The Heart of Engagement : Leadership Development, Management Education, Retreat Facilitation & Executive Coaching : Mike Cook : AMJ Group

                                                                                                                                                        
Stuart Burke died last Friday in Rochester, New York at around 12:30AM after a prolonged struggle with cancer. As best I can tell his life ended peacefully and without pain thanks to the wonderful people in the hospice where he spent his last three days. He died in the presence of his two sisters and his wife, Janice, who held him close until the very end and even beyond. Stuart’s passing came as no great surprise. There had been hope, of course, that the regimen of chemotherapy treatments would turn the tide but in our heart of hearts those of us with any experience knew what to expect, after the conclusive diagnosis it was just a matter of when.

Stuart is one of my step-husbands; I have two, having been married now three times to three remarkable women. Stuart’s wife Janice was my second wife; we were married for over 20 years. We are all very close, my step-husbands and their wives, me, my wife and all the other relatives. It’s just a different way to develop an extended family and it works for us.

What took place in the final days before Stuart left us and in the immediate aftermath is worth noting. Among other things, I believe it provides an insight into engagement as a human phenomenon that is not well understood or even recognized. That element I am referring to here is CHOICE.

A while back, maybe eight years ago, in one of my older versions of a Webster’s, I found a definition of engagement that has become a standard for me in my work.

• Engagement: the condition of being associated with any activity as a matter of choice.

Where I find power in this definition is in the perspective it provides; from there the level of engagement is always a function of the engager as much or more than the surrounding events or environment.

Sunday morning January 8^th: As I am preparing for my trip from the San Juan Islands in Washington State to Rochester the following day, I check my email and see a notice from CaringBridge.org that informs us all that Stuart’s condition has declined rapidly and he will be moving to a hospice facility on Monday or Tuesday. (Pam, our close friend of 30 years has CHOSEN spontaneously taken over the notifications so Janice can focus all her attention on Stuart.)  It is apparent to me then that I will be directly involved somehow in Stuart’s final days. I have a role to play and am just not yet clear of the expectations.

• I can CHOOSE what is in front of me or RESIST, I cannot change what is happening.

I continue my preparations, originally planned around a two day client workshop they will now include the last days of Stuart’s life.

Sunday afternoon January 8^th: I receive a phone call from my youngest son Jake; he is 24 and lives in Brooklyn. He too has been informed of Stuart’s decline. He is going to take off work for a couple of days, head home, and do what he can for his mother. He asks if I can help with a train ticket to Rochester since he has no internet service yet in his new apartment and cannot make the reservation for the following morning. I CHOOSE to accept his request. I look up the schedules and give him the options, we agree on the best time and I complete the ticket purchase on line.

Sunday evening January 8^th: It occurs to me that I have not notified Janice that I will be in town and I know it will make a difference to her in some way. When I call Stuart and Janice’s number, a voice I immediately recognize answers. It is Betsy and we have not spoken in about ten years. Betsy lives in Orinda, CA and is in the area coincidently to visit her elderly father in Buffalo. She has read the Caring Bridge notification as well and CHOSEN to drive to Rochester to see how she can help. She is now managing the incoming phone calls so Janice can get some sleep.  She will pick Jake up at the train the following day before heading back to Buffalo on Tuesday morning.

Monday January 9^th: I fly to Rochester. When I land, I find an email has arrived from Janice. She is glad I am going to be in town at this important time. She also let’s me know that Jake was planning to gather his furniture while in Rochester, rent a truck and drive it all to Brooklyn when he leaves. Upon hearing this I CHOOSE my role and it is to work with Jake, modify my plans and travel back home from New York City after driving with him to Brooklyn.

I also receive an email from my work partner Laurie telling me that her daughter’s water has broken and she is going into labor with her first child two weeks early. It looks like a C-section is in the offing, Laurie has made a CHOICE and is already on her way to New York City to be with her daughter. It now seems I’ll be doing the workshop by myself, having never led this one before. I make a CHOICE, this can all work and I’ll need to do some intense preparation with Laurie over the phone.  

Tuesday January 10^th: I have a buffer day before the workshop begins, (Lynn, another friend of twenty years calls and says she has heard I am in town and wants me to know that she and her partner Barb, another long time friend would welcome me if I was looking for a place for dinner that evening. She and Barb and a group of others have been running meals daily to Janice and Stuart for the past two weeks. I CHOOSE to decline the offer but let her know that it means a lot). Laurie calls in the afternoon and tells me the baby has arrived in the middle of the night, Mom and baby are doing well and she has decided the work we are doing is too important to linger in NYC. She and her husband have CHOSEN to make the seven hour drive home that night, following a similar drive the night before.

I finish a dinner meeting that evening with a special client/friend and CHOOSE to drive to Janice’s home to see Jake. He is so sick he cannot get off the couch. I suspect a strong emotional response to seeing his step-father in an extremely emaciated condition. Janice later confirms that she shares my suspicion. He’ll be fine in time.

Wednesday January 11^th: Laurie and I successfully conduct the first workshop with our new client. She is brilliant and acknowledges around 2PM that she is fading. I CHOOSE to lead the last three hours of the workshop.

That evening I drop by to see Jake after having dinner with one of my former partners. He tells me that Lynn and Barb CHOSE to come by and took him out to dinner. He was grateful and feeling better.

Thursday January 12^th: The previous day Laurie and I had been notified by our client/sponsor that his mother was in intensive care and he would not attend the morning of second day of our workshop. We had planned to meet with him after the session to look forward to plan the balance of the process. We CHOSE to tell him to let go of the workshop, do what was needed for his mother and we’d catch up this week. That’s what he CHOSE. We have a call set with him for Wednesday afternoon.

After the workshop and some follow up debriefing with Laurie, I head over to help Jake move furniture in preparation for an early morning Friday departure. When I arrived, it was obvious that the house had been thoroughly cleaned. Jake said that Lynn and a couple of other friends had CHOSEN to deal with the house and the aftermath of Stuart’s declining health that had piled up for several weeks.

We packed and went off to dinner. We invited our friend Keating who was arriving back in town from a week of work in Arlington, VA. She CHOSE to accept; she arrived at 8PM and drove from the airport to meet us at a restaurant. Jake had always been a favorite of hers and she hadn’t seen him in over a year. We had a great time; Jake started to unwind a bit by the time we were done.

Friday January 13^th: Upon awaking it was immediately apparent that the expected 2-4 inches of new snow would be much more. I had previously planned to meet Jake at the airport and drop off my rental car. We proceeded with that part of the plan but as the snow continued to fall, I could see that driving to Brooklyn with a truckload of furniture was out of the question. As I waited for, Jake I CHOSE to create a new plan, send Jake back to New York by train so he could work Saturday as was expected and to wait until Saturday morning and to drive the truck myself to Brooklyn. He CHOSE immediately, I didn’t have to ask him twice, he saw the same thing I did and was grateful for the opportunity to return to New York on Friday.

Saturday January 14^th: I drove the truck to Brooklyn and arrived without incident. We unloaded the truck and we CHOSE to order pizza delivered.I also insisted on wings!

Sunday January 15^th: Jake needed to be at work so I walked with him to his subway station. I told him I would get a cab to La Guardia from there. He CHOSE to leave me standing on the corner but not without making me promise to send him a text when I arrived safely at the airport, which I later did.

In retrospect it was a peaceful week, blessedly peaceful. It had its moments but what day, week or month doesn’t? Lot of opportunities to CHOSE or RESIST and little chance of changing anything that was happening; CHOICES made by myself and others, many not mentioned here, to do what was needed when it was needed.

We have Stuart to thank for giving us most of these opportunities. Laurie's new granddaughter gets the rest of the credit  Nice gifts I’d say. 

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Last week while working with a group of mid-level managers the topic of “What’s OK to say in the workplace?” came up as it frequently does these days when managers get into conversations about interacting with their reports. After a few minutes of dialogue we reached a consensus that despite much of the counsel provided in harassment training you can still probably say just about anything to anybody depending on whether or not the relationship you have provides sufficient context to hold the comment. I recognize that saying this may raise the hair on some HR professionals’ necks but I am not a big fan of making policy that punishes or constrains the many because of the indiscretions of the few.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to addressing the issue of workplace harassment. Despite all the policies, harassment training, etc. I believe we still step over the most fundamental and powerful aspect of the employee/manager relationship, that it is based on an implicit power imbalance. This fact has a costly (immeasurable) and invisible impact on employee engagement and it is frequently ignored, especially when it is in the manager’s interest to do so.

Are there bullies (harassers) in the workplace? You bet there are and they should be dealt with in decisive, not tentative fashion. As I was reading a piece by Chris Iliades  titled ‘How to Deal with Adult Bullies’ I noted my own blood begin to simmer with recollections of experiences I had as a youth with “the big kids” who thought that being big meant they could get away with tormenting the smaller younger children. Perhaps like you I have been disappointed to find similar behavior taking place in the workplace, often on the part of people who know they have the advantage of position power. Unfortunately this is life in the workplace and I am hopeful that as companies become more enlightened as well as sensitive to public embarrassment many of these folks will find their way out of our lives.

But even as we work to eliminate the bullies and the sexual harassers a certain level of unconsciousness continues to pervade the ranks of managers. When it comes to the negative impact simple position power yielded thoughtlessly can have I find many managers don’t want to be held to account.                                                                                                                                         

‘Office Space’ may be the quintessential motion picture depiction of the negative impact of the unchecked boss/employee power imbalance. The boss,Bill Lumbergh, shown here at right is addressing Peter Gibbons on the left, the story’s protagonist. Lumbergh is obvious in his understanding that his position allows him a certain amount of leverage when it comes to infringing on his report’s personal time, he’s big on last minute requests for Peter and others to work weekends. Eventually this and other unchecked abuses of managerial power and simple disrespect catch up with Lumbergh in the form of an epiphany Peter has about the choice he has to simply not return to work. The events that follow this realization are what have made “Office Space’ a cult classic right down to the bobble head dolls of several of the film’s main characters that can frequently be found in employee’s cubicles.

Employees find ways to deal with the Bill Lumberghs in their workplaces, eventually sabotage of one form or another will take these characters down. Lumbergh knowingly abused his power, we might even say he was a soft spoken bully. What concerns me most are the unconscious actions of managers who otherwise have the respect of their reports. In these instances the manager has created a line of credit with the reports based on mutual understanding and mutual respect. However, and this is what makes the behavior so insidious, from time to time requests are made by these same managers that are an imposition on the personal time or commitments of their reports and the assent that occurs often reflects a passive conceding, without expressed doubts or objections rather than an engaged acceptance.  I see these occurrences as costly in the long run and one of the contributing behaviors that are not reflected in the separation interviews.

• Where do you suspect you may have been getting “yes’s” to requests when what you really been getting are an acquiescence to your position power. Maybe it’s time to have some of those conversations before the costs become prohibitive.

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The next six weeks at the gym are going to be a pain in the butt and you know why! Every year, thousands of us who have known for some time … maybe years … that we need to lose weight or get in shape will once again resolve that this is the year when we finally, finally do it, lose the pounds. Or we’re going to establish the fitness routine that returns our body (and hairline) to the 25 year old image of ourselves that we still carry in our minds like a worn photo of an old lover in our wallet. For many after a few weeks our trips to the gym will taper off to a trickle and then simply stop. Our resolve will wither and we will once again settle for disappointment in ourselves in place of the weight loss or the fitness we had promised ourselves. We will conclude (again)* that … we have some defect of character we have not the strength to overcome, we are too busy, or some such baloney, none of which will be true, and we will eat pizza and make mental notes about getting our fitness routine back on track soon. For me the net effect of all this false resolve will be that from early January to late March my Body Pump and Step classes will be uncomfortably crowded.

Knowing that we need to change, knowing what we need to do to affect change, knowing where we need to go to bring about a needed change … none of these has even close to enough power to bring about desired or needed change. If we cannot tell the difference between a reaction/wish and a creation/commitment we’ll be doomed to repeat our cycles of failure and disappointment.

Companies, maybe yours as well, are a lot like people in many ways and very like people when it comes to making resolutions to bring about needed changes. In companies, resolutions for change are made anytime something unpredicted occurs, especially something like losing a highly talented employee. But are these events really so unpredictable and is there any real resolve in these resolutions?

Eric Jackson is a venture capitalist. Among other things, he is also is a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine. Back in mid-December he took the time to tell us the ‘Top Ten Reasons Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent.’ This piece, which appeared on December 14^th has received well over one million views.

You can read Eric’s blog post if you’d like, in fact I encourage you to. Then, after you finish, ask yourself if there was truly any information there that you didn’t already know. I bet you won’t find much new there and you’ll also find that many people in your organization know his top ten reasons, have known them for a while, have resolved to make the necessary changes every time the company loses a key employee…and it has made no difference. We know what needs to be done yet we repeatedly don’t follow through with the necessary changes. So someone else will dust off Eric Jackson’s article around this time next year, cite a couple of new sources, publish someplace other than Forbes and get another million readers to check in because we know the answer lies in the “knowing what to do.”

Robert Kegan of Harvard might offer that companies for the most part lack a “developmental stance” or commitment to being a continuing home for the transformation of talent. It’s not that companies don’t know what to do or that they cannot see what Eric Jackson has seen. They lack the collective will to address themselves to talent development and retention in a generative rather than reactive manner. Along with his partner Lisa Laskow Lahey, Kegan has identified the attributes of a culture that would be the antithesis of that described in the Jackson article.

Attributes of a Developmental Culture

1. It recognizes that there is “life after adolescence,” that adulthood, too, must be a time for ongoing growth and development.
2. It honors the distinction between technical (simple) and adaptive (complex) learning agendas.
3. It recognizes and cultivates the individual’s intrinsic motivation to grow.
4. It assumes that a change in mindset takes time and is not evenly paced.
5. It recognizes that mindsets shape thinking and feeling, so changing mindsets needs to involve the head and the heart.
6. It recognizes that neither change in mind set nor change in behavior alone leads to transformation, but that each must be employed to bring about the other.
7. It provides safety for people to take the kinds of risks inherent in changing their minds.

• I’d invite you to review these attributes against the background of both Eric Jackson’s blog post and what you see taking place in your own company. Rather than wait to read the next version of Top Ten Reasons large Companies Fail to Keep There Best Talent commit yourself to seeing what you can do to bring about a development stance in your environment.

*This past year I had a personal breakthrough in the habitual pattern I describe here. No medals will be awarded I assure you since I waited until I was 64 and had knowingly tolerated an overweight condition for at least 24 years. That’s a story for another day and I have already told it in a previous post.  

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 “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

                              Dale Carnegie

Lately I have had the feeling that someone backed a dump truck full of lemons onto my lawn. The past couple of weeks in my life have been what you might call…a long story! But first, a little context.

For quite some time I have believed that those of us in the “employee engagement” field, profession, obsession, infatuation, call it what you will, etc., were “tilting at windmills” in our pursuit of factors to adjust, tweak, fluff up, incent and track in pursuit of some evidence of an ability to elevate the level of engagement of our workforce. As each cycle of surveys rolls around we know that “world class” is just around the next corner. No it’s not!

Even if our scores get better, even if we get into the upper echelons of scores in our industry, businesses our size, in our part of the country or whatever other way we choose to measure ourselves. “World Class” engagement is not just beyond our reach. In my view until we can recognize that we have yet to truly determine what it is we need to measure we have no lever into reliably influencing levels of engagement.

This is not to say that what we have been measuring is meaningless. I would submit that what we have been measuring is very meaningful and useful; it just hasn’t been a measure of engagement, more likely we’ve been measuring the offspring of employee satisfaction or employee satisfaction 2.0

From my unscientific perch, observing employees at work for the past twenty five years I am prepared to assert that employees are always engaged, the question is which phase they are operating in….

• Fully and Freely – Characterized by Choice, frequently exceeding expectations
• Compliant – Characterized by Need, barely meeting expectations
• Resistant – Characterized by Fear, failing to meet expectations

In my world engagement is a moving target and has more to do with resilience than any of the current popular factors being measured. By resilience I mean the ability to embrace whatever circumstances are being faced without regard to any concern for effectiveness or need to have things be any other way than they are, and the discomfort that accompanies such ambiguity is not paralyzing.

Life is frequently ambiguous, the workplace also frequently introduces us to ambiguity and we do not get to vote, we get to deal with it.

We do not like ambiguity and we are highly likely to become less than fully effective in the face of the ensuing discomfort. Call it confrontation if you like; say that many people are conflict averse if that seems nobler. What’s true is that we don’t like being in ambiguous circumstances and therefore uncomfortable for any length of time and will go out of our way to minimize discomfort, in fact we are so nuts about the discomfort brought on by ambiguity that we can become overcome traumatized by it, profoundly fearful in its presence.

Based on my experience I’d be prepared to wager something worthwhile that somewhere around 80-85% of every workforce is highly ineffective in the face of the discomfort that accompanies ambiguity. Tough times where outcomes look highly unpredictable and filled with perceived negative consequences have a devastating impact on productivity.

So now what about life handing us lemons and making lemonade? There is a big assumption there that needs to be talked about. What if you don’t have the sugar necessary? Can you just let the lemons be lemons and take effective action?

As a coach and developer of managers for many years I will frequently have the ambiguity/discomfort conversation with whomever I am working with. It has always seemed so fundamental to me and yet it has always looked so difficult to grasp by the people I was working with.

Earlier I mentioned a dump truck full of lemons and the last couple of weeks of my life. There are lots of details but they all boil down to an 88 year old father who had a stroke about three weeks back, an 87 year old mother who has severe back problems and a 59 year old brother with an active drug addiction all living under one roof.

The events of the past two weeks in particular drew me directly into the center of the unworkability in my family. I arrived in my home town for what I imagined was going to be a recon trip to determine what we might take as best actions on behalf of my parents. What I ended up doing was tending to my brother’s issues; taking a trip to the emergency room, making a visit to a courtroom and having my very first meeting with a probation officer were just some of the fun features of my visit home. Suddenly and without planning to be I was daily facing situations I didn’t know how to deal with and in each instance I found myself needing to make a choice, stay and play or run away. I stayed. I can’t say I liked it, that I was eventually victorious (if you’ve ever dealt with addiction even a draw seems like a win), or that I was courageous, brave or whatever. I certainly did not feel that way.

What I can say is that I had an object lesson in what I have believed was true about engagement, it has more to do with maintaining a clear sense of what needs to be accomplished in the face of ambiguity than it does any external rightness or wrongness with the circumstances. I made some progress, I didn’t declare victory, I met the enemy and it was me and my sensitivity to discomfort. I stayed engaged, there is no lemonade at the end of this story, just lemons and they are sour.

• We need to find ways to improve the resilience of the workforce, increased engagement will naturally follow.   

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In Part 1 of this series on New Models for Management Development I offered the following as the background against which much of our corporate management development is currently being conducted…

Development is done…

• Away from the workplace, with a classroom focus
• On a periodic event basis
• With the assumption that development is learning, meaning we focus primarily on providing new information.
• Centers on individual rather than group learning process, most classes made up of unconnected participants  
• Assumes all developmental issues to be more or less technical, developing skills is sufficient.

With these elements as background imagine that alongside programs for which this approach truly does make sense, say learning a new software application such as spread sheets or something similar, we began to lay the foundation for another form of development to take place, a “hack” of the current paradigm of development so to speak. Though there are many working definitions of the term “hack” the one we’ll use here is adapted from Gary Hamel’s Management Innovation eXchange, “a disruptive idea or radical fix” offered in the face of a lingering issue.

A “Hack” doesn’t necessarily work well if it threatens the host being hacked so retention of most of the familiar learning paradigm will be a key element of the success of this initiative. Assume we’ll retain what works about the traditional development paradigm with its skills development focus, let’s gently lay out a new parallel path as follows

Parallel Design Features for Organizational Learning

        Skill Development Focus                                        Outcome Focus

• Learning In artificial groups (classes)                - Learning in real work groups
  
• Time out” apart from work flow                          - Infusing learning within work flow 
• Time-limited                                                       -Time elastic
•  Indirect Learner accountability                          - Direct learner accountability
• Informational/technical                                      -Transformational /Adaptive
• Seeking transfer of learning                               - Starts at transfer of learning
• Serving team-leaders                                        - Co-Teaching with team leaders
• Tight boundary between learning                        - Loose boundaries/adjunct faculty
  personnel and line personnel   
• Loose connections to overall                              -Tight connection to strategy
  corporate strategy
• In prep for an initiative                                        - In support during an initiative

We’ll call the right hand column above a design for “distributed development”. (Hopefully the meaning of “distributed development” is immediately apparent.)

Establishing and maintaining a distributed developmental environment is based in the belief that there will always be room for all employees to grow. Growth comes about as an outcome of an adaptive change process, a process involving modification of behaviors and even sometimes values. In general it is safe to say that management in many a modern organization is an exercise in coordinating adaptive behaviors. To be sure managers still face many technical challenges but what keeps them up at night are the adaptive challenges and unfortunately they are often facing these challenges alone.

Attempting to teach the skill of managing adaptive change in the vacuum of a classroom full of unrelated strangers is either the height of ignorance or arrogance. I prefer to think that the perpetuation of educational models that treat adaptive issues as technical in nature is a function of misunderstanding the distinct nature of the challenges. No matter, the suggestion to establish a set of practices that acknowledge the need for “distributed development” will initially threaten the prevailing hierarchy and many an entrenched internal development staff. It will test many of the management’s large assumptions upon which past practices have been based. Eventually, with patience, persistence and some undeniable successes it will be possible to expand the world of employee development by moving the  developmental horizon right into the place where it can make the biggest difference and offering it when it can make the greatest contribution, a more complete and accurate reflection of the challenges managers really face.

In Part 3 we'll examine what a "distributed development " might look like.

• Where have you been addressing adaptive issues as though they were technical in nature? 

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 If you have been involved in management/leadership development for any length of time I am sure this thought has crossed your mind…

   “There must be a more effective way to do this!”

I’d also be willing to bet that you’ve wrestled with this question…

           “How can we get senior management to see that budgets for management development need to be related to as essential not discretionary?”

You may have also wondered this…

           “Why is it that managers wait to be sent to our programs rather than ask to get in?”

If any of these thoughts/questions seem familiar to you let me then ask you this; do these common elements of a corporate developmental approach seem at all familiar?

Development is done…

• Away from the workplace, with a classroom focus
• On a periodic event basis
• With the assumption that development is learning, meaning we focus primarily on providing new information.
• Centers on individual rather than group learning process, most classes made up of unconnected participants  
• Assumes all developmental issues to be more or less technical, developing skills is sufficient.

If you noticed yourself identifying with any of these elements chances are good that in your version of a “corporate university” participating managers are exposed to the traditional transmission model of adult education. The transmission model is a carryover from the way in which we have taught children for many years. This format rests on the premise that a subject matter expert can transfer crucial knowledge to us by some means, lecture, videos, role playing, simulation etc.  The expectation is that the learner has an insufficient store of information, the expert will “add” some of what is missing and voila! Performance improves.

In this model there is no presumption that the learner may already know what to do and by virtue of other factors cannot execute on that knowledge. The transmission model assumes perfect ability to apply what is being learned and if not then there is some defect of character or attitude involved. These defects of course become diagnosed as opportunities for individual coaching!

So getting back to those opening thoughts and questions… “Why are managers waiting to be sent to our programs…?” Given the way we go about development it is highly likely that they don’t see our offerings as having a critical relationship with what they are accountable for getting done. This can be corrected but it will take be willing to think differently about development.

As for the question, “How can we get senior management to see that budgets for management development need to be held as essential not discretionary?” What if they came back to us and asked, “If we don’t cut your budget what do you really think the odds are of us getting the performance we are counting on from our managers based on what you are proposing?” Would you be willing to put your job on the line?

If we answer honestly we all know there is plenty of research to suggest that betting the mortgage payment on the current and most common approaches to management development would not be wise. Might this not then drive us right back to our lamenting declaration… “There must be a better way to do this!” and encourage us to transform to a more  responsible and engaging statement like “I am going to find a more effective way to do this!”

So where would we start to redesign management development from?

Where would you start if it was your project? **

Consider these questions as part of your process? What if...

• You could link manager's problem solving ability together like computers can be linked for greater efficiency and processing power?
• Management development could become process driven rather than event bound?
• Development and the application of learning took place in a near real time experiential environment using actual situations faced?
• Managers derived most of their developmental benefit from conversations with other managers facing similar issues working collaboratively on real problems?
• Managers engaged collaborative development on a long term basis could dramatically improve their aggregate efficiency and reduce the time it took for results to be produced across all functional lines?

Here is a bigger and tougher question...if all these "what ifs" were possible would you be willing to scrap your existing approach to management/leadership development for outcomes such as these? 

** In coming installments I'll be sharing some of my thoughts on how to revolutionize management/leadership development where it may matter most, in the middle of your organization.

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I don’t think the Super Committee is going to get it done, the European economies are in turmoil, the stock market is poised to whip itself into a frenzy, asking “What does all this mean?” yet once again, and we’re coming into the holiday season. Welcome to wonderland, as in, “Wonder how we ended up here?”

Right about now if you told me left was right or up was down I’d be inclined to at least give the thought some consideration. So many things that we’ve taken as a matter of fact have been turned upside down in the past three years we’ve reached the point where I’ve come to completely understand that nothing is permanent. I was thinking today about what I am thankful for that I look to for inspiration when there seems to be no solid ground. It is my trust in myself and the recognition that as I have trusted myself I have been able to forge some amazing relationships over the years that I am confident will support me through whatever upheavals lay in front of us in the near term. For these relationships I am deeply thankful. Since it is my belief that a trust in myself is what has allowed for this nurturing network to take form I decided this week to re-publish an earlier post on this topic…here it is with my best wishes for a fulfilling holiday.

• Can you imagine being a manager and not trusting people? I don’t necessarily mean specific people, I mean people in general. Unfortunately, I think many managers are unconscious of their biases in this regard, having “handy stories” justifying behavior that might otherwise be considered paranoid. I think you know the stories I mean, they usually include some element of “well you can never be too careful,” or “if you want something done right do it yourself.” Both of these are versions of how to avoid depending on others. These “stories” do a major job of invisibly undermining accountability in any organization. Put in the simplest terms, no trust = no accountability. So let’s take a closer look at trust in a way that opens space for accountability.

Preparing for this article, it occurred to me that for many thoughtful people there are three truths about trust and no common definition. The three truths are:

1.       If I trust, I can count on being disappointed.

2.       If I do not trust, my life will likely be safe but it will feel more like surviving than thriving.

3.       If I am up to anything of consequence—anything that will really make any difference—then I will need the involvement of others. Therefore, trust is a foregone conclusion: I will trust or I will accomplish very little in this lifetime.

With the above three truths in mind, I would do well to establish a tolerance for disappointment. If this sounds paradoxical to you I empathize. It appears that there is always a paradox to be dealt with where trust is involved if I insist on defining trust as having anything to do with someone other than myself!

In my consulting experience most people I encounter offer their definition of trust in terms of the behaviors of others. In contrast as I read through hundreds of quotes from "fairly famous" people to prepare for this article, a single insight became clear: there is no power in any definition of trust that depends on the behavior of others. None of these “famous people” defined trust as having anything to do with anyone other than themselves. Consider this:

• Any definition of trust that generates power will be a function of my relationship with myself.

Do I have the confidence in myself to deal with whatever comes my way? Can I interact successfully with various personalities? Can I have direct reports who clearly have superior subject knowledge to my own? Can I honor my intentions when interacting with people of differing agendas? And most importantly, can I count on myself to respond and deliver without excuses even when someone has let me down?

As a manager this perspective on trust gives me reason to think that I can be effective no matter what and no matter who is involved. After reading all those quotes from famous people I concluded that trust, like we often say about beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. By adopting this perspective I place the responsibility for trust in my own lap. My power comes from the fact that there never was anything I could do about your behavior except to ask for what I wanted and hold you to account for what you said you would do.

• Have you trusted yourself to form relationships with people who know you rely on them?
• Have you formed relationships with people that will be there for you when it is that time?
• Who have you let know that they can count on you when the going gets even tougher than it is now?
   

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 “The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.”

                                                                                              William Deresiewicz
                                                                                                                                     

I got around to reading an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times by William Deresiewicz titled ‘Generation Sell’ on Sunday morning from which I took the quote I opened with here. In a piece I found very enjoyable to read, Deresiewicz takes us through his analysis of the millennial generation that seems to be so troubling to work with or even understand for many managers today. His central insight is that this is a generation of entrepreneurs…

“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.”

  In Deresiewicz’ view, the Millennials operate with…

“…a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.”

 …so their entrepreneurial inclinations are driven as much from a self-preservation strategy as previous generations were driven by the desire for security.

While Millennials view the small business as the idealized social form of the current times. many of them continue to work in our mainstream organizations. They literally walk among us, having learned how to play the game by developing an ability to fit in rather than drop out and assume the risks of business ownership.

Given the continued premium we place on compliance it is likely that we have not tapped the entrepreneurial instincts of this generation and likely as not this is why they will eventually leave us. As managers we might do ourselves an enormous favor by asking not how we can get them to be like us but rather how can we give them reason to stay and invest themselves in our future.

The November 14^th issue of the New Yorker magazine features a Malcolm Gladwell piece on Steve Jobs titled ‘The Tweaker’. In the article Gladwell identifies Jobs’ genius not so much as that of an inventor but truly more of a “tweaker.” By definition…

“The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task.”

As managers, we might prefer a team of “tweakers” to a team of inventors since inventors are notorious for lacking commercial instincts and often times are satisfied with proving out rather than perfecting their ideas. Cases in point abound but suffice for now for me to remind us all of the boon Xerox research has been to the technology industry, if not necessarily to itself.

So if Deresiewicz is on to something, and from my knowledge of my own twenty- four year son I’d say he is, it is incumbent on us to find ways for our Millennial employees to contribute by “being in charge” of something they view as important. This will have less to do with salary category or titles than it will be the idea of having a lot of say in something important to our business … maybe not the final say but certainly a lot leading up to it.

Turning our Millennial employees loose to “tweak” may seem like an invitation to chaos, but it may just be a formula for the engagement and retention of our best and brightest.

• What can you do to give your Millennials more of a say in the business and an invitation to make what is already working even better? 

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We’ve all done this, turned down the opportunity to try a new experience then later regretted the choice we made. The ones we can recall usually involved some negative consequences as well. Sometimes we just missed out on the fun, sometimes we missed out on much more. Sometimes, not often, there may even have been a second chance and we didn’t pass it up.

The history of business abounds with tales of companies that passed up ideas, products or services that later became great commercial successes. These stories only become memorable because some other company didn’t pass up the very same or a similar opportunity.

One company that truly benefitted from another passing up an opportunity was Microsoft when IBM decided that its future was in PC manufacturing, not software, and literally gave the operating system business away.

Ironically Microsoft may have done something similar in 2010 when it chose its past over a possible new future in the newly emerging tablet industry.

This past week in a brilliant two part story CNET reporter Jay Greene  provides the details behind the decision making process that led to the cancellation of Microsoft’s prototype tablet, Courier, and effectively kept Microsoft out of the tablet race and in the continued business of protecting its Windows franchise.

In ‘The inside story of how Microsoft killed its Courier tablet’ Greene documents a compelling exchange between Bill Gates and Courier project leader J Allard in which Gates began to sense that his team was not developing another form of PC:

“At one point during that meeting in early 2010 at Gates' waterfront offices in Kirkland, Wash., Gates asked Allard how users get e-mail. Allard, Microsoft's executive hipster charged with keeping tabs on computing trends, told Gates his team wasn't trying to build another e-mail experience….Courier users could get e-mail from the Web, Allard said, according to sources familiar with the meeting…

…the device wasn't intended to be a computer replacement; it was meant to complement PCs. …Courier was for the creative set, a gadget on which architects might begin to sketch building plans, or writers might begin to draft documents.

This is where Bill had an allergic reaction," said one Courier worker who talked with an attendee of the meeting. As is his style in product reviews, Gates pressed Allard, challenging the logic of the approach.”

• Characterizing something as “an allergic reaction” sounds an awful lot like Gates’ response was promoted by a strong Immunity to Change when it came to offering the public anything that didn’t look like Windows.

 Greene goes on…

“It's not hard to understand Gates' response. Microsoft makes billions of dollars every year on its Exchange e-mail server software and its Outlook e-mail application. While heated debates are common in Microsoft's development process, Gates' concerns didn't bode well for Courier. He conveyed his opinions to Ballmer, who was gathering data from others at the company as well.”

• Many of us have been around situations in our own companies where some project or idea seemed to be sailing along until a senior executive expressed concern and suddenly the “rats start leaving the ship.”

And just like in your own company experience the story of Courier has an unfortunately predictable ending, as Greene reports…

“Within a few weeks, Courier was cancelled because the product didn't clearly align with the company's Windows and Office franchises, according to sources.”

So what about this choice? Did Microsoft avoid a strategic misstep when cancelled Courier?

Since the cancellation of Courier in 2010 Apple has introduced and already updated its iPad tablet. According to Gartner Group there will be 63.3 million tablets sold in 2011, a year after their initial introduction. Projected sales for 2012 exceed 100 million units. two-thirds of these will be sold by Apple. By any count, that’s a lot of tablets and none of them produced by Microsoft.

But the loss of a place at the tablet table was not Microsoft’s only loss…Courier was cancelled and

“A few months after that, both Allard and Bach (Head of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Group) announced plans to leave Microsoft, though both executives have said their decisions to move on were unrelated to the Courier cancellation.”

• With the decision to cancel Courier Microsoft also lost the visionary leadership that had led to the products' inception.

What does the future now hold for Microsoft? Time will tell. The Windows operating system is still the most familiar to most PC users and many would prefer to see it installed in new tablet models. So there is still a market for Microsoft but it has ceded a big head start to Apple in the tablet industry, a lead it is unlikely to ever challenge.

More importantly, for all of us this story offers yet one more example of the adage that you are never to brilliant to be blinded by your own success. As Jay Greene later says… 

“Courier's death also offers a detailed look into Microsoft's Darwinian approach to product development and the balancing act between protecting its old product franchises and creating new ones. The company, with 90,000 employees, has plenty of brilliant minds that can come up with revolutionary approaches to computing. But sometimes, their creativity is stalled by process, subsumed in other products, or even sacrificed to protect the company's Windows and Office empires.”

• If Microsoft can be stalled by its own Immunity to Change it would appear that our own company will likely experience something similar at some point. Maybe it has already?

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Kimberly Davis is a good friend. She is also one of the most creative people I know working in leadership development. Her revolutionary program OnStage Leadership allows leaders to find their authentic voice, and she accomplishes this in a one day developmental experience. I receive her newsletter monthly. This month it contained a piece I wanted to share here and Kimberly has graciously consented. It is a welcome reminder of a bit of wisdom that we frequently lose sight of, told in her unique voice. Go Kimberly…

"For Easter, when our son was three, we gave him a viewfinder.  Ever since his grandma bought him a broken robot at a garage sale when he was two, our kiddo was totally obsessed with robots.  So naturally, when the Easter Bunny left a viewfinder in Jeremy’s Easter basket, he immediately started calling it his “Robot Eyes”.

For a solid week he wouldn’t go anywhere without his Robot Eyes. He’d be sitting in the backseat of the Prius, on the way to pre-school, with a kid’s cliff bar in one hand (hey, we were running late) and the other holding up his Robot Eyes, through which he claimed to see a whole new world.

I think in a sense that’s what we all do. We all have our invisible Robot Eyes plastered to our faces. We’ve held them up for so long that we don’t even know that they’re there.And it turns out that we only have one disc, the one that came with the thing.  We flash through the pictures on that disc only seeing the same old pictures flash in front of us again and again.  We forget that we can take them off.  We forget that we can go to Target and buy a new disc, or ten new discs, or borrow someone else’s disc.  We only see what we see.  That’s what the world has become to us.  We don’t know how to look at the people we meet, and the things that happen to us, as they really are.  We only look through our Robot Eyes.

Professionally, I’ve found this to be a tremendous barrier. 

• I’ve decided, erroneously, who would benefit from working with me and who wouldn’t. 
• I’ve not had important conversations that need to be had, because I didn’t think it was possible to be understood. 
• I’ve not brought ideas to the table, because I didn’t think they’d be valued.

And, after working with hundreds of leaders, I find I’m not alone.

For leaders, this is a particularly tough challenge.  With the intention of communicating authority, confidence, and credibility, we stop asking ourselves these questions:

• What is it I don’tknow?
• Is there another way of doing this I haven’t thought of? 
• Is there another perspective that might be useful?

Personally, I have to work daily to remind myself to pry my Robot Eyes from my face. It’s not something that comes naturally. When I do, I feel a bit vulnerable and exposed, without the familiarity of my own world-view.

Yet when I do, I’m able to more fully connect, with people around me,with opportunities I didn't know were there, with solutions to problems I couldn't solve on my own.

What is it that I don’t know?

The mind is such a funny thing.  We think we’re seeing things clearly.  That we’ve processed all the evidence and have come up with the most logical conclusion, and yet we come to find out that our own perceptions might be terrorizing our life.

Consider that many of our biggest challenges exist simply because of the way we’re looking at things.Maybe we need a new disc, or two, or ten, for our viewfinders.  Perhaps playing the same old disc over and over is what keeps us from the very things we most long to have – connection, opportunity, solutions.

 This month I challenge you to focus more on what you don’t know, on looking for a different way to see. 

• With an open mind, ask your direct reports and colleagues, particularly those who don’t typically agree with you, about their ideas and perceptions (be sure to make it safe for them to share honestly, and be mindful of appreciating what they have to say).

Removing your personal viewfinder isn’t easy.  But don’t worry.  It’s not like getting a bad sunburn wearing strange glasses.  Nobody can actually see the big white rings on your face where your “Robot Eyes” use to be.  Only you know that they were there.  And I won’t tell if you don’t."

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Around 17 years ago my firm was employed by a large manufacturer in our area to assist with a new product development initiative that had fallen waaaay behind schedule…again. In our analysis of the situation, we quickly found among other things a project that was being managed to death, or at least to a stop, frequently!

The folks responsible for the technical (real) development had been given lots of responsibility and virtually no autonomy. The functional management, spread over several areas, was so busy trying to “contribute” and stay informed that they had succeeded in squashing both the enthusiasm and initiative of the technical development team.

We proposed a new project oversight structure that reflected very distinct “contributions” expected from both the functional managers and the technical teams. The technical team would focus strictly on getting the product developed; the functional managers would focus on providing resources and removing barriers…when called upon.

Seven months later, slightly ahead of the revised schedule promised and under the budget allocated, the new product was delivered. Our role along the way, consisted of maintaining the new structure, reminding the functional managers of their new role and keeping them out of the technical team’s hair.

Seventeen years ago we were operating mostly from commitment, intuition and some experience; we didn’t have a good vocabulary to go along with the structures we created and held in place, or a well defined set of distinctions for change management. Based on my recent reading of Chip and Dan Heath’s book ‘Switch…’ I would now say that what we had intuitively done was “shape the Path”, actually we served as a surrogate for the shaping.

More important to us than knowing what we had done to produce this outcome was understanding what we had tapped into that allowed an otherwise completely bogged down initiative to suddenly rise from its own ashes and race forward to successful completion. Since that time I have devoted myself to developing the means to transfer what we had accomplished to a teachable format with what I will call mixed results at best. Using the Heath’s model, I’ve been successful at addressing the rider (rational) and the elephant (emotional) elements of change but never achieved the breakthroughs I was looking for in tweaking the environmental factors (the path).

I wasn’t going to be satisfied until we could develop a systemic approach that rendered our services as change agents unnecessary in the long term. I think you see where this goes…teach the man to fish…it’s a greater contribution.

This past week I began reading ‘The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World.’ As I rolled along through the first chapter I realized that the author, Jeremy Rifkin, has unwittingly provided me a distinction that has been missing for me for 17 years, “lateral power.” His book is written to bring us to the larger realization of an innovative economic development model that ensures the sustainability of our natural resources and ecosystems. In other words he is working on “big ass ideas.”

I am somewhat uncomfortable about whether I’ll be accused of “dumbing down” concepts like those presented in ‘TIR’ but I had a moment if insight as I read. Lateral power, the concept must apply in many contexts. Somehow I believe that every fundamental concept is scalable. After all, it is “turtles all the way down” right?

 "Lateral power is a naturally occurring resource in every organization that is unintentionally constrained and minimized by unfocused, unconscious hierarchy."

We are encouraged by Peter Block in ‘Community: The Structure of Belonging’ to accept that the traditional hierarchies that we live with in organizations will never go away, so we should probably stop trying to change or eliminate them. I tend to agree with Block and I do not necessarily think the hierarchies should go away, if intentionally focused. However, our hierarchies do often serve to obscure and inhibit the lateral networks that would naturally form in their absence. Lateral power is a naturally occurring resource in every organization that is unintentionally constrained and minimized by unfocused, unconscious hierarchy. I am sure this is a controversial statement. But hear me out.

• You go to work each day planning to make the highest contribution possible. Why would you suspect that your co-workers would be any different from you?
• Answer me this, while the hierarchical priorities of your organization provide for an important flow of information and resources, are they always attuned to the creation and retention of customers as an ultimate primary priority?
• In your experience, are your cross functional peers inclined to look for ways to be supportive of each other’s objectives unless otherwise directed?
• Do you believe that continuing to work on employee engagement will be enough to sustain your organization’s performance or get it where it needs to be, or is something more basic needed, like to freedom to convene parties with mutual interests to collaborate feely outside the constraints of hierarchy?
• Would you welcome regularly participation with working peers in a structured format where the point was the progress of your work and the mutual success of everyone attending? 

Lateral power…it is time to go looking for ways to tap into it. When you reach the end of the road… it’s time to learn to fly. 

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If you are at all conscious of the world of commerce today, you know that in order to remain competitive your organization must have at least the same quality of talent as the leaders in your industry. You’ve also got to know that engaging in a price war for talent is a long term losing proposition. The alternative set available would then seem to include a) being willing to permanently accept your organization as less than an industry leader (a questionable long term strategy for certain), b) entering the world of competitive free agency with all the risk that involves, hoping it is a short term solution or c) focusing on making yours an attractive working environment where people can and do develop to their fullest potential. Your immediate response to option c) may be a knee jerk “Yeah, let’s do that,” followed immediately by the recognition that you have no idea how to do that! That is, if you are being honest with yourself.    

The question that is the title of this post is a direct quote taken from the concluding chapter of Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (I wrote about their work a couple of weeks back in a different context). I originally read their newest book hot off the presses in 2009. As is frequently my habit, I did not finish the entire book, stopping once I felt I had a grasp on the “big idea.”

Last week as I was preparing to deliver the Immunity to Change process to a group here in my home area in the Northwest I decided to go back and finish reading the final chapter. To my joy, amazement and eventual embarrassment I learned that what I had thought was a firm grasp on their “biggest idea” was not that at all. I had settled for the “big idea.”

Through their 25+ years of work, Kegan and Lahey have become exposed to some long buried falsehoods as well as false hopes about adult education inside many organizations naming these among them;

• …we annually spend millions of dollars on training programs predicated on the notion that if we provide people with more information we will change their ability.
• …we have often confused the acquisition of more information with getting smarter.

If you are involved in education in your place of work on any level, you may find yourself becoming prickly at the assertion that we have long been looking for treasure while digging in the wrong place. But honestly, aside from high “smiley face” scores, have you seen any really permanent difference in overall ability arising from programs which…

1. Typically are discreet events outside the normal flow of work.
2. Often involve participants who are either total strangers or do not have any ultimate stake in each other’s improvement.
3. Treat subjects that involve behavioral change as though they could be solved by the transmission of information, i.e., “read this book,” “take this class,” “go to this seminar,” etc.

In your own private moments, you must have been as disappointed as I have knowing that all the beautiful materials, lesson plans and instructional design would not make any lasting difference, except in a few cases. (If you are a technical trainer you are clearly an exception in this conversation but if you are involved in management development, these thoughts must be striking a raw nerve!) But wait, there’s more!!!

Kegan and Lahey bluntly recommend that we draw a clear distinction in our employee educational thinking between the desires for technical or adaptive change. Once we have begun to acknowledge that each type of change requires a different approach, they are equally blunt…it is time to move the learning experiences involving adaptive change out of the classroom and into the work teams needing these changes.

Their insistence that organizational environments that foster real change and development arise from the organization’s cultures being built on a developmental stance rings like someone, a voice with credibility, finally shouting that “the emperor has no clothes!”

There is of course much more to Kegan and Lahey's story.Their seven crucial attributes of a genuinely developmental stance form the foundational sketch for the beginning of an entirely new future for anyone involved in organizational development and or change. You can read all that for yourself. But answer me this honestly like your professional future depended on it…

        Would you look forward to a future in organizational/employee education where the budget items associated with these activities were considered sacred and were never part of any discussion that concerned cost reduction?

Yeah, ….that’s what I thought.

There will be no engraved invitations to this revolution.  

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I haven’t written a piece this long in a while but I am fired up about something…You and I both know that your company’s workforce is not in shape. It may not be top of mind in the leadership meetings or among the board of directors but you know, and you know it is affecting everything that goes on in your business, and you are not doing much if anything about it... maybe because your HR department tells you that you can’t.

If you don’t believe me then check in with your risk management group, ask them about the leading causes of absenteeism and on the job injury in your company. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t find that you have an ergonomic plague in your workplace, an inordinate number of injuries and absences related to back and other structural problems. These problems are there because your workforce is overweight and out of shape and aside from the burden this condition is putting on your healthcare costs it also affects the quality of work being done and the energy and creativity available from your workforce at any given time. This is a big deal and it is time we all fessed up and started dealing with it. It is people’s lives and livelihood that are at stake here.

I got rolling on this theme this past week as I finished reading ‘The Coming Jobs War’ by Gallup CEO Jim Clifton.

Clifton has a central thesis and he makes a strong and seriously analytical case for his argument. He makes the bold assertion that job creation and successful entrepreneurship are the world’s most pressing issues right now, outpacing runaway government spending, environmental degradation, and even the threat of global terrorism. “If countries fail at creating jobs,” says Clifton, “their societies will fall apart. Countries, and more specifically cities, will experience suffering, instability, chaos, and eventually revolution.”

Among other things Clifton states very bluntly in his book:

“A nation in which two-thirds of its constituents are obese or in poor health—or soon will be because of their weight, lack of exercise, addiction to cigarettes, bad diets and general low wellbeing –will never win the upcoming fight against global economic competitors. Workers will not be fit enough to win.”

I have a confession to make, although if you’ve ever looked at the picture associated with my blog this may not seem like much of an admission, I have been overweight bordering on obese for the past 30 years of my life. Three years ago with the continual and compassionate support of my wife Pat ("I didn’t marry you so you’d die on me!”) I finally stopped smoking, a habit that I had wrestled with on and off, mostly on, for over forty years. Within the past six months I have begun to successfully deal with my general physical condition. I have lost 50+ pounds and still have a ways to go to get to my goal. Believe it or not I got started with Zumba classes. Turns out it wasn’t so much the Zumba as the classes, I like exercising with other people. For years I have been one of those who made the New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and get fit several times each year only to find myself quickly falling back into old counterproductive patterns because they were simply more comfortable. In my early life, up to and into my thirties I was very athletic; I participated in a variety of sports and even ran marathons for a while. Then around the time I was 35 all that abruptly stopped and for nearly 30 years I simply indulged my appetites in the worst possible ways. It is really a boring story, yes I am a smart guy, I could see what was happening yet I did nothing to honestly step up and take care of myself. My attitude was that as long as I took care of my obligations to family and business I should be free to address my cravings. Like I said…boring.

And now for the first time on 30 years I am effectively, not easily, addressing my well being on a number of fronts. I am grateful to my wife Pat, once again the catalyst for me doing something about my health. Honestly she has had to be courageous, I have not been open to her coaching and she has had to put up with plenty of sharp rebukes from me for coaching when I wasn’t asking for it. I am pretty sure that without her support I would not be as far along as I am, and there is still a ways to go and many new habits to anchor in.

Now, what about your work environment? Jim Clifton states some very stark statistics in his book, among them the fact that currently only one-third of adult Americans are in shape. Another third are overweight and another third obese. Many of these people work for us and we care about them, not just as productive resources but as people and we are allowing them to do what I did to myself for many years, slowly kill myself. I hate to be that blunt but if you are not one of the overweight/unfit you cannot imagine how unhappy a place it is. I can honestly tell you that in all those 30 years there were only fleeting moments of happiness and a lot of self criticism for allowing myself to get in such bad shape. I am betting the people you work with and around who are well out of shape would tell you much the same if they felt safe enough. If you are one of the overweight you know exactly what I am talking about.

So I know this is a big request I am making. If you are currently working with someone who is overweight, obese or in some other way not taking care of their health ask them if you can talk about it. I know all the prohibitions against doing what I am asking but those have nothing to do with caring for your co-workers, they are designed to protect your employer from legal measures. If you are one of the overweight or obese or otherwise self harming folks ask for some help. These issues are almost always more than we can deal with by ourselves. My wife asks me every morning about my weight and if I don’t like what the scale says I am still liable to lie at first before going back and telling her the truth, but I want her to keep asking, I need her to keep asking.  

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A tip of the hat to Gary M. Stern for his piece ‘Redefining the Middle Manager's Job’ which appeared in the September 19, 2011 issue of Fortune magazine. Stern cites a 2010 study completed by Towers Watson of 20,000 global employees of large firms telling us something we intuitively knew but probably haven’t been talking enough about: 48% of the respondents said their immediate manager didn't have enough time to handle their responsibilities as managers or possess the right skills to improve poor performers.

Tom Davenport and Stephen D. Harding, Towers Watson consultants who authored ‘Manager Redefined: The Competitive Advantage in the Middle of Your Organization’ (November, 2010), are strong proponents of an overhaul in the basic design of the middle manager role. The authors recommend that the manager in the middle develop a focus on “offstage management” as the preferred leadership style, managing the environment not managing the people. I, of course, like this because it corresponds with the basic message of my recent post, ‘The Essential Nature of a Middle Manager: Transparent, Transmutable and Permeable.’ When Davenport and Harding assert that right action for an “offstage manager” is one that “…creates an environment for everyone to succeed and then steps out of the way", I am running around looking for someone to “high five”, Hello! Thank you! Mmmmm hmmmm, what did I tell you? That’s what I am talking about!

I could have stopped reading the Stern piece at the point where he presented agreement for my point of view. But…I didn’t stop there, and I am better for having continued. Later in the article there is mention of a very new book, ‘The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work’ by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. I bought the book and once I got started I found I could not put it down. The message is that profound in my view. Put as succinctly as possible, the authors contend that far and away the #1 factor that influences people’s work life experience is progress in meaningful work. Coming from Amabile, a Harvard business professor, and Kramer, her psychologist husband, you would expect this work to be well researched and you would not be disappointed. What the authors found in their exhaustive study of over 12.000 daily diary entries turns the thinking of most present day managers right on its head.

In Amabile and Kramer’s words,

 “Ask leaders what they think makes employees enthusiastic about work, and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant:

• recognition
• incentives
• interpersonal support
• support towards making progress
• clear goals

Recognition for good work (either public or private) came out number one.

Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

Having just completed a multi-year study tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions, and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers in a wide variety of settings, we now know what the top motivator of performance is—and, amazingly, it’s the factor those survey participants ranked dead last.It’s progress. On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.”

If you are a manager or someone who develops managers you should regard this as very good news: the conclusion based on Amabile and Kramer’s research is that the key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control. What the book's authors do assert and strongly reinforce with tools they have developed is that managers have powerful influence over events that facilitate or undermine progress. They can provide meaningful goals, resources, and encouragement, and they can protect their people from irrelevant demands. Or they can fail to do so.

So here's what I have to say about all this. You know this, not like in your head know this, in your heart you know it. You've known this since you accepted a position as a manager. Mostly, it is why you took the manager's role.

• The question, the one you must answer for yourself, is how do I continue to justify not doing what I know needs to be done?

Get the book, read the article, do whatever you need to do. This is the time of people's lives you have in your hands. They are counting on you to help them make their time at work worth their life.

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