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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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Books, Coaching Issues, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

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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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Coaching over Command Leadership, Coaching Yourself, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

Leadership by Relationships and EI

Author: Dave Crisp

13 Oct

Strategically the way we need leaders to behave has changed as a result of more highly educated, informed workers and the need to draw out and share knowledge accumulated by many people in an organization. People are noticing widely and starting to investigate in more depth what this means and how it works. It creates a big change in which leadership style works best today.

A blog I ran across recently, The Rare LeaderT, for example, asks, “.Do I Have To Like People To Be A Leader?” Just asking the question signals the message – the answer is more complicated that liking or not liking people. The short answer is no. You don’t have to socialize a lot or even actually like people, but you do need skills to relate effectively. Blogger/coach, Steve Riege, makes a useful distinction between Social skills and Relationship skills and points out the danger of assumptions based on whether you score as an Extravert or Introvert on the numerous tests we’re inundated with. I like his tone and there seem to be more good posts about style, leadership behavior that’s effective and what it takes to succeed today.

We hear more and more that you don’t have to have a particular style or personality to be an effective leader – simply effective behaviors – and we see tons of books, articles and other material about what those are. What’s missing is a framework to make sense of so much advice. We know the elements cited are the same time and again. So why does each consultant, coach, speaker seem to have to reinvent the wheel. If we know the behaviors so clearly and we now have an idea why this evolution is occurring, why doesn’t everyone who’s handed a leadership role simply apply these skills?

There seem to be two key blocks. Overload – most of the advice looks similar, but is tied to examples that are unique. Lots more books are routinely produced because it can be hard to see how the behaviors of a top military General, a President or band leader actually apply to how you should handle your team in IT or marketing. It’s hard to sort out the key useful parallels from just interesting stories.

Second block – psychological inertia – is it really going to be worth the risk and time involved to change to new skills. It means you have to “unlearn” some comfortable, present habits that conflict with what consultants say are better. The problem here is that leadership is complex, involving multiple skills coordinating together, so learning one or two without a complete new set can feel (and may well be) pointless. Again, having a clear model would help clarify how much or how many skills we need to work on.

First, there are only a few skills – maybe two or three of a total of five that most leaders might need to concentrate on. They’re not rocket science, but basic things anyone can do. Second, they’re written about so much you can pretty much choose any leadership book off the shelf and get a reasonable idea of what will work better than our most ‘natural style’ (telling people to ‘do it my way’ – the approach most people naturally use when first promoted).

In my work I describe the five skills as ‘being positive, being honest, thinking strategically, building habits. in balance.’ Only two – developing creative strategies and good judgment for balance are areas where people may conceivably need help or so we might thing. But it’s amazing how many managers are uniformly more positive or optimistic than realistic or ‘honest’ about their failings – or vice versa – dyed in the wool optimists or pessimists. It really shouldn’t be so hard to find a balance, but many people have this problem and it holds them and their teams back. And it’s always surprising how many executives come up with decent strategies, but fail to execute because there in to big a hurry to build habits through conscientious repetition. Some of this seems ‘baked’ into personality, but anyone can learn skills in these straight forward areas. Yet time and again when people analyze what went wrong in some project, they’ll conclude it was a leader who omitted one of these five keys. Nothing here says you have to like people, but you have to respect their needs enough to ensure all five keys are attended to.

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HR Strategies with Downsides?

Author: Dave Crisp

16 Sep

Two recent presenters at Strategic Capability Network spoke about an up-and-coming idea in the HR strategy realm that has potential merit, but dangers as well. The Director of People Operations (Staffing) from Google and Steve Prentice who specializes in social media both noted the value of hiring staff who have wide-ranging, outside interests.

Google seeks to find out and select for a candidate’s broader interests in the hiring process to ensure diversity of ideas that will lead to innovation in products and services. Steve suggested using an internal Facebook-like system that allows staff to share interests other than simply work as a way of finding people in-house with unique qualities for particular projects. One example both cited, coincidentally, was that knowing someone was a skydiver might indicate their willingness to take risks and that, in turn, might be what you need on a particular project. Another instance – Steve is proud of his sideline – playing in a jazz band.

Both are certainly aware that something like skydiving is only one indicator of risk-taking and one not every boss might relish. I like to think I took risks throughout my career by taking on risky assignments like leading the organization’s union (and incidentally doing it well). Oops, that might not be something I’d want to make widely known to a new company since quite a few bosses would likely have the sort of reaction that wouldn’t have a positive effect on my career.

So how would I show my risk-taking ability or outside interests, many of which aren’t typical big-sellers in the old-fashioned leadership climate still found widely today? My affinity for philosophy and particularly Zen might be tolerated as odd, but harmless. or too weird for a senior VP.

On the other hand I had a CEO who referred to some people he didn’t like as Icabods. (That’s the timid, bookish school teacher character from childhood fiction – an image of ridicule.) I was a bit taken aback the first time he mentioned this to me, given my own early background as a school teacher. He apparently didn’t make the connection, but subsequent CEOs were often quick to tell me I ‘sounded like a school teacher’ – something they didn’t mean nicely on the occasions they were moved to point it out. In fact, I think it’s safe to say my bookish, school-teacher-like interests in philosophy and my understanding of left-wing issues made me valuable in environments where few others could relate and someone was needed who could. That’s diversity, but we have to realize not everyone sees the value.

Just as some unwitting students may be ruining their future job prospects by posting online photos and comments about drinking bouts and worse, we might be inviting employees to do the same without clearly being able to delineate what’s ‘acceptable’ or ‘laudable’ versus what’s ‘not wanted here.’ Can we ever promise all managers will be as open-minded as we’d hope?

I definitely don’t have the answers for this one. Skydiving may sound great to some managers and horrendously foolish to others. Anyone got a handy list of ‘great hobbies or interests to ensure promotions?’ I’m not sure we’re going to develop a specific idea of what those are. That’s the essence of diversity. Who will push the envelope? Soon as well as having the right job experience and training, you may need to cite ‘the right hobbies.’ That’s counter to the intent, but sadly seems almost inevitable.

The same challenges apply to other personal attributes as noted with disabilities and other diversity issues (check the post “Really? Do Tell”). Knowing how or when and how much to disclose personal information is a puzzle.

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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Building A Career, Coaching Yourself, Human Resources (HR)

Impulsive Behavior Affects Strategy, Too

Author: Dave Crisp

11 Sep

Lots of comments on the Internet seem thrilled with Stephen Slater’s theatrical style for quitting Jet Blue – swear at a customer and exit via emergency chute, thus rendering the plane out of commission for three days.

Undoubtedly we’ve all been moved to similar antics in situations. I recall writing “Phooey Ptui” when giving up on a high school physics exam in a peak of frustration. It didn’t help my mark any and I’ve always suspected Mr. Jansen of having less than a stellar sense of humor, but perhaps he just wanted to coach me about losing my cool.

The problem is, as a small number of my teachers demonstrated, when you’re taking out frustration on people below you, not those above, no one is in a position to call you to account unless you step over an invisible line of sexism, racism or harassment of other discernable forms. Call your employee a “b-tch” or the like and you may or may not get hauled up on a carpet somewhere, deservedly, though many don’t. Remarks about people’s work, work ethic or intelligence frequently pass without penalty.

Later in life as a teacher and even later as a manager, it seemed amusing to refer to someone as ‘one brick short of a load’ or any number of other disparaging phrases we hear. Of course, WE would never say that to someone’s face (or where they might hear about it). But some do.

Humor, including banter and snide characterizations, can ease tension at work or anywhere else if handled appropriately, which is to say at least such barbs must be private in some sense. But when they become public daily comments about subordinates, company departments or even customers, their usefulness as stress relievers ends and these are now impulsive evaluations that often substitute for taking corrective action the perpetrator should be seriously considering instead of settling for an easy snipe.

Strangely many executives don’t make the connection. They slide into a habit of commenting negatively on all sorts of people and behavior with such offhand remarks, but don’t act. Venting this way is harmful to everyone who has to hear it and most of all to the executives themselves who should be working on ways to solve the problem rather than simply sidestepping. A habit like this slowly spreads across entire cultures because it means managers lower down don’t get backed to take effective action and they, too, fall into the ‘drive by shooting’ style of evaluation.

We actually need to encourage recognition of impulsive motivations, but see them as a signal that we need to come up with a better idea not a snide comment. Necessity is the mother of invention. The need to blow off steam can be turned to innovation. something companies desperately need all the time. If we’re angry at customers. why and what can we do about it? Same with other departments, co-workers, suppliers, etc., etc. Work is full of frustrations. We call it work for a reason. We need to work at it, but the goal should always be improvement.

Similarly in management we need to be aware of what frustrates employees (not just our behaviors, but those, too). If customers and employees are beginning to resent each other, there are major strategic issues at stake. We can’t simply suggest these are things we should tolerate. They’re signals, loud and clear.

Maybe we should change HR to the Human Signals Department and start picking up on these offhand signals.

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Filed under: 4 Honest - Finding Reality, Coaching over Command Leadership, Communicating Effectively, Fix The Jerks, Human Resources (HR), Leaders of the Future

The Biggest Problem For HR Strategy

Author: Dave Crisp

28 Aug

Over the last years and months I’ve come to believe the biggest problem with HR Strategy and getting results is individual leaders. We know in all companies there are pockets of satisfied, highly motivated, engaged employees who turn out superb work. We also know those are mostly the exceptions. Results and motivation are lost because the good work in one area is cancelled out or sidetracked by what’s going wrong in others. Only a handful of companies have spread engagement thoroughly across their organizations.

We further know that it’s the leader of each unit who makes this happen or not. So I’ve been pursuing the question ‘what’s the problem, why is it so hard to develop enough positive leaders to establish a culture (a set of typical habits) of supportive, innovative leadership across an entire organization?’ We know exactly what behaviors are actually necessary to achieve this and they are things anyone can do, any day, anywhere, if they simply keep them in mind and do them. These can work almost literally by rote if need be. And if you get someone behaving a certain way, their thinking usually changes to match according to psychologists. So why can’t we get leaders giving positive reinforcement, asking for feedback, supporting trial and error and so forth – the keys to great results?

The answer seems to be that we all too easily fall back into ‘natural’ ways of behaving toward others. We find it hard to empathize in most situations (some are far better than others) and without that guide to how another person might feel, we do what first comes to mind – which often means we immediately critique what’s wrong, follow our own instincts without reference to others opinions, etc.

Reading the 2008 autobiography of a US turnaround specialist (The Turnaround Kid by Steve Miller) gives some insight into these problems. He helped Lee Iacocca save Chrysler and then wrote a particularly damning condemnation of Iacocca’s leadership behavior, which he repeats in the book – lack of listening, favoritism, ego-generated strategy blindness and more.

A couple of assignments later he turned around massive construction company, MK, where he followed fired CEO Bill Agee. Bill ‘managed’ MK for his last two years from his Pebble Beach, California mansion, requiring Boise, Idaho head office execs to fly down for ‘instructions.’ Visiting Boise he was known to wear a bullet proof vest for fear of employees and his execs learned to wait a day before implementing his orders because his much younger, controversial wife from a scandal-rocked former work liaison would often convince him to change decisions. Really. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all on record. But people still hire Bill for management advice. Really.

Miller, a self-styled sensitive manager, despite being a hard-nosed, typical CFO-type by style and training was able to do the right things – most of the time. He did remarkable jobs in numerous situations, including Chrysler and MK, of motivating and aligning large numbers of employees and unions to accept cuts and bankers to take lower rates on loans.

Surprisingly, even he stumbled later when he took on saving Delphi, the near-bankrupt auto parts spin-off of GM, where he promptly put his feet straight into his mouth. He insulted unions and even landscape staff as greedy for accepting on-par pay with the rest of the automotive industry. At the same time he was proposing cuts for them and increases in the C-suite. That’s a far cry from earlier massaging of pay cuts by empathetically pointing out everyone was in the same boat and awarding himself a $1 a year salary. Most recently he’s back (just this summer) to save AIG. It remains to be seen which approach he will take, but the bigger question is how can even a person who knows how to behave effectively suddenly do the reverse and create major problems? Was it just perception or a major glitch? At least we can be sure he has noticed and will rethink.

I’m not sure I have answers, but for HR and organization effectiveness this may be the biggest question of all.

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Who Trusts Whom?

Author: Dave Crisp

25 Jul

A number of topics reminded me in recent weeks of the Proust quotation: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. This applies, for one, to the usual way we look at trust in organizations..

One of the measures relevant to engaging employees is always whether they trust management. But isn’t it even more relevant to ask whether management trusts employees.

That is – to ask whether leaders believe employees have the capacity to contribute meaningfully. A great many managers treat employees as cogs in the machine. They don’t want or expect employees to bring their brains to work, just their hands as has often been observed. Follow orders, produce what’s asked of you when we ask. Shift to the new strategy when we tell you to. All formulas for disengagement on a massive scale.

Effective leaders take calculated risks. And one major area of risk is trusting employees to come up with useful ideas and then supporting and helping troubleshoot with them through the inevitable organizational hurdles – no budget, tried that before, not workable for any number of reasons.

Now it’s likely the manager isn’t going to fully understand or see the idea in the same light of certainty as the employee. In fact, highly effective leaders often spend lots of energy encouraging employees to try ideas that neither of them is completely certain about. If either was completely certain it wouldn’t be a very creative, novel, untested idea with the potential to dramatically improve things, but just a moderate extension of what’s already known to work.

It takes courage to encourage (notice the similarity of words) a subordinate to take a risk that may reflect badly on both of you at some point. That’s why it’s so important in companies to establish a culture in which ideas, pilots, trial and error and reasonable mistakes are supported and promoted. That way managers feel supported in supporting their employees’ ideas in turn.

So when we look at trust, it’s important to see that it works both ways and, as with all strategies, starts from the top. If top managers don’t support risk-taking and trial and error and don’t trust employees to be testing things that seems a bit outside the box, how can we expect employees to blindly trust managers? This becomes increasingly true day by day as we evolve into an era in which every organization’s survival depends on continual creativity and improvement – so much so that no single senior executive or executive team can possibly come up with, let alone test, enough ideas to sustain competitiveness into the unpredictable future we all face.

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Do We Need to Review Listening Skill?

Author: Dave Crisp

30 Apr

It turns out the answer is yes, as it is for a variety of such basics. Stuck in California traffic on the way to a conference on leadership skills last week, I found a “Clear Writing” expert on the radio reminding us how many such skills need review. Blogs are great for short ‘how to’ segments on these basics.

Readers, it turns out, prefer frequent, short, clearly written tips. But many small business bloggers especially are stuck for how to keep up with the commitment to do a post every few days, which is what the experts recommend if you’re going to do a blog for serious marketing.

One solution is to engage a service to help. You can still write key pieces related to your business, but to fill in the ‘tip sheets’ readers come back for, a writer like Toronto’s Vera Held is an option. Vera is a professional writer who also writes a monthly column in The Toronto Sun called "Make it Work". She just let me know she’s begun a new writing service for her clients. This service consists of (a) a weekly blog and (b) a bi-weekly media release for prices ranging from $149 per month for a 12-month contract. Topics are developed to highlight client priorities. If you’d like further information, she can be reached at (416) 785-3556 or vheld@sympatico.ca. Please have a peek at the following ‘how to’ blog Vera has just written on why leaders really have to listen—to lead effectively. You may find you appreciate the reminders, just as I did the reminders on clear writing, another of Vera’s advice specialties:

Why Leaders Need to Listen, Actively

by Vera N. Held

Listening actively maximizes your value to your organization. It’s a key business skill that everyone needs to hone—especially the VP, GM and the CEO.

Contrary to popular belief, listeners are “active” participants. Educator John Dewey said, “The hearer is an indispensable partner” in any conversation. Why? You can only share a mind set, concept and idea, persuade someone or be persuaded when “true” listening occurs. Without the desire to listen to another perspective or point-of-view, little gets accomplished.

Indeed, good communicators listen more than they talk. And it is vital to treat all staff with the respect and appreciation that comes from being paid attention to and listened to. Listening actively is the one sure-fire way to keep staff motivated, and to continually build positive work relationships.

In return, staff will not only carefully listen to you, but generously answer your questions. In fact, staff may even provide you with some terrific unsolicited ideas to allow your business to grow by leaps and bounds.

5 LISTENING TIPS

1. Listen to gather data and gain knowledge. Learn.

2. Ask for clarification to make sure both sides are on the same page. Bond.

3. Always let the other person finish his or her thought. Build a bridge.

4. Show respect and interest—even if you disagree. Be polite.

5. Listen with an appropriate amount of empathy. Be open, confident and share.

Leaders are expert at connecting the 18-inches between head and heart. In the words of French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, “The road to the heart is the ear.”

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