Listening to Kevin Cashman this week on the update of his well-known leadership book offered a chance to reflect on the extent to which the climate in which HR (Human Resources) operates is changing… or isn’t. Interesting that Cashman’s writing retains its Zen flavor, something one might think wouldn’t sell well in the corporate world, but he’s been consistent for more than ten years now.

Cashman updated his book to include more research and case studies that confirm the value of its recommendations – that to create change, a leader must first change him or herself. It’s a message more leaders need to hear. In fact, in my piece for Canadian HR Reporter, I make the point that this is why there are so many bad leaders, a question we constantly hear. A leader who thinks their role is to tell others to change, but has no intention or expectation of changing themselves is a bad leader and there are lots.

Cashman’s point with the update is there are many companies beginning to notice this principle and use it to hire or promote better CEOs who in turn create and lead better executive teams, who in turn lead more effectively for results. The problem is that “many” is a relative term. Where before there might have been a handful of such companies, now there are twice or three times as many – still a handful compared to the vast number of organizations out there.

Listening to Cashman and knowing he’s been stumping the world at conference after conference for years makes one wonder how many of have to push this message out before it becomes everyday stuff for leaders in organizations. Somewhere there is a tipping point, to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s book title and concept. It can’t come too soon for all the people who continue to struggle in companies that haven’t picked up on this message.

As it happens, it’s my pleasure to MC a Gladwell book launch event shortly after his new book, Outliers, hits the shelves finally next Tuesday. I’m grateful to have this opportunity to finally meet him as well as hear directly what he has to say. Of course, I’ll be posting about it shortly after that.

Times are really changing for leadership and HR when such information is absorbed so readily and more people seek to put it to use. How Outliers is received will be the next measure of how much.

Thanks to the library’s automated waiting list I got an early copy of the new book “Punching In” by writer, Alex Frankel. I can’t recall where I heard about it, but it’s quite an interesting description of his experience testing and observing applying and working as a front line employee at half a dozen top-rated US employers - UPS, Gap, Starbucks, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the Container store, Apple and applying at others where he wasn’t selected.

This is a chance for senior execs and HR people to hear first hand what it’s like on their front lines or ones that might be very much like theirs. It reaffirms a number of observations that probably ought to be obvious. First, many applicants honestly don’t know what sort of jobs they might fit into and which they won’t. Frankel was impressed that some screening processes correctly judged, but you’d have to say most didn’t.

The overall conclusion he almost gets to is that fit and perceptions are incredibly important. He really liked UPS, a job that sounds as if it would kill some people, while he hated (and implies most people might hate) some of the others. What struck me most is the last chapter in which he returns to his UPS experience and becomes positively rhapsodic about it, to the point where he almost toys with the idea of re-joining permanently. It’s particularly interesting to read how he fell in love with them - via experiences before, during and after his time there - and note what a special and unusual time it was (the Christmas rush, when package delivery takes on a special meaning it doesn’t have to the same extent the other 11 months of the year). For some employees it takes quite a complex of coincidences to hook them.

Considering these are all companies with applicants lined up at the door due to their reputations as employers, it’s daunting to see how difficult it is for even top organizations to impress and hold staff and what a combination of factors it would take to make each company irresistible.

In some ways even more impressive is his recognition that each of these companies has true believers among its staff, people who feel about their employer the way he feels about UPS. He notes how the attitudes of these individuals, particularly when they’re in leadershp roles, get close to rubbing off on him despite his own feelings and scepticism. The human factor is in many ways the most powerful influence, potentially outweighing specific policies and culture as I read it. I’m interested in whether others agree.

Coincidentally this week’s Herman Trend newsletter points to yet another study, this time by BlessingWhite, assessing engagement levels (and strongly correlated retention rates) across organizations in UK/Ireland, Asia Pacific and North America. In general considerably fewer than a quarter to a third of employees are actively engaged while nearly 20% may be actively disengaged. This is actually an improvement on results previously quoted in a number of studies, but not by much. There may be a small trend to improvement as the Hay Group’s Bill Cheshire has noted in Canada, but arguably still a long way to go to reach maximum potential, although we have only thin evidence that this might be in the range of 60% (a number estimated by Michael Koscec at Entec Corporation). While it’s overly optimistic to think we could ever expect all employees to be onside with any organization, it’s important to get a clear picture of where we are at in general. Frankel’s book is an interesting personal look at how such figures come about.

I’ve spoken with two university researchers recently who express concern that the hoopla over the uniqueness of Gen Y recruits may be overblown.

It’s been 4 months since futurist Dan Pink (other books: Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind) jumped into the fray with The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, said to be the replacement for What Color Is Your Parachute specifically for Gen Y.

Maybe. It’s light and light-hearted in manga comic format so it’s clearly targeted there. Many reviewers are quite taken with this, but the questions remains, are Gen Ys buying it or reading it when it’s bought for them.

Dan’s advice is six simple (all in favor of that!) principles for career path choices:

1. There is no plan. [The economy changes too fast for your career to have a plan]
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses. [Find your advantages]
3. It’s not about you. [Serving others serves you best]
4. Persistence trumps talent. [Keep showing up]
5. Make excellent mistakes. [Take risks, but fail forward]
6. Leave an imprint. [Do something that matters]

The issue is, of course, there never was a plan. We mostly stumbled into careers before so that’s not new. Neither are the other items.

Will Gen Y really change the workplace or, when they get mortgages, spouses and kids, will they “sell out” just as everyone acuses boomers of doing? More to the point, will our concern for what Gen Y thinks continue past the first blush of staffing shortage. Will we genuinely start listening to diverse employees’ needs and interests?

Meanwhile Pink doesn’t substitute for good career ‘how to’ books like Parachute or Barbara Moses’ excellent What Next. It’s a useful add-on whatever your generation - things we should all be considering, not just when we’re starting out, but for once, could we hear from Gen Y if they actually want this stuff instead of hearing from “grown ups” that they for sure will? If we’re really as interested in listening as we say, perhaps we should show it by doing so. Anyone heard what they think?

Just back from a couple of weeks travel - conference and vacation - where I made a note to comment on this book title. I noticed it in an airport bookstore, but had made up my mind not to get pulled in while taking time away. In this case, it was easy to say this one doesn’t need to be read due to it’s rather obvious "how to" subtitle.

The book: Make It Glow: How to Build a Company Reputation for Human Goodness, Flawless Execution, and Being Best-In-Class.

Big surprise. Would that be: consistently work at human goodness, flawless execution and being best in class?

Likely there really is more to say. For instance, how would you work at these things and what would your priorities be in relation to the more typical "make the numbers at all costs" approach to managing? Nevertheless the sense of it being so obvious made it easy to ignore.

Networking expert Michael Hughes wrote a comment in a newsletter that captured a key insight. It isn’t only New Year’s Day that produces resolutions. I always resisted that idea. After all what’s different about one day, just because it’s designated as the start of something.

Rather it’s the combination of a designated new start following a substantial mental break with the preceding grind and what you do after that. The elements work best when the work together.

Mentally we think "the old can be left behind at least partly" and "we have an accepted point at which to start something new," where, for instance, sales people begin with a fresh set of goals, a blank page. There’s nothing they can change about the past, but mentally a "do over" opportunity appears.

Whatever different stresses the holiday season presents - last minute shopping, more family than you see all year, special efforts for parties, celebrations, dinners and possibly travel - the new stresses ensure time for the old routines to fall into a bit of perspective.

You can think in terms of a "do over" each day, too, as Mark LeBlanc, outgoing President of the US National Speakers Association captures in his book, Growing Your Business (reviews at bottom of the linked page).

It’s a great idea for tasks with targets like selling or losing weight - do just one thing each day. Get into a habit. Don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t do it one day, but make sure you do that one thing TODAY. Don’t feel you have to "catch up" and do two today. The goal is simply to get into the pattern of one per day until it feels comfortable, you know where in your typical days to fit it in and it starts to get done regularly.

One sales call a day, or one task on some project you need to get done (sending out those resumes?) or one step in building a strategy (signing up for or scheduling training?) or implementing an idea. One-a-day. 

Even Jerry Seinfeld says, "Mark each day on the calendar when you do that one thing. Don’t break the chain whatever you do." If you keep shooting to lengthen that unbroken chain the habit becomes more and more automatic and you get better and more comfortable. Doing whatever it is just once in a day generally seems easy enough to keep you going. Once you’ve mastered the flow, you can move on to a new "one thing."

Not a bad reminder for two weeks into the new year. That’s when I start to see people at the gym who made an early new year’s effort start to drop away. Are they doing just one thing to stay fit somewhere else? We can hope. It’s fine for the way you do it to evolve. Just don’t stop. But don’t beat yourself up for one miss. Make sure you do it next time… today, tomorrow, the day after, somewhere, sometime, somehow. Get into the groove.

By the way. If you find you just can’t, that you rarely or never get it into your day and that continues week after week, it’s time to think up a new strategy to try out, a new variation that you CAN do once each day. You only get better at what you can tolerate doing regularly. Don’t wait for another New Year’s to modify your plan. The real commitment is to progress, whatever it might be or however it comes about.

Do you get much out of webinars?  I hear people say if they got one thing it was worthwhile.  Is it any wonder Gen Xers prefer faster media like texting and short You Tube videos?  Often the best ideas come from very short comments. But you may not even notice them without context.

A webinar today on the subject of effective coaching from Bluepoint by the authors of their new book, Unleashed, suggested we can often benefit from the following question in lots of situations and expect many people to jump to answer this: "who knows a dangerous conversation we need to have?"

In context this is a brilliant observation.  If you’re coaching someone it could be the dangerous conversation they need to have is with themselves or with some significant other - as spouse, a boss, a coworker or any of a dozen other possibilities.

Perhaps even more importantly, this would almost always seem helpful in team meetings.  Maybe change the wording slightly to "dangerous questions we need to ask?"  How many times have you been at a meeting, knowing people are sitting with concerns, but feeling unable to ask for speak up?

Another option: "Who knows a challenging question we should ask?"  The possibilities and the opportunities are endless.  Are there situations where you can apply this today?  Is there a dangerous question you can ask yourself?

Okay, I’ve finally been sucked in.  Visiting a bookstore to use a gift certificate, a new book (with an Amazon release date of January 1) by Marci Shimoff caught my eye.  On her web site she is billed as a key teacher of The Secret, a book I have consistently avoided.

Her new book, Happy for No Reason, summarizes seven ingredients for happiness in easy chapters, a more useful topic. With the Secret I certainly believe the thoughts you hold are critical to the results you achieve.  Since there isn’t a lot more in the book judging from what others tell me, I haven’t taken time to read it.

In Happy for No Reason the standard basics about achieving happiness appear: the concept of a happiness set point, physical health, meaningful work, friends, a close love relationship and several others, some of which she reveals in her You Tube video, linked from the book’s site.  Very slick. You can pretty much get the ideas in the first few listings if you search "Happy for No Reason" in Google. She calls them seven "steps," but they’re really not steps as much as habits that must work together.  Not a heavy-duty book, but with generally solid, comprehensive ideas.

The idea that stood out most as new and different is summarized in a chapter about a step called "Don’t Believe Everything Think." I notice she describes the same concept in a video on her site about The Secret, arguing that many of the 60,000 thoughts we are said to process daily are misleading and that feelings are a better indicator of whether we are moving forward positively or feeling so negative that we will mess things up.  This sounds like an interesting idea that bears some further thought.

More than anything I was impressed by the packaging.  I see she is even a cofounder a group of 100 motivational speakers who have created a site called the Transformational Leadership Council. It’s a quick list of many big as well as smaller names in the motivation business. 

Slick packaging doesn’t mean the information is any less helpful.  If anything we can hope that it will encourage more people to take key ideas seriously and use them.  We’re all in the process of trying to lay out the most useful, simplest and most appealing ways of getting the same principles in front of people. A good effort.  Both her MBA and media training certainly lend power to the message whether or not they make her an expert in these areas.

Often you know you’ve learned something once you finally and fully are startled by its simplicity. Typically it’s a blinding flash of insight into what from then on seems perfectly obvious. Why wasn’t it just moments earlier?

What triggered this observation was reading an article in the Speakers magazine about Dick Richards and his book "Is Your Genius at Work?" He asks four questions:  1. What do you consistently attempt to give others?  2. What do others come seeking from you (maybe ask some)?  3. What’s the common denominator in 1 and 2?  4. Can you distill this to two words: _____________ _____________.

Maybe this arrived just as I’d answered these for myself. People come to me for the right way to say things (and ideas) to deal with challenges with people, to get the results they hope for. And I consistently attempt to deliver exactly that - to make people, as I see it, better at managing, more positive, etc. But the key for me was "what do they come to me for?" That’s the marketable product - what they already want, not something that I have to drum up business for, some intangible "leadership model" or set of skills. Those are just the mechanisms once they’ve asked for what they need.

My only quibble: two words might be "People Solutions," but I can’t resist making it "positive people solutions for high performance."

Doggedly pursing a topic inevitably leads to new insight. Tracking the theme of difficult bosses led from The Alpha Male Syndrome to another (not quite so new) book, When Goliaths Crash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization (Howard M. Guttman, reviewed HERE). It focuses the need for executives in organizations to become better at resolving conflict.

Although the reference to executive conflict first attracted me, the book can really address all conflict, which reinforces my faith that core skills apply in all situations.

So, what’s the new insight? Simply this: most people in organizations have virtually no training in dealing effectively with conflict… even though conflicts of ideas, strategies and styles are inevitable and therefore are often no one person’s fault – neither the executive nor the employee.

One may be more at fault, but both executives and employees are about equally likely to have poor skills due to lack of experience and training. They may both approach situations with fear of confrontation that makes them edgy and even more uncertain. Some deal with it by attacking, some by withdrawing or glossing over issues. Of course executives can get away with the attack model more easily, but angry employees strike out quite frequently as well and are more often avoided than disciplined or constructively spoken with.

Sometimes one can draw the other into productive conversation that gets the issues resolved without boiling over. More often neither can and time slips by leaving people angry and frustrated without entirely knowing whether things could have been different.

The skill of finding balanced ways of discussing problems before they get dropped, shortchanged, glossed over or just grumbled about can be a very productive addition to the repertoire of everyone in any organization. Undoubtedly the greater onus falls on bosses, as does the onus for managing all factors in business, but that doesn’t excuse employees from responsibility for carrying their end of the load. While it takes two to fight, it also takes two to get to the bottom of things and find a solution that works for both. True, some bosses won’t allow this, but then neither will some employees.

Just a few days ago I mentioned Robert Sutton’s upcoming book, The No Asshole Rule [his title]. It’s out early, and as expected, makes interesting reading.

One thing that stands out is what he calls "the chapter I didn’t want to write" near the end of the book: how sometimes everyone needs to act like an asshole to get things done and why this is can be effective. To put it bluntly, it’s because sometimes that’s the only way you get listened to or get respect.

He cites research by Larissa Tiedens who showed groups tapes of Bill Clinton discussing the Lewinsky incident. In one clip he is sad about it all and in the other angry about everything that happened. Reacting afterward, those who saw the "angry" tape were far more likely to agree that Clinton should stay on as leader of the country. Sutton’s take: that all too often we expect leaders to be aggressive and we penalize those who don’t fit our stereotype even if we personally don’t want to be the butt of it. Teidens actually did a number of such studies, all with similar outcomes, showing that we perceive angry people as stronger and more leader-like than balanced compromisers.

Leadership developers have a challenge: they shouldn’t take away the strengths people have… and if anger drives action, that’s a strength. But we need to supply these leaders with the judgment and coping skills to handle it so it’s not toxic to them or others, which it very much can be.