From the time I began playing golf at age eleven until he stopped playing in his mid 70’s many of my most memorable moments with my father took place on a golf course much like the one pictured here. Summer afternoons in Michigan, dry breezes blowing, flat landscapes and lots and lots of trees. Neither my father nor I were particularly accomplished golfers, for us the game has always been more social than competitive. However, in order to pursue the game repeatedly and endure its challenges and frustrations you do need to hit the occasional good shot. One of the things I remember most fondly from these occasions with my father was that somewhere during each round we played he would hit a particularly good shot and almost instantaneously exclaim, “That will keep me coming back!” The following quote from an anonymous source who could have only been an experienced golfer reminds me of those experiences with my father:

“Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle”

                                 Anonymous

On more than one occasion I have mentioned my perspective on engagement being a state of relatedness. As best I can describe that relationship engagement is association by choice and choice alone. With this perspective in mind I’ll go further and offer a corollary thought; when a particular choice is favored anything that facilitates it being made ought to be enhanced.

In every work environment there is one feature that I believe we as leaders significantly under value and it is the role that story telling plays in facilitating the choice to engage or sustain engagement. Just to be clear, in this instance I am not talking about you as the leader using the power of story. Much has already been well written about the role of the leader as propagator of powerful business narratives.

Steve Denning is likely the most prolific and recognized authority on both the leaders as story teller and the power of story to inspire action in the workplace. In March of 2011 the Second Edition of  his book‘The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of the Business Narrative’  will be published. In a piece he posted to his blog on January 28th he is very definite about the state of story telling and its role in leadership. “…the importance of storytelling as a leadership tool has become generally accepted, even in big organizations. “ And then later in the same piece he goes on to say, “…storytelling has gained recognition as a core competence of leadership.”¹

¹ According to Denning, if as a leader you are not by this time developing your capacity as a storyteller you are running well behind the current arc of management thinking.

The stories I am referring to here are not those of the leader but rather those of the people reporting to us. The stories they are collecting and you must know that they are collecting daily. Are we/you managing this process to facilitate the choice to engage or sustain engagement with your organization and their work?

Not much has been written about managing the process of “self story telling” in the workplace, and don’t we all know when we are being celebrated and related to as a stock player in some employee’s opera, the saga unfolds at any opportunity and without regard to responsibility. And are we ourselves so different? Left to our own devices most of us will focus our collection process and our life lessons on those experiences that involved pain, unless we intentionally intervene.

If we are honest about a day in the workplace, especially in a knowledge-era company it is highly possible to describe a day at work as the anonymous golfer described that sport. “… an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle.” And isn’t it the miracles that keep us coming back, isn’t it the miracles that satisfy our souls in spite of the sometimes seemingly endless string of setbacks, the no, no, no, no, no’s that are suddenly erased by the YES!. But these miracles are most valuable when collected and shared, made public. And sometimes we need to take stock and recall that we've experienced the miracles.

Managing this process* is leadership at its best because it leaves the storytellers following the lead of their own voice and whose voice would they likely choose to follow most reliably?

  * How simple might it be for you to  gather your team once a week and in a  round table discussion have each person describe what happened at work last week that made it worth coming back this week?

By establishing this practice you would be sort of teeing up the choice for them, don't you see?

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If you read my posts at all it won’t take you long to notice that I have a bias towards holding management to a higher standard than other employees in any organization. The reason behind the bias stems mainly from my belief in the efficacy of this daunting quote from Luke 12:48 in the Christian Bible:

“For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.”

To this notion my response has always been, “Yeah buddy!” For the 24 years I have served as a coach I have not deviated from this perspective. Without regard to religious preference it bears noting that in any system where there is an imbalance of power more must be expected of those whom the imbalance favors or there will be ethical as well as performance issues to deal with.

Much has been written and will continue to be about the wisdom of encouraging employees, managers too, to take risks in order to bring about innovations.  Steve Denning recently offered his thoughts on “two sided accountability” as one means to developing a risk encouraging environment, “The consequence of failed performance should be personal development, new perspective, improved judgment, skill enhancement, and general all-around learning…” as part of his ‘Reinventing Management’ series. However, as you may have noticed yourself, more often than not our systems of reward also include negative reward (punishment) and many employees, managers included, have found it safer to fail to perform rather than perform and risk failing. “In Taking Risks in Tough Times” author/consultant Ron Ashkenas offers thoughts from his direct experience working with managers who, “were anxious about the consequences of failure and felt it more prudent to continue doing what they had always done.”

The flip side of the risk coin is of course risk aversion, which too frequently is modeled in our organizations and also manages to discourage performing and failing, especially where it appears the former is punished and the latter  rewarded. Very recently I was involved in two situations where I did my best rewrite this equation in favor of risk, or at least away from inaction, the failure to perform.

In one instance I had been asked by the CEO of a good sized manufacturing enterprise to investigate friction among members two of his senior team that seemed to be spilling over into the rest of the organization. Following a period of research in which I investigated the willingness of the parties involved to reach resolution I recommend that both be dismissed since neither was willing to admit their responsibility for the friction. That was the easy part. What was more difficult for my client to accept was my further recommendation that the senior VP to whom both reported also be dismissed. The CEO’s comment upon hearing my recommendation was, “Why, he didn’t do anything?” My response was that the VP’s failure to do anything was exactly the reason behind my recommendation for dismissal. In my view, had the VP acted in accordance with his accountability earlier it may not have been necessary to lose the services of two technically competent but challenging senior people.

The second situation remains to be resolved but it is similar in nature, senior people, highly compensated people, have been involved in a situation that is costing their company considerable revenue and a responsible party has been hard to find. One thing is certain, the sins involved are more those of omission than commission.

Can we all agree that so long as we encourage cultures where “no good deed goes unpunished” ¹ it is unlikely that we are going to produce working environments where innovation will come naturally.

        ¹ Often attributed to Clare Booth Luce, among others

At the same time, until our leaders become resolute about not tolerating the failure to perform, no matter what the level but particularly among those “to whom much is given”, it is unlikely that employees will take seriously any promise of a desire for increased engagement or “employees are our greatest asset."

• What's it like where you work? Are employees more likely to get punished for failing or rewarded to playing it safe?

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This past Saturday evening I once again got off a plane feeling sluggish and nursing a low grade headache. More than once I have found myself ill with a cold, even one time pneumonia within a couple of days of completing a cross country flight. Such are the experiences many of us share who travel regularly for business.

Somewhere along the way someone got the bright idea that if you fortified yourself with enough vitamins and minerals ahead of time maybe you could stave off the ill effects of an extended plane trip. They invented something called Airborne® which must work to some degree because it seems to be doing quite well in stores.

This experience got me thinking as I often do in metaphorical terms. I began to wonder what might be the organizational equivalent of Airborne® now that we are organizationally launching new flights (fiscal years) all around the country and the world.

What initially came to mind was some sort of plan for professional development. So I did a couple of searches through the blogosphere and lo and behold almost everything I came upon had something to do with advancing skills and knowledge. Not at all the medicine I was looking for!

I wasn’t interested necessarily in new skills or knowledge, not that I am against that sort of thing. No, it really was something like an opportunity to create a preventative regimen that I was seeking.

What I have noticed in recent years, especially having my own company, is a tendency to become isolated from ideas and thinking outside one’s own environment as that environment begins to require more and more maintenance. I found myself going a couple of years without attending a workshop or seminar offered by someone where travel and time away from my familiar environment was required. And there always seemed to be plenty of legitimate reasons to put these opportunities off.  

“I recall that my father became very uneasy when he and my mother moved into a new home, one requiring little to no maintenance. He only lived there a couple of years before he convinced my mother to move to another, older home, one requiring considerable maintenance. Once there his peace of mind was once again restored as he was able to return to old familiar habits of painting and patching which allowed him to solve problems with existing knowledge and experience, no new learning required.”

As economic conditions have tightened or remained challenging one historical pattern has reemerged just about everywhere and another is emerging. Non-essential training budgets have been and are continuing to be cut or shrunk. More emphasis is being placed on on-line learning and LMS systems. Both these trends are troubling to me and I believe should be to you as well as a manager, leader and developer of people.

No doubt you have heard this quote from Albert Einstein more than once in your professional career:

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

If we are not intentionally engaging with environments outside our own how will we manage to develop new thinking? How will we keep ourselves well and sharp if we continue to re-think the same thoughts with the same thinkers? Is the situation really all that different than the metaphor I suggested earlier with the plane trip, recycled air producing sluggishness and sometimes even illness? I think not, and yet there is the reality of the economics and sometimes budgetary discretion being beyond your control.

So what can you do?

Here are a few things I can think of and I am sure you can add some more yourself.

• Attend continuing education programs at a local community college. These are usually offered at really bargain pricing. I took a class on “economic gardening” this past summer, it was fascinating and I didn’t even know there were people working on growing local economies.

•  Read, read, read, and not just business books or those in your technical area but also non-fiction non-related books.

•  Visit www.TED.com and peruse the Talks section. Make arrangements to watch a few of them next year with the members of your staff, stay after and hold a downloading discussion on ideas that were generated.

•  Create a Peer-to-Peer Coaching Group. Gather up to eight other managers outside your function. Meet monthly for two to three hours to work together on resolving problems in each other’s areas. Make it a committed activity, if you are going to participate you must attend every session or don’t play. (I like groups that can break into threes to work as pods).

And what can you add to this list? How will you get outside and into the open air of new thinking?

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