If Only All CEOs Believed

Author: Dave Crisp

20 Nov

When three CEOs presented their views recently at SCNetwork that HR is a valuable contributor at the most senior level of their organizations someone commented there wasn’t much new. I disagree. It’s not that we heard earth-shattering new techniques, but we did see something new in three CEOs who expect and insist HR should not only be at the senior table (our former peak aim), but should be challenging the other executives at that level, the CEO him- or herself and managers throughout the company to step up to higher levels of understanding and behavior with respect to HR issues. That’s a bit different from the usual “of course we value HR.”

When the CEOs broke it down, they were unanimous this won’t happen unless the CEO personally drives it. They’re aware managers in lower ranks feel quite justified in viewing HR as a purely transactional role – hiring, firing, disciplining and generally keeping up with the paperwork, the regulations and ‘all that stuff’ that line managers say they have no time for. That’s on a good day. These CEOs want to turn that around and help lower ranking managers develop greater appreciation for their own and HR’s strategic role. It’s interesting how they all seemed to be using similar key ways to go about this.

The two CEOs who hadn’t had direct experience in support roles expressed their surprise at discovering when they reached the CEO chair that they immediately started wanting strategic input from HR. Who else partners with the CEO to improve teamwork at the senior table? How they are expected to partner is also enlightening.

Although I’ve heard and read plenty in the last few years about the need for tough conversations as a regular diet, I was surprised at the vehemence with which this group supported the concept, one also mentioning Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which expands the same basic concepts more specifically toward team development. It’s true we might expect CEOs chosen for a panel to be on their best behavior with respect to HR, especially with their HR directors sitting in the audience, but asking them to challenge executives in such specific ways is new. Of course we’re looking at a select group, but one whose members are serious about engaging HR effectively.

A couple commented there isn’t enough tough feedback coming at the senior team from around the company and that ‘maybe we haven’t made it safe enough.’ The move to encourage constructive confrontation of issues in tough conversations is key to developing teams and turning them into high performing leadership groups, but not many CEOs are ready or willing to face up to that. They know they need HR to help that happen with fairness and balance, a word they mentioned frequently.

When asked about values, they were unanimous about their importance. Again this wasn’t new to an audience of converts in the HR field as the grounding for high performance, but two things stood out. These individuals are serious about making their values work to the point of insisting they and every manager in the company be called out if they weren’t walking the talk. That’s still truly rare, although getting more widespread as the news leaks that this is the way to financial results and customer satisfaction.

As an aside, it was interesting they are quite happy to promote values with t-shirts, mugs, posters, handout cards among the more common tools that have been called into question or made the butt of jokes. Either they’re too new at the game to realize this stuff is perceived by many as hokey or those who see it that way are missing the point – it all contributes – if, but only if, the CEO backs it up and is willing to be held accountable to live those values along with everyone else.

That of course led to the million dollar challenge question – will you fire a top producer who doesn’t live up to the values. To a person all three not only said they would, but gave examples of where they had (thanking their HR people for advice to treat long service well on the way out the door and do things right, but nevertheless, do them). To paraphrase one, ‘if you let stuff like this go, you’re just expanding the problem and undermining everything you’re working toward.’ That’s new despite having heard so many times before, as one said, “if the CEO doesn’t get it..”

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Respect, Good Leadership, (Ethics) and Quality People

Author: Dave Crisp

25 Sep

What issues rank among the top four or five that create high engagement?

Guess what Mercers and SMITH magazine just found from a survey of readers as reported in Canadian HR Reporter? 7000 people entered their Six Words About Work contest and these emerged. As they point out these four have remained constant despite the recession and continuing turbulence.

As far back as the dark ages (just before the dot.com bubble burst and was accused of busting the War For Talent) around y2k, I started using the top five that AON found in one of their massive surveys – and guess what? They found the same items in the same order, with just a little more definition of what those ideas mean.

We could enter this in the “how many times do we have to prove the same thing” contest, but why carp at reinforcing what we all need to keep in mind about the modern workforce? Good times or bad, employees want respect, which incidentally reflects instantly in leaders’ stance on work-life balance, which is why that issue ranks so high on employees’ want lists. If you respect people, you support them taking the time they need, when they need it, to get life in order.

Good leadership is about challenging people to be the best they can be and supporting them in their striving to succeed (and gain promotions, which is where the bigger salary increases come from).

Ethics, which the new survey can’t seem to find a word for, includes everyone being honest, but especially the pride employees want to feel that a company is delivering a decent product or service for the money, something that came out loud and clear in this survey. It slides into AON’s finding that employees want “fairness” which included fair rewards (the good do better than the poor performers) and fair in relation to what other companies pay, but also fair to other stakeholders and customers.

Quality people is about training and supporting staff who can thus deliver those good products and services as part of a team. as virtually all surveys find. All four or five, depending on how you count them, wrap into each other.

You can’t leave one or more out and expect the whole to hold together. Engagement comes when all these are ticking along smoothly most of the time and leaders are walking the talk as well as routinely talking about it in lofty vision and values statements.

And then along comes Yahoo, a modern, up-to-date company enlightened enough to hire a solid woman as CEO. and then. oops, as of early September, fire her. over the phone. Ever want to know a highly visible way to show your employees how much you do or don’t respect people or treat them fairly? This will generally go down as one way to make the point unmistakably.

Does one blunder invalidate everything you’ve put in place before that? Generally not, but if you can treat your CEO this way, I’d be looking over my shoulder as an employee for sure. and maybe tidying up my resume ‘just in case.’ If you want your employees thinking that way, just violate those four or five seemingly basic, but apparently challenging principles that we all know, that operate in good times and bad. Do we need to hear them proven again? Apparently some major operators do.

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Filed under: 2 Positive - Feelings, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Coaching Others, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Integrated Talent Management, Good HR and Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

28 Aug

i4CP sent a newsletter recently commenting on the need for “Integrated” to be added to the term Talent Management in order to update it and make it more powerful as they suggest in a new book. They mention the number of providers in the area changing names – StepStone Solutions to Lumesse and PeopleClickAuthoria to PeopleFluent. It sometimes seems as if every update of strategy requires a new name, though the new ones sometimes don’t seem much more enlightening than the old.

It got me to questioning the use of the term Talent Management itself. I have always taken it to be an umbrella that takes in finding, recruiting, orienting, developing, managing and tracking performance and then moving people up through effective succession planning all the way through their careers. That definitely calls for integration of many HR functions and beyond since line managers have to be central in many of the pieces – from supportive coaching on the development side to career planning conversations with individuals. They are definitely needed for effective succession planning discussions among groups of managers so everyone agrees on how to rotate people through progressively challenging assignments across different divisions to season their leadership knowledge and skills.

So I’m all for adding “Integrated” to make the point since, as i4CP notes, HR is splintered and hasn’t made nearly as much progress as it should have in most companies at breaking down the silos that would allow true integration of these operations.

We need this now, but at a job search presentation I gave recently an audience member came up afterward to ask about my use of the word “talent” in the phrase, “Sell your talent, not your skills.” Her understanding was talent meant born-in skills. Mine (and the source I’d quoted) mean something more like “your global skill set viewed by what it can achieve rather than the individual skills: your overall ‘talent’ for. whatever”. In other words, I sell my ability (or talent) to get upset groups of people cooperating together for common solutions, not the separate component skills like conflict management, consensus-building, etc. – a ‘sell results’ view rather than a nuts and bolts view of what I do.

This definitely highlights a difficulty with the generic term ‘talent.’ Some senior executives still take this to mean the handful of ‘highly talented’ individuals they depend on to drive the business – the so-called A-players. This can mean programs set up for the rare few who show really outstanding performance or qualities. In fact Talent Management as it needs to be practiced for bigger impact on organizational results requires that the program take in far more people – including pretty much everyone in any sort of leadership role in the organization. I mentioned a book a couple of months back (Talent is Overrated) about the folly of thinking people are ‘born with talent’ or that if they haven’t got it, you can’t build it. Geoff Colvin in his excellent book debunks that neatly by showing even the most ‘talented’ musicians, for instance, get there by endless practice at their chosen field. Malcolm Gladwell gets at the same points in his book Outliers.

So while Talent Management is a term that’s grown rapidly in popularity, it probably has for the wrong reasons – because for many it calls forth the mental image of the sole super-contributor, the knight on a white horse – exactly the picture of leadership that is now outmoded and that is holding back results for so many organizations. Instead they need the up-and-coming, innovative, learners who are keen to try new ideas – guided by some seasoned veterans who can help them manage risk (ie: avoid pitfalls the younger set haven’t experienced), but still forge ahead with continual improvement. That’s a very different need from the all-knowing, all-powerful ‘talented few’ that many still hope for and imagine exist.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Coaching Others, Coaching over Command Leadership, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Rays of Insight in the Jumbled Field of Leadership

Author: Dave Crisp

17 Jun

Annually I’ve had a chance to sit in with about 24 Senior VPs of HR as we examine some topic related to, but beyond the normal scope of day to day HR work. At the latest event, Professor Mary Crossan, an expert in business strategy from Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario, walked us through a full day discussing the ‘bleeding edge’ of study of Character that is emerging rapidly. She was on her way to a world conference on the subject the following week and was as eager to bounce ideas around as we were. As with any evolving study there are differing opinions.

In a nutshell this followed themes from Western’s research into “Leadership on Trial” from which they offer a downloadable slide deck. To oversimplify somewhat this arises from the belief coming out of the research that the last economic meltdown was caused in large part by greed and lack of risk-consciousness on the part of a great many leaders who should have both known and behaved better – in short a result of character flaws. From this view, effective leadership requires three elements – competencies, commitment and character. but what exactly is character, how can it be measured, can it be taught, learned or improved on. or are we stuck with whatever character our top leaders were born with?

Looked at another way, we observe that many leaders power their way to the top through tremendous determination or commitment (perhaps driven by personal needs including greed) and by developing good competencies, but along the way there seems to be no corresponding well of character development in operation in many cases that we see.

Many financial leaders rely on Adam Smith’s economic insight that drives free market capitalism – if everyone tries to act in their own best self-interest, things should progress and market forces will make it all self-managing. Like all great observations, this holds considerable truth, but also a real danger of swinging pendulums before the self-managing features take effect. Yes, markets self-regulate to a degree, but not without endless cycles of periodic bubbles — manias like the one in the mortgage markets that led to this latest fiasco.

In short, with more on this complicated topic planned for future posts, the key thing about Character as it is being revealed in newer studies is that it’s quite different from competencies. Where Marcus Buckingham can reasonably recommend the value of focusing on your top three to five competencies rather than trying to change stubborn weaknesses in your skill set, the reverse is true for character traits.

Whether you categorize character traits into six groups totaling 24 traits in all, as Marty Seligman and Christopher Peterson do in their massively complex, and likely flawed, work on the subject, or you use some other list, it is the weak areas of character that can stop us cold as leaders and create boundless trouble. So we have to work on our weaknesses in all areas, at least attempting to become more well-rounded. Nor can we simply assemble a leadership team comprising people with different strengths (and weaknesses) of character and expect it to work – with one, say, very honest and another, who might be quite weak on honesty, but strong on some of the other traits like bravery, persistence, curiosity, etc. Missing that strength in honesty would likely make that team member a fatal liability, if not for the entire group, for at least many of its projects.

Unfortunately few Boards in the financial industry appear to have recognized the potential downside of the flaws of greed and imprudence in many of their top leaders who, in other respects, had many competencies and strengths that otherwise made them good choices to run such operations. This looks like a rich field of study for further understanding of leadership.

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Facing Fallibility as a Leader

Author: Dave Crisp

16 Apr

A Zen principle I took to heart early is one I summarize to myself as “no pride.” It doesn’t mean not taking pride in one’s accomplishments or making an effort to get things done well. The focus is not letting pride get in the way of those very goals.

To get the best results you almost always have to risk looking foolish at least some of the time. If you’re truly taking risks, as necessary for better than average results, you have to face the fact you will actually lose a significant number of those attempts. A great, innovative idea rarely emerges fully formed with all the details perfectly worked out. Often as you try to make it work, the very foundation of it shifts to something you didn’t expect. Not only will others be quick to point out all the risks initially, they will be quick to point out your failures along the way.

It’s all very well to say leaders need to develop thick skins, but when your critics turn out to be right and you have to reverse course and do things their way, it stings no matter how you try to convince yourself this is the only way to make progress. Reminding myself of the principle of ‘no pride’ has often been helpful in getting through those moments. It makes feeling humble a virtue, which it is. Making progress toward the objective is more important than who is right or wrong. Your ability as a leader to stick your neck out first and be the first to be wrong and admit it is a critical part of your ability to move things forward.

It’s great to be right. Ideally we build a track record of being right more often than not, but even more important is a track record of trying stuff. Calculating risk is valuable, but so is forging ahead steadily whether you have time to fully evaluate the risks or not.

One of the psychological factors I believe we overlook in leadership is that the higher you go on the ladder, the farther it feels like you might fall. At the outset, the rashness of youth pushes many budding leaders to take the risks that turn them into strong executives. Experience is a necessary teacher no matter how well we design classroom training. Rotating potential leaders through increasingly challenging roles and exposing them to risky situations and occasional failure is critical to developing well-rounded skills that will be essential for higher levels of responsibility and broader challenges.

It’s a truism, recognized in all leadership development literature that leaders must learn through some sizable failures along their career paths or they won’t really be effective further on. But there is a danger of evolving in either of two fatal directions. Down one path they may become risk averse, which can take different forms – either allowing risks, but blaming all mistakes on subordinates or simply preventing their departments and subordinates from taking risks at all. Down the other path ironically, they may become unrealistic about the potential for failure. This may result in faster, more spectacular failure from blindingly stupid mistakes (can you think of any, say, in the financial industry recently) or it may simply mean choosing a flawed long term strategy and riding its inevitable downhill trajectory despite continual signs of slowly, but steadily declining performance.

Do your leaders fail to risk or risk too much? How do we help them through these flaws?

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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Coaching Issues, Leaders of the Future, Learning Organization

Give Up On Converting C-Level Executives?

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Feb

Recently a group of 23 senior VPs of HR (the top people in their companies) met for 3 hours to listen to and discuss with a panel composed of. a highly respected CEO (now Chair of his organization), a PhD researcher in the field, a highly specialized and successful consultant and a very senior coach of C-level executives with a long history in the field. The topic: how can we get the C-suite involved in actively understanding and promoting employee engagement?

The issue: we see mountains of research proving engaged workers deliver vastly superior financial and company results that accumulate dramatically over time. Still 82% of leaders seem to ignore these results and in almost every company only about 20% of employees are substantially engaged in their work. It seems not a coincidence that these figures work out as they do – the 18% of effective leaders are reaching about that proportion of staff apparently.

The conclusion: by the time executives gain top authority they either believe employees contribute and need to be engaged and treated so they will be. or they don’t (and most still don’t despite the concrete evidence). Those who don’t still find many ways to slough off the figures – doesn’t fit my industry, wouldn’t work in our culture, too difficult, expensive or time-consuming to be bothered, too slow, too distracting from ‘the real business.’ You name it, you’ve probably heard it. And yes, Boards demand quarterly results, so CEOs have to dish out orders, not wait and hope creative leadership will produce results sometime.

The recommendation: (this is where it gets frustrating) Not a lot you can do except hold up examples of positive, people-oriented leaders who are getting good results and then try to make the connection. Even then most nay-sayers will do their best to find other reasons for the success that do not suggest the nay-sayer should improve their behavior.

Two days later this posting appeared on a learning officer site:

Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to sustain participation in leadership development offerings? We have a lot of great programs and a wonderful framework in place to continue to develop our leaders. We have monthly lunch and learn type exchanges, bulletin boards, blogs, wiki sites, book clubs, on-line learning, mentor programs and formal classroom style learning. We select topics either from leader suggestions, developmental gap areas, or from business driven timelines. We have some leaders that are actively seeking self-development and they attend and participate in almost all of the offerings, and other leaders will either attend sporadically or infrequently. Any suggestions on how to truly engage all the leaders in their own development? Does anyone else see the same things in their organization?

My answer: Everyone sees this. (I recounted the SVP conclusions above and said.) We have to convince all our positive leaders to coach every possible individual they’re in contact with. I believe the message is spreading, but if we hope to see a ‘tipping point’ in our lifetime, where the majority of leaders take this stuff for granted and keep on improving themselves and their staffs, we all have to get this message out. Period. A single powerful CEO can influence major improvement, that we know, but we also know there are very few of these and developing more probably waits for new generations to make it to C-level. In the meantime all any of us can do is try wherever we work to influence as many as possible.

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Filed under: 3 Strategic - Thinking, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Business/Strategy, Coaching Issues, Human Resources (HR), Learning Organization

WikiLeaks About YOUR Business?

Author: Dave Crisp

9 Feb

Now that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is preparing to go after a business in addition to his government targets, perhaps that casts some light on what he or the justice system should or shouldn’t do.

Shares of the suspected target, Bank of America, tumbled 3.5% or $4 billion worth in a few hours. Of course, that’s the stock market for you and presumably some seemingly savvy investors would then take advantage of buying low and help stabilize the price almost as soon as it was perceived to be dropping. After all no one actually knew at that point (and still don’t) whether Assange’s claims to have damning evidence of downright illegal dealing actually were being made about this particular bank or not. Only by putting together information he dropped in earlier interviews was any connection guessed.

Whatever the outcome of this event, a few things seem clear. Assange has found a new use of the Internet and hacking (which he was convicted of earlier in life). Many people seem OK that he’s revealed classified documents from governments. Whether they seem as willing to stand by now that he’s moving on to business is an unknown. The debate will no doubt rage extensively.

What his move toward business revelations raises is the question of what would have been the right approach if this isn’t. If you or I had evidence of illegal activity of a business or an individual, the more accepted course of action would be to present it to legal authorities, the police or SEC, and expect them to deal with it.

Innocent until proven guilty clearly falls into a gray zone if such information is simply published. No matter how clearly damning the ‘evidence’ might be, there are rules about whether it is validated, admitted into judicial process and more. Simply dumping into the public domain may be a journalistic scoop approach applicable to public figures, institutions and public information, but when it is classified or proprietary material, however obtained, one would expect going through proper authorities first might be more appropriate. Would that be any less public? Perhaps initially, but certainly not as soon as charges are laid. and that, too, removes much of the right to presumption of innocence unless convicted.

What’s also clear is there are very few true secrets one can or should depend on staying secret no matter what line of work or social endeavor you’re in. In one sense it’s great if we operate all the time as if anyone should be able to know what we’re saying or doing. Companies with rules against negative, behind-the-back gossip, for instance, clearly are straying into questions of confidentiality of individual conversations, hearsay and innuendo.

On the other hand, if a manager has a clear discussion with an employee about short-comings, isn’t gossiping behind their back, and puts this on record as a warning or developmental advice and that sort of personal information is made public by something like WikiLeaks, I think both we and law enforcement would take a pretty dim view of that. It seems likely we’d conclude the information would be damaging to all concerned. The employee’s reputation and future job prospects would suffer and so would the ability of managers to act properly in evaluating work in the future, thus damaging the ability of employees to improve. Some might argue pure verbal discussions should suffice, but we all know that until something is in writing it is often ignored.

It’s not like any of this is completely new. It’s probably more that a single individual with no grounding or connection to established process, like editorial over-sight, for instance, has been able to rock some very large boats single-handedly in a dramatic way. Like so many new initiatives fuelled by wide open Internet and technology, this simply raises old questions in new ways and suggests that we’re all going to be extremely busy trying to figure out what’s best and what policies are needed to ensure that. If it’s all right for Wikileaks to leak your information, how can you ensure your employees don’t routinely use conduits like that to reveal what they cannot themselves? Interesting?

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Filed under: 1 Balance - Judgment, 3 Strategic - Thinking, 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Business/Strategy, Communicating Effectively, Current Affairs

Dealing With Leaders’ All Too Human Side

Author: Dave Crisp

23 Jan

In the last post I commented on conclusions from the book Kluge by Gary Marcus, about the odd ways human beings think due to the history of how our brains evolved. The word kluge describes a haphazard assembly of ‘stuff’ that is put together the way is it because it works, it solves some immediate problem and then further developments tend to institutionalize the earlier, odd, less than fully logical set up.

We needed instant emotional reactions to help us deal with predators and other dangers in our early evolution, but later needed more logical thinking to get beyond that stage. Nevertheless, while instant emotional ‘conclusions’ don’t help as much as logic in today’s world, the latter has never developed enough to fully balance or overcome emotion. So often we make decisions based on emotion and rationalize them afterward rather than logic first even when that would be better.

Marcus makes a solid case that our thinking tends to be biased consistently to see things as we want to see them and to be overly optimistic at times about our own powers of observation and thinking in ways that facilitate conclusions we hope for. We think we’re worth more or otherwise over-estimate our contributions when we’re actually fairly average, for instance, so everyone, including CEOs who more or less have the power to leverage better rewards for themselves, routinely expect larger than average pay increases even in tough economic times when they’re laying off others to save money.

A recent study of executives showed they know managers are generally better at technical skills than people skills like dealing with conflict, coaching and developing others, which consistently rank lowest for the very large majority of executives. People skills are where emotions get in the way of logic. So one might think that’s good news – they see the problem, which is usually the first step to improving. But you’d be wrong. It’s not that they realize THEY are short of people skills themselves! Executives see that OTHER managers are weak, but Korn Ferry’s extensive studies estimate 82% of executives need to improve in people skills. Since they don’t know this, only 15% actually said they felt these were areas where THEY needed help. While they could correctly identify such needs in general (probably areas they think others need to improve at), they were woefully off on where they themselves fit.

So what does Marcus recommend we do with this sort of information? First, make it widely known. Help people see these sorts of limitations apply so widely we ought to assume some apply to ourselves at least to some extent and work on doing something about it. In other words, reflect. Pay attention to research and knowledge that’s developing in the field of human thinking and behavior and take into account that your own decisions and habits may need to become more logical and careful. Pay attention to whether you’re about to make a decision that others will recognize as illogical. Get others’ input, work as teams, but not just with senior members, add diversity of thought and viewpoints. And, for Boards of Directors, do all you can to ensure individuals aren’t deciding their own pay and perks or granting their top teams compensation that will inevitably put upward pressure on their own.

Pay is just one easy example of where these flaws become highly visible. Early, well-known research shows everyone would like 20% more money, but that pay increases, no matter how good, become taken for granted in a year or so and 20% more again becomes the new objective. This is just as true if you make $2 million a year as $20,000. For instance, it’s also been shown that when CEOs order studies of the best place to relocate head offices, they almost inevitably concluded it should be closer to wherever the CEO lives. More research shows more pay doesn’t equate to more long run happiness above a fairly moderate pay level. How many other corporate decisions are being made the same way, based on how one or two people FEEL? And, of course, it isn’t just CEOs deciding in their own favor, but all of us tending to. They just happen to be somewhat more visible. Are we smart enough to find ways to balance these all too human pressures?

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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, All That We Know, Books, Coaching Yourself, Fix The Jerks, Leaders of the Future

Psychological Research Pushes Leadership Knowledge

Author: Dave Crisp

15 Jan

The pace of research and innovation continues to accelerate in every area and nowhere is this truer than in management where business professors and consulting houses compete with each other to deliver insights at a furious pace. Of course, not all of it is highly reliable, nor can it be taken at face value without looking for confirming studies just as in hard sciences where we expect findings to be replicated before they are fully trusted. With the rapid pace, however, confirmation isn’t usually long in coming.

What can be so new? New opportunities, input from the Internet and far more instant sharing of information place us still at the early stages of finding out what human kind can do. Are we going to be burned out by it, overwhelmed or outpaced by our own technology? Will machines start to ‘think’ faster than we can on topics we traditionally excelled at? Would that be a blessing?

In this hustle a number of fierce debates rage about the meaning of some of the things we find. A very interesting, relatively new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, by professor Gary Marcus, raises some fascinating questions that can be applied to how leaders think. Along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, Marcus points out we are subject to many automatic reactions to information and situations due mostly to the way in which our brains evolved, with more or less instantaneous emotional reactions to events not entirely balanced by higher level logic functions.

The book is an easy and well-balanced assessment of the good and bad resulting from this uneven power of two styles of ‘thinking.’ Others argue our brains are still actually evolving as opposed to discovering what can be done with the mental machinery we’ve inherited.

Reading this could be depressing. Human thinking clearly is limited, often flawed and subject to so many competing interpretations one wonders if we can trust conclusions any of us reach. On the other hand, clearly our thinking ability is what got us to the level we’ve reached and what keeps us learning day by day. and both types of brain activity contribute – both logic and emotional reactions, something machines aren’t going to be able to attain and blend quite so easily.

How we balance our thinking modes is so idiosyncratic it’s questionable whether we’ll ever fully understand the way the human brain ‘thinks.’ Yet the patterns Marcus points to emerge consistently. For instance, our tendency to see things primarily as they affect us has clear implications for leaders’ behavior. At an event a few weeks ago I was struck again, listening to a CEO, how even the best individuals in that role for any length of time develop a distinct way of looking at the world that those not in the role don’t relate to in quite the same way. In this case, this verifiably good copy of the type spent much of his presentation focused on pay and perks. specifically those for CEOs and senior executives .and the difficulty that new regulations pose for making changes (read ‘increases’), something he feels VPs of HR definitely need to work on.

The discussion was unquestionably relevant to how leadership works and fascinating. It took me back to the days when I expected to be fired for continued failure in one very important part of my job – getting the CEO more compensation. It occurred to me to wonder how much of the accusation that HR doesn’t understand business revolves around not properly understanding the importance of higher pay in the front office and for line managers in general. The book is certainly enlightening about how completely we have to expect this and what, if anything, we can do about it.

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Civility… Really?

Author: Dave Crisp

19 Dec

Anyone reading much management literature these days will have noticed the growing demands for civility in the workplace, for an end to bullying and greater emphasis on treating people and speaking more politely. Entire bookshelves are devoted to it. Given the tone of much political debate, news and television, this is understandable across the board. We see a distressing lack of civility in many arenas and we don’t like it. or so we say.

Unfortunately the popular media seem to revel in incivility because, apparently, it sells. It certainly must draw major attention and sell advertising if we can judge by which shows survive the ratings battles. One only has to take a glance at Jersey Shores, the many ‘Real Housewives’ and dozens of others including some very popular blogs and even other supposed ‘reality’ game shows like The Amazing Race, to see the tendency to the worst sort of behavior to draw audiences. The first two are more blatant, but the ‘Race’ weekly shows team members berating each other for various shortcomings only partially balanced by later comments about how much they value and support each other.

Where do we stand really? It’s a puzzle because we are doing whatever we can to promote safe, stress- and harassment-free workplaces, yet we apparently enjoy seeing people verbally lash out at each other. We’d like to see greater civility in public discussion, but we not-so-secretly revel in ‘the other side’ getting slammed, often completely unfairly or out of proportion to what they’ve done, in the press. While we Canadians can feel somewhat smug that our level of public discourse hasn’t descended as far as some, we have to admit we are boosting the ratings of offending TV nearly as much as our neighbors.

It’s not news that human beings have contradictory feelings and thoughts. Perhaps we should just be thankful these cathartic ‘un-reality’ shows give us a chance to get our fill of incivility indirectly. On the other hand, there’s some reasonably reliable evidence that watching violence encourages viewers to act violently. Should we not be concerned this applies to violent discourse as much as actual behavior? That would make an interesting study, one I’m sure some college will undertake shortly.

In the mean time, I’m all for holding managers and workers to higher standards than we see outside of organizations. Realistically, though, I’m not sure we can do that as easily if we don’t at least try to address some of these problems in wider public behavior. Certainly schools, hospitals and other public institutions have been working away at the problem, but politics, the press and other media seem immune. Can we not develop the communication skills to have rigorous disagreements without insults to each other and to our intelligence?

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