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

Yesterday as I was flying…and flying…and flying (lots of weather delays) from my youngest son’s college graduation on the east coast home here to Anacortes, WA I was completing a book I have thoroughly enjoyed reading, ‘The New Capitalist Manifesto, Building a Disruptively Better Business’. Written by Umair Haque , I found this read to be a mind expanding exercise, one that challenged me to examine many of my own biases in order to appreciate the premise of many of the points the author was making. It was not simply blowing through the 256 pages that make up the book, I had to stop, think and process before proceeding in many cases and it took me more than one plane flight to make the full voyage.

I found myself drawing parallels from the author’s distinguishing of what he termed “thick value” and many of the coaching opportunities that managers face each and everyday in the workplace. Haque presents “thick value” as a conceptualization of economic value that focuses on the full spectrum of the outcomes produced by a commercial enterprise, not merely the simple financial results. (View the video for a fuller explanation of this concept)

As defined by Haque “thick value” means the creation of enduring, meaningful, sustainable advantage that deeply benefits the larger society—He proposes five new cornerstones to replace those of twentieth-century capitalism…

• Loss advantage: From value chains to value cycles
• Responsiveness: From value propositions to value conversations
  
• Resilience: From strategy to philosophy
  
• Creativity: From protecting a marketplace to completing a marketplace
  
• Difference: From goods to betters

The proposed cornerstone that caught my attention was the last, shifting focus from the production of goods to the production of betters, meaning not simple consumption but the betterment of the life of the consumer.

As I was flying…and flying I began to formulate questions around the employment experience that might be asked reflecting a focus on the production of betters rather than simply goods.

Here are a few that came to mind. I wish I had them available some years back when I was building my own organization:

• Why would I want to work for you (employee interviewing), how will my life be better?
• Why would I want to work with you (coworker), how will my life be better?
• Why would I want to have you working for me (manager interviewing), how will my life be better?
• Why would we want you as part of this team (team interview), how will our lives be better?

I find these questions challenging, intrusive, likely to be very revealing and possibly leading to extraordinary dialogues if pursued with intention. Certainly of much greater value than “Tell me about your benefits package” or “What are you most proud of in your career?”

Personally I think Umair Haque is on to something with his notions of twenty first- century capitalism, something that I think has been eluding those of us who have been studying employee engagement for a while. If we are honest I think many of us, myself too at times, have been trapped in what Haque would term twentieth-century capitalism, primarily paying attention to whatever might lead to furthering the extraction of outputs from our employees (operating effectiveness) rather than focusing on insuring that the experience of working in our organizations produces tangible positive outcomes for everyone concerned. Not just income for people or revenue for the business but better lives for employees, customers and clients.

This past January I completed my longest employment relationship, with my own company. Just over twenty years ago I founded a management development consultancy that came to be called Vitalwork. I see now that in many ways our vision for that business anticipated the new conceptualization of capitalism put forth by Umair Haque. In those twenty plus years I am pretty certain that we never employed anyone who did not take some sort of reduction in income when they came to work with us. Essentially our promise to anyone joining us was that working there would provide something that had been missing in their life, it would be better.

We operated from the following vision:

 It is possible to design working environments where there…

• is respect for each and every individual contributor
•  regard and reward for original thought and
• the expressed recognition that nearly every employee’s first objective is to make a contribution in their place of work everyday they are there.

Our intention was to sell what we were as an organization, our own vision of what was possible from the experience of being at work. We didn’t get it right every time but we did take a good run at it. Since the founding of that business in 1990 four other consultancies spun off from the original company, all with our encouragement and partnership. I like to think that we produced “thick value” even before we knew what to call what we were doing.

• How does working for you, with you or around you make life better for those you interact with? 

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A few weeks back I ran across an Op Ed piece by Stanley Fish in the New York Times titled ‘We are All Badgers Now.’ If you follow his columns at all, you may think that the musing of a professor of Humanities and Law from Florida International University in Miami is an unusual source of inspiration for someone like me who thinks and writes about coaching and management development. Au contraire, dear readers! Stanley Fish, aside from his academic credentials, is a student of ideas particularly how they get formulated and communicated, and he is rigorous about this topic in an uncommon fashion. I read his columns regularly and almost always come away the better for it.

In…Badgers… he was joined by a colleague, Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a thoughtful exchange about the relative merits and drawbacks to unionization in higher education. What I was drawn to was a statement Stanley made in the second paragraph as he expresses embarrassment at unmasking the frailness of the thinking that supported one of his strong biases…

“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats.”

What struck me in this statement was the revelation that here, a man of letters, is owning up to the fact that he has discovered that his perspective on a serious topic had been supported for years by nothing more than an emotion.

“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction…”

You may think this is an obscure insight I am sharing with you. Perhaps, but as a coach especially as a coach of coaches (managers) this personal revelation on Fish’s part occurred to me as profound. If a man such as he, steeped in the discipline of logic, can go for years with a strongly held bias supported by a mere emotional response what do I suppose is going on around me in my workplace with far less disciplined thinkers, such as maybe me and very likely, my direct reports?

I have been thinking recently about how much has been written on the topic of coaching and what there might still be left to look at and distinguish. The inspiration I took from the piece by Stanley Fish is that one of the key unexplored roles of a coach may be to teach those in their charge the art/skill of seeing the world differently, especially when the perspective they are operating from is not offering them actions that are effective.

In The Three Laws of Performance authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan give us a peek under the hood of what lies behind the actions. Whether effective or not, they pose the notion that all our actions originate and are guided by three immutable laws:

First Law of Performance: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. (People act in correlation to what they see in front of them)

Second Law of Performance: How a situation occurs arises in language (What people “see” is a function of what they tell themselves)

Third Law of Performance: Future-based lan­guage transforms how situations occur to people. (If actions are going to ever be different, they need to be rooted in another version of what is being seen)

If you are going to be an effective coach I strongly recommend you not go around sharing these laws with the people you are coaching, that will not be helpful! Being informed by these laws and asking questions is the approach that will probably work best and using questions derived from this knowledge is very likely the way to go.

Here are some examples when you find yourself coaching someone who is “stuck”:

• Do you think there is another way you could see this?
• Are your actions consistent with what you say you want or how you feel about the situation?
• Do you have any facts that support the discomfort you are experiencing?

Space is too brief here for any extended discussion, but I imagine that if you take the three laws at face value and use them to examine your own perspective in a challenging situation, you can practice this technique of questioning your own beliefs and begin to create a set of questions that are reusable in many coaching situations.

• Where are you stuck right now? Does the “sticking” starts with a feeling of discomfort?

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I know you have said these words to yourself more than once…”Golly! I know better than that.” Maybe not exactly these words, but something to this effect, accompanied by the motion of the man in this photo.

A couple of weeks back I had occasion to revisit one of these “How many times is it going to take me to learn this?” situations and, just like the girl in the horror flick who cannot stay out of the dark room, I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

It happened during a period when I was not feeling too well. I had just about completed a bout with bronchitis when I was hit with a severe sinus infection. Being laid up for a couple of days is a big deal for me and this time it ended up being three weeks and I was not at my best.

Sometime during that third week of illness I heard that a business associate that I have great regard for had accepted an offer of partnership in his firm and was moving from our town to the big city. By the time I heard this news, the move had taken place so I thought I would send him a congratulatory email.

The email began in a very light mood with lots of “atta boys” on the move and new situation. I expressed that I would miss seeing him around town but knew this was a great move for him. Here’s mistake #1. Somewhere in the third paragraph of my note I decided to include reference to an unfinished conversation between us and attempted to lighten up the topic by making what I thought was a humorous reference (dum, dum, dum, da!). Before hitting send I reread the note and thought “Hmmm, I wonder if that remark could be misinterpreted?” That question, if asked, has only one correct answer…yes! “Naaah!” I said, “He knows me well enough to know I was kidding and meant what I wrote as a positive comment.”

              “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

                                             Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153)

Is “wronger” a word? If it isn’t it should be, as with regard to my associate misinterpreting my remark I could not have been “wronger!”

The morning after I sent my supposedly congratulatory, funny note I received back an email missile that went BOOM! when it was opened. My concern about misinterpretation had materialized. Now how to handle the mess?

Mistake #2 .Remember I said I had not been feeling well? I looked at the note I had received and said to myself, “He knows me better than this. He should just have called me if there was a question. I am in no mood to be nice about this!” Typitty, type, type, SEND! Off goes my torrid response. “You can take your humma humma and do you know what with it!”, or something to that effect was the essence of my response.

After a bit I calmed down and in taking stock of my actions I knew what I had done was going to call for an apology. This all took place on a Friday and I ended up with the whole weekend to plan my attempt to remedy the damage done.

Come Monday morning I made the call to my associate. He was cool when he answered the phone, a tone I was hoping he wouldn’t take. Mistake #3. I was still not feeling well and I allowed my emotions (read embarrassment) to kick in and we yammered loudly at each other for a few minutes before I realized more damage was underway and offered my apology. It took a while, I had clearly hurt his feelings and of course in business where we have no feelings having them hurt is doubly troublesome.

I think we got all the way back to zero in the conversation and not to the positive place we were at before this incident occurred but at least we wiped the slate clean. We haven’t spoken since that day, not that there has been a need, but upon reflection I see that something is now there in the space of the relationship that was not there before I went off as I did and caused this ruckus. Trust has become an issue and it never was before. An outcome of the actions I took is that I am left with the knowledge that he will now likely be careful in any exchange with me, something I had never intended and something I now sadly regret.

As I said when I began, I imagine you can relate to this event but it never hurts to revisit a lesson like this, especially when the consequences can be so dear.

What are the lessons here? For me they were many and a friend of mine, Bob Whipple, founder of Leadergrow does a better job of summarizing the best practices of E-Mail Communication than I can so I recommend reading and saving his piece titled ‘12 Do’s and Don’ts of E-Mail Communication.’  

• Does this story remind you that you may have some damages to repair?

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