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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And in the same newscast, the lead item was government approval of a sporting workplace in which the main objective is for one employee to batter another as brutally as possible, albeit within rules that prevent the use of lethal weapons, but in ways virtually guaranteed to result in at least a few deaths – a sport where doctors have called for a nationwide ban. What happened to the new Workplace Violence and Harassment legislation, let alone Health and Safety laws? Don’t workplace rules say you have to provide a shield so employees never come into contact with dangerous moving parts? Can you see inspectors ordering a screen between battling competitors in such a violent sport?

The Romans set up rules for gladiators, and bullfights and cockfights follow rules as well, but we wouldn’t really want to call any of those safety rules, so let’s ignore the argument that there are rules that make this safe. Safer than handing out swords for sure, but really.

The Romans used their ‘games’ to divert and pacify unruly citizenry during tough economic times. It cost their governors a lot of money to run them, but apparently the results were worth it. We seem to have done one better since MMA, so-called Mixed Martial Arts combat (where’s the Art?), will be a source of revenue for promoters and tax-collectors. How does that make it OK that someone else’s sons will be given the “opportunity” to beat each other unmercifully? Interesting that we still won’t let those same young men ride to their combats on motorcycles without wearing helmets or in cars without seat belts fastened, but we suspend virtually all normal safety rules for sport.

My point? I can’t answer whether it is completely right or wrong in the grand scheme of things to let youth who want to beat each other do so under some sort of supervision. We know from YouTube it happens spontaneously, without rules. Perhaps they would find more dangerous ways of doing the same if left on their own. But we have laws in other areas to try to prevent as many people as possible doing dangerous things to themselves or others. Maybe this is a small safety valve for the aggressiveness that would otherwise bubble over somewhere else in society as it seemed for the Romans. Maybe, but reliable studies show at least with children that seeing violence generally results in desensitization and more violent behavior.

Perhaps the larger question is whether we will ever raise a generation of leaders who stand for a better solution, one that protects everyone while still achieving economic objectives, that engages workers so they feel satisfaction not the desire to strike out. This has certainly become the strategic goal of many companies that are doing well on a grand scale. Perhaps there will always be rogue CEOs who encourage harassment and battering of employees verbally or otherwise as a means to get rich and MMA is just one limited, perhaps minor, example. But isn’t there some hope that we will someday be better than this?

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The Einstein quote is well known enough: Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. But perhaps Einstein had something different in mind than the obvious meaning that you have to rise up to a higher level of thinking to solve a problem created at a lower level. What if it’s the reverse?

In management strategy we frequently encounter the problem that the solutions we propose are “too simple.” For instance, we point to the tremendous power of simple recognition by senior managers as a powerful force for engagement and performance of staff. Just acknowledge good work we say. It isn’t rocket science. All it takes is literally saying something as simple as, “wow, thanks, that was great” or “I really appreciate your taking the time to think that through, I’m not sure I could have found such a great answer.”

What stops managers from saying stuff like this and reaping the benefits of improved performance from people who will strive like mad to do even better the next time just for a few more words of praise? Can we ever get enough praise? Do we ever get enough so we don’t need more for weeks and weeks and weeks? No. Most of us can absorb that kind of comment almost daily and still crave more. We know what this feels like personally, but we somehow don’t ‘get it’ that others who report to us respond the same way.

Managers argue that employees will tire of this, take it for granted, be even more upset when they don’t get praised next time because we established a baseline (and, oh, it’s work, it takes time, it’s hard to remember to do it – true until it becomes habit!). Many worry that most of the praise would be false, provided for work that’s just a basic expectation of the employee to do a job. Well, I’ve seen tons of employees not do the basics, so it never bothered me to thank people for doing their job and doing it quite well. I never seemed to have too much trouble distinguishing something I could thank someone for and make an even bigger fuss over something truly unique. Psychology tells us repeatedly that positive reinforcement works. So why not?

Isn’t this exactly a case of a problem being solved at a different, but ‘lower level’ of thinking – basic human needs – than the level that created it – expecting all employees to be so ‘grown up’ they just do their jobs because, after all, isn’t that what they’re paid for? Maybe managers are hung up looking for ‘higher level’ solutions when ‘lower level’ would actually work better. Maybe I’ll be accused of ‘lowering the level’ in organizations or in HR, but if it works, if everyone is happy and productivity increases, why not? What do you think?

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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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Legitimate protestors are stuck in a puzzling situation. They can continue to hold marches during G20 meetings and head toward the barriers, thus providing mass cover in which a handful of criminal agitators can hide and do maximum damage. They thereby guarantee no one hears their messages. Or a better solution might well be to hold as big a rally as possible a week or so prior to a G20 or G8 in a safe location, where organizers could video-record sensible statements of protest and logical arguments and alternatives to give to leaders ahead of the meetings when they might make a point. Vandals rarely show up where there’s nothing to vandalize.

There would be less mass media coverage, but the messages wouldn’t be lost in violence and attempted baiting of police. Larger numbers would turn out since additional protesters wouldn’t fear arrest or violence. It would demonstrate how many people are concerned about alternate solutions and would likely get more reasoned attention from leaders instead of being delivered at a time when their attention is fully occupied with deals the protestors don’t want made. Would it work? At least as well as current mangled efforts. Can anyone say clearly from what we saw on TV what the messages are? Anything has to be more understandable than that.

At least in HR we have research that proves counter-intuitive approaches are typically superior.

In day-to-day HR, for example, many line managers hate whatever pay system is in place because they don’t understand the core purpose is fair pay equity among employees and huge increases are counter-productive to their objectives. What they see is they want to pay their best people more and evil HR stands in the way. If every manager does this it will create a race to the top, extremely high pay for everyone, disengaging both top and mediocre employees. (Wait, isn’t that what’s happening with CEO pay, especially in the US where publishing pay scales has the opposite of its intended effect.) Second, based on subjective evaluations of who is ‘best,’ other employees will (and do) become severely upset unless their pay is also raised nearly as much. oops, more of the same problem.

And, third, of course, they pay no attention whatsoever to the tons of research showing that money isn’t the prime motivator – recognition is. Yet many managers continue year after year to say hardly a thank you, let alone a positively reinforcing ‘good work’ despite the fact this free option has been shown to have a far greater effect on results than dangerously raising pay, expectations, claims of favoritism and all the problems unmanaged pay systems create. As to pay, if employees at Toyota happily produce over a million profit-improving suggestions per year for about $50 t0 $100 each, why do we think big bucks are needed to motivate our people?

But counter-intuitive works in more situations than even I thought. At the G20 demonstrations in Toronto I got a front row seat (and picture above) with riot-garbed police at the foot of my downtown driveway. They pushed about 50 demonstrators down our street, past our front door to the main intersection where they promptly sat down and continued taunting police. The officers stood and waited about 20 minutes. and then. just walked away (taking time to drink bottled water from their back up vans and shed their helmets to wipe their brows in front of thirsty protesters). Then they marched back to the government buildings at the other end of the street that they’d been driving the protesters away from. The result – about 5 of the 50 protesters followed them and the rest went home. Bored, tired, dry and uninjured, they’d failed to provoke an incident and gave up.

I have to say I was stunned. I’m not sure what I expected, but in retrospect it all makes the perfect kind of counter-intuitive sense I routinely promote. Show the strength, don’t use it and it’s more effective than bashing people. Kudos to the Toronto Police Service who mostly trained and then coordinated the 15,000 officers it took to maintain this kind of order and kudos to the individual officers who were willing to follow the plan. Now if protesters and G20 planners would learn equally futuristic management, we could avoid spending much of the $1.4 billion this security exercise reportedly cost.

How stupid did planners have to be to put a G20 meeting in a downtown filled with banks and ‘capitalist’ shops with plate glass windows begging to be broken and many congested streets, vehicles and transit that are difficult to protect. Duh?! We know violence has marked every G8/G20 in memory.

With the danger zone placed squarely in downtown police have three choices – massive presence and arrests to move people away, however briefly; no presence, which would simply be an OK to throw everything including Molotov cocktails at whatever anarchists want; or a moderate presence, which would result in officers and bystanders injured in repeated scuffles and set up for a pitched battle at the perimeter fences with even more injuries and possibly even loss of life as we’ve seen in the past. What choice is there, but the former, which takes massive coordination, but provides maximum physical protection for leaders and demonstrators alike. No one wants a police state, least of all in your home town, but for 2 days G20 planners didn’t leave any of us much choice. It’s not a bad reminder of what our country could be like if we don’t manage sensibly. If you have to do something, do it wholeheartedly. and get it over with and go home. It was messy, but the least violence G-meeting in history I expect.

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That’s a testament to a number of key observations. First, you can set out to and succeed at creating a great place to work. Second, it’s hard to retrofit once cynicism has started if you haven’t created one from scratch (but I’ve seen it done). Third, line officers have to get involved to drive the process and walk the talk. You can’t just task HR with it and walk away.

He goes on to draw out the idea that engagement can actually go up in difficult economic times, but only with specific attention to making employees feel safe, valued and not hopelessly over-worked. Companies that have managed this are clearly positioned to get the best from everyone and are far more likely to outdo those who don’t believe it’s possible.

He also pokes fun at another common myth – that managers shouldn’t have to ‘engage’ employees, that staff should just take care of that themselves, presumably along with being grateful to have a job. He quotes an astonished CFO who notes, “. an epiphany; I realized for the first time that managing
people is a big part of my job.” When did we allow ourselves to promote people to manage others who didn’t realize this? Forever, unfortunately. We don’t expect financial results to manage themselves, or new technology or marketing.

Pretty well everyone knows perfectly well we normally don’t give people the title “manager” unless they are being promoted to a position with people reporting to them, but somehow about 80% fail to notice that actually managing them is a key part of the job and most companies fail to ensure any specific training is provided in this. Most act as if it comes automatically. Duh! We know many people learn finance and marketing in school. We also know nearly no one learns leadership there. so how do we suddenly presume them to be effective at it? This would be amazingly funny if it wasn’t so sad. and so universal.

Does anyone see this changing?

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It’s a UK organization called Four Groups and the article that particularly caught my eye is this one. Issues like portability of talent, the futility of individual bonuses and other myths surrounding top talent are not only topical in the HR field, but apply to any organization that wants to maximize performance. This piece also contains a link to an interview with Dr. Karen Stephenson, the only speaker at the San Diego conference to get a standing ovation from the human resource professionals present.

Dr. Stephenson spoke from years of research about the current trend toward emphasizing trust within organizations. These are all timely, of course, in light of how much trust and confidence have been lost by the public in business generally, and these are highly related to my theme of ‘fix the jerks’ that emphasizes how poor leadership destroys value in organizations of all shapes and sizes.

What also comes out of this is how wide spread the move to more detailed understanding of HR is and how much there is to study.

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I wrote the rest of this post to a friend, another keen observer, David Creelman of Creelman Research, who brought it to my attention. I realize this is actually a review:

Just finished Managing and have some thoughts it seems good to put down here. It’s an impressive assembly of far-reaching thinking. I think it will probably frustrate and confuse a lot of readers, which is too bad, but possibly an inevitable step in recognizing what really works. The management/leadership complex is just that – very, very complex without any clear single answers, very situational and requiring unique fit or adaptability to succeed at. I agree with the general premise, but would word it a bit differently. I would say not have said we are wrong to hold up leaders as worthy of examination and sometimes praise, but we are wrong to deify the idea of leader and leadership (and wrong to talk about it as a set of things that can be learned by the usual rote learning we get in schools). However, I believe that leaders do make a difference if they operate as Mintzberg outlines – constantly learning and reflecting and by trial and error efforts to improve things. I’m sure he would agree and wonder a bit why he didn’t make that more clear.

As I see it, organizations solidify the ossified structures they form in hopes of sustaining themselves as the original driving leader(s) move on. Theoretically the structure that worked should be able to adapt with new people coming into the slots and changing them to fit changing circumstances, but we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to that concept. We treat the structure almost as sacred once it’s in place (despite the tendency to constantly ‘re-organize’ to solve every problem, which really amounts to re-arranging the deck chairs – it doesn’t really change much – the power hierarchy is too attractive to those rising in it). To some extent the organization structure does ensure some continuity, but for how long if it doesn’t evolve?

It’s easy for those appointed to assume that they somehow inherit the stature of those who built the organization in the first place, not realizing it wasn’t a one-person show, but a cooperative effort that may be seen from outside to be one person. The fact that some initial leaders are strong-man types who create by force and maintain power by force leads to confusion as well. When we know that 90% plus of leaders believe they’re in the smartest 10%, it’s easy to see why they are so willing to try to impose their vision as Mintzberg points out is so common among those newly promoted. At that moment you’re at the peak of confidence in your infallibility; it’s just been proven, so why not impose it? Then it’s hard to back down and reveal your uncertainty as things begin not to work. You may not even realize it isn’t working and just apply more force to drive things the way you ’see they will work if only everyone cooperates (with your vision).’

We need to help people see that maintaining and developing existing organizations is no less challenging, but very different from the initiating, entrepreneurial phase, that a different type of leader, adept with equally difficult, but different challenges, is needed – one who needs to manage and lead in a very different way, with more visible involvement of others typically, building a truly learning organization, which has to start with a learning leader.

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Depending on how you read these, the messages are puzzling. The long term HR head is replaced with a former operations executive. Layers of management have been laid off to streamline things and shake up the physical bureaucracy, but whether this shakes the bureaucratic habits of thinking and behavior that inevitably form the anchors of culture remains to be seen. HR is dropped from some key operating senior teams, but is tagged as an ‘enabler’ of the change process. Enabling from the outside?

There are suggestions that the new CEO sees the culture change as ‘done’ (or more likely sees it as having been given a momentum-driving start through his bankruptcy restructuring, which appears to have been sold to managers as ‘a gift’). There are other hints he understands it must be a continuing process. I’m skeptical of calling precipitous down-sizing a gift. For sure you can try to make lemonade from such lemons and if you look at the CN restructuring (in Les Dakens excellent new book, Switchpoints) that preceded the sort of culture change GM is talking about, you can see it is possible to make necessity work more for you than against you, but it’s still a wrenching process with some uncertainty as to what it produces.

You can also see with the CN example that it took 10 years in various stages to evolve something like the full impact on culture that GM almost certainly needs. Yes, you can make early gains, but if you assume that’s all, you will certainly fall short of what’s possible and perhaps even create a situation where culture falls back toward what it used to be. Habits take time and repetition to change.

It’s very hard to tell from reports such as this whether the people managing the new structure really understand that it takes years of stable and continuing reinforcement of consistent practices to actually change culture. Are reporters putting their interpretations on things – that change is ‘done’ or that it is ‘in progress?’ We won’t know for some time, but the reporting is worrisome.

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Senior GM execs had a private elevator key that allowed them to get from their guarded top floor suite to their private garage without stopping at any other floors to let anyone on, Rattner notes as a typical example. Perhaps not quite as obviously dreadful as flying in private corporate jets to ask the President for bailout money, but maybe more significant. At least one can argue the economic value of a corporate plane – sort of.

Cutting oneself off from team members and from their casual input on a day-to-day basis, even as much as one might pick up in an elevator ride, is deadly to leadership. Worse, it reinforces your status as untouchable by rank and file. The message is clear – don’t tell us anything, we’re not interested. If relationships never develop on any sort of casual basis, people will hesitate and decide not to approach you about things they worry might be important, but not important enough to risk embarrassment if you turn away or get annoyed.

Not everyone fears speaking to a senior executive just because of their title, but many do. Seeing others engage in casual conversation helps everyone feel OK about it, too. Every leader has to constantly work toward encouraging all sorts of comments. It doesn’t just happen by accident that people keep their leaders up to date. So the private key isn’t just a symbol, but one more actual roadblock that only the worst sort of leaders set up.

Hannibal drank from puddles alongside his troops; Genghis Khan rode with them. No one doubted who was in charge, and you can bet they talked. If you’re afraid to talk to your boss about every day work stuff, you can bet most others including his or her highest lieutenants are, too – so nothing is getting through. Time to be dusting off the resume.

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Oops, that’s an article I have to read! It didn’t take long to find (link above), but, even double-spaced, 54 pages isn’t an easy-to-digest document. This is a great example of why leadership is so often misunderstood.

The key is to understand that when someone misses the point in an article it sometimes helps reinforce the real story when you go dig it out. This is a point I’ve continually tried to make and it comes into very clear focus when you dissect this study.

The researchers, themselves, are very, very clear about several things. 53% of   leadership impact comes from one group of skills, which they describe as follows:

“The first and most important factor is a general factor, explaining 53% of the
variation in the ratings.  All individual characteristics [emphasis mine] load positively on this factor, ranging from a loading for “integrity” of 0.33 to a loading for “efficiency” of 0.68. It is natural, therefore, to interpret this factor as capturing general talent or ability.” And THEN they go on to identify the second most important factor, which explains 20% of leadership results and is much more difficult to understand. It contrasts warm, team-builders with hard-driving, conscientious types who follow through details and gives preference to the latter for achieving results.

By highlighting what they said, I’m prefiguring the better conclusion. We know from many studies that the most important work trait among the so-called “Big Five” personality characteristics is ‘conscientiousness.’ We also know it’s not the only contributing factor to success. To be highly effective as a leader or in any other challenge involving people, the best results come from having a complex of skills WORKING TOGETHER.

Duh, that means the best solution is NOT the ‘either/or’ one. If you have a choice of only one skill set, of course select the hard-driving, one-man-band, the charismatic if possible, the analytic person who dishes out orders. provided they have one even more important element from that group – they’re consistent. If you want the best results, however, find someone with ALL the contributing skills in a good balance. an ‘all rounder,’ a leader who also coaches and builds effective teams and relationships in addition to these. Get it? Look for the #1 skill set, not the #2 where, if you have to make a choice, you should absolutely pick the hard-driver over the warm team-builder.

Why is it so darn hard for reporters of good research to pick out the key fact not the most explosive? Every leader, to be worthy of the basic name, must drive hard toward the end goals. They need passion and constant attention to details. but the best leaders, the very best, go beyond only that to add in the team-building, coaching abilities. If you can’t find the best, settle for the drive, but don’t suggest those traits are the only ones that count. Don’t make it either/or.

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These are powerful, important questions that we’re finally beginning to see asked and answered more often. I like this practical answer at Chief Learning Officer magazine online. But it’s important to understand the role employees play and what anyone can do about it.

This came to mind again with a phone call from a colleague wanting to know what makes a good leader and venting about two hours they’d just spent listening to a manager gripe about their CEO in a small company. “The boss is selfish, lazy, uninterested in anyone’s ideas for improvements,” went the complaint, “My great talents aren’t being used; I’m only staying for the money.” Sound familiar? We’re told about half of all employees or more feel this way much of the time.

In varying degrees we hear this everywhere. I’ve quoted Bob Eichinger of Lominger/Korn Ferry before – that only about 18% of managers have the key people skills for leading and developing others, that these skills fall in the lowest 20% of skills among most managers. Yet, to answer my friend’s question about what leadership is, people skills ARE leadership, so the scarcity of them indicates exactly how scarce effective leadership is in organizations. If we could raise that just 10% or 15% across the board, results would skyrocket.

Once a company grows beyond about 25 to 50 employees in size, employees can no longer be simply extensions of the leaders abilities. Until then a really hardworking boss can probably get around and tell each employee exactly what to do and how every day. Above that size the futility of that should be obvious. Employees have to be empowered and entrusted to take initiative and do things the boss hasn’t specifically ordered or blessed, so the leader’s role becomes encouraging, stimulating creativity, coordinating and supporting initiative where it makes sense – a very different job than controlling every activity day by day.

We shouldn’t be vilifying weak leaders as much as asking ourselves how best to improve their skills and help them transition from command and control styles to coaching and developing. Companies, even many of the biggest and best funded, some of whom spend millions on leadership training, are doing a lousy job of this in the main. How else to account for the finding that 82% of leaders lack the most critical skills for their roles. Hopefully the blizzard of articles and books on what it takes to get results with people will start to make a dent in that gap.

More on this in future posts.

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Perhaps the most important concept is that happiness isn’t a single thing. When thought of as if it were you tend to think of leisure and joyful moments, but it really runs much deeper. Todd Kashdan makes the point in his excellent brand new book Curious? that we might not even want to set happiness as the most important goal in life. That’s carried through in the very interesting Positive Psychology News Daily (PPND) web site authored by graduates of the first MA programs in the field.

In fact, the PPND site impressed me with several graphics or “image maps” that allow you to click on elements that make up, for instance, ‘a life well lived image map‘ and find the components to a ‘positive emotions image map‘ and other facets of living well. The concepts they capture reinforce Kashdan’s point that maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree trying to focus on happiness alone.

A similar point emerges from another new book, The Happiness Equation, by others of the Positive Psych movement. It gives brief information about 100 items that add to or subtract from happiness and well-being – quite a list, from which you can generate a score to assess how happy you are relative to others, but even more importantly you can see from that which factors are contributing or are missing that create a sense of a good life.

Once again one of the most impressive things about this is the vast amount of research and publication that’s been done in the few short years since this field of study emerged. It really puts in perspective the sort of counseling that goes with mild mood prescriptions to form what Jonathon Haidt and others have shown to be the best antidotes to depression and how closely some of these relate to the elements needed for people to be happy and engaged at work.

While it might seem that these are intensely personal concerns, the fact is that happy employees have consistently been shown to produce better results. It isn’t either/or, but both/and. We can do the right thing by helping people identify what would make them happier and simultaneously improve profits and market share. What a concept! Great to see it born out again and again in modern research.

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Here we have the core puzzle of leadership development. The best training programs are established by many of these poor leaders who get to the top. The programs focus on skills that make for better leadership. In my own experience, top leaders were invited to speak at company training programs and gave impressive speeches touching on all the key principles, which they then ignored applying in their own behavior, with disastrous results.

Nevertheless, the article goes on to say, we will see dramatic improvement in future thanks to today’s insightful training. Really? If so, it clearly won’t be the training, but the attendees who make the difference. We’ve been teaching servant leadership, situational leadership and dozens of other effective models for 50 years. Still only a handful of truly effective leaders exist in top roles today.

We point the finger of fault in many directions – business schools, lack of measurement, poor HR – but we don’t face the likely fact that it is all of us and none of us who are to blame. Slowly, but surely we advance and tolerate poor leaders because they have the old-fashioned look of charisma, control and confidence that others lack and we can’t see anyone else being ready. We ignore evidence, training, common sense and examples of the best leadership styles to promote.

Only if a new generation of leaders and staff refuse to work with or for poor managers will we see this start to change. Will that be Gen X or Y or Millennials? Time will tell. In the mean time, the hard drivers, who think they have all the answers will likely continue to surge toward the top while the ‘continuous learner’ types who would make far better choices continue to question their readiness, along with everyone who makes the selections.

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Kenneth is an HR systems guy who says he totally agrees with Beatty that “HR fails to understand the real link between productivity and people.” Here’s someone who, like Beatty, presumably works with HR people in large organizations blandly continuing the stereotype and broad-brushing ‘all’ HR.

My point? If HR doesn’t start to stand up and correct these mistaken, but all-day-every-day, comments we will truly be the failures so many already take for granted. It’s because of such standard assumptions that HR has such an uphill battle for budget, resources, great people and ‘a seat at the table.’ It’s fine that some individuals have spectacularly overcome these, but we’re doing a disservice to other professionals in our field if we don’t speak up whenever and wherever this myth is propagated.

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