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

“The last few months have seen a spate of end of year surveys and forward-looking prediction reports that examine the workplace ‘digital transformation’ to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility.”

David Lavenda, Fast Company, January 2012

As I was reading David Lavenda’s post ‘Surprising Findings About Mobile Worker Collaboration’ this past Thursday in Fast Company I found myself reflecting back to a small conference hosted by the Bionomics Institute that I attended south of San Francisco back in the mid 1990’s.

Among the sessions I attended at that conference was one featuring a panel of then experts on search engine design musing on the true power potential of the technology they were all helping to move forward. It seemed to be the consensus of the panel that day that the major limitation to realizing the full potential of digital technology was more a function of users than developers. In their minds, these experts of the time agreed that people’s communication skills were lagging behind the advancements in technology and that gap was not likely to close anytime soon.

Fast forward to 2012. Honestly, I believe it would have been hard even for those leading experts at the conference that day to have imagined where we would be with technology today. Wow! This is the only term I find that suits what is being daily revealed to us in the technology realm. And it just keeps coming.

But has the workplace ‘digital transformation’ translated to a more collaborative work environment with greater worker mobility; have we advanced our abilities as collaborators and communicators as those experts in the 1990’s said that we must?

David Lavenda offers us excerpts from four different recently conducted surveys on the workplace digital transformation. Among the findings in these surveys you may or may not be surprised to read that,

“The three top reasons why companies are finding it hard to implement tools like analystics, mobile technology, and social media for business are: missing skills (77%), cultural issues (55%), and ineffective IT (50%). It is clear that changing people’s work habits represent the biggest impediment to technology change.”

                                                                                          CapGemini/MIT Survey

Sounds like déjà vu all over again against the backdrop of that conference I mentioned! And yes, I am assuming that among the missing skills cited those involving interpersonal communication are included.

Lavenda offers other studies and factors of course, all of which are worthy of consideration but given my interests I am drawn to consider that “missing skills” continues to play such a prominent role in the digital transformation lag.

In leading up to his conclusion, Lavenda offers these words…

“But, as always, worker reticence to changing work habits is the biggest impediment to adopting new technologies.”

I loved this posting and welcomed the information on research that Lavenda provides; however, I am inclined to go in a different direction when it comes to assigning cause for the findings of these surveys. "Worker reticence" may be more a symptom than a cause in this instance. If we look more closely, we may see that the lag is reflective of factors both inside organizations as well as within the larger society. Here are several questions that immediately came to my mind:

• As we educate future generations of workers, will we continue to emphasize individualistic behavior patterns and measurement and dis-incent collaboration?
• How much does a continued reliance on the sovereignty of hierarchy within organizations retard the development of collaborative practices?
• Why do we continue to use compensation practices that incent the attainment of functional objectives as much or more than organizational objectives certainly de-motivate cross functional initiative?
• What is the source of continued reluctance in many places of work to support worker requests for remote (at home) work settings?

And of course there are more.

There is no doubt some merit to David Lavenda’s claim of worker reticence but it may originate in sources more accessible than only the workers themselves

You might want to pilot some trials in your own organization to see what you can do to promote collaboration. Take sort of a “what have we got to lose” point of view and focus on what you may have to gain.

I suggest starting by addressing some of the questions mentioned just above…but do not undertake educational reform as a first step!

• Ease constraints on work at home arrangements, including what approvals are necessary 
• Establish cross functional operational opportunities where hierarchical input is limited to setting direction and specifying specific deliverables, removing barriers and providing missing resources.
• Design developmental offerings to leverage day to day working community relationships.
• Examine compensation practices for evidence that they may constrain collaboration

Finally, as a manager you can refrain from resolving interpersonal/interdepartmental issues for those reporting to you.

And I am sure you have a couple of your own to contribute as well. 

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“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…”

        Peter Drucker

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice. That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor Department

If you are someone who is concerned about employee engagement yet also appreciates the complexity of the global economy and the challenges and benefits it offers, you will probably find the article ‘Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class’ to be compelling reading, I certainly did. The article, authored by David Barboza, Peter Lattman and Catherine Rampbell, appeared on both January 21 and 22 in the New York Times 

It is a common axiom these days among those of us involved in workforce development or talent management to accept that more employee engagement is better than less. If he was here to offer his opinion, Peter Drucker, as seen in the above, might offer his provisional agreement so long as employee engagement supports the creation of customers.

The quote above from Betsey Stevenson begs a different question which has long lingered in the mythology of the American psyche. Do American companies have some sort of obligation to the American worker to maintain jobs in America? It is still both popular and comfortable to believe that they do yet the macro level of corporate behavior over time would suggest that if there ever was any truth to the myth, it is rapidly crumbling. I say this, there was a time, and it was now a while ago, when American companies could convince themselves and us that they were in fact benevolent to the degree we all wanted to believe. That was because they could afford to put forth that appearance and “afford” is the operative word. That time, as you will hear from an anonymous Apple executive whose words appear below and in the article mentioned, has apparently passed.Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment yet the American psyche still clings to the myth as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries; we don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

Many American executives would also echo a similar sentiment (most anonymously) yet the American psyche still clings to the mythology of corporate benevolence as reflected in the words of our national political dialogue.

The words from Peter Drucker I opened with here are often used in an abbreviated form as a matter of convenience and I think for benign reasons…

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment…And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise”

What Drucker was foreshadowing for us is that the “chickens of capitalism” will eventually come home to roost. I am not sure however that even Peter Drucker imagined a society in which an overwhelming percentage of the wealth producing resources were concentrated in the hands of a small segment of citizens to the degree that has become the case in America. At over $400/share, the average citizen will have a hard time managing to have much Apple in their stock portfolio.

So what then is there to be said for our pursuit of increased employee engagement? I think it safe to say that at Apple if employee engagement allows the company to make the best product possible…with the highest return to investors… then the employees will probably have their jobs for another day. When the day comes, and it did at Apple, that a lower cost, faster moving, more flexible and efficient workforce becomes available elsewhere, you can expect the jobs to follow, regardless of how engaged the incumbent workforce may be.

Henry Ford priced his product, the iconic Model T, so that the workforce that built them could be the customer…he saw the growth of the U. S. middle class as the marketplace of the future…

"I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces."

 Ford’s words were uttered at a time when the only viable market for his product would be the American consumer. I wonder what he would say now if he was facing global competition.

American corporate leadership has faced this reality of the global economy; it is well past time for the American workforce to do the same. Engagement is an absolute must but it is not a magic pill that guarantees employment. 

• What are you doing to make sure your workforce knows the game we are really playing these days?
   

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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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 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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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 am feeling constrained by my current mindset!” Who says that to themselves? Probably nobody, but who says “I am not happy with my results?” or “I have a problem and nothing I know is working to solve it!” Statements like these may seem more familiar.

If you are anything like me, and I am betting you are, when you are facing the frustration of not producing a result or are producing one that you wish you were not, it usually takes a while to get to a point where you will consider that the unresolved issue has something to do with you. For me, I am aware that the result is eluding me but if he, she or it would shape up, the issue would rapidly disappear, I just know it!

When I do get around to considering myself as part of the unresolved problem, I can be fairly self-reflective. However, at this point, often the best I am able to do is blame myself and wrestle forward with the now further frustration of knowing the solution lies outside my current field of vision. So maybe I ask for help and maybe it arrives in the form of a trusted friend who can see what I cannot. With the aid of their perspective, I can craft a one-off solution to my problem. I move on from this point with the dread of knowing that, unless I can take my friend with me everywhere, I will likely find myself returning to the cul-de-sac of my own mindset at some future point.

Until now that is!

This past week I participated in a remarkable program developed by a pair of researchers in adult learning, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. Over the past twenty years, this creative pair has developed a process for self reflection and action that is based on the notion that the real reason people don’t change has more to do with what isn’t visible than with what is.

• No doubt, as managers, or maybe even as friends, we have had occasion to witness people struggle with change to a degree that tests reasonableness. As with any situation which defies our imagination or ability to understand, we may have defaulted to telling ourselves unflattering stories about the motives or character of the other party. This would come along of course once we have stopped assuming that it might be we ourselves who are ineffective providers of advice or coaching. But we know better than that!

When you show up for the class to learn to facilitate the (ITC), Immunity to Change Process, you might go in as an experienced coach thinking, “This will be such a benefit to my clients!” Kegan and Lahey have of course seen you coming. Remember, they have been at this for twenty years. While they are no doubt amused by your naïveté, they are gently compassionate (they don’t actually laugh at you … with you, maybe) and allow you to experience for yourself that reading their book and understanding the process they have designed is not the same as participating in this process yourself. OK, so I should have seen this coming but….never mind!

Once through the process with your own revelation in hand, it becomes obvious why Oprah Winfrey picked up on this process and has shared it with her larger audience through her magazine as Step One in her 2011 Feel Good Challenge. (Trust me, the women in your organization or wives of the men you employ read Oprah and share it with their husbands.)

Let me end this little missive by saying that my forty year professional career as both an HR professional and later as a coach-consultant has been a continuous pursuit of methods and practices for taking suffering out of the everyday working experience. I have learned tools, encountered training, acquired skills, developed my own and the like. I believe that the knowledge and insight acquired in working this past week with Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey will become the cornerstone of my practice moving forward and serve as the frame within which all my other learning can now find a home. Like true masters of their craft they made it look easy. As someone who knows better, I thank them for their contribution to working people everywhere.

• What change have you struggled with repeatedly? Maybe it is time to do yourself a favor and take a ride on the ITC.
  

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Many thanks to Harold Jarche for his July 5^th posting, The Adaptive Organisation. As a result of his encouragement I just finished reading and enjoying Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford.

The topic under examination in ‘Adapt…’ is the author’s contention that as much as necessity, failure may be the mother of invention. Not only does Harford argue for the acceptance of failure as a part of life he celebrates it as essential to progress, something no doubt that makes intuitive sense to many of us but seems avoided like a plague in most business environments.                                                

As I am reading I find myself reflecting on a career rife with a rich tapestry of failures. Certainly some of these I learned from but the most compelling part of Harford’s argument is the strong tendency we often have to promote failures by getting “stuck” in our successes. This point I could definitely relate with. I was reminded of my high school experience playing basketball, something to this day that when thought of still carries the sting of unfulfilled expectations.

I was at best an average high school athlete. Fortunately for me I chose to attend a high school and where the talent pool was somewhat lean and I was good enough to make the teams in baseball and basketball. Our newly appointed basketball coach had himself been a high school All American. At the time I was playing he was in his late thirties I imagine and still a better player than anyone on our team! He had come to our school from a much smaller town where under his guidance his team had won a state championship so his arrival was accompanied by high hopes that our lowly program would finally show some life and bring glory to our fans. In the two years I played for him there was no such luck!

In retrospect I am of the opinion that our coach experienced being stuck with his past success, at least in the years I was there. He insisted on a methodical style of play that placed a premium on ball handling skills and rebounding ability, areas where he excelled. As a group we were not great ball handlers and we were short, not ideal for the style of play he was comfortable with. As a group of players were better suited to a "run and gun" style of play. Our record reflected our inability to execute his system as much as it did our suitability for his system. So we lost a lot and we also didn’t have much fun while we were doing it which is a shame. Midway through my senior year I was replaced by someone, a better ball handler, who was two years my junior. We didn’t win any more, I sat the bench but coach had it the way he wanted it.  And he had bigger things in mind for himself. He was ambitious; our school was just a stepping stone to greater opportunities so our experience didn’t seem to be his top priority. 

In later years I played some city league ball and a couple of those teams won championships in their classes. The style was mostly what you would call “run and gun” making the best use of the speed and shooting ability of the players involved. We let the talent of the players on the floor dictate the style of play and in doing so not only had more success we also had more fun.

In the later chapters of ‘Adapt…’ Harford talks about organizations with successful pasts failing to adjust to current circumstances rather attempting to force their apparent formula for success. He says that the lessons learned are in many ways flawed because they do not take into account the circumstances in which success was achieved. Kind of like my high school coach they assume that all things stay equal so what they know from the past should work in the present. Not likely!

As a manager can you put the development of your people at least on par with your own success? Assuming that you’ll answer yes then the Palchinsky* principles of adaptability will probably work for you:

• Be willing to try new things.
• Make failures survivable.
• Know when you have failed.

                           *Harford loves Palchinsky and cites his principles more than once in “Adapt…’

I am betting that if you can adopt this approach and you know the talents of those  reporting to you then you also know if it is time for a methodical style calling for good ball handling skills or whether you should “run and gun.”

‘Adapt…’ concludes with a wonderful assertion;

“The ability to adapt requires a sense of security, an inner confidence that the coast of failure is a cost we will be able to bear…Without it, we will never truly succeed.”  

• Are you prepared to catch your people when they fall?
• Do they know that?
• Is there someone there for you in the very same way? 

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 I arrived at our office extra early one morning a few years back to find one of our employees sleeping on the couch in the reception area. As she heard the door unlock she awoke, stretched and said “Good Morning” as I put down my briefcase. “Did you sleep here all night?” I asked. “Yes” was her short answer, blushing like she thought maybe she had done something wrong. So I asked, “What’s up with that?”

“Well I sort of got a bit behind on the preparation for that big workshop that kicks off at noon today and I know you guys like to get there well ahead of time so I figured you’d want to be leaving from here early today. Guess I was right because here you are bright and even earlier than usual. I’m glad I decided to stay last night to get things ready!”

Amazing!

In the twenty plus years I was the founding partner in our small consulting business behavior like this was not uncommon. People taking the initiative  to cause extraordinary action and producing unpredictable results seemed to be the norm. Rather than opting for reasonable explanations for failures to deliver people stepped up. I had to remind myself frequently that the environment we had created was in many ways an ideal. And no one was ever criticized for taking the initiative. If a mess was made we cleaned it up together.

Please understand that we were by no means perfect. We were not strong in new business development, our products were mostly one-off creations that made administrative preparation chaotic, some of our decisions didn't work well and proved costly, we retained some people too long and not everyone we hired wanted as much freedom to operate as we offered nor the accountability we expected. So not everyone we hired worked out,but enough did!

• When we moved to our new offices about fifteen years ago I wanted a great looking place to come to work. I knew that would not come if I was involved (I’d work in a cardboard box!) so I asked a couple of our administrators, who I knew had great taste, if they wanted to take it on. Amazing!...fabulous colors, great art pieces and inexpensive too which was important.
• We needed a new copier. (“What do I know about copiers?”) I asked one of the administrators what she thought a suitable copier would cost. She said maybe $5000. So I said “OK, you can spend up to $5000 on a new copier, pick the one you think will work best for us.” She was twenty two years old and had never spent $5000 at one time in her entire life. She did a terrific job. Amazing!...and she came in well under budget.
• Ten years ago we were in the late stages of a merger when I was approached by two members of our administrative staff and asked to meet privately. When we got together it turned out that the purpose of the meeting was to let me know that they felt the merger would be a big mistake. They expressed their desire to preserve the working climate we had established and had serious concerns about the principals of the firm we were planning to merge with. They shared their experience of being treated in a dismissive manner by both the owners of the other firm when we had hosted a meeting in our office the week before as well as on other occasions. My partner and I listened sincerely to their concerns. Two days later we called off the merger, the two employees had caused us to face an uneasy feeling we had both been having for some time but not talked about. Amazing!...I have continued to this day to be grateful to those employees.
• Four other businesses have spun off from ours in the past twenty years, two of them started by people who came to us as office assistants, got intrigued with the consulting, asked for the opportunity and eventually became sufficiently qualified to want to do something on their own. Amazing!...and we still collaborate with all four.

It had been a while since I reflected back on these examples. I was reminded of these and other similar occurrences last week when I was reading Seth Godin’s most recent book ‘Poke the Box’. (This link will take you to an Amazon page, scroll down and read the guest review by Daniel Pink)  This is not so much a book as a long diatribe and he says as much himself several times, he calls it a manifesto to initiative. In one place in particular he points to the infrequently addressed truth that much of the work we offer employees is not all that exciting or naturally engaging.

And they trade their most precious resource, the time of their lives, to work in our organizations.

Seth says:

“…In many instances the nature of the work is inherently unremarkable. If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low.”

From this remark I took the point that if your place of work didn’t hold the possibility of amazing for the employees why would the customer, clients, call them what you will, ever be amazed?

Oh yes, that employee who spent the night in the office. I asked her to not ever do that again. After that I never checked up on her. I wonder how that worked out?

• I challenge you to read Seth Godin’s ‘Poke the Box’ sometime soon and not get upset with yourself.

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Dear World:       

Please be advised…A major talent is being released into your care this week. My youngest son, Jackson Reed Cook, has launched himself and is ready and able to dazzle and amaze you with his “mad skills” and youthful self-confidence. Are you ready?

Jake called Monday to wish me a happy Father’s Day. When he called he was standing in front of the sublet apartment he had just rented in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, NY. There was plenty of street noise in evidence as proof of his surroundings as we talked. He had also called me Sunday but we didn’t connect so he was calling back to make sure he had the opportunity to share his affection and best wishes. He had initiated this process all on his own with no prompting from his mother … a rather new behavior pattern.

But there is a lot about Jake that is new, or more accurately, now just rounding into shape. He graduated in late May from SUNY Purchase with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree specializing in Graphic Design and he is eager to begin his career as a Design Professional. Like most young adults around his age he has had several “job” jobs as he worked his way through college but now it is time to begin his career and for a guy with his ambitions there is probably no better place than New York City. At least that is what he thinks and I am in no position to have an opinion on the matter.

He is taking this new beginning very seriously. He has a Linkedin page and has developed a website and you can also take a look at his portfolio if you are interested. Mainly I wanted to give you some advice about the care and handling of this package of opportunity (my son) that has become available. We talked for a while on Monday to establish some parameters and he is pretty clear about what he is looking for…

• He is looking for a place to contribute
• He wants to be listened to
• He wants coaching and constructive criticism of his work
• He prefers working with others to having individual projects
• He has a keen sense of integrity and fair treatment
• He has a finely tuned “baloney” detector
• He’d like a place where he can grow into more challenging assignments

Of course it should go without saying that he wants to make a decent living and I am not kidding about him being a major talent. This is not my assessment as it comes from his professors.

The main thing I want to stress is that along with his technical talent he brings a priceless package of “intangibles.” He will make your workplace more attractive to others; he is a natural collaborator; he will openly express appreciation of work done by his colleagues; he does not compete; he learns and develops from interchanges with others. Will you recognize and encourage these traits?

As his father I am of course interested in his welfare but I am not too concerned. He’ll find a place to work, probably several. What mainly interests me is how you will receive him. If you don’t offer a workplace that provides what he is looking for he won’t stay long. He has too much confidence in his ability and too much commitment to his vision to hang around where he is not appreciated, respected or allowed to make a difference. If he sees you treating employees with favoritism or what he considers unfairly you better 1) plan on hearing from him about what he sees 2) expect him to depart if you don’t listen or change your ways.

You see, he will arrive engaged. The question is will he be welcomed in kind?

• Do you handle your new employees like they are a precious commodity or simply a commodity?

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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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 Twitter me this, Batman! It doesn’t matter if it is Yammer, Slammer, Stammer, Wham Bam Thank You Mammer or Caller ID; we are a long way from realizing the full potential of the use of intra-company social media tools.

Recently I was reading a review of the progress being made by Yammer as it becomes one of the latest social media products to go completely viral around the world. This is a company that opened its doors in September of 2008 and already has 80,000 businesses as customers.

As I was reading, I flashed back to a conference held by the Bionomics Institute in the mid-1990s. While there, I attended a session featuring a panel of “industry experts,” people responsible for search engine development and innovation. If you remember names like Alta Vista, Lycos, Netscape, Magellan and others, you know the kinds of people I was listening too … pioneering, brazen, hip and bright.

The central topic of the conversation that morning in Silicon Valley was how to address and close the widening gap between the rapidly developing on-line communications tools and people’s actual interpersonal skills. In the view of the developers on the panel, the full value of the web as a communication medium would not be realized until this gap was addressed. There was no evidence in their minds that this gap had even been recognized. Following the panel presentation, the audience proceeded to engage in a number of rowdy arguments effectively proving the point the panel experts were making!

In an unrelated incident, I had occasion to reflect on closing this communication gap and on just how best to approach the continuous process of presenting the case for the Power of Context, the bane of all amateur communicators, which means most of us. (Read this lovely post by Eliezer Sobel) More specifically, how does our limited appreciation for Context continue to undermine the power of rapidly evolving social media tools?  

I was staying at a friend’s house overnight. She needed to make a trip to the local grocery store. On her way out the door she shouted over her shoulder, “If you are hungry there is pasta salad in the fridge!” Pasta salad, pasta salad, when we did we start calling cold pasta in a bowl a salad? “Salad” has been confusing to me since I was a kid, but I have learned to live with and am for the most part at peace with its seeming ambiguity. I now know that the seeming endless procession of salads in life is constrained only by the boundaries of definition:

Salad: noun a cooked or uncooked food prepared with a savory or piquant dressing and usually served cold. (This definition does not include German potato salad which is of course always best served warm!)  

However, a couple of years back another friend, a mischief maker I might add, turned my salad world on its ear one evening when he posed the following scenario. “If you see chopped up vegetables in a bowl …lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, etc… you readily recognize that mixture as salad. What if you dump those same elements out onto the table top, is it still a salad? Or do we see garbage?" For a moment, time stood still …, and then I got his point. When we see something out of the context we expect it is sometimes hard to recognize it for what it really is. Are we not the same way about people and the messages they carry?

We all learn early that here are some immutable facts in our lives, most of them in the physical realm:

1.      If you drop something under normal conditions it will proceed in a downward direction until it meets a solid surface

2.      If you go without water for a certain period of time death ensues, the same for the absence of oxygen, etc.

Generally speaking, if you are reading this post you know these immutable aspects of the physical world and honor them! (Ipso Facto, you'd be dead, and not reading this post.) However, when someone misinterprets our meaning or intent in an electronic communication we act like someone who is surprised when they drop a glass and it breaks when it hits the floor. We keep getting killed (emotionally) or injured over and over wondering how this could be happening to nice, well meaning people like us. Its the context dummies! Actually the absence of context.

Yes, Yammer is great, so is email and Caller ID. Linked In can be a remarkable resource for inter-company communication. However, until we address our ignorance, apathy and sloppiness about the Power of Context we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over. We will confuse the message and the messenger, we will take opinions as facts because of the source, we will apply discounts to information presented from certain sources or simply ignore the information altogether. And we will suffer similar experiences at the hands of others. In short we will undermine the social media tools we and/or our company have invested in because we have not advanced our communication practices to match the power of the tools at our disposal. We still do not recognize that meaning and value, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.

• Whose communications do you regularly discount because 1) The author was wrong before 2) The author hasn’t been around long enough.3) They are part of THEM.

                          - What could you do to intervene in this pattern and why would you bother?

• Whose communications do you accept without question?

                         - Why? Might it be worth challenging the source periodically?  

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Entry into a new realm of working expectations is a big deal; it needs to be related to like a big deal. The process whereby a new employee is taken into the working community ,a new manager is introduced into the clan of management or a manager is elevated to an executive or officer rank are all cultural rights of passage that hold the possibility of being seminal events in any career.

The complexity of the transitions commonly referred to as employment or promotion is far greater than often acknowledged or recognized and the preparations and monitoring processes should be developed accordingly. To describe the process of facilitating these transitions with the use of a “term of art”, ‘Onboarding’, not even a recognized word in our language, is to my way of thinking an insult to the spirit of the events themselves. I do not mean to imply that anyone means to insult or not take seriously these events. Rather, what I am pointing out is that in many ways people in the HR profession appear to be insensitive to the very fact that they are dealing with human beings. It does occur to me more frequently than I enjoy that the HR profession has often drawn not so much people who appreciate people as much as it draws people who appreciate rules and regulation.•

·         I cannot imagine the thought has not crossed many of the readers’ minds as well, whether you are inside or out of the HR function.

If, as I do, you subscribe to the type of thinking represented in this video of Steve Zaffron, author of ‘The Three Laws of Performance’  talking about the work he and co-author Dave Logan have been bringing to companies for the past 17 years. You’ll immediately recognize the counterproductive effect of the use of the term ‘Onboarding.’ The foundational principle of my work as a consultant over the years is this; relationship is the origin of all results in an organizational context. Further, relationship is function of how situations occur, i.e., are perceived. Steve Zaffron points out that performance will correlate to how people ‘see’ or how a situation ‘occurs.’ As importantly as this first postulate is the second; that situations ‘occur’ for people in language.

• …We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or as we are conditioned to see it.

                                                                      Stephen Covey

When we introduce employees, managers or executives to their new roles and relationships by using a mechanical term, ‘Onboarding’, we instantly communicate that an event is taking place. These occurrences are not events, they are transitions, they are in fact state changes, ones that require the reinvention of who one is in order to perform with full engagement inside a new field of relationships. Viewed from an organic perspective these transitions are much more akin to organ transplants than they are to changing the tire on a car.  Unfortunately, the later perspective often prevails in many of our workplaces.

In view of the persistence of the mechanical,event, transactional based perspective that seems to pervade much of the HR profession I'd like to share some recommendations:

Personally I am in favor of the dissolution of the HR function as it currently exists as an extension of the industrial age economy when employees were at best resources and at worst always expense, therefore expendable.

Specifically what would I like to see? Glad you asked!

I’d like to see all matters currently considered the responsibility of HR come under critical strategic review on the following basis:

• Consider. If, as employers need to be reminded, their employees are their most valuable asset these days their care should be in part the responsibility of the company’s asset managers. Compensation and benefits should become the purview of the treasurer’s group.
• Consider. If, as employers frequently need to be reminded, the actual real value of their company leaves the building each evening and then decides  whether to ever return whoever has accountability for Risk Management should be closely involved with matter related to the evaluation, development and retention of employees.
• Consider. There is an inseparable connection between recruitment, development and advancement of employees. The establishment of a function strictly devoted to this continuum would be strategic in nature and need executive level visibility at all times.
• Consider. All actions that involve shaping new performance expectations, employment or movement into management or executive roles are fraught with risk that should be shared equally by all parties involved. Trial periods, no harm no foul, where all parties to transitions of this type can mutually determine whether success has been achieved can save productive assets from being lost to an employer. (There is not sufficient room here to adequately discuss this suggestion)

At best ‘Onboarding’ suggests the movement of passengers up a gangway onto a ship, a mechanical function. At worst the term suggests the movement of a piece of cargo from a dock to the deck of a ship, another mechanical act.  If HR professionals are going to continue to employ language suggesting people as pieces to be moved around on a game board I suggest then consistency.  Henceforth all employee exits will be referred to as ‘Offboarding!’

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My Mom turned 86 last month so you know I am no kid, even though the image here might make it seem so. (This is actually an old photo! It's not my mom by the way, oh, and that's not me. Actually I have no idea who this is but I like the ocean and I like my mom, we did live in California for a while close to the Pacific so I decided to use this shot. I wish we had a photo of the two of us like this.Maybe we do and I have just never seen it!)

Does your Mom read your blog? Mine does and not only that she almost always sends me comments or questions based on the theme I have chosen for the week. She doesn't always get exactly what I am working on, she never worked in a very large organization like many of those I have consulted to over the past twenty years, but she does a pretty good job and mainly I appreciate the encouragement.

Having my Mom read my blog got me to thinking about engagement from another perspective than I had recognized in the past. Is there a connection, reflection or correlation between love, which I know is the motive behind my mother reading my blog, and a manager's engagement with the people reporting to them?

I recall that my very first "grown up" manager after graduate school really spoiled me by caring as much as he did. From the very beginning he took a personal interest, not only in me but in each person who reported to him. One of the events that truly impressed me back then was an occasion when I was really pressed for time on an assignment. Shortly after I turned in the work my manager appeared in the doorway of my office and asked if we could talk, of course I accepted his request. He had the assignment I had left with him in hand but began our conversation by asking me how I was doing personally as he seemed to know that I had been jammed up by the pressure of multiple deadlines. We talked for a while and then just as he rose to leave he handed me the assignment in his hand and suggested that I take another day before turning it in. He said that when he looked over the what I had presented he was concerned that I was stressing because what I had turned in was not my best work. Eventually this manager was one of two people I mention in the dedication of my 2006 book THRIVE: Standing on Your Own Two Feet in a Borderless World.

Did I experience being "loved" by this manager? No, at least not in the same sense that I feel with my mother. I did feel cared about as a person and honestly, in a work environment that was much more than I had anticipated would be available. It made a huge difference to me then and it made a huge difference to me later as an employer myself. I have always made it a point to let the people working in our organization know in obvious ways that they were cared about. We have never paid the most, in fact virtually everyone who has ever worked for my company has taken a reduction in salary to join us. It seems that over time we have developed a reputation for being something more than the ordinary workplace, some place offering a special experience, like the special experience of having your Mom read your blog.

With my Mom I know it's love, with the people that work for me, they can call it whatever they like, it is free and it is authentic.

• If you are a manager, do the people reporting to you have a sense that they are cared about as people?
• If you are not a manager, do you have the experience of being cared about as a person by the person you report to, by your colleagues? Do you care about them?

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Probably the most common mistake I watch managers make daily in the workplace is addressing their reports as if they are in the same frame of mind. When people are nodding their heads, it means they are nodding their heads; that's it!

(* This post applies anytime you are counting on the collaboration of others., manager or not.)

Take a look at this group in the picture above. (Never mind the boats and water in the background, get back to business here!) Are they ready to contribute or have they assumed some pretense? Look, they have their paperwork out and turned to the first page and they seem attentive! (So do you when you assume this posture so now you know how much stock to put in their appearances.)

 You may have never thought about it but as a manager you need to be aware that engagement has at least three voices, Contribution,Compliance and Resistance, which are frames of mind your reports can be in at any time...

·         depending on the day

·         the conversation topic

·         what happened to them last night at home or this morning

·         what they were doing or

·         who they were talking to just before they came to your meeting

·         and, and, and …or, or, or…life will not leave us alone.

So now, what do I mean when I reference “frames of mind?”  Frame, like window frame, the place we are looking at the world from at any moment is more kaleidoscopic than fixed. (What you said to me yesterday was fine and welcome, say the same thing today after I have just had a tough conversation with a peer in another department and I may ‘jump down your throat, much to your surprise and dismay.) We are always giving voice to our frame of mind if others would just listen and watch

Engaged, associated by choice, is a condition of being, and there are both ultimate and interim conditions of being to consider. Ultimate engagement arises from commitments to choices made. Interim engagement is subject to the slings and arrows of everyday/every moment life and constantly in flux. Ultimately, I am completely committed to the success of my marriage; in the interim, my wife has asked me to check under the house for a water leak! Given my aversion to both maintenance and the underside of the house about the best I can muster up for this one is an “Okey Doke honey!” and grudgingly crawl under after just about anything else I can think of that just “has to be done” before checking for the leak. As it turns out my wife knows that my ultimate commitment to the marriage always wins out over my weasel mind and she will get her report on the alleged leak sooner rather than later, so she doesn’t try to handle my dawdling.

 What is this interim Voice of engagement  thing, the one we usually hear from in the moment?

 Voice of Contribution- “I am on it honey thanks for letting me know there may be a problem”, followed by action.

 Voice of Compliance- As above, “Okey Doke honey”, followed by going to the refrigerator ,making a sandwich, watching some of the ballgame and then crawling under the house.

 Voice of Resistance- “It rained last week and I don’t want to get muddy so I’ll get to it next week, its probably nothing.”, followed by no action until asked again.

 I hope that you can translate these personal examples into your own when addressing your team or another co-worker while engaged in getting something done.

Message for today: If you don’t check in with people (ask) you run the risk of talking to yourself and assuming that head nods, Okey Dokes and even “You got it boss” means that something is going to happen and you can count on it.

So, do you know your reports as well as my wife knows me; I didn’t think so.

• How many times have you been burned by talking with your folks as though they are right there with you?
• How many times have you known they were not right there with you and you went right on talking as though you could talk them into it?
• How many times have you taken their silence to mean assent and walked away hoping you were going to get what you asked for. 

Is this too basic? I wish it were and I don’t by any means want to insult anyone, unless it will help get this clear, when you are not winning as a manager start with where people are at. Address them where they are, not where you wish they were. Be curious, find out why they may not be engaged, ask what you can offer to address misunderstandings or fears directly. In the interim getting in communication is the result to be produced, ultimately it will get you where you want to go.

Where are you assuming engagement and getting egg on your face?

For an alternative to the manager's perspective, to see how "life at work" can impact the individual, take a look at All Things Workplace by Steve Roesler especially the post of February 25th, What Happened to the Talent? 

I recommend a regular visit to Steve's site, you'll get hooked.

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It must be very complex, leadership that is. It must be or why would Amazon currently carry nearly 382,000 titles containing the word leadership? A quick Google query on the word "leadership" gives a response of over 143,000,000 entries. I smell a rat and I have been smelling a rat for several years now. Maybe there is something else afoot here and it is time to tell the truth about it.

In practice I have had occasion to have more than one senior leader say he or she was interested in seeing  more leadership from the people in their organization. A typical response from me might be to suggest my sincere doubt in this expressed interest! A provocative remark like this better have a good follow up and there is one available, if you can get that first line out of your mouth. Played properly this exchange can have the desired effect of creating a "teachable moment" or at least one where you have an opportunity at offering something I think is infinitely wise. When challenged in these cases, as I always have been my response is similar to that offered by Doug Sundheim, Executive Coach from New York City. I'll paraphrase Doug here; "I bet you have been taking responsibility for all of the critical decisions - and thus the critical thinking behind them. Your people feel alienated, with no sense of ownership, and you wonder why you can't get them more engaged.There is a direct correlation between employee's stepping up and whether there is any room to step up." This exchange often has led to a visible shrug of recognition and a sheepish question from the potential client, "It sounds like you are saying I am the problem?" So here the "teachable moment" presents itself. My response to the potential client will be to say "First, you are not the problem but you are certainly part of the problem and if you are willing to at least be part of the solution we can make some progress. And is there a connection between what you have been doing and the level of engagement you see, oh yeah!"

It is occasions like these that are also moments of truth for those of us who fancy ourselves organizational catalysts, the conversations that now follow are not only going to determine whether this potential client becomes a client, they are also going to determine whether you are going to go back out on that wire without a net yet one more time, make that promise that things can be different. From here the exchange might go something like this, " To begin with when you have been saying you wanted more leadership I suspect that what you meant was more do as I want you to-ship." This is always hard because invariably this assertion produces a flash of recognition coupled with awkward silence and the tension of embarrassment. But it passes fairly quickly!

I then ask the by now fully engaged executive or manager another question, "What are you willing to give up?" This question almost always requires further explanation so I just go right on. "There is a difference between 1) a 'desire to be in charge' and  2) a willingness to lead. The first is a matter of personal interest or motivation and not necessarily even a qualification for the second, where I imagine almost anyone asked about the topic would say that leadership and accountability are inseparable and many who wish to be in charge just want that, not that accountability stuff!  You very likely have no shortage of people in your organization who like the idea of being in charge, because of a number of incentives that go with that territory but they do not necessarily aspire to accountability because it doesn't work that way.Accountability isn't yours to give or expect anyway. It is, however, something you can request or offer and as in any deal there needs to be an exchange of value, something that provides for mutual, not necessarily equal, benefit . If what you truly want is leadership then you need to be prepared to give up something and generally the give up you are least likely to want to give is the final say."

This statement usually brings up the first " I am not really comfortable with that!"  My rejoinder to that might echo the words of Sue Tupling, "Feeling uncomfortable? So you should!" in the piece she authored recently describing the emotional hurdles many senior leaders face when they first begin to confront the need to let go in order to get what they want. Personally, I have seen leaders knowingly choose control over business results or staff development on more than one occasion, especially when they knew they could make their numbers without letting go.

When we reach this point the conversation turns solemn, like something ominous is about to happen. Thankfully, at least on some occasions something really productive emerges from the somber mood and the executive or manager sees that not letting go is going to constrain them to results similar to those they have already achieved and if they are up to anything more the give up is the price of admission into a new realm of possibility. But the positive thing does not always occur and on those occasions my mood may become a bit sarcastic , "If you can make your numbers without letting go what are you complaining about? Unless of course your intuition is telling you there is something more to be had than just making the numbers. Or maybe you simply want someone to blame if things don't work out?" Shortly after this I usually leave their office.

By the way, it was probably initiative they wanted anyway, much less expensive than leadership but to the control oriented, knowing what they would want, that distinction does not readily appear.

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All across the American business community 2010 budget processes are well underway. Unfortunately in many cases it is likely that training and development is taking a beating as a line item. What makes an employer think that when times get tough they can cut or underfund their employee development budget and not have to account for the cost in terms of ability to execute and levels of engagement?

I am not sure how you'd answer this question but I'll give you my view; the training or development that was cut from the proposed or even the approved budget was considered non-strategic and luxurious to begin with, something that was affordable at one point but is no longer. This reminds me of the "stay-cations" everybody was taking this year and and other similar changes people have been making in the wake of the continuing economic downturn. I guess the kids really didn't have to go to camp after all, it was simply affordable.  Employee Development cannot be seen in this same light.

There is a pretty important difference here, vacations were always luxuries, at least the kind that involved travel and resorts. Cutting back on your training and development investments when the going gets tough signals

1. A surrender to the short term
2. An indication that this type of investment is non-essential
3. Future training or development opportunities your employees have been seeking or looking forward are always going to be subject to cancellation

As far as expensive vacations go I can understand that sort of thinking. When it comes to having my organization in a state of readiness to be at the top of our game, I am sure it is not that optional. Your employees are either your most valuable asset or they are not. Their ability to perform is either always of critical importance or it never is.

Beyond these fundamental questions there are other issues that are related and demand continuous attention. It is always going to be important to keep in mind that a certain portion of your work force (likely those that are essential) may have many options as far as places of employment. You can certainly expect some churn among this group as other companies tempt them away with more rewarding financial packages. What you don't want to be doing is giving them reason to be looking elsewhere by cutting back on their opportunities to develop professionally.

As for the rest of your work force, they will not be as readily on the move. Since they are not, there is even more need to keep continually adding to their knowledge base, skill sets, and exposure to ideas  and experiences. Otherwise they are being asked to deliver in the face of new challenges using recycled ideas and thinking available in the closed space of your own organization.

As a development professional maybe it seems like my thinking is aimed at feathering my own bed. That is a cynical perspective. The expenses associated with the maintenance of a strategic workforce are indeed among the largest an organization faces. It may seem that with all the basic expense associated with the workforce that cutting back on development and training is small by comparison, and it is. However, the savings usually associated with this type of thinking leaves out the costs of insufficient levels of performance and in some cases replacement of key resources, a far greater expense in the long run,.

You may not be comfortable with the intensity of my message or the suggestion that follows, but you'd be well advised to listen well to the words of Gary Hamel, currently recognized by the Wall Street Journal as the leading expert on business strategy. Much of his recent work describes the development he sees needed at all levels of an organization in order to remain any competitive advantage. Reading what he has to say you'll realize that he is talking about your development as well.

So what would I recommend? Honestly,  and without hesitation, I'd cut back executive compensation before I touched the training and development budgets. I'd make the same recommendation if I was one of the executives facing these choices. There is a lot of business to be done after this recession is finally fully understood.

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