Arceil on Leadership

Curiosity: Strategic Engagement of the Mind

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Let's say you have a spare million dollars lying around, maybe under your mattress, not doing much of anything. You decide to put it to work. You find two companies that appear to be well-managed and perhaps worth your investment.

Let's say further that they are identical in every respect but one. Ajax Company is already performing at its peak today, and Acme Company will be performing at its peak at some point in the future.

Which would be the better investment?

Everyone whom I ever asked this question tells me Acme, the company that will reach its peak in the future, and I agree. Why invest in the Blockbusters and Blackberries of the world? The whole idea of investing is to reap the benefits of picking tomorrow's winners today.

The difficulty, of course, is divining the winners and losers of tomorrow while it is still today. People have lost a lot of money trying in vain to do just that. Of course, other people have made a lot of money by successfully doing it.

While I cannot promise you riches, I can point you to an obvious common denominator among the companies that will be more successful tomorrow than they are today: They are looking for and finding new ways to grow organically. They are introducing new products, venturing into new markets, finding new customers.

Doing that requires something that other companies—ordinary companies, average companies—don't have. It requires a culture of extraordinary curiosity.

A culture of extraordinary curiosity values questions over answers. It places more stock in imagination than in knowledge. It prizes wonder-if over know-how. It is more preoccupied with what it doesn't know than with what it does. It is constantly, desperately, urgently seizing on the unknown thing. It is never satisfied with what it knows.

How do you find such a company? You can try examining the balance sheet, but I would suggest looking first and longest at the people and their work. In other words, at the whole pattern of their norms, their expectations, their choices, their conversations, their journey.

A company with a culture of curiosity would hire and promote people who ask good questions over people who dismiss the questions as silly or who answer them too quickly, too certainly, and too dismissively.

A company with a culture of curiosity would invest ever-more time and money in research and development, not snip away at the R&D budget in a fruitless effort to make the numbers.

A company with a culture of curiosity would reward risk and innovation to the point of paying bonuses to people who almost, but not quite, find the right answers.

A company with a culture of curiosity would very nearly become apoplectic at the prospect of answering a question that has been nagging at them. Answering the question, after all, threatens to imperil and stymie the creativity involved in wrestling with it.

But why? Isn't the whole exercise of asking questions all about finding answers? A linear thinker would say so. A lateral thinker would disagree.

As you can see by those two very questions, and by countless others like them, the simple act of asking provocative questions pushes the bounds of what we know. It stretches us. It invites us into mystery. It ushers us through the portal of discovery. It takes us from today and delivers us at tomorrow.

Throughout history, the people who have discovered and invented the future have asked more and better questions than their peers and predecessors asked. They were the Thomas Edisons, the Henry Fords, the Albert Einsteins, and the Bill Gateses of their time.   

Moreover, every one of those gentlemen knew it. They all are on record with splendid statements about the miraculous power of curiosity. (Google curiosity and any of their names if you don't believe it.) They understood that whoever asked the best questions would win.

The thing is, you don't just snap your fingers and demand curiosity, and you don't just sit back and wait for it to arrive. Rather, you need to do the hard work of cultivating it.

As we have argued before, strategic curiosity is one of four essential elements of full, creative engagement in the workplace. With it—along with focus, passion, and courage—organizations can accomplish just about anything, and organic growth comes naturally. Without it, success will be elusive.

But few companies do that work. In my own consulting, I see company after company taking undue pride in their employee morale and regarding it as engagement. They think they are ahead of the game, while the likelihood is that are behind it.

Here are just a few things you can do to create a culture of extraordinary curiosity. How many do you and your peers make a habit of doing?

• Show your own curiosity. Set the standard. Make a regular practice of asking good questions. In fact, try to ask more questions than you make statements.
• Whenever anyone asks a question, presume that it can have more than one good answer. Wrestle with the question to answer it in multiple ways.
• Avoid the assumption that a question has already been answered, or that a question has already been answered as well as it can be. Instead, assume the opposite: that you can do better.
• Favor asking open questions over closed questions, and encourage others to do likewise. When someone asks a closed question, see if you can treat it as an open question to expand the conversation.
• Expect the best suggestion of the year to come from someone you least expect within the next five minutes. Encourage them to make that suggestion.
• When drafting a meeting agenda, try using questions rather than topics. Let the agenda's questions guide the discussion. Encourage people to generate more questions, and record them for future discussions.

If you doubt for a moment the value of curiosity, just look at all the great organizations that have sprung out of questions, and look at the people throughout history who have blazed new trails—in technology, exploration, business, the arts, government, medicine—on the strength of curioisity. The list is long indeed.

By the same token, if you look at the lengthy list of companies that have shuttered or sold themselves over the last ten or twenty years, you will see the opposite: people who thought they knew the answers, only to find that someone else was still asking questions long after they had stopped.

Be curious, my friends. Always be curious.

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

Focus: Strategic Engagement of the Eyes

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

 

15 Signs of Poor Strategic Communication with Employees

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Two Case Studies in Corporate Hubris and Sclerosis

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved. 

What I Learned From the Skunk at My Feet (A True Story)

 

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 feral cat, and it wasn't a squirrel. Nor was it a raccoon or a possum. 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 several years ago. I recalled it again 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 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.

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.

 

(c) 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.

When Strategy and Culture Collide

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 © Copyright 2013   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

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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Servant Leadership: The Secret Sauce of Extraordinary Cultures

 

By Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Great Tool for Collateral Leaders: Microvision Statements

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we are reprising 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See? It's easier than you thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

The Special Problem That Intelligent People Have

 

Coming on Wednesday

The Eight Habits of Highly Effective Listeners

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Four Rules for Growing Engagement

 

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

 —TJL                         

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

 

Coming on Friday

A Leadership Lesson from Elvis Presley

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

Does Accountability Actually Thwart Your Potential?

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They remember these experiences in detail forever. Forever!

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

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

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

 

Coming on Monday

25 Years of Incredible, Exhilarating Change

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

One Year Later, a Persistent Reminder and Prodding to BP

 

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

We believe it continues to be timely and relevant.

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Shareholder Return Rises With Employee Engagement

 

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

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

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

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Coming Wednesday

Just What, and Who, Is a Communicator?

 

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

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.

How Concise Is Communication in Your Organization?

 

(Tenth in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee

Three 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 concise. More than just brevity, our use of concise extends to issues of speed, duplication, detail, hesitancy, and caution of communication.

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:

 

• Does formal communication get right to the point?
• Do business proposals make use of a one-page or two-page format requiring concise statements of purpose, budget, impact, reasoning, and so forth?
• Are managers routinely sent CYA copies of emails, other correspondence, meeting minutes, proposals, and so forth?
• Are managers trained in the use of one-minute conversations and one-minute coaching of employees?
• Do internal company publications have a lot of extraneous, nonstrategic information?  
• Do middle managers hoard information that would be of strategic use to subordinates or peers?
• Do meetings begin on time and proceed according to schedule?
• Are data-intensive presentations and complex information circulated in advance of meetings?
• Are presentations couched in circuitous language?
• Are PowerPoint slides crowded with fine print and indecipherable diagrams?

 

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 Constant Is the Communication in Your Organization?

(Seventh 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 listing some diagnostic questions a company should ask itself to gauge its culture on each of the eight hallmarks.

Today we take up continuous. Here are some of the questions I like to ask to get a sense of the flow, the frequency, and the constancy of communication around strategic direction and work-place priorities:

 

• Is the organization in the habit of managing the flow of information as discrete communications—with an s—as opposed to a cohesive, continuing process of communication, which has no beginning and no end?
• Does the organization scramble to recover from miscommunication? Are the professionals responsible for the communication that drives external reputation and internal engagement often forced to play catch-up or "do damage control"?
• Are strategic messages cascaded down through the organization one level at a time? Does cascading interfere with reliable, timely, responsible communication of business strategy?
• Is your communication process essential one of push, or of pull, or a hybrid of both, and if so in what proportions and how?
• What kinds of information, and in what detail, about your performance and competitive situation are routinely available to employees?
• Is strategic information withheld from employees or disseminated only on a need-to-know basis? Is important information hoarded in middle management? How many employees feel they are often kept in the dark?
• What, if anything, do you do to ensure that ground-level employees are thinking about strategic priorities more or less in tandem with senior management?
• Do managers share business information quickly and eagerly, slowly and reluctantly, or not at all? How does senior management set the right tone for this?
• How well are front-line supervisors and team leaders kept informed of the full thinking behind strategic direction, imperatives, and priorities?
• Do supervisors and team leaders receive briefings that enable them to translate strategies, policies, and priorities to specific day-to-day work by employees?
• Are most supervisors addressing performance issues as they arise, in a spirit of support and improvement, or pushing aside the uncomfortable issues and beating around the bush?
• What is the core message there?
• How often do employees learn of substantive developments through the grapevine or by viewing a local TV newscast? How do they feel when they do?

 

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 Clear Is Communication In Your Organization?

 

 

 

(Third in a Series.)

 by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

Today we take up clear. I like to ask these questions about clarity:

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

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

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

 or write to us at [email protected]. 

 

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

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What Is Your Organization's Communication Culture?

 

(First in a Series.)

by Thomas J. Lee 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

We would be happy to help your organization assess and improve

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

 or write to us at [email protected].

 

 

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

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

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Price You Pay for Poor Leadership Communication

Companies pay a huge price for poor leadership communication, but few of them realize it. To appreciate it, you need to begin by distinguishing between managing and leading, and then compare the communication that drives the work of managing with the communication that drives the work of leading. They are different.

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with our core distinction between managing and leading. For the rest of you, here is a brief primer. It's important to note that we define each as the work it involves, not as a position in an organization.

Begin with Clear Definitions

We like to think of managing as the work of ensuring performance to predetermined criteria of some sort. If the criterion is time, you call it a meeting a deadline. If it is quantity (as in sales or production), you call it a beating a quota. If it is money, you call it coming in under budget. If it is a matter of ethics or the law, you call it being in compliance. If it is quality, you call it exceeding a standard.

Managing is all about diligently fulfilling specific expectations and promises of this nature. The deliverable of managing is workplace alignment around all this.

In contrast, we think of leading as the work of envisioning a future, articulating it, and inspiring people to do more than they think they can to achieve that vision, of their own volition; in circumstances that are unique, variable, changing, or distantly removed, and often requiring extraordinary effort and considerable sacrifice or peril.

Leading is all about bringing about change or a breakthrough performance through the discretionary effort of people, often without the immediate presence of oversight. The deliverable of leading is workplace engagement.

The Two Are Reinforcing

The two are not mutually exclusive. Just the opposite: They are mutually reinforcing. In our leadership-development workshops, we teach that anyone in any position of supervising authority in any organization must wear both hats, as a manager and as a leader.

That is true for the front-line supervisor, for the middle manager, and for C-suite executives. Indeed, looking only to senior executives for leadership is a common reason for the inability to change, for these organizations lack collateral leadership throughout.

Unfortunately, many business people confuse and conflate the two terms. They gloss over the differences between them and between the substance and style of communication that fosters each. They do not fully grasp the cost of doing either or both ineffectively, either.

Communication for Managing and Leading

In both substance and style, the communication that supports and drives the work of managing is different from the communication that supports and drives the work of leading.

Communication that fosters the work of managing is detailed, authoritative, and directive. It strives for consistency, compliance, and continuity. It seeks to limit negative deviations from the norm. Its tone can thus be somewhat negative, and its essential message is accountability.

Here is why: Managers often fret about not meeting a performance expectation or promise, so they are constantly on the alert for any indicator of failure. The quicker they spot a failure, the faster they can fix it. They err on the side of pessimism, because pessimism keeps them and their people wary and alert.

Communication that fosters the work of leading is general, inspirational, and empathic. It strives for the unprecedented, the extraordinary, the phenomenal. It prizes positive deviation from the norm, because it wants the exceptional. Its tone is therefore usually positive, and its essential message is opportunity.

Here is why: Leaders have confidence in an ambitious future, so they work to encourage people to strive for it. They err on the side of optimism, because optimism keeps them confident and energetic. Moreover, they know they must relate emotionally to people if they are to extract an emotional commitment from them. That requires a live-wire connectivity. Too much negativity deadens the connection.

The Cost of Managing or Leading Ineffectively

Now, with all that as a foundation, ask yourself about the cost of managing ineffectively and the cost of leading ineffectively. It’s really quite simple, but it isn't often noticed and appreciated.

The cost of managing ineffectively is misalignment. Here, people are not doing the particular work that needs to be done, or they are not doing it in the particular way that it needs to be done. Projects may be late, or they may exceed their budget, and products may be returned for rework. The misalignment means that you are missing your performance expectations and promises, and therefore that you are disappointing customers.

The cost of leading ineffectively is stagnation. Here, people may be meeting old performance expectations, but they are not moving up to the next level. They are still doing the same things in the same way, without regard to the need for change or breakthrough performance. Because people are too comfortable doing things the old way, they may voice denial or cynicism toward leadership. The stagnation means that your organization isn't changing, and in all likelihood you will not meet the demands of the future.

The Role of Communication

Because it reflects misalignment, the failure to manage effectively is often blamed on a refusal or reluctance of people to do as they are told. That may be part of it, but unclear or unstated expectations and instructions are also often part of it.

Because it reflects stagnation, the failure to lead effectively is often blamed on the refusal or reluctance of people to change. That’s an easy excuse, but incoherent and uninspiring communication is also often part of it.

Just think about it. People undertake change on their own all the time. They are constantly going on diets, proposing marriage or getting divorces, becoming parents, heading off to college, taking new jobs, getting different hairstyles, tasting sushi for the first time, learning to dance—the list is endless. People often inspire themselves to change just fine. It is not true that people are inherently averse to change. Life is change.

'Change Management' versus Leading Change

Good leaders know how to bring people through large change. They know they cannot merely manage change; rather, they must stand up and lead it. They know that leading change requires inspiring, credible, compelling communication. Big change is the work not of managing for accountability, but of leading for opportunity.

Companies need both managers and leaders. By default, they typically have far more of the former than the latter, and thus their feet are on the gas pedal of performance, not change.

It behooves every company to develop its managers at all levels into collateral leaders. That enables a company to change, and that is how every company can define and determine its own future.

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

A Special Report and Comment

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

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

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

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

Amoco's Safety Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Causes Come to Light

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

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

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

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

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

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

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

— TJL          

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The Single Most Powerful Means of Communication You Have

The single most powerful means of communication that you have, and the single most powerful means of communication that your company has, is: the decision.

Yes, the decision. Yes, this decision, and yes, that decision.

Your organization—be it a team, a department, a division, or a whole enterprise—probably makes dozens, perhaps hundreds, or conceivably even thousands of decisions every hour of every day.

Some of these decisions are modest, like whether to let a ringing telephone go to voice mail. Some of them are middling, like whether to elevate a complaint. Some of them are momentous, like whether to hire this person or fire that person. 

Each of these decisions is an opportunity to communicate, for each decision naturally communicates powerfully.

Think of each and every decision you make as a text message 

in neon lights, as a 120-point headline across the front page

of USA Today, as a YouTube video that goes viral and gets 

millions of hits, as a televised presidential address in prime 

time, all of them declaring publicly and globally and lastingly 

what really matters, and what doesn’t really matter, to you 

and to your organization.

That, after all, is how decisions actually do communicate.

Decisions communicate powerfully.

Noble decisions powerfully communicate the primacy of enduring values. Strategic decisions powerfully communicate the importance of business priorities. Public-spirited decisions powerfully communicate respect for people.

On the other hand, careless decisions send a powerful message that prudence doesn’t matter. Slow decisions send a powerful message that speed doesn’t matter. Erratic decisions send a powerful message that consistency doesn’t matter.

Whatever is true of your decisions is the powerful message of your decisions, for decisions tell the truth about you and your intentions. Words may lie, but not decisions. Decisions speak truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously declared: "What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say." Indeed it does. Moreover, what you do is the product of your decisions, some of them thoughtful and others not, some of them conscious and others not, some of them prudent and others not.

You say you want to communicate better? Begin with your decisions. Change your decisions, and you will change your message.

Question: What decisions should you change, and how should you change them, to send a message that is important to your customers, employees, investors, and other key stakeholders?

 

Note: This compelling observation is just one component of our workshops in leadership communication. If you are interested in a workshop for your team, kindly contact us at +1.847.247.2241.

 

Are You Using the GearBox Yet?

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

If you haven’t begun using the GearBox to analyze your employee engagement, you should start now. It is always an eye-opening exercise. It never fails to spark creative, structured thinking around the execution of business initiatives and strategies.

For the uninitiated, the Arceil GearBox is a simple but powerful analytic model that imposes a straightforward structure on the work of leadership to build engagement for change or breakthrough performance.

It consists of a 4 x 5 matrix. The four column headers—­Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance, and Commitment—refer to dimensions of employee orientation and disposition toward an organization’s success and growth. The five rows represent levels of alignment around leadership vision and strategy.

The best level is at the top: strategic focus, curiosity, passion, and courage. The worst is at the bottom: alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. In between are three middling levels, the higher the better. Here it is:

 

	Awareness	Understanding	Acceptance	Commitment
Overdrive	Focus	Curiosity	Passion	Courage
Drive	Attention	Clarity	Trust	Cooperation
Neutral	Acquaintance	Familiarity	Ambivalence	Inertia
Park	Distraction	Confusion	Apathy	Neglect
Reverse	Alienation	Denial	Cynicism	Resistance

This 4 X 5 matrix provides a structure for gauging the relative orientation of employees (or members, or volunteers, or supporters) toward the organization's mission or toward a particular initiative or strategy. The five rows reflect levels of disposition. We named them for the gears of a transmission. (The model and its use are protected by copyright.)

Five Levels of Performance

Think of the top level as creative engagement. For casual reference, we have dubbed it Overdrive. We regard this as an operational definition of engagement in the work place: employees in a state of strategic focus, curiosity, passion, and courage.

Here is where you find high-engagement organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Apple Computer, Nordstrom, Google, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, championship sports teams, victorious political campaigns, and the legendary Skunk Works R&D operation of Lockheed Martin.

The next-best level appears one level down. Think of it as active engagement. For the sake of the metaphor, we call it Drive. We regard this as basic employee support: attention, clarity, trust, and cooperation. It is hard to imagine a cohesive, competitive work force in a dynamic market without this basic support.

Importantly, any organization competing on the basis of innovation, service, technology, creativity, culture, research, speed, or quality must minimally be at active or creative engagement. Anything less runs the risk of abrupt defection of key customers or employees and the sudden erosion of market share.

The middle level is Neutral. You can think of it as passive engagement. It is really mediocrity. We regard it as a sense of affiliation, not much more. The descriptors we chose for this level are: acquaintance, familiarity, ambivalence, and inertia. A work force at this level may be enough to survive in commodity or generic markets, but it is inadequate for competing on turf any more demanding than price discounting.

Another level down is Park. Think of it as passive disengagement. It is inferiority, a state of internal, corrosive disregard. Here you will find distraction, confusion, apathy, and neglect. It is dangerous territory. Unfortunately, all too many organizations find themselves here after years of treating their people like depreciable assets. From here, it is imperative to climb out and up, lest you stagnate or even slip further down.

The very worst level we call Reverse. Think of it as active disengagement. We regard it as an operational definition of toxins in the work place. It consists of employees (or even the executive suite, as in the cases of companies whose management was corrupt) in a state of alienation, denial, cynicism, and resistance. Only the saddest organizations find themselves here. This is where non-represented labor forces are actively seeking to organize, where unions threaten to strike at any perceived offense, or where particularly venal employees engage in sabotage or other demonstrations of contempt. It is possible to climb out—indeed, I have seen it—but it requires a sustained and concerted effort.

The Exercise

The exercise is simple in form but quite compelling in impact. Here is an overview; in our consulting engagements and workshops, the discussion goes quite a bit deeper and drills into the particulars of your organization.

Begin by reflecting on the entire chart, one column at a time. Now, in privacy, pinpoint the level of your management team within each column. Next, do the same for the organization as a whole, thinking in terms of the typical non-supervisory, non-managerial person. Keep your choices to yourself.

Now, ask yourself these questions:

• What would full strategic focus look like? Where do you already see it? Where do you instead see distraction or even alienation? How do media and social “noise” affect this? What can you do to heighten awareness of your business environment, vision, and strategy? What obstacles are in the way? How do you get around them? What have you done that interferes with strategic focus?

• What would broadly based, strategic curiosity look like? Why do you want it? Why is curiosity even more important than clarity? Where do you already see it? Where don’t you? How much confusion and denial are there? What can you do to cultivate greater understanding of the implications of strategy on day-to-day work? What obstacles are in the way? How do you get around them? Which of your own behaviors must you change to demonstrate by example?

• What would real passion look like? Why is it important? Passion for what? Where do you see it? Where do you only wish you saw it? Where do you instead see apathy and cynicism? Do you see real passion in yourselves? In one another? In what ways? What specifically can you do to nurture enthusiastic acceptance of your vision? What is in the way? How much apathy and cynicism are there? How does emotion complement reasoning toward full engagement?

• What would genuine courage look like in business? Do you ever see it? Where, if at all? Where instead do you see neglect or resistance? What emotions do you see when you peel back the neglect and resistance? In what ways is courage in the workplace important? What does it have to do with commitment? What specifically can you do to build more commitment to this organization? What should you refrain from doing? What stands in the way?

An impartial third party should be asked to interview each member of the senior management team, in confidence, so as to collect a true self-portrait of the management team as well as its perception of the state of ground-level employees. Then it becomes imperative to close whatever gaps emerge within the senior management team and between senior management and the workforce. The shorter the "distance" between leader and follower, the more taut will be the line that connects them.

Our clients have found this exercise to be quite powerful. It provides a framework and linear process for the execution of initiatives and strategies. While it may oversimplify things a little, it also sheds light on some real difficulties, and it’s a powerful inducement to a large, overdue conversation.

*           *           *

For onsite/offsite facilitation of a GearBox exercise, contact Thomas J. Lee

by email at [email protected] or by telephone at +1-847-247-2241.

Please note that the GearBox is protected by copyright.

  

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Purpose-Driven Leadership, Purpose-Driven Communication

I intend no disrespect to Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, by appropriating its title for my post today. Warren's ideas certainly trump my own. His arena is of far greater significance, as well.

Still, it is worth examining the fundamental purpose of leadership and communication in the workplace. So many companies get it wrong, and so very much is at stake. Few companies even pause to reflect on important questions like this.

Let's frame the discussion between two opposing poles of purpose: gaining the contentment or earning the commitment of the people of an organization.

Both are important, but one is more important than the other. Even today, probably most large companies go after the former purpose, contentment. They call it morale or esprit de corps or camaraderie or just plain old fun at work. Their ultimate measure of success is one of the 100 places on Fortune's Best Places to Work list. For companies that so value it, the responsibilities and expectations of the internal-communication function often reflect that orientation.

Now morale is a good thing, of course. I myself like to have fun at work, and I hold Best Places to Work companies in generally high regard. But something else is more important than contentment. It is deep, real commitment. Desirable as morale is, commitment is essential for high performance.

You see, genuine commitment is a powerful, powerful thing. I imagine it like the cosmic lever that Archimedes had in mind when he talked of moving a planet. You remember. "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand," the ancient Greek mathematician and physicist said, "and I shall move the world."

When I think of commitment, I think of that power to move the world: a persistent, deep-seated, unyielding, against-all-odds, do-whatever-it-takes drive to achieve that which the organization is seeking to achieve. Such commitment is palpable. You can recognize it and feel it. You can see it. You can hear it and almost taste it.

Commitment is muscle and the energy to move muscle, all at once. Contentment is nice but really no match. In the absence of commitment, mere contentment is a fancy store-window mannequin: pretty and showy on the outside, lifeless and hollow on the inside. Conversely, even in the absence of contentment, deep commitment is a restless, relentless, churning ambition that won't surrender until its quest comes into being.

Of course, in an ideal world, I would take both contentment's beauty and commitment's brawn.

Indeed, that is what you see in such splendid, high-performance enterprises as the Mayo Clinic, Google, the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the Container Store, Wegman's, Cisco Systems, the Weather Channel, the Navy SEALs and Blue Angels, Apple Computer, the Centers for Disease Control, the University of Chicago, Northwestern Mutual, the Boston Red Sox, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, and the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble, to name a dozen or so off the top of my head.

But forced to choose between the two—the beauty of contentment or the brawn of commitment—I will always take commitment. It is the fulcrum for executing a business strategy. Without commitment, little is possible that isn't a matter of luck. With it, anything is possible.

To be so powerful, commitment must run both deeply into and broadly across the organization. It's never enough just to be floating through executive corridors or across a headquarters campus or around a company's flagship operation. It must be everywhere throughout the enterprise.

The commitment needs something to focus on, and that something should be the customer's needs and highest expectations. Its measure can be either strategic or tactical. It may be climbing to first in market share, or shaving months off moving a new product to market, or completely avoiding workplace injuries. It may be dramatically reducing absenteeism or staff turnover, or gaining more diversity in the executive suite, or doubling sales volume. It may be registering more patents than the year before, or retaining a key customer who's on the fence, or reducing the number of product returns. The list can go on and on.

The specific goals will naturally flow from vision, its roots sunk deep in the soil of both nobility and community. By nobility, I mean that which meets the highest standards of what is right and proper. By community, I mean the inclusion of everyone on your team.

Setting the company's direction, vision and goals is a primary responsibility of senior management. Growing the commitment necessary to achieve those goals is the primary responsibility of leadership communication. Did I say communication? You bet. By dint of managing the company's formal media, it is uniquely positioned to do this work. No one else can do it.

This is a new, major responsibility, to be sure. It goes far beyond the responsibility that is traditionally accorded to corporate communication. But that is only because most companies are concerned more with contentment than with commitment. Few have ever thought so out-of-the-box like this.

Wherever and whenever contentment matters more, the communication function will rarely be central to the success of a company. Employees (or associates or partners, depending on your nomenclature) may be happy but ultimately unfulfilled, and the organization itself may be self-satisfied but less than optimally successful.

So my central message today is: Driving commitment deep into and all across the enterprise should be the first aim and the final measure of leadership communication. It is the purpose of leadership communication.

Where this is not already the case, senior leaders ought to rethink their expectations for corporate communication and raise the bar accordingly. Begin to value purpose. Distinguish between contentment and commitment. Don't settle for contentment, for morale. Go for deep, genuine commitment—at the contagious level of nobility and community.

Now once you choose the right path, appreciate what it means. In Warren's books (he has also written the The Purpose-Driven Church, which is even more instructive for business leaders), the notion of purposefulness is central to everything. Warren argues that an organization's core purpose should drive all substantive decisions on goals, strategy, and tactics down to issues of budget, personnel, and time. For if not purpose, what else?

Organizational purpose must also align with individual purpose, at least at the top and preferably throughout the company. If the C-suite's purpose is to prepare the company for a leveraged buyout, or to sell it at a premium primarily for their own largesse, the misalignment will undermine the professed corporate purpose. That's no good either.

So let the nobility and community of your purpose rise to its proper role. Let it control your decision-making. Let it be determinative. The sad alternative is to forget or ignore your real purpose and then to fall short of it and settle for a good but meaningless effort. Through clarity and command of good and decent purpose, you win, and everybody around you wins, as well.

At the very least, you'll always have a better chance of gaining contentment by going for commitment than of gaining commitment by going for contentment.

(Adapted and republished from September 24, 2005.)

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By the Numbers: Workplace Safety

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

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored issues of employee engagement, organizational culture, information overload, trust in business, strategic communication, job satisfaction, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

 

Work-related injuries, both fatal and nonfatal, continued a 15-year decline in the United States in 2008, the most-recent year for which statistics are available.

According to preliminary data, the United States experienced 3.9 cases of work-related nonfatal injury or illness per 100 full-time workers in 2008. That represents a substantial decrease from 4.2 cases in 2007.

Also by a preliminary tally, there were 3.6 work-related fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers in 2008. That, too, represents a substantial decrease from 2007, when the comparable figure was 4.0, and a dramatic decrease from 1994, when it was 5.6.

Still, there were 5,071 workplace fatalities in the United States in 2008. That is far more than the death toll of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan last year, or of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or of drug abuse, or of swine flu.

No one can rest until this figure is zero. 

 

As you reflect on this data, explore the implications on workplace safety from the trend to multitasking and the proliferation of smart phones and personal data devices.

 

 

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Insights on Leadership from the 2016 Olympics Host Decision

Having lived in or near Chicago for most of my adulthood, I am naturally disappointed at the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2016 summer games to Rio de Janeiro. Yes, it will be good finally to have the Games in South America, but the world will miss an exquisite opportunity to see my own beautiful city.

Let's try to extract some lessons on leadership from yesterday's voting. Now that it has become clearer what happened and why, perhaps we can learn something from the experience about how leadership plays out in our day-to-day work.

Four cities were competing for the honors: Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio. Each had some advantages and disadvantages. I like to think that Chicago’s advantages were overwhelming and its disadvantages minuscule. London’s bookies had laid odds on Chicago. The prevailing expectation was that Chicago would win. Yet our city was the first to be sidelined in the tiered voting.

The structure and process of voting was key. The IOC consists largely of former Olympians, the bulk of them from Europe and few from North America. Although representatives of the competing cities and countries do not vote, their loyalists do. The actual voting proceeds in rounds. Barring an outright majority, in each sucessive round, the city with the fewest votes loses. Then the surviving cities move on to the next round.

With 20/20 hindsight, we can now clearly see that it was in no one’s interest to let the United States survive the first vote. Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio could all hold out hope for their own bids only if Chicago lost early. Otherwise, the American city would prevail.

So they cooperated on that first round. Because it appeared that Tokyo would most likely be the first city to lose, enough IOC delegates who favored Rio shifted their first vote in Tokyo’s favor so that it could survive the first round. These were insincere votes, intended only to defeat Chicago. The gambit worked. The first-round tally was fairly even, but Chicago came up with the least support.

What meaning does this have for leaders and would-be leaders? Just this.

Leaders must never presume that their followers will fall into line, and they must never presume that their skeptics and rivals will be idle. Followers, both real and potential, will think and choose for themselves and align in their own strategic interest. They may or may not identify themselves in ways that the leaders presume. Their alliances may or may not reflect the assumptions of leaders. Their self-interest may or may not be apparent to leaders.

The support that leaders expect to enjoy may or may not materialize. Whether it does is not up to the leader. It is up to the followers. Indeed it is always the follower, never the leader, that determines who will lead and who will follow.

That is the lesson we draw. In the IOC voting, it was painful for us in Chicago. But that’s life.

One final note of unabashed civic boosterism. For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, you really do  owe it to yourselves to discover Chicago.

Ours is a city of spectacular beauty and charm. We have incredible architecture, phenomenal museums and orchestras, two world-class universities, towering skyscrapers, impressive public sculture, a network of virgin prairies and forests, flower-laden boulevards, unrivaled ethnic diversity, and riveting dramatic theater and opera.

We have an inland coastline with beaches and an azure sea dappled with white sailboat masts to the horizon, extraordinary shopping, a river that flows backward and bridges that open to the sky, the best baseball park in the world, restaurants for any taste, a patchwork quilt of charming and livable neighborhoods, and—how can we put this?—endlessly intriguing politics.

On top of all that, in Lincoln Park, Grant Park, and now Millennium Park we actually have a front yard. In every respect, we are truly the quintessential American city.

Give me a call if you're coming. I would love to show you around.

By the Numbers: Front-Line Supervisors Fail to Communicate

About a month ago we introduced a weekly feature, By the Numbers. We start off each week (or most weeks, anyway) with a statistic that is noteworthy, alarming, misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

To date we have explored the economic impact of employee disengagement in U.S.-based companies (scroll down to the September 21 post), the extent of disengagement in the workplace (September 14), the frequency of projects that fail (August 31), the link between employee disengagement and absenteeism (August 24), the myths around the impact of nonverbal communication (August 17), and the fear of recrimination in the workplace (August 10).

Today we explore the lack of candor and honesty in supervisory communication.

Probably most companies still rely on the front-line manager or supervisor as their mouthpiece in the workplace. In those companies, the supervisor is supposed to convey key strategic information and messages to employees who do the work.

We will return to the question of whether that is the most appropriate role for front-line supervisors in the 21st century, with the ubiquity of communication by BlackBerry, text, Twitter, and good old-fashioned email. Today, far more and far faster than in the 1990s and before, electronic communication reaches everyone in an organization by leak and by rumor. (Those of you who participated in my webinar last Thursday know that I have a perspective on this issue. We’ll come back to it here in Minding Gaps in a few days.)

For now, let’s concentrate on how well front-line supervisors communicate. They appear to need some help. According to research by Towers Perrin, only 38 percent of employees of global corporations say their managers communicate openly and honestly. As for the other 62 percent, we can only speculate.

It’s hard to imagine that employers or the managers in question would agree with that perception, but communication, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is the listener’s judgment that counts. If the listener perceives half-truth or untruth, or if the listener perceives double talk or fast talk, then that is what it is. You have to deal with the perception, because perception is reality.

Here are some questions to frame your thinking on this challenge:

• What roles and responsibilities with respect to communicating business strategy and priorities do managers and supervisors in your organization have?

• What particular skills and competencies are necessary to carry out those roles and responsibilities?

• To what extent does the organization assume those skills and competencies are inherent in anyone with the normal and overall qualifications to work in management?

• To what extent are they, truly?

• What training in strategic communication—that is, the communication of business strategy—is provided to the new front-line manager or supervisor? How well and how often is that training upgraded and renewed?

• What does the training say about clarity and honesty?

• What is the process of support in strategic communication for the front-line manager or supervisor? In particular, how does the organization funnel strategic information to the front line?

• What accountabilities for strategic communication does the front-line manager or supervisor face?

• Does your organization have a review process, involving the people who report to the front-line manager or supervisor, to assess each manager’s and supervisor’s communication of business strategy?

Feel free to respond to these questions by leaving a comment. Comments are subject to review by the blog’s editor, who may edit them for grammar and clarity and may leave a response of his own. Comments with abusive, promotional, or profane language will not be published.