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

Sunday night I rolled into Gibson’s Bar on South Lamar in Austin, TX around 7:30PM looking for a happy hour function hosted by The Starr Conspiracy and Quantum Workplace. You guessed it! I am attending a conference and these were two of the many vendors participating in the first ever conference hosted by TLNT.com and its parent company ERE Media, Inc.

This is ostensibly an HR conference but unlike any I have ever seen and probably a prototype for similar conferences that you may be getting invited to soon. There is not a lot going on about compliance or process and a lot of conversation about HR producing and being associated directly with business results.

Just to get this off my chest, being here makes me realize my age in a way I have not before. Just last week I had signed up for Medicare but even that did not have the gravitas of being in a room full of vibrant young HR professionals who can’t stop talking about their issues, or products, depending on their role here and have obviously tremendous appetites for whatever can assist them in their quest to build talent driven organizations.

I need to get out more!

So…back to Sunday night, as soon as I arrived I looked around for my friend Ron Thomas, a guy I have known on-line for a couple of years but never met in person. I found him easily enough and true to his nature Ron immediately began introducing me around. First he had me meet David Manaster , CEO and Founder of ERE Media. David I later learned through watching him shoot photographs of most of the presenters in action and also a generous conversation at the conclusion of the first day’s proceedings is a CEO who clearly understands that he is the least important person in the room. He spent all his time making sure the conference was going well for everyone attending and honestly if Ron hadn’t introduced us Sunday evening I would have thought he was part of the logistics team since his dress of plaid shirt and jeans was not taken from the dress for success tradition.

Right after I shook hands with David I turned and Ron was already pointing me towards another guy I would have sought out, a waiter, so I could order a drink. I found myself standing in front of a guy in his late 30’s, maybe early 40’s spiked hair and goatee, clearly a career musician filling in his income stream by working a second job at Gibson’s. Except that’s not what he was doing. This was Jim Knight, Senior Director of Training for Hard Rock International.

From the program guide I knew that Jim was going to be presenting at the conference but hadn’t imagined he might look anything like this. He is the Hard Rock experience personified.

I don’t know about you but I've had my Hard Rock experiences, twenty years ago, but I came to find in talking with Jim that they are way outdated and today’s Hard Rock, though still true to its rock and roll origins has been completely updated and Jim’s outward experience was simply one expression of the modernization of a well recognized brand. By the time I finished my conversation with Jim on Sunday night I couldn’t wait to see him in front of the crowd and he did not disappoint.

In his presentation Jim told us a lot about they way they do things at Hard Rock to insure that they hire the right people to create the experiences they are looking for in their cafes, casinos and resorts. Things like every new hire going through a minimum of three interviews with three different levels of management and each interview having its own guide that is actually followed by every manager. Whoa! Imagine this level of attention being paid to people that are going to be busing tables? Would that happen in the parallel positions in your organization?

In an hour and a half Jim took us through an inspiring array of training tools that he and his staff have developed for a potential workforce that he says has these characteristics:

• Individuality is a priority
• They are risk takers
• Visual Learners
• Short attention spans
• Technology savvy
• Socially Conscious
• Want to do meaningful work

You may recognize this description from your own recruiting efforts…there are the millenials.

His presentation was energetic, fast paced, highly visual, made use of a variety of technology tools, spoke to us at a profound level and in fact was everything he said it takes to recruit, hire and retain a millennial workforce. He knows how to speak to his target audience and it was an object lesson for me.

Oh yes, and one more thing Jim said, that I can’t get out of my head, and he repeated this more than once about looking for the right people to work at Hard Rock…

             ...“I don’t care what you look like; I care what you have to contribute!”

I loved that, he isn’t looking for a compliant attitude as his first sign of employability.

• What is it like to hire people who don’t need to be there? It can't suck to work there.

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Some years back I signed on as a guest speaker on the Vistage circuit. If you don’t know anything about Vistage, it is a worldwide organization made up of CEO’s from smaller sized businesses who meet regularly to advance their business acumen and work with each other on the multitude of thorny issues of owning a business. A requirement of membership is a willingness to be transparent with the other members of your group about what goes on in our business.

The transparency requirement is a really big deal. Small business owners are notorious for being loners. This fact alone may be a significant contributor to the reasonably high failure rate experienced in the small business sector. *

     * Depending on whom you ask the rate of failure for new business runs anywhere from 35-50%  in the first five years after opening 

Let me be clear that this is not a Vistage commercial. However, the fact that this organization has been around for over 50 years, continues to grow, and that it has many imitators makes its principles and practices worthy of examination by those of us who toil in the gardens of the larger organizations.

• Surely there are circumstances within larger corporate environments that allow for the application of the successful practices from the realm of the smaller enterprise.

Most of us are familiar with the inefficiencies and seemingly built-in, counterproductive aspects of large organization operating models. “Silos” , a term used with a decidedly negative connotation immediately comes to mind. Consider these words from David Rock, himself a corporate coach...

   “...Trust cannot be assumed or mandated, nor can empathy or even goodwill be compelled.
       These qualities develop only when people’s brains start to recognize former strangers as friends. This requires time and social interaction.”
                                                                                from ‘Your Brain at Work’

Hundreds of articles and books have been written on what to do about the limiting effects of silos and many attack the traditional organizational hierarchy as the primary antagonist. After looking at David Rock’s work for some months, recently reading a lengthy article by Jonah Lehrer  in the New Yorker, ‘Groupthink: The Science of the Team Effort’  and another much less lengthy piece by Daniel Pink titled ‘Employees Are Faster and More Creative When Solving Other People’s Problems’ I am now of the mind that we have been looking in the wrong place the try to solve the problem.

Maybe the issue has never been the hierarchy, or at least not totally? Maybe, as can be inferred from David Rock's work, hierarchy has been a convenient foil for the inherent mistrust our brains experience when presented with occasions to meet or work with people who are "strange" to us. 

What if by not understanding this basic human trait we have failed to sufficiently evolve organizational design to match the types of information flows our organizations need now. Think back…our organizational models were created when almost all product or service design work could be done by a limited number of people requiring larger numbers of people for production purposes only. For those times the simple hierarchy sufficed and to some extent protected us from each other. Today it is often difficult to distinguish design from production as so much of both kinds of work are done simultaneously and in real time.

Interject into this new set of circumstances the creatures we are as described by David Rock and we can see at least some of why the stalemates continually occur.

Recently I have been experimenting in larger organizations with a design for intentional collaboration on day to day issues based on my observations of small business owners working together willingly and compassionately to resolve each other’s issues. This experimental design is intended to counteract the unintentionally limiting consequences of simple hierarchy. In a pilot for this design in a company that offers high technology products and services I have assembled three groups of mid-level managers who are clearly interdependent and we are employing a version of the small business owner collaborative model that has proven so effective.

The initial pilots are designed for six months. Managers were selected to work in groups of nine to twelve based on their observed level of collaborative need for each other. The managers were then allowed to examine their placement and self-adjust into other groups if it made more sense to them. These groups which I am calling “collaboratives” are meeting once each month for four hours for the six month pilot. During the sessions we are covering various elements of basic management development for about two hours and then, more importantly we are having the entire group work together for about two hours to address a real time problem one of the group members is facing.

As David Rock might anticipate, even though these people work alongside each other and have for some time, we are off to something of a slow start when it comes to opening up to colleagues about the challenges they are stuck with.

What I am hoping for are some outcomes that resemble those described in the article by Jonah Lehrer that took place in Building 20 at MIT back in the day, though perhaps not as dramatic. Already after two sessions the small groups are meeting unassigned on their own initiative.

We’ll soon see for sure but almost anything beats the need to live with the limitations experienced by managers hiding behind hierarchy, posing as rugged individuals when they may well be just timid weenies!

•  Would you be willing to allow your reports to meet regularly with their collaborators in other departments and simply take action as they see it is needed?  

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This past Sunday afternoon I was fortunate enough to be able to have lunch with my good friend Dwight Frindt. I have known Dwight for over twenty years but since we’ve always lived in different parts of the country our times spent in person have usually been organized by our shared commitments to The Hunger Project or The Pachamama Alliance. Since I moved to the west coast six years ago we’ve been able to get together a bit more frequently but still never enough to satisfy me.

Dwight is one of those people with an insatiable curiosity about what it takes to allow both people and organizations to reach their highest potential. Aside from a shared interest in supporting groups with very large social visions this is another interest we share in common. So Sunday when we got onto the topic of “collaboration” in the workplace the conversation consumed two hours and could easily have kept going except Dwight had a plane to catch.

For Dwight the topic was particularly timely. He is one of the elder statesmen in the Vistage International network. Vistage, as you may or may not know, is one of the most successful of the peer coaching networks for small business CEO’s, having been around for over 50 years and Dwight has been around Vistage for over 20 of those years.

Among other things Dwight has a responsibility for the success of newly formed CEO groups in Seattle, WA, Portland, OR and Orange County, CA. He expressed a certain amount of frustration in being able to have the coaches in these new groups understand that the real key to sustaining a successful group was having the members relinquish their myopic obsession with the success of their own business and become open to the concerns and interests of the other group members. “The group coaches continually confuse cooperation with collaboration, like somehow being willing to listen politely to a member report on their business and the issues they were facing was the same as really getting involved with that business owner in resolving their issues.” It seems that letting go of our own agenda for the possibility of something even greater doesn't always look that attractive.

Right about now many of you reading this may already be asking yourself, “Why spend time on this tired topic, haven’t we covered this ground before and maybe to death?” I say no, and here’s why. We are afraid to collaborate and we continually put it off and defend and limit ourselves with cooperative behavior.

Fear is the primary barrier to collaboration in our places of work and mainly because collaboration implies vulnerability and we, all of us, have spent years developing measures to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of our colleagues at work. We are so good at these methods of protection that we cannot ourselves often distinguish between the minimal levels of “cooperation” we have learned to survive with and true collaboration. To make this distinction just a bit clearer, to wipe some of the smudge from the window of recognition, I’d invite you to review David Wedaman’s posting to his own blog on January 12^th this year aptly titled, ‘Liaisons, Collaboration, Cooperation and Soup.’

David Wedaman works in a very different environment than where Dwight and I most frequently find ourselves but his thoughts clearly echo Dwight’s own from his 2010 posting ‘Issues of Collaboration’.

What I find most provocative about attempts to collaborate or promote collaboration is captured in these words from the Wedaman piece…

                   “Collaboration (and learning in general) is anxiety producing.”

Correspondingly what I find most of us are challenged by when faced with a situation calling for collaboration is captured here in Dwight’s words…

         “...to become truly collaborative there are some critical pieces that must be put into place … Participants surrender their own protective barriers  and come with a commitment to create an essential atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, and safety…”

So, given the absolute, irrefutable necessity we are all faced with these days to collaborate why do we continue to hesitate? My guess, what we’ve done historically in many cases is engage in cooperation begrudgingly. The time has past when we can make any legitimate argument for anything other than a full embracing of the reality that cooperation and collaboration are inextricably linked and admit to ourselves that we have still a lot to learn and it is high time for the learning to begin.

• Where do you see yourself or your own reports settling for cooperation where collaboration is called for? 

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He said, “Wouldn’t it be great to take off for someplace warm for a while this winter?”

She said, “I think so too. What do you have in mind?”

He said, “I was thinking of Mexico but if we go I want to stay at least two weeks.”

She said, “I can’t be gone that long, I need to be working.”

He said, “Well so do I but what if we could find a place with an internet connection so we’d stay in touch?”

She said, “That’s great but what about phone service?”

He said, “I’ve got us covered with Magic Jack, I can buy international minutes at low rates…

Before this ends up sounding like a commercial for a phone service or a travel agency, let me tell you that I have written my last two posts from La Paz, Mexico, where we have been staying for the last 17 days. We’ve had a great time. Rather than pretend we were on vacation and sneak peeks at our email everyday and feel guilty we just worked each morning from 7AM to noon and then set off for exploration the rest of the day.

I travel a lot for my work with companies around the US and for the past several years our “vacations” have been used to visit our several children and grandchildren around the country. No complaints of course but this trip was something special, something we’d heard that other people do but had never tried for ourselves. It has worked out brilliantly, so brilliantly in fact that we trademarked the name for future adventures. Just kidding about the trademark but it has been an eye opener to see how relatively easy it has been for both of us to stay up on our work and address some leisure action at the same time. “Work-Cation” We really like the sound of that and it captures the last two plus weeks perfectly because now there will not be that pile up of emails to answer or phone calls to return as we’ve stayed right up to date with everything.

And I need to make special mention of the people of La Paz, Mexico and the surrounding area. I think many people in the US have a very slanted view of the Mexican people based on limited to no first hand experience of what the people of Mexico are like when you meet them in their own country.

From the very first evening we arrived, we were the “fish out of water.” Neither my wife nor I speak Spanish beyond the conventions of “Hola!”, “Gracias!”, “Buenas Noches!” and “Yo no hablo Espanol!,” which I used repeatedly throughout our stay. Our experience of the warmth and customer orientation of the average Mexican citizen began upon our arrival in the airport in San Jose del Cabo and continued until the waiter in the beach side restaurant where we watched the Super Bowl gave me a “fist bump” on our way out the door. We found only a limited number of people who spoke fluent English, but everyone we asked for help would not quit until we had what we needed and this included sign language, drawing pictures and sketching out maps. We stopped people on the street, in stores, in the markets and gas stations and once even in a dark alley. No matter, they acted like all they had to do was help us out.

The extreme example of this was Arturo, an assistant manager at the local Mega supermarket. We met him in the produce department on our first trip into the store and he personally escorted us throughout the store, helped us get acquainted with the location of various items and translated for us when we went to the butcher and deli counters. While we were in La Paz, we made five more trips to the store and each time Arturo noticed we were there and made sure we did not leave without finding everything we had come in for and none of this was because we asked. He insisted on helping us.

It may seem trivial to report in this space on an experience that sounds a bit like a travel log but as someone who spends a lot of time focused on how organizations work, I found this town of 200,000+ to be a working wonder. We noted literally thousands of small businesses, retailers of just about anything who would direct us to competitors down the street or around the corner if they did not have what we were looking for. I wish I could count on the type of customer service I experienced here in Mexico at every turn when I am home to the US. 

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