One answer seems to be that we find ‘nice guys’ not very leader-like, so we hesitate to emulate them. Instances to explore this question come to light constantly. A high profile example arrived in a newsletter pointing to an interview in Forbes of ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann who has just written his second book of leadership wisdom called Rock, Then Roll: The Secrets of Culture-Driven Leadership, which Forbes says “gathers nuggets of information distributed to ING Direct’s employees over Kuhlmann’s ten years with ING Direct,” the second of his books to do so.

Mr. Kuhlman is a fabulous Canadian success story not many know much about. An RBC VP at age 33 he took on the challenge of developing online banking for Dutch-owned bank and financial company ING and made the new venture amazingly successful, both in the Canada and the US and several other countries internationally. I happen to know what an uphill battle he must have had within ING from recent coaching with another Canadian sub of theirs which found them almost impossible to deal with – never allowing the sub to make decisions and delaying giving permission needed to operate, exactly opposite to Mr. Kuhlman’s style.

As a result of these different approaches to leadership ING overall needed a $13 billion bail-out from the Dutch government, while one way to pay it back has been to sell Mr. Kuhlman and his super-successful ING Direct to Capital One for $9 billion. Those numbers make the value of effective leadership pretty clear. If you’re wondering whether ING head office will be reading Mr. Kuhlman’s books, I can guess almost certainly they will pay no attention to them despite his success versus their failure.

Mr. Kuhlman, before anything else, promotes an empowerment culture and what he calls ‘culture-driven leadership.’ That means creating a culture in which everyone potentially leads and no one waits on the CEO or anyone else to lay out orders. It is also a great affirmation of the principle that an excellent leader can carve out a highly effective culture in his or her segment of a company that otherwise is downright hostile to it. But will an old-line bank move from command and control culture to this? Not likely in our lifetimes.

The only hesitation I have recommending Kuhlman’s books is he hands out 302 leadership messages in them and another 46 since that latest one. From his interview I think the themes are likely pretty clear, but none of us is capable of digesting, let alone putting into practice, 348 bits of advice, especially when you recognize they fit a particular set of circumstances that you may never encounter again. Inspirational undoubtedly, but workable?

Oddly, a more usable description of similar, but literally on-the-ground ‘nice guy’ leadership is an analysis of Denver Bronco’s quarterback Tim Tebow’s style (also in Forbes). The highly religious Mr. Tebow has become quite controversial as a result of his very public devotional behavior on the field, but he’s simply one more unique individual with unique style. It’s hard to argue with his practical success as a leader, which Kevin Kruse (author of the recent book, We: How to Increase Performance and Profits Through Full Engagement helps us get a handle on.

Without much of a stretch it seems clear these are examples of similar approaches especially in intent, albeit in very different situations where specific details inevitably have to vary. I tend to like Kruse’s descriptions better because they get at more directly what I believe are the five key core concepts without confusing them with too many specific examples – being positive with everyone, but dealing honestly with challenges, bringing the unique pieces together in balance (together meaning ‘we’ over ‘me’ just as Kuhlman insists in his culture-driven model), keeping focused on delivering results. Both promote starting small and persisting to build momentum. and both provide excellent, but very different examples of all this working effectively. Surface differences, similar principles.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

For every useful item that lands in the inbox, there are about five that make me wonder who thinks this will be of interest to someone they often address as “Dear HR Strategist.” (Thanks to Canadian HR Reporter, that’s my label at the moment and one I’m honored to aspire to.) About half of these make me wonder why they think anyone at all would be interested.

Cases in point – one entitled “Employees’ Poor Emotional Wellbeing Is Obstacle to Wellness Efforts.” No, really? There are stats to prove it, sort of: “40% of employees say an emotional or physical problem has interfered with normal activities..” Yup, when I get a cold or flu, it sometimes interferes with stuff. If I had an emotional problem that might well too, though I might not know what was happening or be willing or able to report it. Wonder what they were hoping for with this factoid. The same survey shows unhealthy habits among sizable segments: “34% of employees consume one or less fruits and vegetables a day.” Maybe of more direct concern at work: “Only 16% get enough sleep.”

What HR strategies should I promote for these? I can report my intentions to be a good leader caused me more than once to ask a team member if they were sleeping OK, but I have to admit it never occurred to me to ask about their fruit and vegetable consumption. Lest I be unfair just quoting teasers, let me add the objective is to point out emotional problems may lead to poor wellness habits, so wellness programs without a component to help with mental/emotional issues may be less successful – a laudable aim.

Another opens with the dangerous headline: “Canadian Employers Not Doing Enough to Keep Employees Happy.” Bosses are justly suspicious of trying “make employees happy.” It goes on to say about a third of both Boomers and Gen Y feel employers should do more to address their concerns. Not a surprise. and clearly related to the endless surveys showing 65% to 80% or more of employees are varying degrees of disengaged. Surprisingly their attached press release expands on this to say 75% of Gen Y and 82% of Boomers are satisfied with their jobs. and yet 40% of the young group couldn’t get jobs in their preferred fields and 33% are planning a job change soon and 60% are working for money not enjoyment. So. they’re not as happy as they’d like, but they’re highly satisfied, but not in their preferred fields and thinking of moving. What’s the right strategy for this?

I’m a huge believer in two key observations. First, human beings are constantly subject to contradictory feelings, wants and needs. making it difficult to articulate a consistent direction. We want autonomy at work, but lots of feedback on how we’re doing, clear direction and support, but not micromanaging. These are contradictions we can understand and work with. Need I go on. We are contradictory beings and that makes life and HR interesting and challenging, but we can shape strategies on these.

Second, we develop innovations, both strategic and tactical by facing such contradictions squarely, so calling them out clearly can be helpful. My puzzling is about how to sort out useful contradictions from such ‘teaser’ factoids and headlines that may not reflect anything like the actual meaning of the reports they purport to summarize. Often it seems more likely the confusion such reports create, but don’t specifically try to resolve just makes strategic innovation more difficult. If a dozen readers can develop even more than a dozen interpretations of the study by picking and choosing from the supposed highlights, what use can we really make of it?

Bookmark and share this post

More »

We keep stumbling over this. The answer, of course, in its humorous way is: Just one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.

This is the crux of coaching, of training, of performance improvement programs and all sorts of change efforts: the people who need to change have to want to change. It begins with they have to see the need for change. So feedback becomes incredibly important for several reasons. First it shows the need, second it shows progress of lack of it now that the person is engaged and working to change and third it suggests where to try next whenever the effort to change isn’t working.

It’s probably safe to say most executives do want to change to some degree. We don’t get to the top without recognizing along the way that we need better skills, that some of what we do isn’t working, etc. But we probably would prefer to change invisibly, not publicly have to admit flaws or have them drawn to our attention. We’d all prefer to anticipate and make the changes before anyone really notices we need to. Unfortunately that isn’t always possible. So we’re caught in what is for some a dilemma. To change effectively we need honest feedback, but we would prefer that no one notice our flaws, in which case no honest feedback would be possible. Of course we know people have opinions and observations, but how to get at them without facing the scary feedback process remains for many a great puzzle.

The solution is fairly simple. Ask for feedback. Steel yourself for what you may hear. Make it as painless and worry free as possible for those you ask – don’t wince, snarl, deny or retaliate, even if retaliation is (in your view) minor sarcasm or push back. Thank the person, ask for more whenever they can think of anything and keep smiling while you leave the scene nicely without betraying your inner turmoil or upset. Feedback, even good stuff, is often upsetting and feels off-topic or unfair or all too painfully true. Whatever your reactions, they are the things you CAN keep to yourself while you keep smiling and treat people positively.

Change ultimately is up to us. If we communicate subtly or otherwise that it’s dangerous or unpleasant to provide us with feedback it shouldn’t surprise us when we don’t get it (or only get the whitewashed version).

So, can character be improved? You bet. But like my efforts to stop griping loudly while driving the car when my spouse is present, it isn’t easy. It was painful for both of us. Neither wanted to fight, but we most certainly did on many more occasions than should have been necessary. I even made little notes to myself (somewhat sarcastic at times). One, partly hidden at the bottom of the cup holder said, “Just don’t talk at all.” Making notes turns out to be a helpful step actually. This marked the point at which I made the decision that I had to be the one to resolve the “problem” (whether I truly bought that it was my problem or not at that particular point – I could hold onto that – maybe not all my problem, but I will solve it come hell or high water!) Slowly I began to anticipate my outbursts and head them off. After a couple of years at it, I can see I’m calmer overall and probably a better driver for it, but it wouldn’t have been a good idea to tell me that at the time. The feedback I needed most was simply to understand it made my spouse upset and nothing I could say would change that. I’m happy to report we now take long drive trips together without her threatening never to get in the car with me again.

How many staff relationships would hold up to this sort of stress remains to be seen, but honest feedback like this at work is possible if people respect each other and want to keep working together. It’s rare though and will remain so until bosses start making employees feel more comfortable in saying what they see.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

It was great to hear from Bob Sutton about my previous post as well. He seemed just as puzzled about why Denning trashed his work as promoting “Dilbert-style Management.” My take on it is that we bloggers tend to go looking for straw men to tear down and Denning picked something from the Internet, took a quick look at Sutton’s book perhaps and leapt to misinterpret things as limited in such a way that Denning could make points he wanted to emphasize. (Somewhat the way I’ve probably done with his work above.)

Leaders in general tend to be guilty of this, I think. Everyone is incredibly busy. There’s mountains of information. It’s hard to pick out what’s valuable when we have so little time to give to it, so we try to categorize people and ideas and then find what’s wrong so as to get a handle on what would be better. By not stepping back and putting the pieces in context of a larger picture we’re all failing to deliver useful advice. It isn’t just ‘delighting the customer’ or ‘ending command and control leadership’ or any one focus that will take us to the next level. We all know it, but we fail to keep that front and center.

The scary fact is we expect all things from our leaders and no one can be all things to any individual, let alone to an entire team or organization. Or can they? It depends on the definition of ‘all things.’ Perhaps there’s a realistic one we can shoot for – not one person being all things, but one person facilitating and helping build and coordinate ‘all things’ from ‘all contributions’ from staff.

A first key is leaders have to be continual learners, willing to listen, ask sensible, real questions they don’t know the answers to (not just rhetorical ones) and apply positive people skills with an aim of achieving the organizations goals – including delighting the customer, but also sustainability, productivity and more for multiple stakeholders – way more stakeholders today than ever before, so way more goals to coordinate. Painting a vision, whether using story-telling as a key tool or finding other ways to engage people in a larger purpose is a critical kick-off point, but making people feel secure enough to contribute novel, potentially risky ideas and implement them with some judicious trial and error without fear of reprisals is also critical.

I often liken leadership to juggling many balls at once. It is the coordination and balance the leader brings to the challenges that seem to make it work overall. To do that they have to be adept at as many of the component parts as possible and willing to let others fill in without micromanaging them so that the whole becomes greater than any one individual.

This is what we miss in so many of our efforts to say, ‘no, no, no, you’re missing the point’ in our blogging and development programs. It isn’t missing the point as much as missing how all the points fit together – the most important piece of the puzzle – the ultimate picture. The leader doesn’t have to be the top expert in any one area, but in how others get involved and how they’re managed so the whole pattern works.

Meanwhile, Google recently revealed its very interesting work on identifying ‘the 8 keys to leadership.’ Beyond being ‘one more getting into the act’ of laying out ‘what’s most important’ is Google’s huge ability to justify their findings with statistics worthy of the best engineers. I’m going to focus on that and what it tells us beyond what Google learned in upcoming posts, but you can get the background here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Bookmark and share this post

More »

To get the idea across, it helps to get people thinking about other changes they want to make in their lives and what those take. For instance, one might start out attempting to lose weight and before long you realize it is more about overall health. It doesn’t take much reading to discover the experts say diets mostly don’t work, that you need an overall lifestyle change – but what’s that?

In practice it means working on one thing at a time, but recognizing it will take more changes to support the one you’re trying to achieve. If it’s losing weight you soon discover it is generally thought the best route is through a combination of moderate dieting and exercise. Both these are sets of habits that take consistent practice to develop. Neither the diet nor the exercise pattern you initially try are likely to be the ones you finally settle on. There are ‘sub-habits’ that have to be developed and other old, established ones you have to ignore (change isn’t really the right word for habits – you never really lose an old habit, just install one that is more frequently used and becomes more comfortable in time).

Habit is comfortable and automatic, so you have to pay attention to notice what your existing habits are and work consistently (tolerating some feeling of discomfort) to practice new ones instead. Most of us don’t last long at this. We try exercising after those New Year’s resolutions or when we get back to work after the summer. and then peter out when work pressure takes over. We skip one visit to the gym, then another, another and finally we hardly go at all. We know how this works.

Instead we have to concentrate on when and why we’re not following through with a view to finding a better time of day, day of the week or whatever until simply by trying variations we start to find the ones that feel most comfortable. and at the same time, by forcing ourselves to try variations we are actually repeating the core element – in this case exercise. which starts to feel not only comfortable, but like something we miss if we don’t do it – it becomes self-reinforcing to a degree, but yes, we still have to make the effort and the time.

If a particular change is truly a priority, it’s because we truly believe it will be better for us in the long run. Building such true belief may take some practice and reinforcement, too, plus reading on the subject, talking with others and willingness to take advice or pay attention to the obvious. We have great skills at rationalizing why our current habits are “close enough” – anything to avoid the discomfort of practicing change.

We can hear the statistics (on smoking, say, or the benefits of a positive employment environment) on our future and still not act, or at least not act consistently enough to make change stick. Senior executives who refuse to work on improving the environment for engagement and individual innovation are no different from the many who prefer to huddle in the cold despite the health risks of continued smoking. I recall one CEO who liked to brag he could outrun same-aged non-smokers on treadmill tests despite his heavy smoking habit. So what? It’s still hard to argue his health wasn’t affected, but at least that’s a personal choice affecting only himself (and eventually his family). Maybe I was lucky early on that my two-pack a day habit didn’t give me a choice if I wanted to keep breathing. Some people desperately want to believe they will never come up against the wall even though they know it’s there in theory. and maybe some won’t change despite the risky gamble.

For CEOs who argue they don’t have to stop yelling at subordinates and firing people for the slightest mistake, the gamble and the consequences affect far more than the individuals caught personally in these episodes. Shareholders, suppliers, customers and all other stakeholders are being shortchanged. Sure a senior executive can get away with bad behavior for a time, but overall results of disengaged staff and high turnover of key people will eventually tell the tale. It’s just proven business fact. Those who don’t acknowledge this can keep kidding themselves, but the rest of the world is figuring out the truth. Increasingly Boards are pushing such changes in habits or ‘culture’ or finding CEOs who will do this for them.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

Bloggers, speakers, news people and the rest of us will continue to write about this until we get an answer everyone can absorb and apply. I was surprised to see a great contribution about this recently. But I suspect like many, I got excited by it and then a day later I can hardly recall why I got wound up. It seemed so obvious and logical and so much like information we already know that it’s easy to discount it. As a result I have to get myself wound up again and I wondered why.

The answer seems to be that because it sounds like much we’ve heard before that takes away much of its validity. Do you find yourself reacting that same way?

The piece I saw is from ‘strategy + business’ (a site I wasn’t familiar with) talking about how to change people’s behavior and organization culture, aka habits, via a ‘modern understanding of brain research.’  Here’s the thing: they refer back to Adam Smith’s theories (in the 1700s) – that’s how long this discussion has been going on, not just (like most HR concepts) the last 100 years or so.

The drift is that to change habits is tough and requires constant repetition and encouragement. and habits are what perpetuate behavior and ‘culture’ of organizations (which is just everyone’s combined habits). They’ve wrapped this old observation in new jargon – brain research – and some of the findings are generally interesting, but they simply reinforce these basic observations that we already know, have known since at least Adam Smith’s time and yet don’t find management people acting on very often.

Yes, it clearly bears repeating, but having repeated it, have we learned anything new? That’s what we always ask ourselves. The answer, I believe, in this case is yes. We learn that a couple of big organizations have changed their cultures through this process. (That’s important, but minor because although we hear lots about change efforts that don’t work, these aren’t the only ones that have.) We learn that modern scientific research confirms what we generally know, so we are on the right track. There’s some biology at work that it  helps to understand and counterbalance – and our beliefs are validated. (Those are always helpful, but again, not totally surprising.)

More importantly we learn a couple of seemingly minor techniques for developing new, better habits that actually could be very important.

First it’s clear the objective isn’t to eliminate old habits (you can’t), but to install new, stronger ones that will take precedence over the old – through endless repetition (in this case endless means you can’t let the focus shift rather than meaning it’s drudgery). You can figure out your old habits by watching your behavior closely, decide rationally what you want to change and start practicing. and persist despite how scary or annoying or frustrating it seems at first. And we ought to surround the core habit with as many new, supporting habits as we can possibly develop. Eventually the new behaviors become ‘the way we do things here’ and you’ve achieved your goal, provided you keep practicing, the more consciously the better so as to ensure when people AREN’T thinking about these things they will ‘automatically’ do the right thing. What you can’t do is order it, enforce a bit of practice and then stop and expect the new, good behavior to continue.

So, it’s always been logic, it’s been observed for centuries, now it’s scientifically proven. and it’s what we all strive to figure out – how to change culture. Shouldn’t that seem unbelievably exciting??? Let’s actually do it this time!

Bookmark and share this post

More »

What he argues basically is what I’ve been harping on – that we can solve pretty much any of the problems facing us with ingenuity if we build our capacity to innovate in all our organizations. He makes his arguments in context of a very interesting survey of history in which he insists the urge to trade, to do business with each other, leads to each of us specializing in some skill set we can get exceptionally good at. therefore producing far more than if each of us tried to produce all the things we individually need. By becoming specialized we can ‘over-produce’ beyond what we each need and thus trade the surpluses among ourselves so we all have more of everything. It’s fascinating to view the history of the world in this light (and I have to agree generally with his conclusions).

Overall it’s a great, positive message for those who choose to work in commercial endeavors. Of course, not surprisingly my copy was a gift from a Canadian mutual fund company, Vertex One, that stands to gain if we believe the future is literally worth investing in. Good marketing (the second year in a row they’ve chosen a book that is definitely worth not only reading, but thinking about). On a cautionary note, this isn’t a fund recommendation, but for disclosure, it is one I hold a small stake in. It definitely promotes the concept that business can have a significant role in saving the world, perhaps not a surprise from a West coast company.

Of course, we can never be sure of the future, but Ridley’s makes a good point that throughout our spectacular rise to technological superiority of today, there have always been pessimists predicting we would run out of the ability to improve things. Every generation has predicted we’d run out of food, etc., but so far we haven’t. so far.

What we can’t disagree with is his conclusion that we better continue to innovate at a rapid pace or we most certainly will be faced with problems the globe can’t overcome. Innovation has become the prime strategic imperative and we know that a unique sort of leadership and human resources environment is required to support that. In one sense, we’ve set ourselves on a treadmill and have to keep it going at least until we find population numbers decreasing significantly (hopefully not due to catastrophe). His view of ‘evolution’ is most interesting, too, arguing we’re the only species to have ‘evolved’ through social re-structuring, education and development. It’s a powerful conclusion, but just how true or how much we can count on this continuing remains to be seen.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the new insights and would recommend this for many college curricula.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

It’s an interesting application of how simulations could apply to training leadership thinking when people have difficulty understanding where the road blocks are, a common problem. Often those blocks are confused even more by other people pulling in different directions.

The gist of this game is you choose among tax increases or budget cuts that have been discussed or proposed by Obama, senators, representatives and financial experts – and you keep choosing until you ‘balance the budget’ for 2015 and 2030. two different requirements. It turns out to be easier than you might think, although clearly there could be complicated intermediate options – like partially reducing certain health care spending rather than cutting it entirely. A game can’t include every possibility in a complex situation without becoming unwieldy. Nevertheless it’s instructive.

Among the surprises: there are actually solutions knowledgeable people have proposed that, when put together, solve the problem, just as in most situations. This isn’t insoluble at all, which many of us have certainly wondered about. Second, these solutions are apparently feasible, though one wonders what unforeseen long term impacts some might have. Actually that is no different from any choice of strategies we might make in any arena – and it’s what leadership is like in essentially every situation.

At the end, you can’t help, but wonder why this isn’t being solved faster… or whether it is at all. The answer, if you think about problems you’ve faced yourself, is we choose to solve problems when we’re ready, when we’ve had enough of lacking a solution. We’ll quit smoking when we worry finally it will kill us or our loved ones. So, too, will the US solve its budget issues – when enough citizens fear the alternatives. Unfortunately that appears to remain some years or even decades in the future and you can see why through the eyes of this game – a potentially valuable gift it offers.

Clearly each interest group will resist giving up its pet tax breaks or benefits. Can leadership speed things up? Obama did a great job, at least in US terms bringing in health care, yet got hammered in the recent elections. On the other hand, voters stopped short of upending his hold on the Senate so the gains couldn’t be erased easily. Why? It looked like lots of misunderstanding of issues on both sides from here, but only those actually in the midst of the mess can draw useful conclusions. The rest of us have to wait more years to see what they will do even though their economy affects much of ours and many other nations.

The game offers a possibility of making the choices clearer to voters (team members) and some variation of it could likely do the same for thorny problems businesses or even individuals face. Yes, it would take some doing to put together the list of options for a given situation, but this makes it look more worth taking the time to do that. Simulations are growing in importance as decision-making aids and this is a chance to see why.

And yes, leadership definitely makes a difference, but doesn’t solve things in total. Clearly if Obama hadn’t been in power, no progress on health care would have occurred and 30 million Americans would still be without health care they now have access to. Two steps forward, one back. Can our teams be different? Nothing worth doing seems easy, but anything which sheds some useful light and clarity on the inevitable debates has to be a gain.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

Gallup specializes in workforce productivity issues these days as one of their many undertakings, but it was still odd to see it discussed on what we’ve come to think of as a Happiness web site, but it’s time we tackle this question head on.

We hear plenty of executives make fun of the concept that we should try to keep employees happy. I’ve been guilty myself since, to get in good with senior teams, HR people often have to distance themselves from such ‘fluffy’ concepts. Nevertheless, if happiness is what it takes to improve results, why not? Indeed, most executives are fairly open to ‘nice to have’ benefits in the workplace as long as their primary objective of increasing productivity is the result.

Much of the resistance comes from many executives’ misunderstanding of what it takes to make employees happy. They often think, “They won’t be happy till we double salaries (and then they’ll get tired of that and want even more).” Of course, today we all know that simply increasing pay is only a temporary boost to morale, don’t we? But do we also know there are more permanent ways to achieve happiness and that this in turn boosts results?

The Gallup paper doesn’t focus on the word “happiness,” but on employee “wellbeing” and “quality of life,” which some might see as buzzwords for the same concept or at least root causes of lasting happiness. Phrasing it in these terms has the benefit of making it more obvious how it applies to work.

Without feeling as sense of physical wellbeing, employees book off sick. Experts in absenteeism have long estimated 75% of sick time is driven by psychological factors – a huge cost to any organization.

Poor social well-being has been in the Gallup ‘disengagement index’ or Q12 for years now with the question, “Do you have a best friend at work?” Many executives use this to poke fun at the measure, joking about how they do or don’t have ‘best friends’ at work. Sure it sounds odd to many, but when research shows far higher engagement and productivity for those who have such connections and feel more comfortable in their jobs as a result, why are these jokes still acceptable in many organizations?

Similarly lack of Career, Community and Financial wellbeing have negative impacts. Some organizations encourage participation in charitable work and offer lunch and learns and other programs on how to manage your money, career and more while others still regard these as a waste of time. Gallup finds “a mere 8% of employees strongly agree that they have higher overall wellbeing because of their employer and the vast majority clearly think that their job is a detriment to their overall wellbeing.” By contrast those that maximize combined wellbeing scores get far better attendance, attention to work while present, creativity and willing participation. and therefore, inevitably, productivity and results. It seems completely clear when the numbers are laid out. And, oh, managers who simply treat employees badly, bully them, fail to provide simple recognition (such as routine compliments) or maybe, say, make fun of employee happiness. all items with no cost remedies, would they be contributing or detracting from overall wellbeing? Duh!?

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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?

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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?

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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.

Bookmark and share this post

More »

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.

Bookmark and share this post

More »