Arceil on Leadership

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.

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.

The Birthplace of Cynicism Is an Iceberg

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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.

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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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.

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.

A Simple Process for Better Listening

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A week or so ago we explained why smart people have more difficulty listening.
In a nutshell, it is because you process information rapidly, you are usually thinking critically, you render judgments frequently, and you are often juggling multiple demands on your time.

It all adds up to what I call a conspiracy of cacophony. There's so much stuff rattling around your head, and it is making so much noise as it rattles, you cannot hear anything else.

Here's the good news. You can discipline yourself to become a deeper, better listener; and you should. People will appreciate it. It's actually a straightforward process. To get started, recognize the four levels of good listening.

The most basic level is simply alert listening. This is just being seriously ready and willing to listen. (Some of my coffee klatch friends will tell you I am often not even at alert listening, but that's before 480 milligrams of caffeine have begun coursing through my body.) If you cannot take time for a conversation when someone approaches you, say so, and agree on a time when you can.

The next level is attentive listening. Here you are in the conversation, and you are deliberately seeking and absorbing information. It requires an investment of determination and sincerity. You cannot fake it, and multitasking is toxic to it. Clear your mind and expect to grow.

Beyond that is active listening, a rigorous process for ensuring that two parties to a conversation fully and accurately understand each other. It was introduced in 1955 by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, and it is still standard operating procedure in many organizations. Though a little on the laborious side, active listening is an especially good tool for taking the heat out of negotiations, disputes, and other tense relationships.

Finally we arrive at affirmative listening, where you are demonstrating your real commitment to a full, candid, guileless exchange of information, insight, and intuition that honors and affirms everyone. Here you are determined to make that happen, and you are doing so with a nobility and innocence of purpose.

At the risk of appearing "graceless and manipulative," as Richard Farson later put it (in Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership), by "analyzing those special moments when we are enriched and exhilarated by someone's listening to us," I offer this eight-step path to affirmative listening:

1. Have a predisposition toward learning and acting on what you learn. Your default state is probably speaking and controlling, so you must change your default state. First, recognize that you can learn something of value from almost anyone you meet. Expect the best idea this year to come from someone you least expect, and look for it in the next five minutes. Next, convince yourself that you will probably have to act on the information you're about to learn, so you'd better get it right. Finally, tell yourself you have less than half the information you need to make a prudent decision, and the other half is in the mind of the person right in front of you. She may be reluctant to share it with you, so you have to tease it out.
2. Turn away from distractions. Be fully engaged in this conversation. I know: You're busy. We all are. No one will blame you for wanting to do as much as you can in the time you have. But that doesn't mean you can, and it sure doesn't mean you should, be thinking or doing anything else while carrying on a substantive conversation with someone. You must concentrate on the conversation. Research has shown that subsequent ability to recall data depends heavily on how attentive a person is during the conversation. So focus, focus, focus.
3. Suspend evaluation and premature judgment. Sincerely grant good faith. Evaluation and premature judgment are the twin bogeymen of poor listening. You may be smart, but you cannot listen openly to what someone is saying while you are also evaluating and judging it. You will have plenty of time for that later. For now, just listen with an open mind, and concentrate. It's one thing to have an open door, quite another to have open ears, an open mind, and open arms to embrace an idea you didn't come up with. Don't bother with the devil's advocate. Instead, be an angel's advocate.
4. Calmly probe for detail, and seek real-world examples. Before you reach for conclusions, take the intermediate step of listening for details and examples. Ask for stories or anecdotes that convey a linear progression of events you can see in your mind's eye. The colorful detail and stories are relatively easy to remember, and together they bring life to the matter at hand.
5. Absorb and synthesize the information. Square it, if you can, with other information, with your intuition, and with other insight you have already developed along the way. Here is where your inductive reasoning comes into play. A moment earlier you were deliberately not listening at a conceptual level; you were listening for memorable detail. Now you must broaden things by looking for the governing idea, the principle, the thesis. (Note: It's fine to compare what you are hearing with your own experience. However, for now you should be reluctant to interject your own experience, as that can divert the conversation away from the other person's concern and leave the impression that "it's all about you.")
6. Ask relevant, open questions. Then stop talking. Let silence do the heavy lifting of a conversation. If you are always rushing in to fill the uncomfortable silence, others will never have the opportunity to speak their piece. Be sensitive to the asymmetry of power in any organization; if you're the boss, the people on your team may feel intimidated or anxious in your presence, so don't be the first to speak (unless, of course, it's an emergency and people need to act fast). Generally favor open questions over closed except when you're in the muck of details. Closed questions (often beginning with do/does, is/are, who, when, where, and how much or how many) elicit only specific, discrete bits of information: a yes or a no, today's date, an age, your hometown, whether it's raining or not. Open questions (typically beginning with what, how, and why or why not) elicit richer descriptions, preferences, reasoning, explanations, questions, ideas, observations, insights and the like. For a great example of the latter, just watch a real pro like Oprah Winfrey or Charlie Rose interview someone. You won't hear many closed questions.
7. Clarify meaning, and translate implications. This is the labor of active listening. You clarify meaning by repeating what another person has said to that person's satisfaction before you get to reply substantively. Then you reason through the implications in dialogue and collaboration with the other person. Use words like we and let's. Make sure the two of you (or three, or however many) are in agreement as to what comes next.
8. Promise and deliver a response by a certain date. Any salesperson worth her commission will tell you she never departs a prospect's office until she has a date and time to talk next. The same goes for any substantive conversation. Don't just leave people dangling in mid-air. After you do leave, make sure you follow through on time. If you cannot, get back to the person to update him on your progress and your new expected time line.

Just get into the habit of using these eight steps, and people will notice. They may even decide that you do care, after all.

 

Next: Eight Archetypes of Poor Listeners

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

More Employers Ask Job Applicants for Facebook Passwords

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs Replies to Mr. Smith

 

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

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

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

TJL

Greg Smith's Very Public Resignation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Three Essential Components of Any Leader's Credibility

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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

 

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

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

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Wednesday

Leaders Must Know and Respect

Other Kinds of Authority

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Hypocrisy

 

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

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

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Coming on Monday

Data on Leadership Training

Coming on Wednesday

Types of Authority

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Irony of Seeing and Believing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

Be Your Own First Follower

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Quote / Unquote: Rod Tidwell on Primitive Communication

 

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

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

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

 

Talking is just a primitive form of communication.

 

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

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

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

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

• Why does he call talking "primitive communication"?
• What are the limitations of talking in business? (You may wish to refer back to our essay of May 20 on ten talk traps.)
• When you think of nonverbal communication, do you think mainly of body language? Facial expression?
• What other kinds of nonverbal communication communicate far more than body language or facial expression?
• What does your own nonverbal communication say about you? In what ways?
• Is it deliberate or accidental?
• How specifically are you working to improve your nonverbal messages?

Coming on Monday

The Vision of a Celebration

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

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.

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days I have been involved in two discussions—one as an observer in an online forum, the other as a participant in an exchange of emails—regarding the necessity for communication in support of leadership and change.

It appears some people out there are not yet convinced that communication matters.

Frankly, I find that astonishing. The factual basis is so solid, and the logic is so compelling, that I cannot understand why any serious business executive has any doubt. The evidence is both quantitative and qualitative, and it is conclusive.

Surely we can stipulate that the world is always changing. Technology changes. Economies grow and shrink. Older people retire, and younger people with new ideas come along. The market for goods and services changes as consumers and businesses decide they want and need different things. Companies merge and spin off. Trade barriers come down. Management fads come and go. Innovation creates new competition. Companies form and enter the marketplace. Always, things are changing.

Now, follow along with me. Wouldn't you agree that:

• Companies cannot control the changes around them, but they can control (a) whether and how they initiate change and (b) whether and how they respond to external change. Both the direction and the pace of their own change are variable, and both are controllable.
• Organizations that fail to change will invariably become irrelevant. Then they will whither and die. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company and AOL, history is filled with the bones of giants that failed to adapt.
• If what made you good is alone enough to make you great, you would already be greater than you are. In fact you will always need new ideas, new competencies, and new practices to grow and meet the demands of the future. That's life, and life is change.
• The work of leadership is largely the work of envisioning, articulating, and supporting change, commonly requiring discretionary effort and even self-sacrifice by many people, often in a state of uncertainty and risk. That fairly describes the business world of the 21st century, doesn't it?
• Communication is the energy of leadership and thus of change. You know this to be true because all of history's great leaders, those individuals who have brought about the greatest change in the most trying of circumstances, have consistently been articulate and inspiring communicators. Think of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. The reason this is true is equally obvious: People cannot act in concert with a leadership vision and agenda unless they have the big ideas, the information, and the incentive to do so, and they get all that through communication.
• Every organization is always communicating with itself—thinking out loud, as it were. People talk. Rumors spread. Leaks occur. The communication may be managed well or poorly or not at all. It may be clear, credible, compelling, constructive, collaborative, continuous, civil, and concise, or it may not be. The degree to which it is managed well and purposefully is the degree to which the organization can change in accord with the leadership vision and agenda and thereby determine its own destiny. 

Now forgive a little hubris, but executives who choose to deny these propositions are denying some very obvious truths, perhaps because it is comfortable for them to remain in denial. After all, it is easier to deny the need for communication than to assume responsibility for communicating and perhaps even to confront some long-festering professional competency gaps.

Executives who acknowledge these facts, and we hope this includes you and your colleagues, will properly ask what they should do first. I would suggest they consider the possibility that a systematic process of integrated strategic communication just may be the missing piece of the puzzle. At the very least, they should get moving on a needs assessment to better understand their situation and the opportunities it presents. Remember, every problem in life is an opportunity.

Call us. The number is +1-847-247-2241. We can help if you call, but not if you don't.

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Role of Emotion in Leadership

 Coming on Friday

A Great Tool for Collateral Leaders

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

{Numbers} Effective Managers Repeat Themselves

 

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

Ever since the pioneering work of Frederick Winslow Taylor a century ago, managers have been trying to do more with less. Efficiency is good.

For many managers, that is certainly true of communication. They want to say something once and be done with it. Especially in a time when we are all assaulted daily by thousands of messages—emails, advertising, announcements, complaints, questions, Google searches, conversations, requests for this and that, the news—brevity is the soul of clarity as well as wit.

There's just one nagging issue: Does it work? Can we truly say something only once to someone and seriously expect to communicate well?

The answer isn't so simple.

In some circumstances it can work. Probably all of us remember hearing some particularly pleasant or hurtful words on the job: "We want you to start work next Monday" or "You have to go to Fresno again" or "We won the Smith account" or "Everyone has to take a pay cut."

On the other hand, when I am troubleshooting poor communication, one-off instructions often emerge as a problem. For routine information, saying something once is tantamount to never saying it at all. People don't remember hearing things that they were told just last week.

Now comes intriguing new research on the importance of redundant communication. A study reported in the current (May 2011) issue of Harvard Business Review found that managers who deliberately repeat themselves are significantly more effective than managers who don't. The key word there is deliberately.

The researchers noticed that the effective managers were building redundancy into their communication plans. Even before they communicated the news the first time, they were planning how to do it a second and even a third time.

The pattern was especially pronounced among managers without formal authority. These days, that includes more managers than ever before, as companies form ad hoc project teams for special assignments and limited periods of time.

The study of six companies shows that 21 percent of managers without formal authority routinely sent redundant messages—for example, following up a face-to-face meeting or a telephone conversation with an email—while only 12 percent of managers with formal power did likewise, according to Paul Leonardi of Northwestern University and Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School.

The powerless managers got things done faster and with fewer hiccups, presumably as a result of the redundant messaging, the professors said. Meanwhile, managers with official power tend to rely on their authority. They apparently assumed that employees would just follow their directions, and they believed that communicating once was enough.

"We’re so bred to believe that clarity is the key to being a better communicator," said Leonardi. "The literature says pick the best medium for the [message], and anything else is wasteful. This research suggests that’s not true. You need to use multiple media.

"It’s not necessarily just about clarity. It’s about making your presence felt. Employees are getting pulled in many directions and reporting to lots of people and getting tons of communications. So how do you keep your issues top of mind? Redundancy is a way to do that."

For many of you, this will confirm your lingering suspicion and our intuition. You know from your personal lives the importance of repetition. After all, how many of us are content to hear our spouses say "I love you" only once?

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that people are not robots, and that business is all about people. As advertisers and politicians seem to have known all along, managers should repeat themselves. I say:  Managers should repeat themselves. I say . . .

 

Coming on Wednesday

Rogue Communication

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Big Lessons in Leadership from 'I Love Lucy'

 

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

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

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

—TJL                

 

 

  
 

by Thomas J. Lee

All but the youngest of us have watched reruns of the I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy and her pal Ethel go to work on an assembly line in a candy factory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

"Kleptomaniac"

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

"Lucy Tells the Truth"

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

"Job Switching"

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

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

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

Ricky makes sure he uses “plenty of starch” in laundering Lucy’s hosiery. Fred’s seven-layer cake comes out less than one inch tall, and the two men agree that a pound of rice per person is “just about right” for dinner that night. The volcano on the stove erupts just before Lucy and Ethel get home.

The women don’t fare any better. Lucy is assigned to make chocolate dough balls alongside a stoic, stone-silent coworker. Obviously unskilled, Lucy cannot get the assistance she needs, for want of any communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Wednesday

What We Measure When We Measure Engagement

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

In either case, anything that is not is counterfeit.

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

 

Coming on Friday

Precisely What Is Employee Engagement?

 ©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

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.

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 NCAA Brackets and Your Leadership

by Thomas J. Lee

If it's March, and it is, many if not most Americans are watching far more college basketball than they normally watch. For three straight weekends, from mid-March into early April, the annual rite of spring known colloquially as March Madness and formally as the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament dominates conversations everywhere.

I offer myself as a case study. Apart from the Wisconsin Badgers (I took my undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin), I haven't really paid attention to college basketball since—well, since the NCAA Tournament last year at this time. But this past weekend I watched all four games. The winning teams—Butler, Kentucky, UConn, and VCU—will compete in next weekend's Final Four, which culminates in the championship game on April 4.

Something else about the NCAA Tournament is relevant to the subject of this blog. It is the tournament's brackets, like those in the photograph above. In the abstract, the full brackets look a little like the branches of a tree extending out in four directions, one for each of the four sectionals that feed into the tournament's final weekend.

Each of the 64 teams that earned berths in the tournament began on one of the far branches. The winner of the first round of games, which winnows the field to 32, advanced to the outer limb. The progression continued until only four teams are surviving, then only two, and finally only the champion. Last year it was Duke.

Here is how the brackets apply to leadership. Those brackets create a skeletal structure for the tournament. Without the brackets, no one would know which team was playing which other team. The whole tournament would be meaningless and pointless. The brackets impose structure and order on chaos and ambiguity. That's how important structure is.

People take structure for granted, but it is everywhere. You depend on structure whenever you walk into a grocery store, because it tells you where the cereals are, where the fruits and vegetables are, and where the milk and butter are. You rely on it when you get behind the wheel of a car, because the structure on the dashboard tells you your speed and fuel supply and mileage.

You need structure to read a menu in a restaurant, to surf the net on your computer, to balance your checkbook, to find a book in the library, to book a flight, to pick a TV show, to read a map, to pay a bill or apply for a job or weigh yourself or make an appointment—really, to do just about anything.

In business, we have plenty of structure, too. A balance sheet has structure. A bill of lading has structure. A computer algorithm has structure. A Gantt chart has structure. A contract has structure. A manufacturing process has structure. An organizational chart has structure.

One thing in business, however, does not have structure: the very work of leadership. There is no structure for a process of leadership, or for a culture of leadership, or for the training and development of leaders, or for any aspect of the work of leadership.

Moreover, because leadership is the hard work of envisioning, articulating, supporting and driving change, it follows that there is no structure for change.

Now in my experience, most companies are intensely interested in change. They recognize they must change just to keep pace with their customers and their competition, let alone exceed the expectations of customers and build a competitive advantage that puts them ahead of their competition.

The absence of a structure for that work means that people are lost—even bright, hard-working, serious managers who want to do the right thing by their company. Without a structure, they have no road map, no compass, no plan that tells them what do.

Make that didn't have a structure. We have just the structure they need. We'll take you through it on Wednesday. 

 

Coming on Wednesday

A Structure for Leadership 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Robust Credibility Requires Respect, Affinity, and Trust

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

March Madness and Leadership Communication 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires Authentic Trust

 

 

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Coming on Friday

Why Robust Credibility Requires All Three Cornerstones:

Organic Respect, a Bond of Affinity, and Authentic Trust

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

{Numbers} The Tyranny of Meetings

 

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

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

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

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

 

Coming Wednesday

A Closer Look at Trust

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

A Leader's Robust Credibility Requires Affinity With People

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} We Have the Data on Meetings

 

Coming next Wednesday

A Closer Look at Trust

 

© Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   Arceil Leadership Ltd.

For a Leader, Credibility Is More Than Just Trust

 

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By affinity, we mean a high regard for a common bond of interests, needs, and concerns. Apart from someone under the hypnotic spell of a cult, no one willingly follows a leader whose purpose runs counter to their own well-being. Rather, people look for nobility of intent: an honorable purpose that aligns with their own well-being. This shared well-being takes the form of mutual interests, needs, and concerns. What is important to the leader must be, or must become, important to the people she would lead, and vice versa. Remember, it is always the potential follower, never the putative leader, who judges the nobility of intent.

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

 

Coming on Wednesday

A Closer Look at Respect 

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   Arceil Leadership Ltd.

{Numbers} The Mysterious Case of the Shrinking Cublicle

 

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

At this very moment, many of you are sitting in a cubicle not unlike those that Scott Adams draws in Dilbert, and if your company is like many others, the cubicle is smaller today than it was a year or two ago.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the one-two punch of recession and technology has led companies to shrink the size of cubicles quite considerably. It is a long-term trend that has picked up speed lately.

The International Facility Management Association reports that, in 1994, office workers had an average work space of 90 square feet. By last year, the average was just 75 square feet. Space for senior managers shrunk, too, from 115 square feet in 1994 to 96 square feet in 2010.

At one Silicon Valley-based chipmaker, the shrinkage is even more dramatic. The standard cubicle at Intel used to be 72 square feet. Now it is now just 48 square feet. 

Moreover, owing to the profliferation of telecommuting and mobile technology, some knowledge workers no longer even have permanent work spaces. When they need a space, they reserve it by the day. More often than not, they are working off-site.

"Everyone used to get a cube, but that doesn't work for the way people actually do their work today," said Neil Tunmore, director of corporate services at Intel, who spearheaded a corporate redesign that began in 2007.

To be sure, some companies are bucking the trend, and they seem to be winning the talent war. For two years running, Fortune magazine has named North Carolina-based SAS, a business intelligence software company, the No. 1 place to work. SAS officials say they give almost all their employees private offices, which they believe contribute to their success.

"We do value employees not just as a commodity but as an asset," Jim Davis, senior marketing officer of the company, said.

 

Wednesday: Nothing to Lose, Everything to Lose

 

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

The Sensitive Issue of Romance in the Office

 

 

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

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

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

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

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

By any other name would smell as sweet;

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

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet                                                   

 

by Thomas J. Lee 

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Is Communication Really Essential to Change? To Leadership?

by Thomas J. Lee

Over the last few days I have been involved in two discussions—one as an observer in an online forum, the other as a participant in an exchange of emails—regarding the necessity for communication in support of leadership and change.

It appears some people out there are not yet convinced that communication matters.

Frankly, I find that astonishing. The factual basis is so solid, and the logic is so compelling, that I cannot understand why any serious business executive has any doubt. The evidence is both quantitative and qualitative, and it is conclusive.

Surely we can stipulate that the world is always changing. Technology changes. Economies grow and shrink. Older people retire, and younger people with new ideas come along. The market for goods and services changes as consumers and businesses decide they want and need different things. Companies merge and spin off. Trade barriers come down. Management fads come and go. Innovation creates new competition. Companies form and enter the marketplace. Always, things are changing.

Now, follow along with me. Wouldn't you agree that:

• Companies cannot control the changes around them, but they can control (a) whether and how they initiate change and (b) whether and how they respond to external change. Both the direction and the pace of their own change are variable, and both are controllable.
• Organizations that fail to change will invariably become irrelevant. Then they will whither and die. From the British Empire to the Pickett Slide Rule Company and AOL, history is filled with the bones of giants that failed to adapt.
• If what made you great will make you greater, you would already be greater than you are. You aren't, so it can't. You will always need new ideas, new competencies, and new practices to grow and meet the demands of the future. That's life, and life is change.
• The work of leadership is largely the work of envisioning, articulating, and supporting change, commonly requiring discretionary effort and even self-sacrifice by many people, often in a state of uncertainty and risk. That fairly describes the business world of the 21st century, doesn't it?
• Communication is the energy of leadership and thus of change. You know this to be true because all of history's great leaders, those individuals who have brought about the greatest change in the most trying of circumstances, have consistently been articulate and inspiring communicators. Think of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela. The reason this is true is equally obvious: People cannot act in concert with a leadership vision and agenda unless they have the big ideas, the information, and the incentive to do so, and they get all that through communication.
• Every organization is always communicating with itself—thinking out loud, as it were. People talk. Rumors spread. Leaks occur. The communication may be managed well or poorly or not at all. It may be clear, credible, compelling, constructive, collaborative, continuous, civil, and concise, or it may not be. The degree to which it is managed well and purposefully is the degree to which the organization can change in accord with the leadership vision and agenda and thereby determine its own destiny. 

Now forgive a little hubris, but executives who choose to deny these propositions are denying some very obvious truths, perhaps because it is comfortable for them to remain in denial. After all, it is easier to deny the need for communication than to assume responsibility for communicating and perhaps even to confront some long-festering professional competency gaps.

Executives who acknowledge these facts, and we hope this includes you and your colleagues, will properly ask what they should do first. I would suggest they consider the possibility that a systematic process of integrated strategic communication just may be the missing piece of the puzzle. At the very least, they should get moving on a needs assessment to better understand their situation and the opportunities it presents. Remember, every problem in life is an opportunity.

Call us. The number is +1-847-247-2241. We can help if you call, but not if you don't.

 

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

The Best Way to Change Is Just to Change

by Thomas J. Lee

Throughout the Upper Midwest at this time of year, you will see groves of several species of tree—pin oaks, white oaks, and immature beeches—with dry leaves still clinging to their twigs, like infants hugging their mothers at the knee, long after brisk autumn breezes have brought down the leaves of other trees to the ground.

I walk past just such a grove of pin oaks, lean and shivering against the steel-gray sky, on my way to coffee with friends almost every morning. Until recently, I hadn't really noticed. Now, thanks to a fellow blogger, Michael Hyatt, I not only see these particular leaves, but I also appreciate a parallel between them and the prospect of change for so many people. Let me explain.

You already know that trees generally fall into two broad categories; evergreen and deciduous. Evergreens like the pine, cedar, and spruce replenish their needles continually throughout the year. They are always shedding some needles and quickly replacing them with new growth, but they are never naked to the sun. In contrast, deciduous trees like the ash, maple, and elm shed their leaves in a blaze of autumn glory. Then they are barren for months until springtime.

What I had never fully recognized was a subset of deciduous trees. Like other deciduous trees, these few species lose their leaves annually. But unlike other deciduous trees, they retain their leaves for months after the leaves stop growing, lose their chlorophyll, and turn first a burnt crimson and then a rusty orange.

These trees are known as marcescent (the first c is soft, as in incessant). Marcescent trees keep their leaves all winter, until the warming sun of spring. Even powerful gusts of arctic air sweeping down from Canada week after week through a Midwestern winter cannot pry the leaves loose. But finally, new buds emerge. The growth of buds literally pushes last year's leaves out of the way. Only then do the old leaves fall to the ground.

Here's the parallel to change and people. As the great Earl Nightingale observed, we are creatures of habit. We will do tomorrow what we are doing today, and we are doing today what we did yesterday. Like the leaves on those marcescent trees, dysfunctional behavioral patterns will persist—unless and until we recognize them and act decisively to change, like new buds emerging from twigs.

Now the thing is, the change we undertake must be constructive. It must reflect an affirmative alternative. People don't just stop doing things, even things that are hurtful and destructive, without an alternative. They can try, but they will usually fail; they will usually lapse back into the old pattern.

Rather, to be successful, we must substitute something else. Only by replacing one behavior with another do we stand a realistic chance of changing once and for all.

As a young parent, I experienced this phenomenon with my daughter. At one point her grades weren't what they should have been, only because she wasn't completing her homework assignments and preparing for tests. Instead, night after night, she was playing video games.

Her mother and I intervened. We forcefully substituted a productive activity for an unproductive activity. It worked. She turned her grades around. (Years later, I can report to you that she has graduated from the University of Chicago and is midway through Northwestern Law School.)

For people, as for marcescent trees like the pin oak, the old way persists until a new way replaces it, because until then the new is not fully present and real. The lesson here is to underscore the importance of identifying an alternative behavior and arranging for it to replace the previous behavior. Otherwise, people will probably never find their way out of the rut they are in.

Questions: What behavioral pattern are you in that you must replace with something else? What will you replace it with? When?

 

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

By the Numbers: Open and Honest Communication

 

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Most companies of any considerable size survey their employees from time to time on a raft of issues relating to satisfaction, morale, commitment, and engagement. The questions on these surveys vary considerably, but a few questions are typically devoted to the frequency and quality of managerial communication.

(Better companies go so far as to field annual communication audits. If the surveys are well-constructed and well-interpreted and acted upon, so much the better.)

One survey question in particular always interests me. It has to do with the candor and credibility of communication. Often it is phrased as the degree of "open and honest" communication. (Ideally, it should be two questions, but that is another matter for another day.) The results say a lot about the organization and its future.

The only acceptable score on this kind of question is (a) a score that is better than the comparable score of your most recent previous surveys, and (b) a score reflecting approval at or above 85 or even 90 percent of all cohorts, most especially ground-level and customer-facing employees.

If you think 85 or 90 percent is too ambitious a target, I would remind you that it is still shy of three sigma. No self-respecting manufacturing company tolerates a defect rate of less than six sigma. 

On questions of this nature, reference to an industry norm is irrelevant and perhaps even counterproductive. Let's say the external norm is 72 percent, and your score is 75 percent. You may be feeling heady, having beaten the norm by 3 percentage points, but you must realize that one of every four employees regards your communication as something less than acceptable.

Having said that, you should be less concerned about validating your management team's efforts than about assessing your present situation and mapping an approach to improving it. So even if your scores are improving from survey to survey, you should still use the data to determine how you might improve further. Of course, if your scores are deteriorating, consider it a five-alarm alert. You need to get busy, fast.

Now, here are some discussion points for you:

• Has your organization conducted such a survey recently?
• Did you even ask about communication?
• Did you specifically inquire about candor and credibility?
• Did you also inquire about clarity? Coherence? Civility?
• Did you collect data by grade level? What were the results?
• How did they compare with previous surveys?
• What are you doing in response?

 

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

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

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

 

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

Job Titles Can Be Barriers to Teamwork and Collaboration

 

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

The difference is partly a question of focus. By reframing our place in an organization, we can throw a spotlight on the actions and behaviors that give life to our mission. That's a good thing.

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

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

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

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

 

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

What You Say Isn't Necessarily What They Hear

 

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

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

How Constructive Is the Communication in Your Organization?

 

(Sixth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

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

 or write to us at [email protected].

 

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

How Credible Is the Communication in Your Organization?

 

 

(Fourth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

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

 or write to us at [email protected]. 

 

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

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Eight Hallmarks of a Healthy Communication Culture

 

 

(Second in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

Let's briefly explore each of those eight hallmarks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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What Is Your Organization's Communication Culture?

 

(First in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee 

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

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

The concept was initially controversial. Companies resisted the notion they were about anything more than their numbers. Since then, of course, many companies have come to compete on culture as much as on goods and services. You see it whenever a company touts its ranking on the Best Places to Work list.

Sociologists define culture as the totality of attitudes, norms, and behaviors that distinguish one group of people from another. In business, culture is commonly regarded as "the way we do things around here."

There are profound cultural differences between Google and Microsoft, for example. Similarly, there are significant cultural differences between Toyota and General Motors, between Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines, between Nordstrom and Macy's, and between Bank of America and Chase Bank. The list could go on.

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

For example, in any one company, you may notice cultural differences between headquarters personnel and field representatives, between the engineering geeks and the marketing mavens, between salaried staff and hourly workers, between grizzled veterans and young turks, between teams supporting a growth product and teams supporting a cash cow, between the day shift and the night shift, between manufacturing and sales, between legacies of an acquired company and legacies of the acquiring company, and so forth.

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

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

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

By culture of communication, I mean the tendency of people throughout a company to share information, ideas, and their intuition on business matters in a particular way. It is less about the flow of official information and more about the countless decentralized eddies of information converging and diverging throughout a company. Here it's important to remember that communication is more than just words, numbers, pictures, and images; it is anything that conveys information or creates meaning for people, and it is often unintentional, implicit, and unmanaged.

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

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

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

Ideally, any company's culture of communication has as its hallmarks eight descriptors that just coincidentally begin with the same letter: clear, credible, compelling (or cogent), constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. That's a tall order, but it's mightily important to a company's success.

You can easily think of examples, for better and for worse. A worst-case scenario might involve the proverbial Mushroom Theory, keeping employees in the dark and feeding them—well, you get the idea. A best-case scenario would embrace employees as intellectual partners in the enterprise, whose thinking is integral to the company's success. You can easily see just how critical communication is to performance.

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

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

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

 or write to us at [email protected].

 

 

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

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Management Has a Rose-Colored View of Communication

 

 

 By the Numbers                                               

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

For more information on the ORF data, contact Andrew Mosko at 847-816-8611 or write to him at [email protected]. For more information on solutions to the problem, contact me directly at 847-247-2241 or write to me at [email protected].

 

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

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

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

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

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The Six Hats of Leadership

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

Here are the six hats every leader wears.

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

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

 

 

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

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A Lesson in Leadership from Robert Frost

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

A discussion among Facebook friends the other day sent me back to the famous verse by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, written in 1915. Take a moment to read it slowly and carefully:

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What wisdom do you find in these lines? How might it apply to the work that leaders and managers do?

At the behest of Don Bates, a professor at George Washington University, I pored over this poem. Just as he suggested, I found it simple on my initial readings and then more and more profound. The words are austere, the imagery familiar. But the message is deep.

"Reading serious poetry requires disciplined scrutiny," Bates wrote. "The truest interpretation is usually discerned from between the lines, and irony is often a key to unlocking the greater meaning."

Thus, a good poem often speaks to us implicitly as well as explicitly. That is certainly true of this one. Peeling back its levels, we can ask what Frost means by a yellow wood. We can ask what the two roads symbolize. We can ask what the poet isn't saying.

Frost's verse doesn't explain the difference that taking the other road made. He says only that the two roads diverged; they were different. More importantly, he doesn't say one road was absolutely or plainly good and the other absolutely or plainly bad. He doesn't even say that either road was better. The other road was only just as fair.

Frost says a couple of other things, as well.

He says that he must choose, that abstaining is not an acceptable alternative, lest he stand forever in the yellow wood, a thicket of decisions. The reader can imagine a setting sun or a waiting rendezvous, or even a chill that signals the approach of winter, something that pushes the hiker forth this day.

Frost also makes plain that the choice is his. Although some scholars believe he is implicitly referring to a companion with whom he frequently hiked, the poem itself is silent. He further suggests the choice can only be intuitive, without a map or a guide or local lore or even trampled grass to point him: in leaves no step had trodden black. The hiker is on his own. He must trust himself, and he will live with the consequences, for he will be one traveler.

Finally, the poet says that he doubts he will ever come back, that taking the other road is a risky and a final, determinative choice. He hints that he will regret the choice: I shall be telling this with a sigh.

Applying all this to the challenge of leadership, we can think of the two roads as imperfect or gray or roundabout alternatives. We can think of Frost's fork in the road as a dilemma: a choice between alternatives of equal value or insubstantial difference. We can think of the traveler as a leader trying to retain her integrity as she finds her way through ambiguity.

Leaders and managers are always facing such choices. In business as elsewhere, it is rare that choices are perfect and stark; and when they are, the issues are usually small or so basic as to be rudimentary. On the big and consequential decisions, one can typically choose only between marginal or flawed alternatives. That's life as we know it.

But here's the thing: Just recognizing this fact is liberating. It humbles us from our pride as leaders. It enables us to explore alternatives that were previously hidden from sight. It brings us to greater comfort with uncertainty and thus to greater collaboration with the people we would lead. It frees us to embrace paradox: to move from "tyranny of the or" to the "genius of the and." And it opens us to a palette of creative thinking that is so valuable in times of confounding ambiguity.

Organizations and society in general put so much faith in leaders, we almost seem to beg for the arrogance that is the bête noire of true leadership. We need rare and extraordinary individuals to step forward and lead us, but we cannot tolerate the smug, self-certain hubris that brings leaders to the brink of paralysis or defeat. That, of course, is what we so often get.

Life's most vexing choices, the old New England bard seems to be saying, are always nuanced and always imperfect, but they are not necessarily always bad. We just need to make them, for they will be made. And we must recognize that the perfect choice rarely presents itself, that usually we face only choices that are scarcely even better and worse. Still, we must choose, and choosing will indeed make all the difference.

 

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

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By the Numbers: How Employees Regard Their Managers

 

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

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

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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Four Rules for Creating More People Engagement

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. Allrights reserved.

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's get more specific:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Mixed, Muddled, or Mute Messages Cause All Kinds of Problems

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In my years of consulting on organizational communication in mid-size and larger companies, I have seen all too many problems boil down to three broad categories of miscommunication: mixed messages, muddled messages, and mute messages.

Let's look at each of them.

Mixed messages are those where the explicit and the implicit communication are at odds with each other. The company has said something is important, but its actions say otherwise. For example, perhaps it has said that safety in the workplace is important, but front-line supervisors commonly overlook hazards. Or perhaps it has said that customer service is important, but telephone bank operators have rigid quotas of 20 calls per hour. Or perhaps it has said that product quality is important, but the choice is always to ship a deficient product rather than send it back for rework.

These mixed messages compromise the credibility of the company. That, in turn, undermines the integrity of leaders and their leadership. No self-respecting manager should stand for it.

Muddled messages are those beset by confusion. Some are explained poorly. Some are fickle, changing daily with the breeze. Some are lost in a fusillade of communication around too many initiatives, and employees just cannot keep them all straight. Some messages are the victim of so many acronyms and so much jargon that even long-time employees scratch their head at times. Some are the unhappy result of cascading, which succeeds only at feeding the rumor mill.

These muddled messages are a lost opportunity. They prevent an organization’s leadership from creating a keen strategic focus. Without that focus, employees cannot possibly engage themselves in the work of the organization or the satisfaction of its patrons.

Mute messages, the silent killers of business, are the issues and challenges that management either ignores altogether or simply chooses not to talk about. Often, this is a deliberate choice not to invest time and resources in communication on anything at all. There are managers who genuinely believe they can run the business and even grow it without engaging employees in the brand promise and strategic direction of the company. With luck, and for a short time, they may be able to. Sooner or later, they pay the piper.

These mute messages leave well-meaning and eager employees without an understanding of strategic priorities and sense of direction. They don’t know which task is more important than another. They must rely on their own intuition and guesswork. That may work for a while. Ultimately, however, the lack of communication will lead to conflicts in expectations among management and employees that will eventually affect customers, indicating a profound failure.

Smart companies don't settle for any of this. Alas, many companies out there aren't so smart as they think.

 

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Sometimes, the Thought of Change Can Be Paralyzing

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

why do I need to change ?

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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