody but me." My mother died a happy woman, for she was loved.

Most of all, I remember Dad as a man who worked hard, who made the most of what he had, who lived his life with passion for his art as well as for his wife, who humbled himself and honored others, who recognized duty, and who devoted himself to the things that matter, which is to say, to the people around him.

Will you abide one last anecdote? It is from the day I learned to swim. I tell it because it says so much about the man my father was.

There was to be a kind of commencement exercise at the old YMCA pool in my hometown. All the kids would swim the length of the pool, and then, one by one, we were to be called up by name and given a certificate.

Now it's odd what we remember from our childhood. Of that day, I remember a feeling of anxiety, knowing that my mother was home with my little brothers, and my dad was at work.

Back then, Dad always had to work on Saturday mornings. So the other kids would have families in the gallery cheering them on. But not I. I was on my own. That would be okay. I could handle it. I would be fine. I would just buck it up.

So one by one, in alphabetical order, the instructor called the names of all the swimmers. I remember hearing the instructor call out Ade, and Bobby, and Mike, and Steve. And one by one, each of them walked over to get his certificate as the gallery erupted in cheers.

The closer the instructor got to my name, the more alone I felt. I braced myself for a little polite applause from the other parents. The instructor called my name. I got up, walked over, and reached out for my certificate.

Sure enough, the applause was polite. But just then a voice rang out from the gallery, loud and clear and echoing around the pool: "Way to go, Tommy!"

I looked up. It was my dad. Somehow, he had got off work, and he had made it over to the YMCA to watch me get that certificate.

Ever since, whenever I have needed some encouragement, I have harked back to those few words, and I have picked up the pace and tried a little harder. My dad's voice is never far away. He is my cheerleader, even now, after he is gone.

By my measure, this is certainly the stuff of leadership. My dad was an ordinary, everyday hero. His achievement in life wasn't winning an election or getting a big promotion or living in a fancy house. Rather, it was leading a fine, long life and filling it with honor and love.

And so now, for another Father's Day without him, it's my turn, and I just hope he can hear me: "Way to go, Dad! Way to go!

 

Coming on Monday

 The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

One Year Later, a Persistent Reminder and Prodding to BP

 

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, we call BP's attention to our special report and comment of August 18, 2010, outlining a comprehensive approach to best practice in leadership and integrated communication for workplace safety.

We believe it continues to be timely and relevant.

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Silicon Valley CEOs Work in Glass Houses

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

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

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

by Thomas J. Lee

Glassdoor.com compiles data on compensation, cultures, and chief executives at companies around the world. Anyone can access the data for almost any company of significant size.

Oddly, the employee approval ratings for CEOs of high-tech companies are the only ones that regularly make news. That creates public accountability for one industry. However, it leaves employees, investors, and customers of companies in other industries to do their own research. You can do it, but it's laborious.

In the most recent period, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt ranks highest among his Silicon Valley peers: 96 percent of Google employees approved of his performance as chief executive. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on medical leave, is right up there, too, at 95 percent.

In contrast, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft came in at only 40 percent, a decrease of six points from his approval one year earlier.

Yahoo's Carol Bartz saw her approval drop the most, from 77 percent to just 50 percent. John Donahoe of eBay improved the most, from 24 percent a year ago to 46 percent now.

A few questions to reflect upon:

• How would well-publicized employee approval ratings of leaders in your company affect their leadership?
• Have you checked your CEO's approval rating on glassdoor.com?
• Should leaders make decisions in fear or favor of employee approval? 

 

Coming on Wednesday

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Accountability or Missed Opportunity? FAA Official Is Out

by Thomas J. Lee

The New York Times is reporting that the U.S. government's official in charge of air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration has resigned after night-shift controllers at five airports were found to have been asleep on duty.

As severe an issue as this is, the official's dismissal (and that's really what it is) raises three important questions:

• Is this a powerful example of accountability or an equally vivid example of scapegoating?
• Should we expect and even demand that heads roll in situations like this?
• Or should we dig deeper in search of systemic causes that may otherwise persist long after the official's departure?

In the wake of these incidents, the FAA has already changed its policy to ensure that each of the busiest airports in the United States will have at least two air-traffic controllers on duty at night. Previously it was just one controller working alone. The solitude and darkness were too much for some of them to stay awake.

The Refreshing Humility of Butler coach Brad Stevens

by Thomas J. Lee

Many of you are watching a lot of exciting college basketball this weekend, as first the surviving sixteen and then the surviving eight men's teams compete in the second weekend of the annual NCAA Division I Tournament, otherwise known as March Madness. Yesterday's two games were both thrilling. Butler defeated Florida by just three points, and UConn defeated Arizona by only two, to advance to next weekend's Final Four.

After the Butler-Florida game, I was struck by the humility of Butler coach Brad Stevens. Looking at Stevens, who is all of 34 years old and appears to be even younger, you just wonder if he is remotely up to the task of big leadership.

I'll admit to being a little jaded. In the consulting and training I do, it's common to come across ambitious young managers whose instincts on leadership are about as wrongheaded as they can be. They are so eager to get things done, they make every mistake their elders made and then some, and all the while they just assume they are smarter, wiser, and better. It's a shame. Ego can be a powerful driver of performance, but it can also be an obstacle to learning and to professional or personal growth.

Something about the young Butler coach is different, profoundly different, from those young managers. Not only has Brad Stevens proved his mettle by taking a team to the Final Four two years in a row, he has done so with a refreshing humility and abundant self-effacing tribute to others.

Talking to a TV reporter on the basketball court moments after the final buzzer yesterday, Stevens was ever classy. He said he was plainly "out-coached" by Florida's Billy Donovan, and he credited his Butler players with coming to his own rescue.

Curious about that rare humility, I did a little digging on the Internet. I quickly learned that Stevens is "not about the money," in his own words. He isn't in coaching for fame or glory or riches. He is in it because he loves the game. It is that simple. After four winning seasons he signed a long-term contract with Butler University despite its modest size and obscurity. He is there through the 2021-2022 season.

I also learned that Stevens was humbled early this season after his team, which had gone all the way to the championship game a year ago and ultimately lost to Duke on a buzzer-beating shot that almost went in, got off to a disappointing 4-4 start last fall. Butler was dragging a three-game losing streak.

Stevens knew that Donovan was a man of uncommon generosity and good will, always eager to help other coaches. He also knew that the Florida Gators had gone to the Final Four two years in a row under Donovan in 2006 and 2007, and he knew that he wanted his Butler Bulldogs to replicate that feat against some very long odds. So he put in a call to Donovan for advice.

Here's an interview with both coaches, taped the day before yesterday's big game, about their conversation last December. After that conversation, Butler went on to win 23 of its next 28 games, including Saturday's overtime victory that kocked Donovan's team out of the NCAA championship. 

 

 

Refreshing, isn't it?

Stick with me now: As regular readers know, over the preceding two weeks in this space we have discussed the concept of robust credibility, a higher level of credibility that leaders require in order to lead effectively. (You can begin reading those essays here.) I wasn't remotely thinking of Brad Stevens when I wrote those essays, but as a leader he certainly is working at the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and a bond of affinity. There's no question about that. If you want a role model, he is a good one.

We will have more to say about March Madness and leadership communication tomorrow. Be sure to come back.

 

Coming on Monday

March Madness and Leadership Communication 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Is Your Change Quotient?

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

Here is how it works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try it out and let me know how it works.

 

Coming on Monday

Part One of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

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.

{Numbers} Shareholder Return Rises With Employee Engagement

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Formerly known as By the Numbers, it appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

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

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The financial value of employee engagement has long been obvious to some managers, particularly those who appreciate the importance of psychological anchors such as pride, belonging, and meaning on both the quality and the quantity of work, and those who understand the systematic role of communication in creating engagement.

But to managers who focus first and last on mechanical drivers of performance, such as unmistakable authority and the certainty of accountability, the financial metrics of engagement are not so plain to see. To them, engagement has largely seemed a wasteful annoyance.

Now we have new data to prove the business case for high employee engagement. It turns out to go beyond the bottom line and straight to the curve on the shareholder return graph.

New research by Hewitt Associates, which was recently acquired by Aon Consulting, has found that companies with relatively high levels of employee engagement (at least 65 percent) outperform the total stock market. They posted shareholder returns 19 percent higher than the average in 2009, the most recent year for which comparisons are available.

Meanwhile, companies with very low engagement (less than 40 percent) underperformed the total stock market. They posted returns 44 percent lower than the average for the same period.

That's a total difference of 63 percentage points attributable to employee engagement, which, as we know from other reputable studies, is driven by nothing so much as clear, compelling, credible, collaborative communication.

If this doesn't make the business case for a strategic process of internal communication in support of engaging employees, nothing will. After all, how many other processes or improvements can even come close?

 

Coming Wednesday

Just What, and Who, Is a Communicator?

 

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

How Do Great Bosses Communicate?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever thought about differences in communication style between really good managers and really bad ones? Between managers with an excited, eager team of people, on the one hand, and managers with employees who are anything but excited and eager, on the other hand?

Here is a little exercise. It first appeared in this space almost two years ago. Recently a reader asked us to tweak it and republish it.

Take out a sheet of paper, and make two lists. Headline one list Best Boss. Headline the other list Worst Boss.

Now think back over your entire work history. Take it all the way back to your first part-time job as a teenager. Bring it forward to the job you have today. Zero in on the boss or bosses you have had for each job. Of all these bosses, pick your best boss of all time, and pick your worst.

Visualize them both. Remember everything you can about them and about your experience of working for them. Recall details, conversations, casual remarks, decisions, and explanations, if any. Recall your feelings, your productivity, your efficiency, and the quality of your work.

Now think about the level of trust and engagement on the team. Recall the amount and depth of information you had, where it came from, and how quickly you learned news. Recall your emotions as you arrived at work each day. Recall how you felt about yourself and your future.

Finally, think about your willingness to take risks, to volunteer opinions, to ask tough questions, to make observations unseen by others. Recall anything that fleshes out the boss’s temperament, judgment, leadership, and integrity.

Next, for the best boss and for the worst, answer these questions and briefly record your recollections on each list, respectively: 

• What adjectives would you use to describe each boss?
• What did the best boss know about leading people, and what did the worst boss need to learn? How were their paths on leadership development similar or dissimilar?
• How did the best boss listen, and how did the worst? (Describe their physical posture and expression, their verbal cues, their curiosity, their recollection, and their application of insights.)
• What was each boss’s attitude toward sharing strategic business information?
• How much did the best boss care about you as a person, apart from your role as an employee? How much did the worst boss? What evidence and feelings do you recall to support your conclusion? Were there any consequences of the difference?
• Did either or both have a vision for you and your future in the organization?
• What were each manager's expectations for you and the quality of your work?
• To what extent did each boss teach and mentor you?
• How much was each manager’s day-to-day behavior congruent or incongruent with his or her stated values? What examples can you cite?
• Did you sense that either boss or both bosses had favorite employees with whom they consulted and collaborated, more so than with others on the team?
• How would you describe the social environment of trust on each team? Who trusted whom? How much?
• How candid was each boss? How candid were you with each boss?
• What was your own level of engagement with each?

And one more question, as a bonus: To what extent did the variability between these bosses contribute to the performance of the respective teams and of the larger organization?

Finally, look over the two lists. Reflect on them, and ask yourself the $64,000 question: How would people who have worked for you describe you and their experience of working for you?

Ponder these questions, your own responses, and your anticipated responses of people who have worked for you. If the spirit moves you, capture your learning and write to me at [email protected]. If you prefer to talk by telephone, provide your contact details so that I can reach you on the run. (I strive to be accessible.)

I think you will find the exercise very, very worthwhile.

 

For professional facilitation of this exercise,

call us at +1-847-247-2241.

 

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

Miscommunication and the Shuttle Challenger, 25 Years Ago Today

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

[Side Roads] For the Packers and Bears, Their Greatest Game Ever

 

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

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

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; and shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

Today we look at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin. For the last thirty-odd years I have made my home in or near Chicago, Illinois. Each of these cities has a team in the National Football League. Both teams are as old, as venerable, and as legendary as the league itself.

Their rivalry is storied. Think of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Think of Palmer and Nicklaus. Think of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Think of Manchester United and Liverpool, of Ali and Frazier, of Evert and Navratilova. Rivalries all, each pales against the heroic test of wills that has defined the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears since their founding in 1919.

The Packers and the Bears have played each other 181 times, twice a year for almost an entire century. They have each won more world championships than any other team. Curiously, only once before, in 1941, have they faced each other in post-season play, and never before have they played each other for a championship. That will change Sunday afternoon, when the Packers and the Bears face off in Soldier Field on the shore of ice-laden Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. Without question, it will be their greatest game ever. Our grandchildren will probably hear stories of it.

The winner of this game, for the National Football Conference championship, will go to the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is traditionally the crowning glory of American football, but this year it is so incidental as to be all but irrelevant and anticlimactic. Rather, this weekend's game, between the Packers and the Bears, is what really counts for these two teams. For them it is all that counts. If the winner of this game loses the Super Bowl, it will still be victorious in the eyes of its fans, for it will have vanquished the only team that matters.

Now I love Chicago. Truly I do. I went to graduate school here. I raised my family here. For years I wrote a newspaper column here, and I have spent most of my career here. I love the lakefront, the architecture, the museums, and the symphony. I love Navy Pier and Lake Shore Drive and the Archicenter boat tour and Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago and the rickety old Red Line and even O'Hare Airport. Almost all my friends live here, all but a few of them benighted Bears fans, and I even love them.

But I am not, and I never will be, a fan of the Chicago Bears. Never. Never, never, never. To the very marrow of my bones, to the synapses of my brain, to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, to the valves of my heart and in the plasma of my blood, I am a fan, through and through, of the glorious Green Bay Packers, and that is the way it will always be.

It has always been thus, too. As far back as I can remember, the Green Bay Packers were the very center of every autumn in my hometown, a few miles down Highway 41 from Green Bay. My brother actually attended the famous Ice Bowl, the NFC championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when the temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero. Today, I own one of those gaudy yellow foam cheese heads, and I even have a frozen brick of genuine Lambeau Field turf in my kitchen icebox. I really do.

Green Bay is an improbable city to have a major sports franchise. It has a population of scarcely 100,000 people, in sharp contrast to the millions in greater Chicago and other cities with NFL teams. That alone makes the Packers unique, but there is much more to the story.

The Packers are the only major sports team to release their balance sheet every year, and they are the only team to be owned by the general public and operated on a non-profit basis. The team's by-laws call for all its assets to be given to charity in the event the team is ever moved from Green Bay. That would be unlikely in any case; since 1960, the Packers have sold every single seat for every game in their stadium. Over the course of a half-century, not one ticket has gone unsold, and there is a waiting list of thousands. No other team in major sports can claim anything remotely close to that.

Even the great George S. Halas respected the Packers. In the 1950s, Halas, the founder and longtime head coach of the Bears, drove the 200 miles to Green Bay during the off-season to urge the citizenry to build a stadium for the Packers, which were struggling through a sustained slump and had little immediate prospect for success. Until then the Packers were playing at the Green Bay East High School field (just coincidentally, the alma mater of legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith). Without a new stadium, the NFL would move the team from Green Bay. Voters listened to Halas and approved the new stadium.

Still the hapless Packers continued to lose. Two years later a granite statue of a man named Vince Lombardi arrived from the East Coast. He would be the new head coach and general manager of the sad-sack team. The year before his arrival, the Packers had lost all but one game in their new stadium. That season still stands as their worst ever.

The next year, under Lombardi, the Packers began winning. They started the season with a victory over the Bears and finished with more wins than losses. The year afterward, they won their division; and the year after that, they won the world championship. They would win the world championship four more times under Lombardi, including the first two Super Bowls. Today the Super Bowl trophy carries his name.

There's an important lesson for leaders everywhere in the Lombardi play book, for the great coach won all those championships with most of the same players on that pathetic, losing team he inherited: Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Ray Nitschke, Forrest Gregg, Max McGee, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, and more. They were all losers, and they knew it. Lombardi came along and made them believe in themselves, and so they did. Once they believed in themselves, they played like winners.

You can expect both teams to play like winners Sunday. The Bears have come out of nowhere to win their division; at the start of the season, experts were predicting they would win only four of their sixteen games. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler passed and ran for two touchdowns each last Sunday. The Packers have survived more than a dozen significant injuries, and they have rolled over two excellent teams en route to their NFC championship berth. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is at the top of his game. The Packers beat the Bears three weeks ago in the regular-season finale, but the Bears prevailed back in September.

The convenient and conventional thing for me to say here would be: "May the best team win." But I cannot bring myself to do that. Not for this game. Not for any game between these two teams. No, my sentiments are all to one side. They are all on the side of the venerable, the estimable, the great and glorious Green Bay Packers. I can only speak my truth, and this is it. 

GO, PACKERS!

 

Addendum on Sunday, 23 January 2011:  The Packers won, 21 to 14, in a hard-fought game on loose turf that made proper footing difficult. Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was hurt in the second quarter, and third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie drove the Bears to two touchdowns in the second half but also threw two interceptions, one of which ended the game. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked masterful on an early touchdown drive but was otherwise lackluster. Fortunately, the Packers defense stepped up to the challenge.

 

Addendum on Sunday, 6 February 2011:  The Green Bay Packers went on to win the Super Bowl and thereby become the new champion of the National Football League. The Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31 to 25, after pulling out to a dramatic lead early in the game but losing some momentum in the second half. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who completed three touchdown passes, was named the game's most valuable player. For the Packers it is their thirteenth world championship; no other NFL team has nearly as many. (The Bears are in second place with nine championships. The Steelers have six championships to their credit.)

 

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

Edison Peña, Running In Defiance of 'Destiny'

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In need of a little inspiration today?

Look no further than Edison Peña, one of the Chilean miners trapped underground for two months. All the miners are paragons of endurance, to be sure. But among them, Peña stands apart: not only through the 69 days of imprisonment that he shared with the other miners, but in his own dauntless courage and in the sheer resilience of his own human spirit.

Yesterday this 34-year-old man ran the New York City Marathon, its 26.2-mile course wending through the five boroughs before ending in Central Park. Running a marathon is a big achievement for anyone. Running a marathon after training on 3-mile and 6-mile runs through dark tunnels a half-mile underground, with every reason to doubt his own survival and only a miner's lamp to light the way, is just this side of phenomenal.

For the first 17 days of the miners' ordeal, Peña did no running. There was little point, for there was little food and little hope of survival. He curled up in a fetal position and waited to die. But when the first drilling bore reached the miners and brought more food, he was able to recapture hope. So he did what a runner would do: he trimmed a pair of work shoes and began going for daily runs.

"I ran to forget I was trapped," he told the New York Daily News last week. "I became two people: the weak person who wanted simply to give up and the person who chose to be strong, to run and survive. Eventually, I chose to live."

Asked what he thought about during those runs in the mine, he offered a sentiment that could very well serve as a mantra on a beleaguered day for any of us: "What I thought about as I ran in the mine was that I was going to beat destiny. I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, I can outrun you. I'm going to outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me. And I did it."

On hearing of his daily runs underground, marathon officials invited him to New York as their guest to ride in a pace car. He replied he would actually prefer to run in the marathon. He did just that. Though he needed an ice pack at mile 20, he finished more than an hour ahead of his goal to the cheers of thousands of spectators. The cheers were nice, but he was already on top of the world, quite literally.

There is a mighty lesson for all of us here. It is altogether too easy to prostrate ourselves on the doorstep of destiny, to tell ourselves that whatever our lot appears to be is meant to be. So let us take a little inspiration from Edison Peña and his fellow miners.

Let us stare down whatever destiny looks to have in store for us, and just say No thanks. Let us rise up and go for a run today, as if in miner's shoes through dark tunnels. Let us finally and defiantly cheat destiny of all its dark and dreary doomsaying, just as Edison Peña did, and one day we, too, will emerge to the cheers of throngs and taste the sweet sunshine of a different destiny, a destiny we create for ourselves.

Thank you, Señor Peña, for your inspiration to us all.

 

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

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Example of a Very Scary Public Speaker

A colleague sent me this video of an Ohio politician declaring his candidacy for public office.

I have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political speeches in my career by candidates of all stripes and persuasions. Never before have I witnessed anything like this. It is downright scary. This guy makes Howard Dean look sound asleep.

The fact that this speaker claims a master's degree in communication makes it all the more pathetic. It serves as an object lesson in what not to do as a speaker. Do not begin with hostility. Do not yell. Do not become unhinged. Do not be threatening.

I hope and trust you can do much, much better. Goodness, that should be easy.

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

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Special Report and Comment

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

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

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

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

Amoco's Safety Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Causes Come to Light

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

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

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

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

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

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

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

— TJL          

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By the Numbers: Jobs, Salaries, and Budgets at Hewlett-Packard

 

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

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

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

 

 

Last week in this space we waxed eloquent on the dismissal of Mark V. Hurd as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Before we move on, we offer this statistical picture of the company in the wake of his five-year tenure.

These facts and figures have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and other publications.

 

Hewlett-Packard’s revenue has skyrocketed from $80 billion in 2004 to $115 billion in 2009, while Cisco Systems’ has risen proportionately even more, from $22 billion to $36 billion, but as IBM’s has stagnated, growing only from $95 billion to $96 billion, in the same time frame.

In 2009, Hewlett-Packard announced across-the-board cuts in employee compensation. Mr. Hurd took a 20 percent reduction, but only on his salary, which accounted for a small share of his overall compensation. Managers took a cut of 10 percent, salaried workers 5 percent, and hourly workers 2.5 percent.

HP’s famed research and development budget was 4 percent of revenue in 2005, and hovers just above 2 percent now, a potentially devastating reduction for a company that is known for its innovation, and whose slogan is Invent.

Under Mr. Hurd's tenure, more than 15,000 Hewlett-Packard employees lost their jobs, while his total compensation during the last two years exceeded $72 million.

HP employees recently gave the company only 1.6 stars, out of 5 possible, as a place to work. By comparison, two companies with whom HP competes for labor, Cisco Systems and IBM, get much higher marks: 3.5 stars for Cisco and 3.7 stars for IBM.

Employees of Hewlett-Packard give their former CEO an approval rating of only 30 percent, while employees of IBM give their CEO a rating of 40 percent, and employees of Cisco give theirs a rating of 60 percent.

Prior to Mr. Hurd’s dismissal, almost two out of every three HP employees said they intended to seek employment elsewhere as soon as the economy improved.

 

Questions: What do these facts and figures tell you about Mr. Hurd as a chief executive? What lessons can you derive for your own leadership? Do you believe that economic adversity invariably depresses employee engagement? How can a company whose employees suffer under a CEO restore their engagement in the wake of his departure?

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are two schools of thought here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some questions to ponder:
 

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

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What Can We Learn From Failures of Leadership?

 

There’s a fascinating article today in the Science section of The New York Times on learning from disaster. It builds off the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico but also cites other historic engineering failures. Among them are the sinking of the Titanic and the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor.

One of the most notorious engineering failures was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge over Puget Sound amid high winds just months after it opened in 1940. (For many years, a 16 mm. video recording of the bridge collapse was the most exciting thing about high-school physics class. I remember viewing it two or three times. Nowadays you can find several versions on YouTube.)

The Times article today, written by William J. Broad, reports that engineers have learned to study such disasters for insights on how to avoid similar design mistakes in the future. “Nobody wants failures,” said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University, “but you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”

That got me thinking. Taking the same tack, and applying it more broadly to leadership, we can well ask ourselves what we can learn from failures of leadership. Traditionally, we have looked at successful leadership for lessons. But success has a thousand fathers, as the old adage goes. Its true critical success factors are often ambiguous. Perhaps abject failures are easier to analyze for insights in the negative.

What case studies of failed leadership would you suggest? What lessons would you derive from them?

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By the Numbers: Worst Cases of Low Trust

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

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

You can read any or all of those posts whenever you wish, just by scrolling down to the hundreds of short essays that follow this one. For a particular issue, use the search button in the right column.

We are devoting several weeks to the erosion of trust and confidence of Americans in major institutions. Last week we looked at institutions that have maintained the public’s trust. Today we look at some more problematic cases.

Certain sectors of the business world and the government seem unable or uninterested in nurturing the trust of Americans. New data from the Pew Research Center document it.

Hollywood (our shorthand for the entire entertainment industry) has the trust of 33 percent of Americans, according to Pew. Labor unions have the trust of only 32 percent. Federal agencies and departments generally come in at 31 percent, as do the national news media.

Even worse off are large companies, at 25 percent, Congress at 24 percent, and banks and financial institutions, at 22 percent.

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56 Seconds of Truth

Why is it that so many business leaders so rarely speak their unvarnished truth with candor, clarity, conviction, and credibility?

Here is an example of one who did. It’s a video of Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, commenting on the demise of Friendster and MySpace. He was speaking at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored conference last week in New York City.

It deserves 56 seconds of your time, if for no other reason than it is a refreshing bucket of cold water.

Just click here.

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Quote / Unquote: Jim Nordstrom on Employee Empowerment

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

 

Whole books have been written on employee empowerment, but few offer such an inspiring case study as Nordstrom, the top-tier American fashion store. Anyone who has shopped frequently at Nordstrom is familiar with its legendary and well-earned reputation for customer service.

Once, I stopped briefly at the men’s shoe department at a Nordstrom on my way out of the store. I had already purchased what I came for. But I noticed a pair of Allen-Edmonds loafers like the very ones I was wearing. A salesman approached and noticed the similarity. “Need another pair?” he asked.

“Well, the ones I have are just a wee small,” I replied. “They’re fine much of the time, but when I fly, which is often,  my feet seem to expand, and then they become unbearably tight. I suppose I could just wear different shoes whenever I travel.”

“You could, but that wouldn’t be right,” he said as he showed me to a chair. “Who on earth sold you these, anyway?’

“Actually I got them here.”

“Then it definitely isn’t right.”

Now, I had already worn these shoes for six months. They were not new. They weren’t even close to new.

The salesman insisted I take off the shoes. He disappeared in back and then re-emerged with an identical new pair a half-size larger. He was taking the initiative to replace them on his own and at no cost to me.

I protested. “It was my choice to buy the tighter fit in the first place,” I said. “I had wanted loafers to be snug. They just turned out to be too snug on airplanes.”

Still, he was insistent. Five minutes later I left with a new pair of shoes on my feet. 

That’s the way it goes at Nordstrom.

In The Nordstrom Way: The Inside Story of America’s #1 Customer Service Company by Robert Spector and Patrick D. McCarthy (John Wiley, 1996), the late James F. Nordstrom is quoted as saying:

 

People will work hard when they are given the freedom

to do the job the way they think it should be done,

when they [can] treat customers the way

they like to be treated. When you start taking away

their incentive and start giving them rules,

 

boom, you’ve killed their creativity. 

 

For many years Nordstrom store personnel were asked to abide by just two simple rules. The first rule was: In all situations, use your good judgment. The second rule was: In other situations, refer back to Rule No. 1.

 

As you reflect on this question and on the time-honored Nordstrom policy, ask yourself what rules you can abandon and how you can develop and use the good judgment of people on your team. 

 

 

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An Orchid for Google

Today we’re introducing another occasional feature. Orchids and Onions will offer encomiums for laudable decisions or noble behavior, especially in challenging circumstances, and criticism for poor decisions or untoward behavior. We’ll bestow orchids on people or organizations that are doing or trying to do the right thing, and onions on people or organizations that are doing the wrong thing or just behaving heedlessly. Today’s column marks our very first orchid.

Companies face difficult ethical issues all the time. Often, correctly resolving these issues is a matter of rereading the corporate values and looking in the mirror. The difficulty is greater when doing business in other countries, where a company naturally wants to respect local laws and cultural norms while also doing right by its own values.

China’s business environment poses a particular challenge. The world’s biggest and  fastest-growing market has an insatiable appetite for online information and connectivity, which makes it fertile ground for high-tech companies like Google. Unfortunately, the government has a reckless and even aggressive disregard for human rights that we Westerners pretty much take for granted. The inevitable collision is now occurring in cyberspace.

Some high-tech companies, most notably Yahoo, have looked the other way. They have been complicit partners in China’s oppressive cyber warfare, as when Yahoo enabled the government to imprison four dissidents.

This week, however, Google signaled it would be different. After the company learned that powerful forces within China—read: the government—were hacking the Gmail accounts of dissidents, Google declared it would not tolerate government interference in online searches and its email service. If it has to remove itself from China, the company said, it will.

That would be unfortunate, for it would leave one billion people dependent on another search engine, Baidu, that isn’t so noble. Moreover, it would be a giant step backward in the global integration of knowledge.

Still, the Chinese government’s determination to control and stifle the exchange of information and ideas is unacceptable. Google’s principled stand is refreshing and fully deserving of our first orchid.

A Lawsuit for Our Times

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read more here.

 

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