The most diverse teams come up with the widest range of ideas and offer the wide range of skills needed to implement them. But they are a challenge to manage, so better leadership is required.

What’s clear as well is that a single leader at the top of an organization or function makes an enormous difference. Only when the CEO (or function leader) puts an issue on his or her agenda, talks about it personally and follows its progress, does anything happen. This should be obvious, but like so many “obvious” facts, it is overlooked in a vast number of organizations.

The problem is you can’t talk about and monitor everything at once. You can’t make everything a priority. That confuses people, wears them out and makes them change priorities frequently as each item comes to the fore, so ultimately nothing is actually a priority except keeping your head above water – another “obvious” fact that is constantly ignored.

So what should a leader do? Again it sounds easy, but isn’t – pick the top three or four things and use them to drive results. Diversity today has to be among them because of the need for innovation, let alone that our employees, customers and other stakeholders are now more diverse and will work for, shop with and invest in only those they believe are on the right path (the latter being the good and sufficient reasons normally cited by diversity experts). Of all of these, it is the over-riding need for innovation that will ultimately drive the point home, but that hasn’t struck many organizations yet.

I’ll offer two examples that popped up on my screen recently. First is Antonio Perez talking specifically about how he learned the value of diversity and used it to resurrect Eastman Kodak, a company most of us thought was doomed for lack of it’s recognition that film was a fading commodity: http://bit.ly/9VbSkB and second, Clay Shirky, the media guru, talking about why newspapers have been even slower to recognize and find solutions for their dilemmas with the Internet eating their lunch (or more specifically their subscribers): http://bit.ly/18tDhy.

The more hidden point all this makes is that executives, human as they are themselves, tend to overlook basic human reasons why things are important. We see that diversity is valuable and can contribute, but we set up a ‘program’ for it and expect that will suffice. It won’t because our employees need reminders that matter from a boss that really cares about the issue and about them. We hesitate to make a ‘touchy feely’ item like diversity one of the top three objectives because we can’t quite overcome the feeling that today’s sales or marketing initiatives are more important. The fact is those will get done. done better than any one of us could do alone. if, but only if, we have a diverse and capable team around us. Get the right people in place and keep them motivated, that comes first. Is it something you can see in operation in your organization?

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Here’s an example. A problem in HR is so many of our efforts only pay off in a big way if they’re consistently applied over time. Yet we work in organizations where leaders dream of quick solutions and want to hop from program to program in hopes some new phenomenon will instantly solve immediate problems. Can you deliver both?

I ran into an interesting piece in the online Gallup Journal (http://bit.ly/9WZXTE) about creating personal well-being (a sometime topic I follow). It makes the point strongly that many personal solutions we pursue – for example, losing weight by eating right – actually align for value in the short term, too – eating sensibly keeps you awake and energized through afternoons where you’d be tired and sleepy if you eat the wrong lunch .and long term you lose weight. We know these things more or less, but we seldom push them to logical conclusion. For some reason even though we know both long and short term effects are positive and therefore aligned, we still gravitate to old, comforting habits rather than fully developing new, better ones even though we also know the new ones would become comfortable and comforting in time if we simply persist. Managers have the same problem building better management habits.

Take something like getting managers to recognize employees good work every day. Establishing a positive recognition culture has tremendous impact on results long term, but it also gets great reactions and increases motivation right away employee by employee. We tend to take both these for granted. Many managers hear the message, but still fall back immediately into their comfortable habits of command and control with no recognition. Why praise someone who’s merely done what you asked (likely not even as well as you could have)? If instead you’re asking them to think up better solutions, some of their work will genuinely surprise and please you and it becomes easy to say ‘great idea.’

Buried in these seemingly minor, hard to grasp human foibles are keys to vastly better outcomes for everyone. There doesn’t seem to be a magic pill to overcome habit inertia. At present the only help we seem able to offer is explanations. They seem to make more sense when I see how they work so similarly in personal and work situations. Will such information help line managers change their style? Will it help me eat protein as a late night snack instead of chips? Can that sort of insight help my clients to see the value of asking for ideas and praising them instead of their usual ’safe’ style of telling staff what to do day by day?

Is there a way to make such small insights help more with implementing long term HR strategies better? How can we make that leap?

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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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The second trait he pulled out is Emotional Stability. Is it any wonder a big company CEO might need the skills or temperament to tolerate rocky surroundings and keep on trucking? You can’t get to the top without being severely buffeted by conflicting demands, crazy work expectations and dramatically challenging personalities around you. To forge ahead Conscientiously in that environment takes Emotional Stability, for sure. We  hope in personal life to have it a bit smoother, but for many it isn’t too different.

The fact these traits are possessed by pretty much every big company exec – and needed in most of what we ourselves do – stick-to-it-iveness and the emotional balance to persist long enough to get results – should be no surprise. So they’re ‘common’ to everyone. But that’s not to say these are their only traits nor that having them makes them ‘dull’ as Brooks argues. The top notch people I mentioned are or were highly unique personalities that we’d describe as anything, but dull.

The problem is exactly that these two are not ‘enough’ to get the very best results. Beyond sticking to it and staying the course, we need to be creative, able to work well in teams and energetic enough to care to, whatever the origin of that energy – belief, faith, commitment to a great goal, faith in people, whatever. These other three can all come from very different sources, hence the uniqueness of personality and style we see. When we look deeper we see that the first two traits can come from very different sources, too, not just gritting our teeth discipline.

Viva variety. Yet we see the five core needs for success are pretty much the same five in every endeavor, for every person. HOW they achieve them can be unique, but not whether they work. These are the five skill areas I work to help people discover and develop – ones that turn up in every book on success and which anyone can build for themselves if they simply keep focused and keep adding to steadily, conscientiously. throughout our entire lives: it isn’t over till it’s over. unless you flat out give up.

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I’d said there are times when command and control is still the most appropriate style – and used an example of a sinking ship where you want the person who knows best what to do to assume control and direct the best actions for everyone, the more firmly the better – no panic, life jackets, lifeboats, line up here!

The coach trainer insisted that even on the Titanic, if the captain had coached, everyone might have been saved. In fact, it would undoubtedly have led to a better outcome if the captain had coached the crew sufficiently before the emergency so they knew how to take charge, but I can’t honestly see the opportunity to coach once the iceberg was hit. If you think about the coaching process and questions, is it really an appropriate time to ask people “how’s it going, what do you really want, what should our strategy be, what needs to be different and what will we do now?” Or do you hope the crew lines people up firmly, guides them into lifeboats and tells them how to launch?

The one antidote to panic is clear confidence from a leader who remains calm and balanced and seems to know what to do when you don’t. This is true for any situation, but in true emergencies, it can take a pretty directive leader to convince people. Once things are underway, you hope individuals will take initiative and you may be able to coach that once everyone’s in boats and away, but in those first stages of crisis finding the right balance of command first before coaching seems wisest.

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Several very different factors are evolving rapidly in society, having begun 30 or 40 years ago, now becoming visible in many places. Best known, most obvious is the impact of the PC dating from the first Apple computers built in Steve Jobs’ garage in 1975. Not only have these changed world history, but we don’t yet know how much or what the most powerful impacts will be. From pure record-keeping to social networking the story is far from finished.

Less well known, but now quite clear in direction, we can date recognition of the amazing power of effective HR from the takeover of GM’s Fremont, California car plant by Toyota, who were able to double production with the same people, machines, suppliers, etc., in just two years and have continued to boost productivity steadily since – for 25 more years – a management/human resources process that in incredibly powerful.

Then Complexity theory, with roots in biology and mathematical systems, least well understood, tells us that complex situations behave in similar ways in all endeavors, all challenges from physics to human behavior. HR – or human behavior – is the most complex area of all.

Complexity theory tells us that thousands or millions of “independent agents” working on problems will evolve rapidly to produce amazingly powerful, unexpected answers that turn out to be based on simple principles. Of course this is exactly what we’re seeing on the Internet… and at Toyota’s Fremont adventure called NUMMI – notice their simple principles: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety.

With blogging and social networking conversations, often truncated, halting and confusing, by millions of people someone will stumble on answers and ideas that will change the world in dramatic ways – and some of those will be further clarity in HR and leadership.

We now know HR process can revolutionize results. What we don’t fully understand yet are the simple principles that work together to create the right framework for this to occur in the widely varied organizational situations we face. We know what work on auto assembly lines.

Hospitals are struggling to apply complexity theory directly, a confusing path based on the concept of “positive deviance” or “copying the successful people from thousands of attempts” at solving a problem like rampant, drug resistant infections. More of these efforts are being tested world wide. The potential to solve political and organizational problems never before resolved logically is enormous. Those whose conversations lead them to the best solutions stand to reap equally enormous benefits.

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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?

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McKinsey & Company in their latest weekly points out long term recruiting strategies are necessary in China to overcome growing shortages of managers – an external marketing challenge.

Susan Abbott who runs an excellent blog on marketing and branding points out in her newsletter today that for a group to be effective they need to keep focused in for the long term… stick to the strategy.

And finally, Sherrill Burns of Culture-Strategy Fit Inc. emphasized in a presentation this morning that a strong culture makes HR work – and that requires a long term, consistent marketing strategy focused on getting everyone step by step into the same cultural mold and keeping them there.

The message? People don’t just work superbly together by accident. There needs to be a strategy, clearly focused and consistently pursued, to make that happen. It’s simple enough, but so few organizations manage it that the ones who do win awards. Sherrill brought along the President/Founder, Pat McNamara, of one such award-wining model company, APEX, a 32-consultant PR/issues management firm with remarkably low turnover for their industry, achieved by internal marketing to their staff – which enables them to use that as a powerful selling feature with clients and thereby earn exceptional returns.

Awarded “Best agency of the year” twice in a row, Pat has also been named one of the Top 100 Women Entrepreurs. One of her comments – “it takes a lot of time – more than you ever expect – to engage every single person, but it’s absolutely worth it.” They turn business away to keep the positive culture and people’s lives and sanity intact. And make enough money to give perks like an extra five days off in an employee’s fifth year and a month paid sabbatical in the eighth. Sticking to those policies requires commitment… long term. The message – basics: long term, strategy, commitment, consistency and marketing internally as much or more than externally… if  you want happy staff and great results!

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Often we discount others’ abilities to understand. Many times in frustration, we get at the real truths under the every day stuff we keep hearing over and over. I particularly like his comment about being tired of “leaders” who never interact with their protegés. Although I’m one of those who promote the (in my case) “five” irrefutable laws of leadership, I like to think all I’ve done is take the simplest advice available and used it to encourage exactly that – interaction with the people you’re trying to grow and lead.

Thanks David.

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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.

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His own blog, Simplicity, I’d describe as a rather quirky, opinionated version of the concept, but that’s a plus. It takes your thinking in new directions and collects links to some other very interesting, somewhat quirky stuff as well.

I started with his video and then some background, but was very interested to skim some of the blogs he links to, like these: Promanager , Hillbilly PhD, Phil Gerbyshak’s Make It Great which in turn refers to this list: Top Productivity and Lifehack Blogs (a Lifehack, by the way is blog-speak for cute tips and shortcuts you can use to improve your life – or "hack" your life, in other words).

The only trouble I have with blogs, including my own is too many and too much to read. They work if you keep focused, but it’s easy to get sidetracked in a thousand directions.

What bloggers link to is often misleading because they mix personal and business interests and some bloggers waver back and forth between the two far too much to make either aspect useful. If you believe in Serendipity (lucky coincidence) great, but finding what you’re actually looking for can be a long haul.

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The long-time management guru (not at all too strong a word for a professor, author of 140 articles and13 books like Managers Not MBAs) has always worked toward taking the mystery and myths out of effective leadership… and now out of leadership development.

The new venture, CoachingOurselves, is fascinating if not entirely unheard of previously, but its great to see an acknowledged master show how simply we can develop leadership skills.

In this approach groups of managers, usually four to seven, meet together with the role of chair rotating among them, on topics of their choosing. They follow a guide in the form of an agenda and a few PowerPoint slides, created by Henry or his co-authors and learn on their own from their own discussions about their own experience.

He suggests the primary model is that the group meet once a month for about an hour and a quarter for as long as they feel they’re benefiting. So far there are intended to be a couple of hundred topics to choose from with about 20 or so currently available and more in development that can be tailored, costing in the range of under $200 each – that’s $200 for all five or six people, not per person… and no travel cost or time.

Obviously the major advanced and travel programs can expose managers to experiences, people and diversity that no in-house program could duplicate. Nevertheless Mintzberg insists the core feature of the expensive programs carries over – managers sharing their own experiences and learning from open discussion with each other. So it’s "go big or go home" literally, with the option to learn at home now being a valid one.

It isn’t a program that creates learning, it’s individuals’ willingness to learn and to share their thoughts, knowledge and experience with each other that makes for more effective leadership. And we know from personal experience that doing it consistently beats a one-time shot in the arm every time.

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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.

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Exactly.  The "clear objectives" noted in the quotation are the Strategies (as I call them in my model) that you choose to arrive at your goals.  "Workable implementation" means building Habits.  And "the discipline to stay the course" is all about finding Balance in the midst of constant up and down emotions ranging from highly Positive to Honest recognition of the hurdles.

Why emphasize the same five key words in every single situation instead of finding a specialist and learning specialized words for each new challenge?  The reason is simple.  Doing so connects what we do successfully in one situation to all others. When we generalize our skill we give ourselves a far greater chance of succeeding immediately in every new situation without much additional training.

Every time we read a success story, we are likely to find the author using different words from earlier ones.  The result is people imagine the principles may be different in each situation when they are not.  By seeing the pattern in the skills you develop for one situation, you can apply the same principles immediately to the next.

The ultimate objective is to give people themselves the tools they need in the simplest possible form to achieve whatever results they want.

Showing how to apply these five basic concepts consistently in every situation means people become expert at all of them and at balancing them together.

One way to reinforce this for yourself is to translate what you read about success in any situation into these five ideas.  You’ll begin to see the pattern instantly wherever you look.  That will add to the ease with which you use the skills in an unfamiliar situations.

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ADKAR’s elements – Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement – effectively describe end results needed for organizational change. As a memory aid they don’t point toward HOW to achieve these, which is where I find most managers ask the most urgent questions.  The strategy is good; how can it be executed?

Take "desire" for example.  Desire or motivation often seems to managers the most difficult thing to develop in yourself or others if it isn’t there to begin with.  ADKAR accurately suggests that once you become aware of the need for change you need to create a state of wanting to or desiring change.  But how?

My corresponding principle is "positive."  I describe the five principles as habits you need to build toward in yourself, others or both. With this in mind, I think managers have a relatively easier time concluding what they need to do – talk and behave in ways that get people into habits of feeling positive about aspects of work in general. Most can think of ways to be more positive, more of the time.

You can’t usually get a group of people fired up, motivated or filled with desire to change on the spur of the moment.  There are exceptions.  When the theater you’re in is burning or some other inescapable crisis makes it absolutely clear that you should all be motivated, pretty well any leader who stands up and points to the door is seen as charismatic. 

Highly charismatic individuals seem to have the ability to motivate groups purely through words.  Unfortunately lots of CEOs attempt this by putting speeches on video and sending them out to the troops.  Needless to say, lots fail.

But if you work with a group of people over time and have always been honest and positive with them, encouraged them to take initiative, and they’ve seen the results that occur when they jump into action as you suggest, they are very likely to do so again when you point out that change is needed. They build on already positive beliefs that taking action makes sense. They are positive about acting and positive they can succeed. That’s how "desire" bubbles up when needed – a lot of small positive elements adding together.

Am I splitting hairs? Maybe. But my focus is decidedly in favor of describing what’s needed in terms people can most easily see how to put into action. Consistently positive people make both organizational and personal change far easier.

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