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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

                              Dale Carnegie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Development is done…

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

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

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

Parallel Design Features for Organizational Learning

        Skill Development Focus                                        Outcome Focus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may have also wondered this…

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

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

Development is done…

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

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

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

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

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

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

So where would we start to redesign management development from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                              William Deresiewicz
                                                                                                                                     

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

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

  In Deresiewicz’ view, the Millennials operate with…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Greene goes on…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it that I don’t know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among other things Clifton states very bluntly in his book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Amabile and Kramer’s words,

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

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

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

Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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“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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 I ask you to consider that if you are a manager your greatest contribution might be made while not being noticed.                                                                                                           

“A manager (sic) is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

Lao Tzu- Chinese Taoist Philosopher, 600 B.C. – 531 B.C.

After 25+ years of working, reading and studying the topic of manager’s development the quote above is still my favorite when it comes time to characterize how managers need “to be” as they perform their roles. The great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised that the fundamental character of a “good manager” (He actually said leader but please allow me the poetic license!) is one of making a contribution or adding value while being invisible; i.e., transparent, transmutable and permeable.

Not being noticed! This may be a tough concept to digest, especially if you are uncertain of your own vision as a manager, are constantly spoken to about “your numbers” like you actually meet them, or you have a personal need to be in charge. I struggled with all of this myself for a long time, especially needing to be in charge. It took me a while to realize that a personal need of mine did not qualify me as a manager!

For some of us this image of the manager as invisible presents a paradox as we think about a) contributing b) while not being noticed. Perhaps our greatest fears are associated with not being viewed as valuable or important, as though it is us who needs to be valuable rather than value being produced is the objective.

What if as you pursue your role as manager your unexamined motives have you become visible, in fulfillment of personal rather than organizational needs. You may now be “in the way”, a limit to what can be accomplished; you are the narrow spot in the road, the lid on the jar and very likely a bit of a pain in the arse and not just to others but yourself as well. If you make the role about you, you are apparent in ways that detract from the production of value.

If you yield to any of the following fears you are probably more visible than necessary and getting in the way:

● an unwillingness to trust others work completely

● an unwillingness to give up control

● an unwillingness to depend on others

● an unwillingness to not seem always buried with work.

● an unwillingness to not be viewed as “in the know.”

● an unwillingness to let go of today and focus on “the future” or even be freed up to do so.  

Consider these words from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, “…The primary job of the manager is not to empower, it is to remove obstacles.” It will be pretty hard to be focused on removing obstacles if you are constantly yielding to one of the fears mentioned above. Truthfully you may be so fearfully occupied in the present that you don’t see the potholes in the road ahead.

The best way to become transparent, transmutable and permeable is to become obsessively interested in the future. Become intensely knowledgeable of how the business will likely profit in the future, focus on how the work being done around you will affect that future profitability and notice what obstacles you can observe and intentionally remove in service of the mutually important objectives of employee, client and shareholder satisfaction? What can you see about the way your company has always done things that might no longer be creating value? You cannot see these things from the present, you must move to a future focused perspective and when you do you’ll disappear. But don’t worry; it will probably be a relief to a lot of people and who knows, you may find you like your new found invisibility as well.

• What could you let go of today and get out of the way?
• Where is there an immediate opportunity to remove an obstacle?

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“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

Lao Tzu , Chinese Philosopher

--The Space Between--

“Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.”

- W. Edwards Deming

 Often in my coaching I am torn between the practical (Try this and let me know how it goes!) and the inspirational (Think about this and see if anything opens up for you!) To have any value whatsoever both ways of thinking/seeing must be related or connected by something I call “The Space Between.”

Lao Tzu and W. Edwards Deming are both leadership theorists.They are mainly known to us now by their legacies. Lao Tzu, a philosopher, left us a couple of thousand years ago with a complete contextual perspective on leadership and living life. Dr. Deming, the father of the quality movement across the world, was a mathematician who created a comprehensive, systemic , practical yet also philosophical approach to developing and sustaining economic value. He is also gone now, since 1993.  

What draws me to these two sources is that they saw life through different eyes. Both views comprehensive, neither complete unto itself. When considered as complimentary perspectives their views point to the need for both a long view and a measured and detailed approach for any endeavor. Life in general or life in business  was to be “measured” in order to be appreciated, measured as successful in terms of both the quantity of achievement and the quality of interactions that took place on a day to day basis. Neither was very interested in “top line” success stories, they wanted to dig deep, get down to what really mattered. They were concerned with enterprises lasting for as long as they added value and understanding the process of doing that.

Both these men also saw that without profound knowledge and a worthy vision, whatever the endeavor came down to putting in your time, like a “life sentence.”  In Deming’s world profound knowledge meant developing a deep understanding the process by which you were creating value. For Lao Tzu the knowledge he was recommending we develop was knowledge of ourselves.

Where do I make the connection between the admonitions of the crusty mathematician and the poetic if at times enigmatic counsel of the Chinese philosopher? In the Space Between.

Of what value are tools and skills without a project to fulfill? Of what value is a vision without a path for fulfillment? It’s small wonder that Dr. Deming spent much of his professional career exasperated. He had designed tools to fulfill profound economic visions and what he found for clients were often business leaders that had little sense of Mission and a strong desire to simply hit their numbers. Lao Tzu would call this an absence of leadership. For leaders they would say there is always the Mission. Mission is the name for the Space Between. Without Mission there is no real need for application of tools and skills, no need for all that we inherited from Dr. Deming. Without Mission a Vision comes off as a pipe dream, or worse a manipulation, there is no sense of connection to anything beyond the immediate.

Have you named the Space Between for yourself or for those who report to you? Do you truly have a vision for yourself, as a professional and as a person, which calls forth a Mission, which begs for learning in the way Dr. Deming described it? And what about for the people who report to you? Have you shared it with them in ways and language they find meaningful?

•  What are your projects between now and the time you become a butterfly?

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The President is going to give his jobs speech next week. I know we are all hopeful that his words will mark a return to the good times. Just look at what I read this afternoon, another gloomy projection.

“As I write this the morning newspaper has yet another story of new “job losses” ---- several stories actually. We are told that the recession has been over for quite a while but the percentage of the workforce that is “jobless” has not fallen the way it has at the end of previous recessions.”   William Bridges

Gosh, I am tired of hearing this, it reads like so many lead stories I may have seen on CNN Headline News in the past three years, but that reference to “newspaper” is odd. I wonder?...

Let’s take a little trip in the WABAC Machine; you all remember Mr. Peabody and Sherman don’t you? Maybe that will clear up my confusion…maybe!

The most striking aspect of my first views of the city of Pittsburgh were the silhouettes of the steel mills that lined the Monongahela River as I drove in along highway 376 from the east. I arrived around mid-afternoon that February day in 1981, the sun was already sinking behind the hills. I did not notice at the time that there was no smoke coming from any of the chimney stacks in those mills. They had all been closed in the previous three years.

It didn’t take long after my arrival to begin to pick up from the locals the regular references to “when the mills open again and the good jobs come back” Pittsburgh had been a steel town since 1875, an industrial center since well before that and after all the mills were still there so there was always hope.

For several years after my arrival the conversation about the good jobs in the mills returning continued and then in early 1986 the mills themselves started being torn down and by late 1987 the riverfront was a clear and open space for the first time in over a century. There was finally room for something new to emerge, for another conversation to take the place of the hope filled refrains about steel and all the good times from the past.

Within 24 months new structures began to fill the space along the riverfront; long and low these new buildings would become home to technology, medical equipment and financial services companies which now form the backbone of the local economy. The old jobs never came back; they were replaced by new opportunities. Some of the new positions were filled by re-trained steel workers, many, perhaps most were not. Nothing new had any chance of happening until the mills were torn down. Until then those artifacts of the past served to anchor in a conversation that was more comforting than facing the anxiety of needing to create something to take their place. This conversation about jobs coming and going has a long history

I opened this piece with a quote from William Bridges. Very likely it sounded current, like news we continue to hear at least weekly as the economy has struggled to recover from the collapse of 2008. However, what I showed you there is not the entire quote. Here is the rest of what Bridges had to say, back in 1994!

“As I write this the morning newspaper has yet another story of new “job losses” ---- several stories actually. We are told that the recession has been over for quite a while but the percentage of the workforce that is “jobless” has not fallen the way it has at the end of previous recessions. The Clinton administration is trying to “create jobs” although its critics claim that some of the current taxes and regulations will destroy jobs.”

                                                             William Bridges, Mill Valley California

These words are taken from the Preface to Bridges book titled ‘Job Shift: How to Prosper in an Economy without Jobs.’ The first 55 pages of this book should be required reading for every elected official in this country who prays on the fears of the unemployed and the employed by perpetuating the mythology of jobs and more importantly any reference to government’s ability to create jobs like they were butter or cheese and could simply be handed out.

To be sure there is work to do, there will continue to be but it will not look so much like the jobs our politicians refer to, it will look more like “the work that needs to be done.” Our employees need to show up ready to engage with the “work that needs to be done.” The unemployed need to learn what elements of the “work that needs to be done” match their interests and prepare themselves so that rather than looking for a job they can look for places where the “work that needs to be done” is a match for their skills and interest.

What are the metaphorical steel mills that need to be torn down in your organization?

How about you consider these suggestions?

• job descriptions
• performance reviews
• job clusters
• pay systems based on jobs

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Last week my oldest son sent me an intriguing article from USA Today that got me very excited as it seemed to be part of a much larger pattern I have seen developing slowly for the past twenty years and more rapidly in the past five;mainstream interest in the science behind the "soft stuff." The article,‘Brain- training games are new exercise craze’ provides a very high level teaser about a field of software development, mind fitness games, that is not very far from its infancy but is projected to be a $1.5 Billion industry by 2015. That’s just around the corner!

While the title of the article is pretty self explanatory the notion of equating mind fitness with physical fitness may seem radical to many people. However, the implications of the growing market for home based brain-exercise equipment (“Own a Bowflex for your brain!) for anyone involved in workforce development should be fairly evident.

This is a pretty standard USA Today piece, “Hey, here’s something interesting you might want to look into!” Not exactly hard hitting reporting but definitely what you expect from a publication that is intended to promote popular mainstream news. I’ll bet that if you read the article and you are anything like me you’ll dig through the references and begin looking for ways that software applications like those described in the article can be worked into regular ubiquitous opportunities for employees in your place of work to keep their minds fit. Right after you have this inspiration your spark will start to fizzle as you realize that the toughest task you’ll have in front of you is convincing your management that if employees can have tools like these available it will likely have a positive effect on both the quality and quantity of work, especially in situations where the nature of work still tends to be mind deadening to a large degree.

But take heart workplace warrior! News like this in USA Today is one more piece of the growing evidence that companies are beginning to take seriously the science that strongly suggests that the demands of work today require that we take into account the needs of our brains.

Remember Margaret Wheatley’s Breakthrough work, ‘Leadership and the New Science?’ Doesn’t its first appearance in 1992 seem like a long time ago? Actually, given the progress of technology in the meantime it was. This book was among the very first to introduce us to the notion of a connection between hard science and management science. At its publication the book became an instant sensation. Business thinking was apparently open to entirely new possibilities, perhaps finally ready to depart from the basic notions of Frederick Taylor that had served us well in the industrial economy.

Since that time we have gone from the initial work of Daniel Goleman popularizing Emotional Intelligence  in the mid-1990’s into the fascinating work of Malcolm Gladwell,‘Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking’, Daniel Pink’s , ‘A Whole New Mind’ and then more recently ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ and then on to works like ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard’ by Dan and Chip Heath  and ‘Your Brain at Work’ by David Rock. With each step along this new pathway we are laying down the first foundational elements of an entirely new way of looking at ourselves at work; and we are doing it fairly rapidly helped along no doubt by technology advancements that are demanding that we change.

And not all this new science is about mental acuity. “Mindfulness” , a term long associated with eastern religion has gone from the mystical to the very practical as evidenced in this terrific piece by Louise Altman, The Neurobiology of Mindfulness- Reshaping Your Brain. Sometimes our very fit minds need to rest as part of the fitness practice.

From all this new research and integration of knowledge more than one thing is becoming clear:

1) We have entered an entirely new era in our thinking about what it takes to develop and manage a workforce

2) A lot of the work in this arena is being done by individuals taking the initiative on their own behalf to insure that they stay competitive

3) If learning has now become a lifetime activity then brain maintenance, fitness or whatever you may call it becomes a critical practice.

4) And companies that recognize the value of mental fitness and partner with their employees to provide resources for this purpose are going to be more attractive places to work and likely more highly engaged workplaces. 

• Where would you say your own company is when it comes to being mindful of the need for greater mind-fitness?

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“The greater the loyalty of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater the probability that the group will achieve its goals.” 

                  Rensis Likert, American Educator and Organizational Psychologist 

• Sometimes we forget that what used to work still works, is available in real time and offers a low tech yet powerful approach to promoting engagement

What could be a more practical approach to building trust than the words expressed in this quote from one of America’s pioneers in the field of organizational behavior? There is nothing normative or judgmental in the way Rensis Likert expresses the power of loyalty here. This is pure pragmatism and group dynamics and like it or not for the most part our business is a social system with an economic purpose, a community intentionally developed for a purpose, pragmatism in action. We are loyal to our company and to each other because it works towards producing the results we are seeking.

“Showing Loyalty” as a practice is one key to the kind of power to produce results we are seeking as managers. It is built just as intentionally as the community that supports the business purpose and is a function of integrity, loyalty, recognition and gratitude. Each piece of this practice, integrity, loyalty, recognition and gratitude is intended to reinforce and acknowledge the interdependence that underlies the success of the larger enterprise.

Consciously recognizing that whatever success the business has experienced is the product of the actions of many, not just a few employees is the foundation for this practice. When we can stay present to this “fact” it is easy to realize that giving credit to the contribution of others both personally and publically is a reinforcing act and power building practice in itself. Who doesn’t want to be around people who readily recognize our contribution and thank us for what we have provided?

The integrity aspect of “Showing Loyalty” is tested when those we may be speaking of or about are not present.

• Can we discipline ourselves to always speak of someone else as if they were with us? Wow!

Wouldn’t it change how we felt about each other if we knew that no one would ever say anything about us that they would not say in our presence? Would we not also be quick to want to return that loyalty in kind?

Questions for Reflection:

 1) Can you commit yourself to never speaking of or about co-workers in any way other than how you would in their presence?

2) Scan your work group for opportunities that have been missed to recognize someone’s contribution. Take action if you do see the opportunity. 

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 Long ago, (1976), and far away, (central New Jersey!), Josephine had finally had it with what was going on around her. Normally she was far from demonstrative, took most things in stride, and did her level best to put forward an image of herself as calm and pleasant. Not this afternoon.

For several months we had been in the process of moving the HR department from one end of the very large building to another. Right now I can’t exactly recall why and the process of moving was not particularly painful. I had been charged with shepherding the construction and logistics of moving to the new space, all of which went very smoothly. At least that’s what I thought until that afternoon.

While the final stages of the move were taking place, we were also managing a new hiring initiative for our plant. We were considered a premier employer in the area and our need for fifteen new people had drawn responses from over two thousand applicants! Without the aid of digitized applications and everything else we take for granted these days, we had a major task just keeping track of everything. We had applications stacked everywhere and Josephine was responsible for the safe keeping of all of them.

Shortly after lunch on this particular day I heard a scream coming from her new work area about thirty feet outside my office and then a muffled crash. I quickly headed for my doorway and as I poked my head into the hallway I could see the source of the crashing noise. Josephine was standing ankle deep in applications with her hands covering her face. She had reached the limit of her tranquil presentation. The move coupled with the confusion of the new surroundings and the added stress of keeping track of all the paper has pushed her right on through calm and pleasant and on into hysterical. Who knew that was hidden just on the other side of her permanently (formerly) placid exterior?

I was told later by her co-worker that Josephine was working with the applications and she began talking to herself out loud, suddenly screamed and then proceeded to sweep the several thousand applications from their neat stacks and into what were now haphazard piles on the floor.

That was it; it was over as quickly as it began. She was duly embarrassed by her outburst. She didn’t say much as we all pitched in and began helping pick up the mess of applications. We didn’t say much either. Back then nobody ever said much about anything that remotely smacked of the personal. Our Christmas lunches were brutal!

Josephine took the rest of the afternoon off and returned the next morning and we never talked about the incident again. I heard recently that she had died in her late forties from complications related to colon cancer.

I’d like to think that if I had another opportunity to revisit those circumstances I might have paid closer attention and noticed her stress level rising, maybe even have somehow saved Josephine from herself. At least I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that these days we are paying closer attention to each other in our places of work, especially now when stress levels are compounded by fear of job loss in so many places. I’d like to think so.

And then a friend sends me the picture you see here on the right. This is not a photo taken at  a meeting, this is a work space occupied by a group of people as you can see, for an extended period … months.

Here’s the note she sent with the picture, it is her workplace.

“You too can work 12-14 hours a day in these luxurious facilities. You just have to meet the following criteria:

• You have no personal space issues
• You have no issues of entitlement
• You have good hygiene”

From the outside this company seems fine; their investors think everything is rosy. My friend has been there for a while and is looking for other opportunities. She says that it’s not too bad, trying to work in these surroundings. I think she has been there too long!

Normally I would now provide you with links to articles that document that workplace violence is on the rise...again this year. But there is little point. The quick research I have done easily revealed several sources citing studies beginning as far back as 2005 reporting annually since then that violence is on the rise in many places of work. Mostly these stories are about vandalism or what one worker did to another, basically stories about what happened after it was too late to make a difference. I didn’t find any story about the violence we do to ourselves by insisting that we put up with unworkability far too long. But then that wouldn’t be sensational.

• Take a look around you. Do you see someone, anyone who looks like they might benefit from somebody asking how they are doing? Ask them how they are doing; you might save them from colon cancer.

I’d like to think that we would be willing to include the damage people do to themselves as a form of workplace violence.

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One of the most traumatic experiences of my life occurred around the time I was turning thirteen years old. That was a birthday more meaningful than many because I knew from conversations with my parents that they were going to increase my allowance. I was the oldest child and I’d be moving from the $.50/week my other siblings received to $.75/week. In my world, where baseball or football cards were $.05/pack w/ gum these were going to be high times!

Not wanting to get my hopes too far out of line with my understanding from past conversations I decided to check bets with my Mom before the big day. To my surprise and disappointment I was informed that yes, I would be getting the increase as previously discussed but with the stipulation that from the day of my birthday onward I needed to run each of my purchases by my mother in advance so she could insure I was making good choices. Yikes! This is now remembered as my "Bait and Switch" birthday. Up to that point, I had spent my weekly $.50 however I chose, mostly on the sports cards that I so dearly prized at the time. What would the future hold? Somehow this didn't feel at all like I had expected it would.

To say the least, I was crushed! What if she didn’t agree with my spending choices? Moms have different priorities than young boys; they are often looking for opportunities to teach them lessons about the value of money, saving for a rainy day, that kind of thing. Drat! My excitement was dashed in one short conversation. What was the point of having the extra money if I couldn’t decide how to spend it?

Fast forward to right now,... the event just described never took place! For the record, I never had a $.75/wk allowance, I topped out at $.50/wk. Sorry for the ruse; I was trying to imagine myself in the situation many managers have reported finding themselves in. A scene similar to the conversation I fabricated with my mother would come after several rounds of the annual budgeting process. Managers then receive their final numbers along with the admonition from the granting authority that they must submit a request for approval of any expenditure of either a certain type or size. Almost anything of consequence is covered by this caveat.

Yaaaaaagh! Hey, Senior Budgeting Authority, what’s the point of granting a budget if you aren’t going to grant full spending discretion along with it? Oh, yes, and by the way, how exactly is it that you hold someone to account or tie their compensation to a number you have final control over?

I am not going out of my way here to be a smarty pants and you are welcome to question the accuracy of the analogy I have created; but not much. Let it burn! I actually think practices like this are frequently and thoughtlessly held in place by habit. How are they tolerated? It is a tough economy where new opportunities are hard to come by.  Or maybe, the managers involved just don’t care enough to push back.

Practices like this one are often fiercely defended by their practitioners if questioned (I doubt that you need me to provide examples, I am sure you unfortunately have plenty of your own).

“Back in the day” , when command and control was the only management approach maybe no one thought a lot about practices such as this, it was just the way it was. These days when every organization is counting on discretionary effort, especially from managers we need to step back and ask, “What exactly is it that we are hoping to accomplish with this constraint on our managers? Maybe we could gain more by encouraging initiative, innovation and creativity?"

Here’s a thought, Senior Budgeting Authority, If you aren’t willing to question your restrictive practices, how about considering that the scores on your engagement surveys are really more of a measure of apathy in a tough job market?  

• Think about what you do as a manager that may be a) communicating to people that they are not trusted or b) constraining them from taking full accountability for what you have told them is expected?    

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 “All are needed by each one; nothing is fair or good alone."

                                                     “Make yourself necessary to somebody.”

                       Ralph Waldo Emerson: American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882

There is probably no aspect of the American mythology that has caused more mischief or been a greater source of misinformation than that of the self made man/woman. Between the fiction of Horatio Alger in his popular Ragged Dick: Or Street Life in New York to the fact (mostly) of Jack Welch Americans can easily recite a list of high profile names that have become part of our “household” vocabulary.

From Andrew Carnegie to Mark Zuckerberg Americans seemingly have an unlimited appetite for consuming tons of media related to the cult of the individual or great man/great woman theory. Yes, all of these people made an undeniable contribution to the economy and/or our society…and none of them truly did or do it alone.

Some prominent American thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson among them, as seen above, did not necessarily concur with the self made mindset. However, on balance I think the mythology of rugged individualism is somehow sexier, more glamorous than Emerson’s suggestions and so it holds sway and is the dominant cultural conversation. For the most part the mythology persists and presents a barrier to collaboration that is holding many companies back and definitely undermining the working satisfaction of many managers

Today in a world as highly connected as it is we do not seem to see that the pathway being built by technology is one that will best lead to a future where a talent for self generated collaboration, interdependence and community accomplishment will be the skills for success rather than the standard set of leadership competencies that are derivatives of the prevalent mythology.

As a manager what can you point to in your immediate working environment that encourages or pulls for collaboration?

• Performance appraisals…not so much.
• Compensation structures…rarely.
• Mentoring...most often focused around managing your own career.
• Identification of high potential candidates for future assignments...look who is doing the evaluations, the kings or queens of the mythology of individualism.  

Is peer coaching, especially in a community context, a legitimate developmental and managerial alternative to historical practices?

The concept of peer coaching is of course not an unknown so there is some precedent but mainly it has been a one to one activity not one intended to represent an entirely new form of organic infrastructure.  

If you are a mid-level manager and not ruggedly individualistic by nature (Less than 20% of the managers in any workplace are highly competitive, many more enjoy the idea of being part of a winning team) and somewhat thwarted by the “go it alone” perspective fostered by many workforce practices you may be in a place where you are faced with doing something unnatural for you…getting radical!

By radical I mean initiating change from where you are in the organization, being the source of a change in approach; moving away from a focus solely on individual development to another form. How about moving coaching from the prevailing individual improvement context to a peer community context?

Honestly now…

Do you accomplish your results alone? No.

Do you deliver to the client or customer without support from other groups and their managers? Probably not!

Are you so focused on your own advancement that you don’t have time to devote to seeing what you can do to help a fellow manager resolve an issue? You are not that selfish!

Would you benefit by having several peers work with you on a regular schedule to share best practices, provide both advice and coaching, hold you to account for your own sake and be committed to your success? Please!

Oh you'd still be self reliant, for everything you have promised to deliver but, in a context where you are held accountable by people whose word, not just their bonus depends on your performance.

• Would you be willing to approach two other peer managers and engage them in this conversation about developing a peer community? If they say yes you've got a team. What game will you have in mind?

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main..."

                                            John Donne 1572-1631

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This past weekend my wife and I set out on what for us was intended to be an adventure. It was indeed an adventure and it turned out to be a humbling learning experience as well. The narrative that follows is a bit long but not nearly so long as my memory of the events of the weekend will be.

For some years now I have held to the belief that when it comes to teamwork and collaborative initiative the person you need to know best and first is yourself. Knowing what you want is only part of the equation for success. You also need to know what you are capable of and what you are not in order to know who to ask for help and for what to ask them. In 2008 in a slim volume titled ‘Managing Oneself’ managers are urged by the master of modern management theory, Peter Drucker**, to study themselves. He said in effect

  “Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by identifying your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses. Articulate how you learn and work with others and what your most deeply held values are. Describe the type of work environment where you can make the greatest contribution.”

**The link here is to a remarkable piece by Business Week’s John Byrne shortly after Drucker’s death.

 Knowing your strengths is certainly a high priority but this weekend I learned first hand that not knowing your limitations can make you a liability that is invisible until the most inopportune moment.

Here on Fidalgo Bay in our home town of Anacortes, WA being on the water in one form or another is a natural part of living in the area. In fact not being on the water seems downright unnatural. We’ve been here for almost five years and with the exception of one tour on the whale watching boat we have not ventured closer to the water than to toss rocks from the shore of the many beaches we hiked to and from. Kayaking has always intrigued both of us and is in our future plans. Sailing, however, is a bit more familiar, at least to my wife who some years back spent many hours as a member of sailboat crews. So last week when she saw an announcement that adult sailing classes were going to be offered again by the local parks and recreation department she suggested we sign up immediately and just jump at the chance. So we did.

I have spent little time myself on the water over my lifetime. Water sports always seemed interesting but I just never made the time. I am not a particularly good swimmer, in fact I am poor but I have a lot of confidence in flotation devices and am always willing to put myself in the hands of instructors I feel are competent. Saturday was the perfect setting for a day on the water, bright sunshine, mild breezes and a cloudless sky. So we packed our lunches and by noon were already rigging our boat for our first turn on the water. My wife had mentioned that she always wanted to be the captain so I offered her first go at handling the tiller. Things went very well, I was her crew and with some trial and error she managed to get a basic handle on the notions of jibing and tacking, the fundamental turning moves in a sailboat.

When it was my turn to take the tiller the entire experience changed in the matter of a few moments. I found that I was confused by the necessary coordination that needs to go on between the mainsail and the tiller. Added to that the boat was small and the cockpit required an agility that I currently do not have, I kept losing my hold on the tiller as I made the exchanges from one side of the boat to the other. Finally, I found myself and the mainsail on the same side of the boat. According to my instructor this was a certain pathway to capsizing. He was correct.

In less time than it takes to describe my wife and I were both in the water and the boat was on its side. At first this may sound like just plain summer fun but we live in the northwest where the water stays at about 50 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the year. Research has shown that in water that temperature your chances of surviving a fifty yard swim wearing a life jacket are about 50/50. Not great odds as you can see so “in the water” is considered bad.

When I hit the water I was not prepared for the immediate cold I experienced. My breath was literally taken away. Fortunately our instructors were nearby in inflatable motor launches and within seconds they were alongside providing comforting words and encouragement. Within a couple of minutes I was able to catch my breath and comfortably hold on to the side of the motor launch. It was only then that I had my first thoughts of how my wife was faring! For a full three or four minute period after we hit the water she was out of my mind completely as I gasped to recover my normal breathing. Did I assume she would be OK because she is a strong swimmer? I’d like to be able to say I was that conscious. In truth I was so consumed with getting myself back under some sort of control that she was out of mind altogether.

The next awakening came once the boat was righted. We needed to get back in the boat. My wife scrambled in quickly and I grabbed the side attempting to pull myself up. It was then that I realized I was not strong enough to pull myself back in the boat! I turned to the young instructor and let him know that I’d need his help. Thankfully his experience, youth and strength were enough to compensate for my insufficient physical condition.

Back at home that night as I replayed the entire event in my head I suddenly realized that I had unknowingly put both myself and my wife in jeopardy. In my superficial approach to being out in the small sailboat it had not occurred to me that at some point I might be in the water, and what that would mean. It was clear to me then that if it had not been for the expertise of the instructors Saturday was not destined to end well. What’s more, rather than being a partner for my wife in an adventure I was an unintended consequence waiting to happen.

Sunday I returned to class and the first thing we needed to do was a capsize drill. I volunteered first but insisted that I partner with another man closer to my size. I knew my wife could not possibly right a boat if she needed to pull my weight as well and I also knew now that if I pulled the boat upright I still wouldn’t be able to get in on my own. So in choosing my partner I made my limitations clear at the outset. He agreed to assume responsibility for my limitations and within a couple of minutes we were able to intentionally capsize, pitching ourselves into the chilly water, and then successfully right our craft using a method that allowed me to be pulled back in the boat as it went upright.

I have been working out for a few months now but I now see that if I plan to pursue sailing or kayaking for that matter I need to resolve my physical limitations or the next water adventure may not end as well. And my wife has made it clear that there will be no two-person kayaking…ever!

• Are you sufficiently cognizant of your own limitations to know when you might be a liability for your direct reports or peers?
• Are you prepared to or have you owned up to your limitations in such a way as to empower and not deflate your reports and peers.

If you are really up for a challenge read “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths” by Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser. As you read the article you may be stimulated to ask yourself, “If I am overdoing my strengths what limitations am I masking?”

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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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Yesterday I was working by telephone with a young man who is a coaching client.  In my opinion this is a uniquely talented manager, rare in that he has a keen sense of what it takes to develop a staff that can function well or better without him. Most of my clients these days are under forty and I am finding more of them have an inherent understanding of the importance of and skills for staff development. Still, I find this instinct uncommon in many places of work.

The conversation we were having involved realizations my client had over the previous two weeks that some of the behaviors he was trying to alter were based on a false or at least no longer valid premise. He characterized it as realizing he had been playing a joke on himself. This would be no small awakening for any of us.

Here’s a guy who has made the high potential list in his company, probably would in most companies, who has been told there are some behaviors he exhibits that may hold him back. Sound familiar?  He’s come to realize that his actions in some cases are driven by false fear that is now so old it has become thoroughly justified and cloaked in explanation (story). In another context we might say he was under the spell of a superstition.

• I need to tip my hat here to a couple of folks at Harvard, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, authors of Immunity to Change and the work that they have done to demonstrate the underlying reasons people don’t change even when not doing so produces a negative outcome. (You can check out this overview article for a summation of their methods.) What these two researchers have come to understand is that behavior that produces negative outcome often has its root in positive experiences in the past, not bad motivation or character flaws.

The net of the work this client and I are doing together is not so much to get him to stop doing what he has been doing. Rather, we have gotten him to a place where he now sees he has a choice about how he behaves. Now we get to see what he is really committed to!

Do you appreciate how hard it is for a successful person to unwire a pattern that has led to success in the past? You do if you’ve ever tried it yourself.

Now put yourself in another position. Imagine you are average Joe or Jolene and you are not on anyone’s high potential list. You are not aspiring to anything special, you like your work and the standard of living it affords you. Most of the time you are able to get your work done in a satisfactory fashion but sometimes you have to work with THAT PERSON or THAT DEPARTMENT and then it is a different story. You often get “uncomfortable” when you have to interact with THAT PERSON and you don’t “feel welcome” when you sit in on meetings with THAT DEPARTMENT. In fact the emotions you experience in these situations are so powerful that even the thought of being in similar situations is enough to have you get upset. And around THAT PERSON and THAT DEPARTMENT your performance suffers. You don’t like it, your manager expresses frustration and nothing changes. Fortunately you don’t need to be in these situations often, in fact you go out of your way to not be available for them. Unfortunately for you, not being on a high potential list it is not likely you’ll have the benefit my young client has and you’ll continue to avoid these situations.

Chances are good that if the data I have from Target Training International holds up; and it has for me now for over fifteen years, the vast majority, somewhere between 65-70% of any given workforce are not motivated by strong negative emotions (think FEAR), in fact they are often paralyzed by the experience. Paralyzed as in not able to do what they know needs to be done. That is a lot of productivity that is at risk and guaranteed it is presented to you as the manager in a most reasonable package.

What are the warning signs to look out for?

As a manager, whether dealing with a direct report or someone you report to when you hear phrase like:

“I am not comfortable with this!”

“This doesn’t feel right to me!”

“I don’t like the sounds of that!”…

You are dealing with FEAR disguised as reason. Further proof will come as you attempt to provide a reasonable response. It will make no difference. Until the person you are addressing is able to identify their reaction as based in FEAR and can question their underlying assumptions you have no hope of proceeding successfully.

• It would be great for everyone concerned if you could become sensitized to the need each of your reports and, yes even your manager, have for someone to recognize the signs of paralysis by negative emotions. Remember, it is not cool to even have emotions in the workplace much less own up to the fact they guide your behavior.

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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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Back in the early 1990’s, when I was getting my company off the ground, the focus of our work was execution. We didn’t call it that; we called it implementation but whatever word we would eventually use the basic idea was to dramatically improve a client’s ability to get done what they intended. When our assignments were complete we often noted that not only could the clients reliably do what they set out to do, the people who worked there were also inspired, looking forward to the next project and openly proud of their work. Generally this state of being was a long way from where the group was when we arrived.

‘Execution’ is also the name of a still very highly regarded book by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. In the introduction to the book the authors state unequivocally that focusing on the discipline and practices of execution is the surest way to cause your business to survive in difficult times. Remember this was 2002, post 9/11 and everyone was thinking times were tough! In their words, “Any business leader, at any company or any level, needs to master the discipline of execution.” The authors also say that, “Leading for execution is not rocket science.”

From my reading of execution and my own experience I have a couple of questions:

•  If execution is really not rocket science and my experience indicates that an execution focus produces the conditions for engagement why isn’t this book a handbook for creating a culture of engagement?  
• Why do the authors define execution as a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability, say it is stronger than culture and then go on the refer to “cultures of execution?”

Maybe because in 2002 they were distinguishing a set of pre-conditions for engagement, not only inventing some new management method or technology?

Here’s an example of a systematic process of rigorously questioning that has become pretty familiar to anyone working in the arena of employee engagement:

• Do you know what is expected of you at work?
• Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
•  At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
•  In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
• At work, do your opinions seem to count?
• Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
• Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
• Do you have a best friend at work?
•  In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
• In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

I am guessing that about three questions into this list you recognized these as the now well known Gallup Q12.

So here’s what I am thinking and you see what you think. Engagement and Execution are first cousins, maybe even siblings. These 12 questions or any others like them without the process to bring them alive and keep in existence the environment they intend is an exercise in futility. People go to work to produce results not post scores on an engagement survey. If work and the experience of working are meaningful, engagement will be a ripe possibility. I trust people in the presence of the possibility to make the choice to engage.

•  What makes you think you need some fancy tools to measure engagement when what you may be better off doing is focusing on execution? Try playing for keeps and see how that goes.

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Earlier this week I was talking with a friend about the idea of working smarter. I asked her how long we have been hearing the encouraging words, “You need to work smarter not harder!” She thought for a moment and offered that it seems like a phrase that has been around at least twenty years. We both agreed that we’ve heard these words used usually like a healing salve in certain contexts:

• Right after a layoff was announced
• Right after a budget reduction was announced
• Right after we had been informed of our newest “stretch objective”

As our conversation continued I realized that what had originally been offered as insight intended to enlighten had clearly become cliché, guaranteed to annoy!

After our call I began to wonder what others like me might have to say on this concept of smarter vs. harder so I ventured out into the rarified air of the blog-o-sphere yet one more time. Tips! Yikes…ten things to this…five ways to that; as rapidly as I could I waded through the obvious “advice” that proliferates around topics like this and eventually settled in on a piece written recently by Nate Moller on May 6^th this year titled ‘Why I Hate the Cliché Work Harder, Not Smarter.’ It turned out to be a bit of a rant on Nate’s part but he provided an interesting distinction that got me thinking further. Nate quoted Seth Godin , which these days seems a good idea when looking to establish credibility.

I’m not quite sure of the source Nate was using but Seth was making a distinction between Long Work, .i.e., hours for the sake of hours, and Hard Work, using innovative or creative thinking to come up with a novel solution to a problem. Nate’s point was that in this life there really is no escaping HARD WORK at times. OK, I get that but I wasn’t looking to wiggle out of hard work, unless it was yard work!

The messages from the piece Nate has written are valid;  1) Do not confuse long hours worked with value added, they may be the same thing but not likely.2) And for sure don't kid yourself into thinking there is any way out of hard work. But am I then to accept that HARD WORK and SMART WORK are interchangeable notions? That I do not!  Unless, by HARD WORK Nate meant to suggest, or maybe it was Seth Godin’s suggestion, that it takes HARD WORK to WORK SMARTER. Now maybe we are getting somewhere and now maybe the dilemma we’ve been facing becomes clear. It is actually easier, more comfortable, more familiar, safer etc. to work longer than it is to find another (smarter) way to work.

I wonder if all these years we have been looking in the wrong place for the answer to this seeming paradox that has been posed to us about working more productively without working longer hours.  

Almost for sure you know the joke about the guy looking around the street lamp for lost keys right? When asked what he’s doing he reports that while he lost his keys somewhere down the street he’s looking for them under the lamp because that’s where the light is. It seems silly and funny no matter how many times you hear it for the very reason that it is what we do. We come up against problems we don’t know how to solve and we look for solutions where we have always found them, under the metaphorical street lamp because that’s where the light is. So, we work harder and harder and harder, knowing we will not find the keys and hoping we get some credit for the hardness with which we are working and most certainly not asking for help from anyone else. If we are honest, at least with ourselves, we finally admit that left to our own resources we have no idea how to work smarter. In that moment of surrender the future opens up before us!

• Would you be willing to accept the possibility that working smarter might mean more frequent collaboration with others if it meant you’d have to share the credit for results achieved but you’d work less hours? Don’t answer too quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We operated from the following vision:

 It is possible to design working environments where there…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                             Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 This week I'll continue with Part Two of my interview with Bill Catlette, co-author of 'Rebooting Leadership.'

MFC: Bill, I am wondering about something else; you are a former HR manager/leader, I am merely an "old" HR practitioner, however, I think I have noticed a dramatic shift in the practices of HR departments over the past decade, maybe even a bit longer. To put it bluntly it seems to me that HR has gone from meaning Human Resources to meaning Human Regulation. I know this is not very subtle yet I have heard little positive about HR departments in many organizations I have worked with over the past 23 years. Again, is this just my view or have you noticed this trend as well?

BC: In fairness Mike, I think the road to “Human Regulation” or “Human Remains” as some put it, has a lot more to do with much larger tectonic shifts in our workspace and society in general, than with any failing on the part of HR professionals.

As a nation, we find ourselves extremely divided and in deep yogurt on so many fronts, yearning for some success, some fresh air. As former Medtronic chief, Bill George put it; the situation we find ourselves in was caused “not by subprime lending, but subprime leadership.” I am in furious agreement with Mr. George.

 To be sure, the terms of the deal in the workspace have morphed radically over the last decade, to a point where many (most?) managements no longer enjoy the benefit of the doubt of their workers. The terms, “employer” and “job” have lost nearly all relationship to what they meant just twenty years ago. So much so that in the case of the former, British management scholar, Charles Handy suggests that we should give up the name entirely, and refer to ourselves not as employers, but “organizers of work.” Chew on that for a minute or two.

 Things like worker engagement get pretty tricky when most of our workers are, as my son put it, “not married to their jobs, but just dating them.”

 Do HR professionals and pundits share some of the blame? Sure we do. Staring unemployment in the face, some have no doubt become weak-kneed, while others struggle with just what becoming “more strategic” really means. Hint: Earning and keeping a seat at the “big table” does not stem from losing either your head for business or your heart. While many by necessity spend a lot of their workday plastering lipstick on a pig, we mustn’t lose sight of real sunlight at the end of the tunnel, or the courage to quietly but clearly remind the CEO that it is still after all, a pig. If we can’t or won’t do those things, we should find something else to do for a living.

 And, I think that those of us who have been practicing the HR craft for more than 15 years should regularly ask ourselves if we’re truly willing to learn and adapt to new realities. If not, then the Millennial rant about the Boomers who just won’t get out of the way has some merit.

MFC: To be fair, I don't want to paint the entire profession with the same brush. There are plenty of bright stars in the field; Kris Dunn immediately comes to mind. I follow his blog HR Capitalist and the one he founded and coordinates, Fistful of Talent on a regular basis. What I especially like about Kris is that a) he thinks like a business person, a quality I find missing in many HR professionals. and b) he is an active HR professional, not just a commentator like myself. But why so few Kris Dunn's, or is this again just data from my limited perspective?

BC: I don’t know if it stems from the cable “news” model where only the negative or outrageous stuff gets covered or what, but too many of the good stories get buried. I would trade just one story about an HR manager who is keeping his/her CEO from looking like a complete bozo on Undercover Boss for the next 1,000 pieces on Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan.

There are a lot of good CEO’s and good leaders, and good HR professionals out there who get neither the attention nor credit they deserve. People like Brian Ennis (ETEX),Christopher Smith (H.J. Baker), Niki Leondakis (Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants), Jim Goodnight (SAS),Dan Cathy (Chick-fil-A), CSM Michele Jones (U.S. Army Reserves, ret.) and on the HR front, Steve Browne (LaRosa’s),Tim Kern (Pfizer), and Susan Merfeld (Pebble Beach Company). There is nothing, repeat, nothing I enjoy more than working with folks like this, and focusing whatever spotlight we might have on them and other deserving leaders.

I try to live by the motto, “Feed the Opportunities… Starve the Problems.” If all of us, me included, could do a little better job of that, our world might be a better place.

MFC: There are two things I do not understand about this, first, CEO's who allow their HR leadership to not think like business people, you know, risk/reward not just risk avoidance. Second, HR professionals seem to have at best limited interest in what I think may be one of the highest leverage vantage points in any business. HR is involved in everything. They see the smoke before the fire becomes visible. I do not understand why they often seem reluctant to "name" what they are seeing and initiate or at least encourage the difficult conversations to take place. You have worked with many "C" level executives. In your experience what is the prevailing view of the value added by HR from the line executive’s point of view?

BC: Sorry to sound like an attorney (I’m not), but the answer is, it depends… on the CEO or other C-level exec. Some “get it” and some don’t. Many have never had the pleasure of working with a real HR pro who is a business partner in every sense of the word, so it is a hard concept for them to appreciate. In fairness, it is incumbent on us to show them, not the other way around.

 MFC: Bill, if it sounds like I am grinding an ax here on the heads of HR departments I am. I don't mean for you to give a boost to my bandwagon but this is a big deal for me. Going back 39 years I received a Masters in Labor and Industrial Relations from Michigan State. I worked in the profession for nearly 10 years before moving to OD, I worked on the original ERISA conversions in the 70's and the whole bit. We always worked like everyone in the organization was counting on us to get things right, not just management. We felt, acted and thought like we needed to represent everyone's point of view to management, like it was a sacred trust. I am not seeing a lot of that these days so for me I ask these questions from the perspective of someone whose heart is broken by the unfulfilled possibility that HR represents. Have you ever given any thought to writing a book directed strictly at engaging HR professionals in your vision for what an HR function could provide if it were truly focused on engagement?

BC: Stay tuned. We’re not done.

MFC: Thanks Bill, as always the pleasure has been mine and the learning priceless.

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Recently I have not been feeling very positive about the HR profession. If I was really being specific I wasn’t feeling good about a couple of interactions I had with HR managers that I thought were shortsighted. Well, really I thought the interactions reflected an unnecessarily biased perspective towards management’s interest. OK, so I didn’t get what I wanted! Are you happy now?

When such an occasion does arise and I find myself “screwed into the ceiling” I often turn to cooler heads to provide me a new perspective and allow me the opportunity to come down from my high horse. One person I always feel confident can talk me off the ledge is my long time associate, former Managing Director of HR at Federal Express, Bill Catlette.

Unlike me Bill is one of those people who suffer from perpetual “level headedness”, a trait I can honestly say I only aspire to. My hope would be that whether you are an HR professional or a manager in some line function that you have someone like Bill that you can turn to when you can’t get out of your own way.

That’s where I was a couple of weeks back and I was embarrassed about it. I like to think I am above taking things too personally, it is “just business” after all but I know I will on occasion get “hooked” so when I contacted Bill my face was still red and I had to sort of sneak up on my agenda by asking him about his recently published book, ‘Rebooting Leadership’. I knew he’d be ready to talk about that and once we got started I could launch into my true purpose. What transpired was an exchange that became an interview and I am pleased to share it with you here, a conversation with a true leader in the HR profession.

Here goes.

MFC: Bill, along with your longtime partner Richard Hadden and Meredith Kimbell, you have recently written and released a new book, 'Rebooting Leadership' that is targeted at front line managers and their managers, my favorite place in the management structure. I say favorite because this is where I believe authentic employee engagement is encouraged or damaged. Why did you feel this was the time for a book directed at this segment of the management hierarchy?

BC: Thanks, Mike, for giving me the opportunity to talk with you about what has become our favorite topic, too.We wrote Rebooting Leadership for exactly one reason:

For us, the topic - trying to do something to help front-line managers, was like a blinking red light with a wailing siren attached to it. Even on the best of days, front-line leaders have the toughest jobs in any organization, with increasing performance pressure, very little support, and no place to hide. Add to that an increasingly dispirited and disengaged workforce, the complete cratering of trust in the workspace, having precious little training for going on 4 years, and their jobs are made near impossible. Think about it, before they even show up for work in the morning, a glance at their email in-basket forewarns them of intense data water-boarding for the first couple of hours. And unlike a lot of others, they have real work to get done. In short, most of them are stuck in a real hard spot.

We committed to doing a book that offers the front-line leader the practical benefit that a stuck computer gets from pressing Control+Alt+Delete… a fresh start, using a time honored operating system, yet applicable to today’s challenges. Practical advice like, how to build your own high performance team (aka Friending), how to survive a failed project or bad decision (Failing), and how to get people engaged (Getting Sticky).

Early reports suggest that we may have struck a chord with it. I got a note just the other day from a business school professor at Butler University, advising that the book is required reading for his fall term graduate class on leadership.

MFC: You have a deep background in Human Resource management; you played a key role in that function at Federal Express, among other places. Your first two books 'Contented Cows Give Better Milk: The Plain Truth About Employee Relations and Your Bottom Line' and the more recent 'Contented Cows Move Faster: How Good Leaders Get People to Put More OOMPH! Into Their Work seemed to appeal more to the rational side of managers and leaders; this new book seems to be almost an impassioned plea to supervisors and managers. Can you comment on this or is this simply my interpretation? If I am in sync with you here can you also comment on this shift into another gear?

BC: Each of those books, and thank you for remembering them, was written for a specific purpose and audience. The first, ‘Contented Cows Give Better Milk’, was written as the capstone to our research that showed quite conclusively, for the first time, those organizations that treat people right, and are legitimate employers of choice, grow faster, are more productive, make more money, and create more wealth for shareholders. We made the business case, not with faith, but facts. In essence, it validated the hard work of good leaders and hard working HR professionals. Game, set, match.

The second book, ‘Contented Cows MOOve Faster’, did a deep dive on the whole notion of Discretionary Effort, that extra morsel of effort, the turbocharger that each of us can turn on if, but only if we want to. It is somewhat more prescriptive than the first book, and is intended for leaders at every level. It shows them how to tap into that extra 30 – 40% of capacity that our people choose daily to either expend in the workplace, or take home at days end unspent.

Written for Level 1 and 2 leaders and the people who coach and direct them, ‘Rebooting Leadership’ is nothing but prescriptive content (do THIS, stop doing THAT). It’s what your own boss would be teaching you if they had the time, and over 75 years of leadership experience (and the scars to prove it). We actually tried to condense it to a series of 140 character Tweets, but couldn’t quite pull it off. Our publisher, David Cottrell of Cornerstone Leadership so bought in to this concept that he allowed us only 112 pages, on the premise that our intended audience has neither the time nor inclination to read a book any bigger than that. Besides, as Mark Twain put it, long books/letters are what you write “when you don’t have time to write a short one.”

(to be continued) Coming up next, Part Two: Bill Catlette answers my question, "Has HR come to mean Human Regulation?"

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How does an organization sustain the engagement of employees through a significant period of change, not a change management initiative, a continuous period of evolutionary change lasting say, ten years? That experience is one that has been shared over the last decade by the 70,000 + employees of the Boeing Corporation in the greater Seattle area.

Here in the northwest our relationship with Boeing is up close and personal and if you work there, as a leader or not, you might feel like a fish being followed by a group of wide eyed tourists in a glass bottom boat. We cheer when the news for Boeing is good like it was recently when the company was awarded a large contract and we tremble when the company seems vulnerable as it has during the 787 project.

The trials and tribulations of the Boeing’s 787 project are a journalist’s dream come true because so many things have gone wrong. And with a presence as prominent as Boeing’s is here in the Northwest you can bet that EVERYTHING gets reported on and from many perspectives given the wide diversity of agendas that have some dependency on the company. Almost no news day is complete without something being reported out of Boeing.

Something I have wondered about for a while is how any company can maintain employee engagement during this period of rapid and sustained evolutionary change. Boeing provides plenty of opportunity to consider this question. So Monday when an article appeared in this Monday’s (4/4/11) Seattle Times Business and Technology section profiling one of the key leaders at Boeing it grabbed my attention.

I was hoping for some insight into how Boeing’s senior team has been leading the organization? What have they been doing to keep engagement high, have they even been concerned about it? I am a fan of both Bill Bridges and Dick Axelrod. In his highly regarded book ‘Terms of Engagement’  Axelrod outlines three critical leadership practices that are keys to success in any change management process, such as Boeing has been undergoing for a decade. They are: 

·         Honesty

·         Transparency

·         Trust

It is these practices, Axelrod tells us, that when followed create the conditions in which employees can choose to engage fully while leadership is making big demands on them. How is Boeing’s leadership doing as followers of these practices?

As I was reading this new piece I had Axelrod’s model in mind.  

The article by Dominic Gates, the Times Boeing beat reporter, profiles Nicole Piasecki, Boeing’s vice president of Business Development head of Strategic Analysis for Commercial Airplanes. If you live anywhere, never mind simply the Northwest, and are involved in employee engagement you will find some nuggets here, some to save and some to avoid.

The article, as well as being an executive profile discusses some of the key strategic issues Boeing leadership has and is dealing with as it prepares for competition in spaces in which it has been one of two dominant players for many years

Nicole Piasecki has clearly been on both the receiving end of some pretty big decisions made by others that resulted in negative consequences and also an active participant in making some of these same decisions herself. As Dominic Gates points to in his article…

“…some of Boeing's strategic moves in the past decade — which Piasecki had a hand in — now look questionable. Boeing's leadership has conceded that the wholesale outsourcing of work on the Dreamliner (787) program was handled badly. The debacle has trashed the company's stellar reputation for delivering on time and has cost the company billions of dollars.”

Has Boeing’s leadership completely stepped up to full responsibility for the decisions that led to the 787’s problems? Maybe you should judge for yourself but here is how it was reported by Dominic Gates when he directly asked Piasecki about one such decision…

“Piasecki considered her answer for a long moment, pausing, a conversation that was otherwise a fluid mix of lively, confident answers and occasional playful banter.

Finally she acknowledged, as her boss Jim Albaugh did recently, that Boeing's leadership at the time was very focused on shrinking in-house assets to boost Wall Street's assessment of company profitability.”

As I read these words I felt my confidence in Boeing leadership rising and then I read the next sentence…

“Then she briskly moved on, saying she won't "second-guess decisions that have already been made."

For my part, and she may not have intended it to be so, I found this response cavalier and I was left deflated. I know Boeing employee’s read this piece and I wondered whether they might have the same impression as I did. Is this the kind of transparency, honesty and trust that provides a foundation for engagement?

So I am now left wondering a) whether Boeing’s leadership is fully prepared to create the conditions for employees to continue to choose to engage at the high levels the company no doubt needs and b) whether those 72,000 + employees working for Boeing in the Seattle area are coming in each day fully engaged or whether they may just not have anyplace else to go?

•  What about your own leadership? Have you made decisions that went badly? How did you handle these with the people affected?

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Last week I was working with a young manager I have been coaching for a while who had just delivered a tough review to one of his direct reports. In reflecting on how his session had gone he mentioned that the employee’s last manager had stopped by recently and apologized for not previously addressing the employee's performance shortcomings.

"So why couldn't he have handled this before now and skipped the apology?", my young colleague quipped. "What good does that apology do me now? So one more time I am left to be the bad guy!"

He may have thought he was asking a rhetorical question but I decided to provide him an answer, albeit perhaps not one he was looking for. “So did you hear the invitation in the other manager’s apology?” I asked. Silence…”What do you mean invitation?” the young manager asked in return. I responded, “Well you asked why he couldn’t have skipped the apology, how about interpreting the apology as an invitation for some coaching?” Again the young manager was silent for a bit, then chimed in, “Wouldn’t that seem a bit arrogant on my part, suggesting that maybe he was looking for some coaching?”

So here was a young manager expressing the limits of his vision* in much the way Arthur Schopenhauer  a couple of centuries back suggested that we all do.

“Everyman takes the limits of his own field of vision to be the limits of the world.”        from ‘Studies in Pessimism’

* I have reached this point time and again with managers I have coached over the years; a failure to be able to look beyond some disappointment they have experienced and create an empowering alternative interpretation of something that has occurred.

So I responded, “Well maybe it would depend on how you asked the question.” The point I was getting to was that this young manager had a gift to offer the employee’s previous manager. So I went on, “You have spoken to me before about this manager as someone you work well with and you know he has trouble with confrontations. What if you went back to him now and asked to talk about the apology again and made him an offer?” For a moment it seemed that I had thrown my colleague a real curve ball when finally he asked, “Could you tell me how that might go?”  So here now was the request for coaching that had been missing.

"OK!", I said, " How about this, you could go back and ask to revisit the conversation. Knowing him as you do I expect he’ll accept the request. Once underway I suggest that you thank him for the apology then let him know that it would be of greater importance to know that he was going to correct this shortcoming and not have a similar situation occur in the future. You then can offer your own skills and let him know that you’d be more than happy to coach him when the next opportunity comes along for a tough conversation and he is thinking of passing it up. He’ll either accept the offer or not and let him know that whatever his choice the offer will remain open." I finished off with this question, “Which do you find preferable, leaving things as they are, wishing that manager would change and being pretty sure that on his own he won't, or taking this initiative and recognizing that your gifts are to be given, not to be apologized for and definitely not used to make yourself feel superior to those you work with?”

Maybe to you as the reader the answer to my question seems obvious but it is not. For this young manager to accept my suggestion he was going to have to break through one of his own limitations, not wanting to appear arrogant. There was going to be a win in this for everyone involved if it could be pulled off. We’ll see.  

• Where are you watching someone struggle and being judgmental rather than offering to help?
• What are the gifts your employees have that they could offer each other?

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When the idea first came to me to write a post using this title I wanted it to be profound, pithy, memorable and certainly tweetable! What I found in trying to write the piece is the words in the title so say it all that there seems to be almost no need for further explanation! Rats! Not much room for pithiness but it is a great title so allow me to illuminate where no explanation is required.

Intuitively you probably agree with the quote used here. The words are those of Ian Tyler CEO of Balfour Beatty, an international construction contractor. The context in which I encountered these words was the 2010 IBM Global CEO Study: Capitalizing on Complexity. I downloaded a copy of this study shortly after reading about it in a post from Sharlyn Lauby, The HR Bartender, on March 6th.

It is always interesting to me what different perspectives come from readings of the same material by a diverse set of eyes. Me, my eyes are always tuned to picking up insights into patterns companies have developed that unwittingly undermine their expressed intentions to encourage a highly engaged workforce. Ian Tyler’s words struck me as the kind of obvious wisdom almost any manager would agree with then quickly launch into one of those “…wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a perfect world, one that allowed us to choose just the right people for management, blah, blah, blah.” Nothing discounts profound knowledge faster than a “Yeah but…”

It is certainly a matter of picking the right people for management but what does that mean? What are the criteria that indicate the greatest chance of success? I’ve lost track of the number of companies that complain about the quality of their managers when they really mean they are missing leadership. When asked, these same companies will answer sheepishly that they usually find themselves selecting a top performer for the vacant manager spot or the most technically knowledgeable candidate available so they will have someone filling the spot, since as we all know if the employees don’t have someone watching them they will run amock or just sit at their desks idly.

Are there some companies that do a solid job, certainly, and based on my experience they seem to be few and far between. Why else would “My Manager” be among the top reasons cited for employees leaving their positions voluntarily? In my career I can count on one hand the companies I have encountered where managers told me they felt well prepared before they received their first management assignment. The number of companies that do a rigorous job of succession planning for first management positions may be more numerous than my experience would indicate.

However, when it comes to leadership, managers who have an understanding of how to become not only a leader of the people they manage but also among peers and superiors… I think the recognition that their position as leader is granted by their audiences is truly rare.

Case in point: I interviewed a young manager last week who I was told by superiors was struggling to find a leadership voice. It didn’t take me long in the conversation to establish that this was an exceptionally bright young person who one day may well become both a solid manager and a good leader. But not yet! In a period of maybe thirty minutes the young manager provided at least five examples of personal brilliance and frustration...if people would just listen to them…it was sad! I left recommending an immediate coaching engagement, if not with me certainly with someone else because this situation already smelled of burn out and it had only been 11 months since the appointment had been made. Too bad, really smart person, really passionate person, I hope this turns out for the best.

To just wrap this up quickly for now I suggest you might want to refer your managers to this little piece I found while searching last night. It is called Connecting as a Leader and it was written by Ivy N. Carter. It is a sweet little bit of personal wisdom and experience that I am sure almost any manager would benefit from.

• Are you trying to lead without preparing your audience?
• Do you know someone who is struggling because they think their title confers leadership on them?

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One of the remnants from a time not yet past is the notion that employee vacations are an earned benefit. Bah! Humbug!

The other day I was speaking with a neighbor, a younger person, who was talking about his feelings of needing to take some time off work. “So why not just schedule some time in the next month”, I asked? I was taken back by his response. “Well, I only have a week paid vacation time each year and I’d like to hold off until the weather gets warmer”, he said. It has been a long time since I worked for someone else but one week of vacation annually hardly seemed adequate for my young friend to recreate, refresh and ready himself for extended periods of performance in the mentally challenging role I knew he held.

When I started my “career” with a major petroleum company nearly forty years ago I recall how my new manager explained to me that the company was going to generously provide me two weeks paid vacation time after one year of service and after five years service I’d have another week added. I am not sure that my manager realized that since I was just coming from six years of higher education with usually three weeks between trimesters off and summers as well a “generous” two week vacation seemed more like a sentence to servitude than a benefit. Yet, that was forty years ago and an altogether different time. And here my young friend was in 2011 with just a single week paid vacation time after a few years with his employer!

 
That conversation disturbed me! Somewhere between full slumber and consciousness this morning I started thinking about the necessity for knowledge workers to regularly and intentionally involve themselves in the practice of refreshment. I am not talking about the worn out conversation around “using all your vacation time.” I mean an intentional practice of unplugging, shutting down the commercial part of our brain and just playing at something. So I started this morning with a visit to the dictionary:   

Main Entry: ¹va·ca·tion  
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English vacacioun, from Middle French vacation, from Latin vacation-, vacatio feedom, exemption, immunity, from vacatus (past participle of vacare) + -ion-, -io -ion -- more at VACANT
1 : a respite or a time of respite from something : INTERMISSION, REST
2 obsolete a : freedom from work or cares : LEISURE b : time free for something else; specifically : time for contemplation
3 a : a scheduled period during which activity or work is suspended.

Look…look, we are three usages of the word into the common definition and there has yet to be mention of vacation as an employee benefit or employer concession! To be fair that meaning does come shortly after what I have shown here but it is not at the top of the list.

The point I mean to get to is that the subject of employee vacations remains as symbolic as it is practical and to that extent I see an issue that potentially affects employee engagement. The symbolism of course is reflective of an era where employers were considered the “grantors” of any condition of employment. For many, many years in the North American economy employment was considered to extend at the pleasure of the employer. This mindset was simply a matter of fact for decades. The times may have changed but much of the mindset remains intact. But perhaps not as much as in the past.

In a very recent article in Fortune, ‘Flexible Vacation Policies are Here to Stay’ reporter Shelley DuBois opens with a most provocative series of questions:

“You're an adult. You know how to prioritize your time to do your job. So why should your company ration out vacation reluctantly and monitor when you spend it? Wouldn't it be nice to do away with vacation-day limits entirely, so you could leave work whenever you want for as long as you feel you need?

So, if you are an employer does considering this concept of flexible vacation time sound revolutionary, make you a bit lightheaded? Does it leave you feeling weakened in some way. If it does I’d suggest that you place more of a premium on control in your business than you do productivity. Viewed from the perspective of considering practices that will promote engagement and therefore less need to spend time focused on productivity a change in your current policies may be worth looking at. You would of course need to consider your own business and the needs for customer satisfaction as the basis to work from. However, if you want encouragement…the company I started in 1989 began with a flexible vacation policy and until I left in mid-2010 I can say for sure that we never has a recorded incident of abuse of this practice. More often than not I found myself in the position of telling employees that they needed to take time.

• When was your last vacation? Did you really disconnect ?
• When is your next vacation? Will you do better at disconnecting that time?

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I was reading an article this week that appeared recently in the Whidbey-News Times. This was the headline:  

          UPDATE: Whidbey loses Poseidon, thousands of jobs in doubt

If you just read the headline you’d be inclined to think that the people on Whidbey Island, located north and west of Seattle in the Puget Sound, were facing an immediate economic crisis with 2600 jobs in jeopardy. In truth the jobs may be at some risk, there are still a lot of unanswered questions; however, any phase out of these positions would take place over a nine year period, if it takes place at all. This all becomes clear if you read the article which is written in such a way as to emphasize the uncertainty of the situation. But the headline sells the news media!

On Fidalgo Island, just north of Whidbey, where I live in the town of Anacortes, we have two modest sized petroleum refineries employing about 800 people between them as well as several hundred contractors on an ongoing basis, very likely an additional 300 jobs. The people in our town can and have been frightened by headlines similar to those in the Whidbey- News Times on more than one occasion with threats of the loss of these jobs, and will continue to be into the future. Such is the cost of economic dependency.

Being mindful of the potential economic threat facing the people of both islands I was reflecting today on the way many people, much like many in these two communities, unwittingly position themselves to be emotionally and psychologically “whipsawed” by forces beyond their control. I currently participate as a member of the economic development subcommittee of my local Chamber of Commerce in Anacortes. My intention, along with those of my fellow committee members, is to be able to stimulate economic and employment alternatives for the island, not to avoid the loss of our refineries and the employment they bring. Whether we like it or not that eventuality is very likely beyond our control. As a community we need to be responsible for the potential loss of these assets and have in place alternatives that could replace many if not all of these positions or serve as incentives for new citizens to be drawn to our area because of the opportunities we represent. As a committee of invested citizens we are operating freely into a new future rather than being paralyzed by the fear of the loss of our present. Time is always going to be our primary limitation which means that there is no time like right now to get cracking on creating solutions.

Scenarios similar to those portrayed here on both Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands are played out on a miniaturized scale day in and day out in organizations all around us. Managers seeking solutions to producing significant gains in employee engagement are being unconsciously undermined by the very lifestyles of employees they wish to engage. Many employees, managers too, live at or near the limits of their economic wherewithal. These very same people have no disaster plan or exit strategy in place in the event they experience a loss or decline of their income flow. Consequently they often live in a state of quite desperation, hoping that they do nothing to cause the loss of their employment. They are not grounded in their responsibility for their own economic future. In their world opportunity is something someone creates or offers to them and has little or nothing to do with who they are or what value they may bring. They live in a state of economic dependency without necessarily a corresponding awareness of the risk they continually place themselves and their families in by failing to insure against a catastrophic loss of income.

You may think this sounds preachy or judgmental, even critical. Well….yes, if that is what it takes to wake people up! Managers need to wake too for that matter.

People who are scared for the future of their income are rarely if ever fully engaged, they lack the capacity for full engagement. About the best they are able to offer is compliance or adherence to desired direction. Furthermore, they are not trustworthy.

By now you should be very uncomfortable but consider this; I am not talking about absolute untrustworthiness. What I am referring to here is people being rendered untrustworthy by virtue of being held hostage by their own economic need. Honestly, can you count on people to do the right thing when they believe it may in some way threaten or constrain their employment situation? Hopefully this is a rhetorical question.

We will not drive fear from our organizations without being responsible for the many employees that are coming to work scared and consequently limiting their contribution to that which appears safe. I am not suggesting that we need to address the  external conditions that promote the fear but rather the fear itself and how catering to it unwittingly contributes to lessening the perceived value our employees can provide.

• Where do you suspect that you have employees who are operating so as to limit their own risk of losing either their current position or employment with your firm?
• What conversation can you imagine having with such employees that would bring the fear out in the open and allow it to be addressed directly?

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 Last week I read some powerful thoughts at ProjectConnections.com written by Kimberly Wiefling, founder of Weifling Consulting.com. I like to check in periodically with those writing in disciplines other than my own mainly to find fresh perspectives. When I clicked through to ProjectConnections.com I arrived at a very thoughtful piece titled ‘Avoiding Stone Age Practices in the Age of the Internet.’ Snappy titles will get my attention but this article has plenty of solid content as well, especially as it pertains to both leadership and engagement.

Kimberly wrote ‘Scrappy Project Management’ back in 2007, it is consistently a best seller among project manager’s guide books and currently #1 on Amazon Kindle in the Total Quality Management category. More importantly to me Kimberly is a project management expert who recognizes that people and culture are as important as process and planning when it comes to realizing successful projects . She also shares the same continuing disappointment that I do. In Kimberly’s words, “In spite of a wide array of research, books, and articles on exactly what works with millions of people worldwide, I still find that most work environments fail to implement even the most basic elements required of healthy, vibrant, work environments: corporate cultures capable of fostering and enhancing business results.”

To these words from Kimberly I give a “tip of the hat” to honor Dr. Deming’s words in his well recognized 14 Points for Management , specifically point '#8 Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.' With all the dollars invested in new systems and process analysis (how we do our work) it seems intuitive that we might we might allocate as much attention to who we are while we are working. Yet we do not, or when we do want it done in a half day session!

What exactly is present when FEAR is absent and why do modern managers have such a limited ability to address or eliminate fear in their places of work? I’ll conjecture the following theories and ask you to test my thinking against your own experience.

First, the model shown at right suggests that organizationally all Results become “possible” from a foundation of Engaged Relationship and the unspoken assertion here is that POSSIBILITY is a precondition for all desired Results. Show this model to a classically trained manager or MBA and they will say something like “OK, I am with you on the RESULTS thru OPPORTUNITY part but what about this POSSIBILITY you speak of? It was not covered at my university or in my management development curriculum.”

The point I wish to distinguish is that POSSIBILITY is the "space for accomplishment" and is what is present when FEAR is absent. It becomes available as the condition given by the creation of ENGAGED RELATIONSHIP; chosen not required associations.

An ENGAGED or CHOSEN RELATIONSHIP is one characterized by Mutuality of Purpose, Respect and Understanding. To get to this point means that all parties involved have engaged in dialogue sufficient to satisfy these conditions. Failing to pursue sufficient dialogue to accomplish this purpose there will be a resulting absence of POSSIBILITY and that space will be occupied by FEAR. Think emotional and psychological distress if FEAR doesn't register.

Secondly and in support of the earlier theory, while classic management training or development does not acknowledge or even recognize the importance of POSSIBILITY, it consequently also does not recognize Learning as a legitimate OUTCOME.  Essentially the failure here is the function of only being able to register RESULTS using the language of finance and that language does not distinguish Learning as having measurable value. Take a look at this second model, one which includes OPPORTUNITY generated from Learning.

What we often see is that while a given endeavor may not culminate in the desired financial RESULT there will always be Learning that occurs. The product of the RESULT that is realized and the Learning will provide a new place (OPPORTUNITY) to address the FUTURE from and the cycle begins again. Unfortunately, our insistence on the tyranny of the financial language leaves us with an inability to distinguish the new OPPORTUNITY in any powerful way or way that can be celebrated for its contribution to a new Future

 OK, now don't get all crazy here, this does not mean we have to change all our compensation plans or find some way to measure learning. As a leader it is really just a matter of using your head. You know that even when you miss an objective something of value was produced. Don't act like you hit your objective, acknowledge the failure but also acknowledge the learning. What you will produce is far more valuable conversations that people look forward to because while they know they will be held to account they also know they'll be able to leverage the RESULTS they have produced as well and the LEARNING that has occurred. FEAR will decline.

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

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

                                 Anonymous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        ¹ Often attributed to Clare Booth Luce, among others

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

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

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If you lived in northwest Washington as I do you'd know that the economy of the region is dominated by the fortunes of several large employers. Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon are only a few of these. Among this group and maybe the most volatile in recent years has been The Boeing Company. Headquartered in Everett, north of Seattle about 30 miles Boeing employs just over 70,000 people in Washington. So, how things are going at Boeing matters a great deal to everyone hereabouts and recent years have been challenging indeed.

How is Boeing doing? 

Boeing One

In October this year a new book on Boeing was published, 'Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers.'  The story told in the book covers a ten year period of Boeing’s experience, 1996-2006, a period of massive internal change.

As the authors state about this period in Boeing’s history “The very innovations and changes Boeing introduced to remain a leading producer of airplanes — altered management strategies, pervasive technological changes, extensive outsourcing, broad global partnerships, massive layoffs, and drastically altered ways of working ---- produced stress and turbulence in the lives of workers and managers alike.”

Well….DUH!

Harry Hurt III, the author of the review of this book in the New York Times points out the following:

“One of the book’s most notable findings has to do with outsourcing….Two aims of the outsourcing were to cut costs and to gain access to more foreign markets; both of those goals were largely achieved.

… Yet in practice, the authors say, the process proved much more complicated, something Boeing discovered to its considerable discomfort in 2008 and 2009... Production of the 787 would fall two years behind schedule.”

I am betting this was stressful too!

• The surprise to me is that we continue to insist that this type of news is surprising!

We are talking about cataclysmic change here…who is good at this, who would have ever seriously thought this would be anything but highly stressful and as for a determination of success, do the authors have all the right measures for offering any final assessment?

Boeing Two

Quite possibly as interesting a story to follow about Boeing lies in the short history of its current CEO, Jim McNerney. In his 2008 book 'You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing' author/consultant/venture capitalist Peter Cohan introduces us to the success and tale of a well known executive coming in from another system, GE, and bringing his unique talents and consensus driven style to bear on a company that by any standards would be tough to manage.

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OK, so now that’s settled, according to 'Turbulence' a lot of people were upset by going “hard to port” for ten years but according to Cohan’s book, ‘You Can’t Order Change…” it all turned out fine in the end…? Well, except for some morale issues.

Boeing Three

Not so fast my friends! As recently as September 30, 2010 Peter Cohan was calling for Jim McNerney’s head. It is just short of two years since he offered high praise for McNerney and he still thinks of him as a strong financial manager, “Boeing's financial performance under McNerney isn't that disappointing. Between 2005 and 2009, Boeing's sales have risen 27% to $68.3 billion…” And Boeing stock, selling for $66 a share in 2005 when McNerney took over was selling at $65 as recently as December 23^rd, 2010. However, Cohan is now critical of McNerney because he is not an operations guru as well. Says Cohan “The problem is McNerney lacks a key skill that Boeing needs: the ability to manage a portfolio of complex engineering projects…And this suggests that McNerney isn't in control of Boeing's operations.” (Author’s note: This is a gross understatement of the issues Boeing is faced with!)

So what is really going on at Boeing? How should those of us in the northwest feel about the future of this critical player in our economic puzzle?   

Honestly I think Cohan is to be credited for intellectual honesty. If he were to be anything less than honest about how he feels about McNerney now his credibility would plummet. As for the authors of Turbulence; they do come up short on solutions yet maybe wisely so. Possibly the best anyone can do for now is to admit that they alone do not have the answers, the new wisdom may well lie in suggesting a new model for management, a strength based model.

The big lessons here may be two fold:

1. Strap in folks, no matter how good we are we are all in for a rough ride into the future.
2. The days of clinging to the “one great man/woman” models of management are just as likely over.

The complexity and chaotic nature of today’s global business issues may well be bringing forth a new era in management, one that is strength based and truly more democratic than any we have ever seen. Jim McNerney needs an operations partner with the final say on those issues and hopefully the wisdom to bring in some highly talented logistics and supply chain experts and oh yes, a great vendor management system and someone to run it.  He also needs investment partners, people who can see beyond the current financial cycles and counsel investors to take the long view. Finally, McNerney will need to recognize that his management experience at GE, primarily a portfolio of companies may not neatly correlate to Boeing, a portfolio of projects. The two companies are different animals altogether.

What then is the truth about Boeing?

It depends on what you want Boeing to be. Here in the northwest we want Boeing to be around for as long as possible and offer employment to as many local citizens as possible.

• In your own organization can you see where a more collaborative management model may be called for?

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As the year draws to a close I find myself harboring deep concerns for the future of the employee engagement dialogue. Rather than continue to stew silently I've decided to come clean and reveal what I have been thinking about and my hopes for the future.

 In many cases I view the path being pursued by employee engagement professionals as the perpetuation of bankrupt paradigms of management by simply painting them with a new vocabulary.

• It is high time that professionals in the field of employee engagement accept that "engagement" ,like love and life, is an inside job and will only respond in a limited fashion to external manipulation.

If "engagement" is ever to have any power it needs to be understood as an ontological tool (Engagement = Association by Choice), a matter of declaration,  and not an emotional/psychological response to external factors that can be measured uniformly by some sort of survey instrument. I firmly believe that much of what has passed for the measurements of engagement in recent years are in part measures of interest (Q12etc.) and a perception of mutual benefit and as such perpetuate the carrot/stick management models of the past 100+ years. “Interest” is like sexual attraction, it waxes and wanes and is fundamentally a response to external stimuli. Employees are likely better served by being brought to consciousness about their talents and strengths (their gifts)  and provided information about where in the workplace those are likely to be welcomed and invited to be offered. They could then be encouraged to plan careers in those directions rather than being surveyed and scored according to some normative instrument.

• One of the fastest ways to poison any employee engagement initiatives is to tie managers’ compensation to survey scores. 

What could be more "stick-like" in terms of classic management science than to put someone's survey scores on anything squarely at the center of your own person's financial well being? I’ve seen customer service reps. “ask for the A” on client surveys; what do we think managers will do when placed under similar pressure? Stop it, just stop it!

• Can we all consider that the Work/Life Balance concern is and always has been a bogus issue and another indication of our archetypal fear that management is BAD and employees are GOOD.

Work/Life balance from the perspective of management = respect people's private lives and honor the commitments they make there as equal to any fear you have about not meeting your objectives. Dear Manager: Don’t justify your need by suggesting that anyone’s employment is in jeopardy.

Work/Life balance from the employee perspective = I don't care of you want to work 80 hours a week, don't expect me to do the same and just make sure you are keeping the other commitments in your life. Who am I to say that you should have a hobby or spend more time with your family? Oh yes, and if you have a commitment to your family and get asked to work on the weekend get a spine and tell your manager "No" or negotiate responsibly with your family and don't blame your boss.

It turns out that some recent research indicates that, as I have suspected, the issue may just be a bogey person anyway.  A Management Craft post on December 11, 2010 by Lisa Haneberg cites a new study published in the Journal of Management and Organization, "Work–life balance or work–life alignment? A test of the important of work-life balance for employee engagement and intention to stay in organizations."

• Finally, for now, and probably most importantly make peace with your fondest desire; that someday organizations may really be operated from an authentic concern for employee engagement.

While I wish he had written about it much earlier Peter Block did recently get around to addressing the flawed thinking that suggests that employers should be held to account in any way for employee engagement. In ‘The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods ’ published in 2010 and co-authored with John McKnight we find these words addressing the notion that the systematic development of for-profit organizations can in any way be expected to deliver anything other than an economic outcome;

• “Here is the rub: Systems that are constructed for order and predictability cannot provide satisfaction in domains that require a unique and personal human solution.”

 The simple fact of the diversity of humanity in terms of intelligences, talents, visions, desires and on and on would indicate, at least to me, that our measures of  engagement are here further suspect as reveled by this perspective. As with interest and perceived mutual benefit we may also have been measuring the level of tolerance employees have developed for the degree of “institutionalization” they are subjected to each day. The less “institutionalization” the higher the survey score.

'Just for fun, imagine operating from the premise that no one has ever made you angry, or afraid, or happy, or joyful--that you've done it all yourself by what you've decided is "real". What if life were entirely an inside job?'

~ SXR      Check out Steve Roberts and his full collections of pen and ink sketches at CoolMindWarmHeart.com 

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Most employees make a very limited impact in their work environment.

This statement is not meant to criticize but rather draw attention to something I believe is worth considering. In a world of workplaces that continue to struggle with the right balance of talent to task, with all our emphasis on “LEAN everything” most people still have a very limited impact; they color inside the lines! As a manager I think there is something you can do about that and you’ll need a challenge in order to make it happen. You need to break through the self-imposed limits you and your employees work within.

As we approach the completion of another calendar cycle I offer the following challenge to those of you who manage. Would you be willing to commit to tripling the impact you and each of the people reporting has on your business in 2011?

If you take this challenge authentically you and your reports are going to wind up productively and naturally needing and being needed by others in the organization in ways you never imagined possible. I am convinced that the truest definition of POWER is; the ability to accomplish. Organizationally, accomplishment runs in direct proportion to the degree of surrendering to the tutelage of interdependency.

 *********************************************************************************************************

Back in 1994 a book appeared that for many readers rocked the foundations of modern management and indeed it was intended to do just that. ‘Leadership and the New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe’ by Margaret Wheatley was heralded by management experts as a breakthrough publication and has very likely been read by many of you reading this post.

You may be inclined at this point to comment that reference to this book is old news. Before you do that I’d ask you to consider this reference from a 2008 interview with Scott London in which Margaret makes the case for value of learned interdependency. (Remember, this book was published in 1994 and 14 years later the content is here being treated as current information; news!)

Here is what she said in response to Scott’s question about her learning from the study of quantum physics:

“I think there were several real breakthroughs. How do you understand a world in which the only material form is that of relationships, and where there is no sense of an individual that exists independent of its relationships? That was the gift of the quantum worldview. It said there are no independent entities anywhere at the quantum level. It's all relationships. That was something that made a lot of sense to how we were starting to think about organizations — as webs of relationships.”

▪ This entire interview is worth reading, especially if you haven’t read ‘Leadership and the New Science.’

• A point that may easily missed here, since we are so familiar with the word relationship that we are inclined to assume understanding, is that in nature there is no such thing as a casual relationship, all relationships are intentional and causal, anything but casual. Not so with us in the workplace and herein lies the opportunity.

And…and…in case you need some further encouragement to dig more deeply into the possibility resident in the study of quantum physics in the context of management I’ll mention that this interview with Margaret Wheatley came to my attention while doing a blog search on “interdependency.” I found the interview in its entirety posted December 8, 2010 by a guy named Jeff Miller who shares information he finds valuable as he comes across it. Like a “message in a bottle” eh? ( ← yes, this is what you think it is, a Sting!)

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Now, back to the notion of tripling impact and my challenge; the technique that will open this door is to be willing to be needed by others before you concern yourself with what you need.

Here is how to begin and it is as simple as it sounds. Have each of your reports approach someone outside your group at least once each week and ask that person what they can do for them, today, this week or this month to help them accomplish their objectives. The response may not be immediate because the invitation will probably be a surprise. The invitation must be authentic and a commitment must be made to deliver something specific by a defined time.

That’s it. Keep track of what your folks are promising to others and their delivery record. If my intuition is correct within a relatively short period of time you will find similar requests beginning to come in to your group.

I’d love to hear if you’ll plan to accept the challenge.

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If you are the owner of or manage in a small business you likely know that it’s not just the buck that stops with you it’s the whole “kit and caboodle.” ( ← Click here and learn something just for fun) One thing is for certain, if anyone is looking out for employee engagement it’s you. But who watches out for your engagement? I do.

Rule #1 for Managing Your Own Engagement (according to me) has been revised as follows:

• Whoever sees it first gets (to do it) to be accountable for it getting done

“Rules for Managing Your Own Engagement” is the label I have given to a list of guidelines published here previously. I realized today after working with this particular rule for several years that I may have unwittingly been encouraging some people who are more automatically responsible or control oriented to continue to “over own” the situation they see in front of themselves in their workplace. Maybe the title for today’s post should be ‘To Do or to Delegate.’

Whatever the title, the point of this post is that in announcing that you notice something that needs doing in the workplace you implicitly provide yourself with the opportunity to lead. It is not your place in the pecking order that puts you in this position, it’s that you see what needs to be done. Whether you act on the opportunity you have created is a complicated matter and one not to be taken lightly.

There are many forms in which you may announce your observation that something needs to be done, these ways range from total responsibility to complete irresponsibility:

• "I'll take care of it!"
• “I’d really like the opportunity to…”
•  “I wonder when someone is going to …”
•  “Why doesn’t somebody…”
•  “They should..."
• “Can you believe it…?”

Regardless of the posture taken (conscious/unconscious…responsible/irresponsible), when an observation of something needing to be done is made a “leadership choice point” has been established. From this point of leadership many avenues for action are open to select. 

One observation I made early in my business ownership experience that led to a flawed leadership choice went something like this; “Since I own the business I should be the one who manages it.” I say flawed choice but honestly I am sometimes so automatically responsible (I even clean up at Starbucks when people spill the cream and sugar!) that it was really like there was no choice, “I see therefore I do.” An exaggerated sense of responsibility has it limitations. Let’s just say that my talents did not match my observation.

 If you are the owner of a business or a manager in someone else’s business you may know exactly what I am referring to here. Have you ever found yourself staying late, doing something poorly and taking a loooong time to do it only to realize later that someone else could have done it much better in far less time? Yeah, you know what I am talking about, doing driven by an exaggerated sense of responsibility.

• But are there times when you as observer might want to be the doer? You doing what you see needs doing may be the best choice, when it makes a point or sets an example.

In his most recent newsletter titled “Authentic Leaders Roll Up Their Sleeves” my friend and author Richard Hadden makes the case for a leader doing what he/she sees needs to get done much better than I can. Richard had this to say on December 1…

"Good leaders know what they're good at, and leverage their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses by delegating. But sometimes, as the Biblical expression goes, when the ox is in the ditch, authentic leaders roll up their sleeves, pitch in, and, as in the case of the councilmen laborers, take care of business.

They don't stand on ceremony, or worry about whose job it is. They just get it done."

So how will you make your choices in the future, automatically or with an eye towards not just what needs to be done but who is best to do it. I promise that if you choose the latter you’ll benefit more than just yourself.

• What are you planning to do that someone else does better than you?

• What have you been waiting for someone to do and it is time to step up and get it done?

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Pain, as experienced in the workplace, is something most of us learn to accept. Pain coming from, misunderstanding, an inadvertent action interpreted as disrespect, a request denied, a promise broken and not accounted for. These events will all inevitably occur. We learn that pain is a part of the “game.” We learn to provide the benefit of the doubt, we forgive when offered apology, we apologize when recognizing damage done, we offer to atone for promises broken, we understand we are not going to get everything we ask for. We get over it.

In part what allows us to get over it is the knowledge that the game of business is largely competition. Business attracts many people who are highly competitive and even the least competitive among us generally enjoys friendly competition and knows our businesses must experience winning to survive.

What we don’t enjoy, what we did not sign on for, what we don’t get over, what we resent and expect special compensation for …is the suffering.

One of the definitions offered me by my on-line Merriam Webster unabridged dictionary for suffering is “to endure with distress.” That gets it for me!

Suffering overheard:  “This is not my idea of fun!”

                               “I don’t recall agreeing to put up with this.”

                               “They are expecting us to be working again this weekend!”

Suffering being spoken: “I’ll speak to you any way I want to, I am your boss!”

                                   “You should be thankful you have a job in this economy!”

Pain is a natural experience in the game of business. Suffering is what we and our colleagues add to the game that has no place in the game, serves no useful purpose, and has a very high cost. Most of the suffering that we either inflict or endure is brought about by unconscious or highly justified action, very little is intentional. Actions such as these:

• A manager finds herself being asked repeatedly by an overly mistake-averse HR representative for several levels of documentation before terminating a poor performer. Finally in frustration the manager gives up and just decides to put up with the under performing employee. The balance of her direct reports log this occurrence, share about it amongst themselves only and the performance and engagement level of the group declines.
• An HR manager becomes aware that certain line managers are damaging her group’s reputation, making excuses to not bother with proper documentation and justifying not taking appropriate action with under performing employees. She says nothing to the managers involved choosing instead to kibitz with her colleagues about how lame those managers are and joke about how it’s a wonder they can keep their jobs.
• A district level sales manager receives a call from a representative, his top producer, letting him know that for the third month in a row he’ll be processing his orders at the last minute and with some incomplete paperwork. The sales manager tells the representative not to worry; push the orders through and he’ll handle any blowback at his level.
• Name your own favorite suffering inducer here____________________________

There is a cost to all these and other unnamed actions but there is no way to calculate this cost, and we have it all nicely justified in such a way that the likelihood of change is minuscule. The cost remains untouched by “engagement initiatives” because it is a crisis of being. We see how others are being that induces suffering; we do not see ourselves so clearly. If you are wondering about yourself and want some idea of the price you’ve been paying I have a suggestion.

I am midway through a wonderful little book recommended to me recently by a friend. It is titled ‘Leadership and Self Deception.’ Somehow this quiet little book written at The Arbringer Institute in the parable format has sold over 750,000 copies worldwide and is now translated into 22 different languages.

Quoting from the publisher, Berrett-Koehler’s website;

"Since its original publication nine years ago, Leadership and Self-Deception has become an international word-of-mouth phenomenon. Rather than tapering off, it has sold more copies each year since 2004 than it did in any of the first four years after publication..."

This is not the kind of book you buy because you see it advertised, you have it recommended by a friend. The message may be painful to hear but it illuminates the path to alleviating suffering.

A small sample may peak your interest.

• Do you know someone who is managing and cannot see the suffering they are causing?

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Is it possible that in our zeal to humanize and streamline our organizations over the past two decades that we may have, in some instances, thrown the proverbial baby out with the bathwater? I speak here of the disregard or dim view some of us have developed for certain traditional management tools? There is at least some cause to consider this possibility. Hierarchy, especially in support of a “command and control” mindset may be one of the management tools that have suffered this fate without due consideration.

Saturday is now Zumba® day for me. I believe the unusual name is taken from the Spanish word for, “If you are an out of shape male over sixty you have no business here!”

There hasn’t always been a Zumba® day for me but it has become increasingly evident that I need to spend more time intentionally and actively moving my body as I get older and what better for that purpose than Latin dance in the middle of the day on the weekend?

So, mid-routine last weekend I began to develop a connection between my experience at that moment and conversations I have been having recently with associates about revisiting the value of hierarchy. Would it be possible to re-purpose organizational hierarchy, place it in a more democratic perspective, and in the process breathe life into what was once a revered yet frequently feared hallmark of organizational life? What if the vertical nature of a hierarchy was a function of its purpose and value in a democratic context? This would stand in contrast to the authoritarian context that now so automatically comes to mind?

“Re-purposing hierarchy” was the thought that came to mind last Saturday as I swayed wanly in the back row of my Zumba® class. The class is scheduled for an hour but I noted that after about forty-five minutes the signals that were being sent to my legs and feet from my head were not being executed. I am not talking about insubordination here, simply failed execution, the spirit was willing but the flesh was weakened by that point.

If I were constrained by the traditional understandings of hierarchy, at that point I would make my commands even firmer and just tough it out for the full sixty minutes. In my younger days I was capable of that approach, mind over matter in a system that permitted such things to happen without major consequence.

There is a pretty compelling article in the November 8^th issue of The New Yorker magazine, “The Perfect Stride” ,by Jennifer Kahn, about the life and accomplishments of Alberto Salazar, once considered the premier long distance runner in America. My conclusion from reading this piece was that Salazar may have sacrificed his future and legacy by over employing the command and control based hierarchy approach for short term benefit. I often fear US  public corporations are making the same mistake each financial quarter.

Last Saturday morning rather than allow vanity to attempt an override of the information I was receiving from my legs and feet I decided to listen. What I heard was affirmation; I had gotten what I came for. My heart rate was up, my legs were noodle-like, thoroughly exercised, and I had simply finished earlier than the rest of the people in the class! I was done and now I could look forward to the sauna. So I left.

What a different way to consider hierarchy, as a way to manage for the future as well as for the moment, consideration and appreciation given to all information received, viewed in  the best interest of the entire system, not merely some of its components. There is more to think about here but that’s enough for now, let’s hit the sauna!

By they way, who was it that thought putting mirrored walls in those exercise rooms was a good idea?

• If you are a manager, where are you receiving information right now that you are choosing to ignore because it conflicts with the attainment of certain objectives?

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 Have you ever read anything by Derek Irvine? He writes the Globoforce Blog and I usually catch his pieces on Human Capital League. I love Derek's writing, concise, lucid and spot on when it comes to employee recognition.

Today I was reading Derek's piece entitled "Paying Bonuses" - When Will We Ever Learn?" As is often the case I was flowing right along with Derek, "Yes, you are right about that, glad you mentioned that, couldn't agree with you more" etc., etc. I wasn't far into the piece when suddenly a couple of words hooked me and sent me reeling.  In speaking about the folly of many annual bonus programs he said, among other things, "The challenge with them tends to arise when bonuses become an entitlement."

Whoa! The room started to spin, back, back back! Suddenly it was 1972 and I was in the classroom , Kedzie Hall at Michigan State and we were discussing an article that was making its way around the graduate programs in Labor Relations at the time and causing quite a stir. The article, "One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?” authored by Frederick Herzberg, had been published in Harvard Business Review in 1968.

In his article, considered a breakthrough in thinking for the times, Herzberg argued that if employers were truly interested in motivating employees they must realize the distinction between what he called Movement and Motivation. At that time, often as not employers relied on tools that were external to employees in hopes of spurring performance, Herzberg called this Movement. He labeled these tools as extrinsic motivators, Hygiene Factors, a bit of a sterile term but this was after all 1968! He stated that these factors, external to the employee, had little to do with motivation and were in fact not dissatisfying at best.

Herzberg went on to label another category of factors as the true Motivators for employees and all these were in fact internal and idiosyncratic to an individual employee.

Here’s How Herzberg saw the world of Motivation:

So now here we are and it is 2010, forty two years since Herzberg published his landmark piece and I am reading a blog post about the folly of many bonus programs!

Right after Derek’s article I see a comment from Doug Shaw, who regularly writes pieces I really like in his blog, ‘Stop Doing Dumb Things to Customers’ and he says to Derek, “…I sometimes wonder if we'll ever learn....but then I read your good stuff and I am heartened that some folk do get it and are making changes to business practice…" and Derek responds with “…I agree -- collectively, we are making great strides in changing business practices…”, and I gag!  Sorry guys, with all due respect, forty-two years seems like a long time to keep doing something that doesn’t work. I admire both your enthusiasm and perseverance.

I suspect the attachment to bonuses has more to do with what matters most to senior management than it does to what works! They do like their bonuses.

Just how long will it be before we accept the premise Herzberg distinguished for us all those years ago? Like a lot of other things, not everyone wants to hear that the world is not flat…say the people in the extrinsic motivation industry for example. Coffee cups, hats, key chains anyone!

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 Small Business Forum: If you want truly engaged employees, work with them to find their natural contribution and provide opportunities for them to make it.

Over the past twenty years I have spoken most frequently with managers and business owners on a common topic, employee performance. The theme is almost always the same, “How can I get more from my employees!”

I have two responses to this question and neither managers or owners like them very much.

Here’ the first:

• You want more; OK, what are you willing to give up?

 The virtually predictable immediate response to this question is, “Give up? Why should I have to give anything up?” (This statement has often been generated from the fear that the only way to improve performance is to pay more.)

The conversation goes on with me explaining that I am not talking about giving up money, it is much worse than that; I am talking about giving up control! Now I can see the hair stand up on the back of their necks.

My second response;

• “Do you want more or do you want their best?”  

This response usually evokes something that sounds like, “Huh?” and a look of confusion from the manager or owner

These questions are really closely related.

As a new owner of a small business back in the 1990’s one of the biggest challenges I faced was realizing that every day would be an opportunity for me to choose between control and contribution insofar as how I related to the people in my employ. The classic mistake I made early on was thinking that because I owned the business I should manage it. Eventually I got over that and along the way I learned that what I believed and preached as a coach/consultant was in fact true, with the addition of the right conditions…people really do want to contribute. In fact, people will give you their best for free; they make you pay them because they are doing what you want.

OK, maybe you don’t believe what I just said but at least consider that there is truth somewhere in the statement.

Don Tennant posted a nice piece on November 2nd in the IT Business Edge. If you look over what he’s talking about it may not seem right on point but it is close enough and when it comes to people, “close enough” often gets the job done because when others pick up on your sincerity they will start to pull their own weight.

Our business grew quickly in the early going; we needed to move twice in the first five years. Each time I found myself with the logistics of moving to deal with, phones, computers, files etc. and of course some amount of decorating the new surroundings.

I was in an out of the office a lot, as a consultant we didn’t make a lot of money in our own office so being out was where I needed to be. But the administrative staff was in the office all the time. When it came time for the moves I gathered my people, we identified what needed to be done and then they along with me determined who would do what. As often as not I wound up setting a budget and paying the bills. They did everything else; chose the paint colors, the carpet patterns, the light fixtures, the office layout etc. In each case they beat the budget and I ended up with a great place to be when I was in the office and they created surroundings for themselves that gave them something to look forward to each day.

• Simple, you bet; easy, not so much. Control is a tough thing to let go of and yet the release of it is the highest form of recognition and your most powerful management tool.

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Small Business Forum: Your Beliefs May Be as Big a Problem as Business Conditions!                                                                                                                                                                          

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone in our small business mutter, "The next six months are everything!" over the past twenty three years I'd have a modest pile of nickels and a twitch whenever I heard something about cash flow projections. Oh, I do have a twitch!

C'mon people, it is really a whole new world out there, stop acting like you didn't see thing coming. I was traipsing around Fort Worth, TX back in early 2008 when I started noticing the "$5 Foot long" signs in the windows at Subway followed shortly by the same offers at Quizno's, a sure indication that the amount of lunchtime traffic in that area had slowed and the companies were trying to draw people out again. To be sure this was also one of those times that gas prices were flirting with all time highs but I had the feeling this was more than just that. Our business, management education and development, had started to slow in the fourth quarter of 2007 so my economic antenna were already on red alert and had been for several months.

If you operate or have operated a business to business services company (well actually any smaller business!) you know that often your fate is tied to your larger clients. If you have a business like mine you have always known you were considered discretionary, even in the best of times.

We’ve seen things fall apart before, the dot com bust, post 9/11 and so on, so in early 2008 we just figured “Hang in there and this will pass, it always has!” Well it’s been almost 30 months since then and it hasn’t past and it isn’t going to. This time is truly different.

I was inspired a couple of weeks back to read a piece in Seattle 2.0 by Richard Luck, CEO of Loudlever, a software company. Richard is a software guy and fortunately for us he occasionally posts to his own blog, aguywithanidea.com. He doesn’t write often but when he does  it is worth waiting for. He is in the trenches everyday building a company but has that rare ability to step back and comment on the larger context.

Take a look at Richard’s piece, especially his thoughts on financial planning in the current circumstances. In his words, “Financial forecasting in this environment, in this marketplace, is like trying to build a house on a foundation of quicksand.”

Richard is being realistic; he is not operating from his past waiting for things to get back to what is familiar and manageable. If you haven’t adopted his perspective it is time you did. Oh yes, and get around to reading ‘The World is Flat 3.0’, I know it is a bit old now but it will seem like news if you haven’t seen it yet. Very grounding!

• Are you still operating your business like "things will get back to normal?"
• Can you see that it may be time to create a new set of operating assumptions? What might they be?

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Earlier today I was shuffling around on Amazon and ran across a book title that caught my interest, ‘Self-Promotion for Introverts, The Quiet Guide to Getting Ahead’ by Nancy Ancowitz..  I have always considered myself to be an “introvert” so I decided to spend a little time with the information about the book.

 Within a few minutes I had been introduced to a world of similar titles I did not realize existed and they are all selling better than my book! Here are some examples:

 ‘The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World’ by Marti Olsen Laney

 ‘Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength’, by Laurie Helgoe

 ‘Networking for People Who Hate Networking: A Filed Guide for Introverts, the Overwhelmed and the Underconnected’ by Devora Zack

 ‘The Introverted Leader: Building on Your Quiet Strength’ by Jennifer B. Kahnweiler

 ‘Confessions of an Introvert: The Shy Girl’s Guide to Networking and Getting the Most Out of Life' by Meghan Wier

 ‘The Successful Introvert: How to Enhance Your Job Search and Advance Your Career’ by Wendy Gelberg

 And the list went on…

 As someone who considers themselves an introvert I was stunned to see how bold my people had become, especially in recent years. All these books have been published since 2002. By past standards of introversion this seems like almost an epidemic of coming out…I AM AN INTROVERT, HEAR ME ROAR!!!

 OK, then I pulled myself together and once more resumed my practical, pragmatic approach to life and I began thinking about managers and the challenge of having someone with an introverted nature working for you. Statistically speaking anywhere from 25-40% of a work force fits the introvert personality profile.

“Basically, an introvert is a person who is energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being around other people.”

                                                                                Carol Bainbridge

The concept of Situational Leadership was developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in the mid-1970’s. More likely than not if you have worked as a manager in any of the larger public corporations, the Fortune 1000, or even some larger private firms in the past 35 years, you have been exposed to some form of Situational Leadership training.

The basic theory as developed by Hersey-Blanchard calls upon a leader to assess the needs of either individuals or groups in relationship to the task they are faced with. The keys to success using this approach rest on a leader being able to accurately assess the maturity level of all parties involved and apply the most appropriate leadership style. The literature on this management model is abundant so I won’t take time with it here.

 While the staying power of this model stands as a testament to its value I think it is important to remember that it was developed well before the concept of knowledge work had been fully distinguished. As I read through the summaries of the books listed here it struck me that while there is still plenty of value left in a management model that is task-relevant we are also likely in need a  model, or at least some thinking about a model more person than task focused.

 In the world as it is constituted today the highest value is knowledge as it is being created and therefore the source of knowledge, the individual becomes the focus of developmental concern. I will even go so far as to say that the truest role of managers, especially mid-level managers is to use the production of results they are accountable for as the venue for development of the human capital they have been assigned.

 If you can accept this possibility it then becomes imperative that those of us responsible for management development begin to frame an idea of the individual employee as “the situation” and the tasks at hand and results to be produced become the means to address “the situation.” For most managers this will turn their world on its head. And yet, if we are to effectively develop managers who can reliably identify, develop and retain human capital for our organizations does anything else really make sense?

•  Where in your management development education process place is there an emphasis on having mid-level managers develop in-depth knowledge of a variety of “types” of personalities?
• Would you consider offering one of the resources named above to a direct report as a possible developmental tool?

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I am sure that as manager/leaders we’d all like to know or be able to guarantee to those reporting to us that fully engaging with our work, with all our passion and creativity, will result in big dividends and an awesome payout for the efforts made. Yet we know that the journey itself must be the reward because nothing in this life can be guaranteed except that it will end. But sometimes, not always, we witness a big payoff and it offers inspiration for many. I’d like to share a case in point with you now.

 It seems like I have known Marty Mucci for most of my career in organizational development. Looking back I found that I first met him in a client capacity in 1992; when he was not even 35. Back then Marty was a manager, already developing a reputation for strong analytical skills and already a member of the local telephone company’s emerging leaders’ team.

We didn’t necessarily hit it off right away, him and me. However,over a period of three to four years we began to recognize that our differences were mainly in approach but our desired destinations were virtually the same. He was and is analytical, I am intuitive. He was guided by traditional values, hard work, integrity, ethical behavior, perseverance ~ the high level values we have all been taught. I have always tended to take a pragmatic approach to most situations e.g. whatever works at the time to get the job done. As it turned out, hard work, integrity, ethics etc. were usually what worked.

I think Marty may have referred to me as a “loose cannon” a time or two and while I may have refrained from the use of such colorful terms in public when referring to him, I know the thoughts crossed my mind at least a couple of times. We have worked together on and off over 18 years in the space of the mutual respect we developed, not necessarily our mutual agreement.

By 2000 Marty had progressed, he was named CEO of Frontier Telephone of Rochester and President of Telephone Operations for Frontier Communications. That was amazing progress from 1992 to 2000 by any measure, but Marty had great mentors and he worked well with a diverse set of constituencies and personalities. He was ready for this, and, along with his continued reliance on keen analytical skills, he developed himself as a participatory leader and strong proponent of programs and practices that foster high levels of employee engagement. He had reached the final reward early and was looking forward to many years in his hard-won leadership role. And then, in 2001, Frontier Communications was purchased by a national service provider who did not share his views on employee engagement.

So what is a man of character and values to do? Marty stood his ground and within a few short months he was informed that his services were no longer needed.

If that is the way things ended for Marty you can be pretty sure I wouldn’t be writing about him today.

Within a few months, Marty’s availability came to the attention of Tom Golisano, founder of Paychex, Inc. To Tom’s credit, he interviewed Marty in mid 2002 and offered him a position that had not previously existed …senior vice president of operations. A few months after he started Marty engaged us at Vitalwork to assist him in ways similar to what he had experienced in his previous position. He felt he had been granted a second opportunity to build a culture of engagement and he was eager to get started.  Last week, just eight years after joining Paychex, Marty was named president and CEO of the company, becoming only the third person to hold the position since the company was founded by Tom Golisano in 1971.

In announcing Marty’s appointment Golisano emphasized the traits I have known in Marty for the past 18 years. In his words:

“Marty Mucci has earned the opportunity to be the CEO of this company, based on his character, his level of accomplishment and his ability to be an inspiring leader,”

Neither Marty nor I have as much hair as we used to. Otherwise we are pretty much the same people and will no doubt challenge each other on the same topics and bicker over strategy like always when we get together. One thing is for certain, back in 2001 when the handwriting was on the wall, Marty could have caved to a philosophy he didn’t agree with to save himself from an otherwise certain outcome. He didn’t, and there was no guarantee his story would turn out like it has. That day in 2001 when has was asked not to return to his office the only thing he knew for certain was that his career with Frontier wwas done. When I reached him by phone late that same afternoon I expressed my view that no matter how things went in his future, it is better that he had stuck to his principles rather than lose his integrity and had his spirit die long before his body.

It has been a privilege to know Marty Mucci these past eighteen years. The shareholders, employees and clients of Paychex are now in the extremely capable and dedicated hands of an honorable, honest and insightful man.

For Marty…I know the race has just begun. 

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 Managers of current workforces concern themselves daily with how their groups might score on an engagement survey. There are legitimate reasons for this concern, many in our workforce are both anxious and unconscious , neither emotionally or psychologically ready for the challenges of NOW much less those of the future! What are we, managers, doing to address the underlying issues?

On September 16 Edward Gordon wrote a compelling piece, ‘Filling Job Vacancies Today and Tomorrow’ for his posting to the Britannica Blog. Among the many solid comments he offered that day, he said the following:

“The American education-to-employment system is largely failing to prepare people with the required skills to compete in this new labor market era. Laid-off workers often lack the skills to move into jobs in growing sectors of the economy. Job training programs are largely inconsistent, short-term, and too generic.”

But what we need now is jobs…right? I say no, we need honesty and the recognition that doing more of what we have always done expecting things to get “better” is simply a form of collective insanity.

I grew up in Lansing, Michigan in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s when that state could have been said to be the heart of the US economy. Today, with 13.1% unemployment, Michigan leads the nation in terms of dire economic circumstances…and I worry for the future. It could get worse!

Last Saturday night I had an opportunity to gather with about 50 of my high school classmates for our 45^th reunion. For the most part it was a great experience but some of my conversations left me deeply concerned. Many of my former classmates are of course retired, beneficiaries of a economic conditions that will never be repeated. The ones who have any knowledge of me and my circumstances know that I am still working and several asked my opinion on the current state of the economy and prospects for a return to “normal”, the conditions that prevailed during their working careers.

I could tell they were authentically concerned that the future for their children might not be as rewarding materially as their own working careers had been. Each of them seemed to be rooting for or hopeful about the prospects of returning to a set of circumstance both familiar and favorable. Me? I am more concerned that they think “recovery” is even a possibility.

As I sat with one classmate and his wife, who had raised a large family, all of whom will be working for many years, I raised the issue of Michigan’s legacy from the heyday of the automobile industry. I could see from my travels around the state that the members of available workforce are fundamentally undereducated and not aware of how ill prepared they are. When I posed this issue to my classmate, the response was that the workforce had plenty of skills and what was needed were jobs! This perspective was offered without a moment’s hesitation and without a hint of recognition that the inference was that the creation of jobs was someone else’s responsibility and most likely government’s.

Another conversation directly concerned the topic of “recovery” and the soon-to-be-voted-on question of whether to extend the Bush era tax levels. My classmate was retired from a non-entrepreneurial, large company background. She expressed a concern that if the tax levels returned to pre-Bush levels it would have a stifling effect on small business owners, historically the most reliable source of job creation. As a small business owner myself for the past 23 years, I offered my perspective:

• Most small businesses will always be small, that’s the way the owners want them.
• Growth is less a concern for small business owners than what they are doing and being profitable while they are doing it.
• Owners of small businesses do not make their decisions about hiring or laying off on a short term basis. They rely heavily on their employees and don’t relish the idea of letting them go and then trying to rehire them when things get better.
• Tax rates are only one aspect of the economic circumstances small business owners deal with; they are more likely concerned with overall demand for their offerings.
• If small business owners were going to be creating jobs they would very likely be doing it now, and for the most part they are not. I am not sure what difference the tax rates might make if extended without a change in overall demand.

As I concluded my response to her stated concern she frowned and offered that she was concerned that if the tax levels returned to the pre-Bush levels small business owners might be deterred from creating new jobs! This was in case I had not heard her the first time, I suppose.

Michigan’s problems are really no different than those of the rest of the nation save for the fact that at one time there was such a high concentration of manufacturing jobs within its borders. What has occurred in America has also taken place in previously industrialized nations everywhere. We can name the change China or India just as we named it Japan, Mexico or Korea before now and the “naming” would have been equally inaccurate. The change that has occurred is structural in nature and inherent in a capitalistic economic system. There is no “recovery” coming. There is future similar to our very recent past into which we will continue living, if we are fortunate. Whether currently employed or not, an entirely new future is here now. No return to the past is possible.

Consider the following declarations:

• Whether you are an employee or a manager we have arrived at a point where new ethical imperatives have presented themselves. Sending children to private schools because we can rather than address the issues of our educational system is not an answer; it is an avoidance of responsibility. Our children may end up well educated, but they will pay a price for the choice we have made.

• If we are managers and we see that those reporting to us are resting on their current skills, we have an ethical responsibility to confront them on their prospects for the future. They are not going to be surprised by what you say, unless they have their heads in the sand, in which case the discomfort they experience will outweigh the consequences of the ignorance they will shed.

Are either of these statements true? It really should not matter. Both open the possibility for futures other than the one that is predictable today, whether it be Michigan or elsewhere in the world. New opportunity (jobs) is far less our challenge today than is a new way of seeing the world around us.

• How can you help your children or those reporting to you to see the future clearly?

• What actions should you, your children or those reporting to you be taking immediately to improve their readiness for the challenges of NOW?

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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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Last week I led with the theme of storytelling and the power it offers for managing/leading. The implication of the piece was that as a leader/manager it is incumbent on you/us to develop an ability as a storyteller in order to continually provide teams and individuals with a sense of direction through sharing in a relevant context.

Of equal importance is a firsthand knowledge of the story being spoken into and a willingness to let it alter our reality, the one we may think everyone shares, if we plan to stay connected to the people we are leading/managing. This is true especially if the people are twenty-somethings and we are a forty, fifty or in my case sixty-something.” 

In July I wrote a piece that strongly suggested managers get interested in what their charges were passionate about. This as a strategy for being able to understand how to “job craft” towards a particular set of enthusiasms younger people might be bringing to the workplace. In mid-August I asked if your managers might be being put in a disempowered position by certain company policies and practices. This week I bring together the central themes of both these pieces and offer that as leader/managers we would be well advised to engage ourselves in a course of study on the “world of twenty-somethings” if we plan to be relevant to the people reporting to us. If we are not willing to discover what tickles their fancy, we may find that as a leader we are indeed “bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

 Whenever I need an update on “twenty-something” reality I check in with Jake, my own “twenty something” son. He is 23 as of August this year. Jake spent the summer interning in Manhattan with the magazine Complex that aims right for the psyche and interests of the 20-35 year-olds in our culture. Having just returned from this sortie into the mind of the Millennials, I knew his ‘intel’ would be fresh.

We sat down this morning for breakfast and he gave me the “411” on what he and his friends are interested in. It will be no great surprise to find they spend a lot of time on-line. Before you dive into the websites I am going to share with you, ask yourself whether you are really willing to spend the time to grock what is going on. Beware all ye who enter here!

Organizations, the ones most of us work in, do have an economic purpose and we have been taught for the most part to think if them as machine-like or mechanical in operations. In reality they are, especially today’s highly knowledge based organizations, social systems with an economic purpose. Since they are social in nature as well as substance knowing the norms of important segments of the population would seem to make a lot of sense . 

 Almost for certain you are familiar with You Tube. Knowing what Millenials are watching on You Tube is another matter altogether. Try these references for starters:

                    Jurassic Park HEY                                            David After Dentist    

Double Rainbow Original Video                                             Double Rainbow Song

By the time you finish with these references you may be certain you’ve been transported to another world… and you have! Just for fun take a quick trip to

                                                   Garfield Minus Garfield

By now you'll be certain that your own grip on things is slipping.

To get your bearings back spend some time at Know Your Meme. This site offers explanation, based on research, as to what accounts for the attention getting aspects of certain web phenomena. You may find the "Yo Dawg" episodes particularly educational.

If you get through this and have an appetite for more I suggest Technologically Impaired Duck back at Know Your Meme and if that doesn’t do you in try %&@ck Yea: Struttin Leo.

Having these experiences under your belt you’ll be ready for the relative sanity of Buzz Feed to get caught up on current events, Millennial style, topped off by a visit to Funny or Die.

Congratulations…you are now nearly an honorary Millenial. The only thing left for you to do is take a ride in your car and tune in to one of the 200 AM stations around the US that carry the Jim Rome Show (aka The Jungle). Once you share three hours with Jim and his 2.5 million listeners you’ll have little concern that as we turn things over to the Millenials all is well.

Here are a few fast facts courtesy of the Pew Foundation** regarding the Millenials;

They are history’s first “always connected” generation. Steeped in digital technology and social media, they treat their multi-tasking hand-held gadgets almost like a body part – for better and worse. More than eight-in-ten say they sleep with a cell phone glowing by the bed, poised to disgorge texts, phone calls, emails, songs, news, videos, games and wake-up jingles.

They embrace multiple modes of self-expression. Three quarters have created a profile on a social networking site. Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). Nearly one-in-four have a piercing in some place other than an earlobe –about six times the shar.e of older adults who’ve done this.

** The Pew Foundation has produced a fabulous report on the twenty-somethings titled simply MILLENNIALS. Download the PDF.

• So now, when will you sit down with your twenty-somethings, share your new knowledge and find out what I didn’t tell you about?

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It is unusual to find someone these days who hasn't heard some version of this old parable of the bricklayers:

‘One day while wandering, a young monk came across three bricklayers. He asked the first bricklayer what he was doing.

“Laying bricks,” he told the monk.

He asked the second what he was doing.

“Making a brick wall,” he replied.

He asked the third the same question.

“Building a cathedral,” he explained.’

The first time people hear this tale they say to themselves something like “Cute! What a great way to get the message across about the value of a positive attitude.” Unfortunately this is a very weak lesson to take from this simple story. The truth about humans, the one all great leaders know inside and out is that humans and stories are inseparable. In fact it just may be that what it is to be human is to be a being that lives the stories they are telling themselves.

If this is so, and I believe it to be then as a leader where I want to be is attending to the story I want people to be paying attention to, the one to be made real in the best interest of all concerned.

Let’s go back and consider the bricklayers for a moment. Aside from reporting on what they are doing each might also be considered to be reporting on their current state of engagement. The first, the one laying bricks might be reporting that he, or maybe she, is in a condition of engagement I’d call resistance. Not necessarily resistance to the work, resistance to being involved with anything outside or larger than themselves. The second, the one building the wall may be reporting on a condition of compliance, doing what there is to be done, a task to be completed, nothing more or less. The third, the cathedral builder, may be operating from a state of contribution and connection, clearly identifying with something greater than him, or her, self.

The pitfall here for the leader is to think that any one of these “stories” is better or worse than the others. They all seem to be getting the work done! So what of it?

Each story describes a field (see definition 6a), in this case a field of possibility. Ask yourself, from which story does there seem to be a greater sense of possibility for reward, satisfaction, sense of empowerment, which story is richer?

Last week my wife and I jointly took on the challenge of finally rebuilding a brick garden enclosure we had de-constructed about two months ago. That was Phase I. The original garden box was falling apart and not very useful. I had been deeply involved in this phase, taking the wall apart, digging up the foundation and chipping away all the old mortar on the bricks so we could start all over again, essentially building an identical structure using the same materials. (Have I told you how much I detest manual labor, especially working in the yard?) You can imagine how much fun I had with Phase I!

Having done everything I could think of to avoid being involved in Phase II I awoke one Sunday morning to find my wife curled up with her coffee on the couch watching ‘You Tube’ videos on how to construct brick walls. I was trapped without a plan for evasion. One of the many things I love about my wife is that while she knows my aversion to things yard related she is happy to pursue many tasks on her own and with the others she uses the old “Tom Sawyer” method, making whatever she has in mind seem like so much fun I wouldn’t want to be left out.

If I am resistant she takes what that provides, if I am compliant she works with that as well. However, she is always keen to let me know how much she is fully engaged and the fun she is having and how welcome I would be to join her.

In this case I fell for her enthusiasm and decided to make a game of it myself and since I knew she was bound to be the mason I offered to be her “hod carrier", mixing the mortar, fetching and wetting the bricks, setting them in a handy place, telling her what a great job she was doing, etc. Lo and behold a few hours later the two us grimy with lime dust stepped back and admired our completed construction; high five all around! The miracle? It was not that the work got done but that the work got done and I didn’t even notice the passage of time. I had been enchanted by a master storyteller and swept from resistance to contribution ending up in a place of shared accomplishment, all because she simply allowed me to be where I was and stuck to her story.

There is more than magic in becoming a master storyteller, for most of us it takes work and as a leader it is inherent in the role that you master the art. If you have the interest I recommend a blog called appropriately, ‘A Storied Career’, authored by Katharine Hansen. Her September 7^th entry deals specifically with the topic of storytelling in blogs but there is much more information on the art available through Kathy and her site.

• Where is it that you can see that you have let the story get away from you and be told by others? Can you see how to get it back?
• Where do you see the need for a good story and people are just waiting for the storyteller to arrive?

ps: I just spoke to my wife, she is in the midst of painting the kitchen and I’m on the road and won’t be home for another week. Yippee!

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                         “The sins of the father shall be visited on the sons”

                                                                               (Exodus 20:5)

This year, the year before this, next year and the year following next year there will be innumerable gatherings of professionals in conference after conference addressing practices to elevate employee engagement. HR pro’s will talk to each other. Engagement pro’s will talk to each other. Labor and OD the same…and while they are all away they’ll get a report that some manager back home pulled off a spectacular demonstration of “Dumb @ss”¹behavior that will set back everything they have been working hard to achieve.

I can hear us all now as we gather…

“Can you believe it?”

“What was she thinking?”

“And he was supposed to be one of our best!”

“Wait til you hear this; you are not going to believe it!”

“Well, at least we’ve got job security, cleaning up these messes!”

When I first joined “corporate America” in early 1973 I was a pretty naïve guy with a Master’s in Labor Relations fresh from Michigan State. Arriving in New Jersey, employed as an HR Generalist in a mid-sized refinery where our plant employees were represented by the Teamsters, I was finally ready to join that big “team” I knew was waiting for me out there. Let’s just say that the awakening I experienced was RUDE!

Turns out it wasn’t one big team and we didn’t play together all that well. If that wasn’t a sufficient disappointment, I was regularly treated to displays of “Dumb @ss” behavior on the part of managers and unfortunately some of the worst offenders were the very senior people.

Thirty seven years later I continue to hear reports of the same behaviors I encountered “back in the day.” The examples I refer to are not exotic, they are ones we all know: rating all employees in a merit pool as Above Average so everyone is eligible for an increase, changing a performance review written by a subordinate manager because you don’t agree with their appraisal, producing ‘Satisfactory’ or better performance reviews for employees who everyone knows are sub-par, transferring sub-par employees without dealing with performance issues, etc..

The truth is, when it comes to managing people there really isn’t that much new under the sun. There are just repeat offenses and often by repeat offenders. It is this habitual pattern of our tolerance for repeat offenses and the offenders which I want us to consider.

Allow me to re-introduce you to a couple of colleagues I hold in high regard, Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden. These two author/speaker/consultants wrote what I believe is a seminal work on employee engagement ‘Contented Cows Give Better Milk’ in 2000. They are engagement pioneers.

Bill Catlette regularly publishes a very down-to-earth monthly newsletter titled ‘Fresh Milk.’ This past week he included a piece on managers being mindful of the difference between authority they have and the wisdom of using it just because they have it. In the midst of his counsel he offered this bit of wisdom, “…we have yet to see, for example, a bullying or self-absorbed boss get more Discretionary Effort from a worker than a caring, authentic leader.” Later in the piece Bill reminds us, “With things like institutional loyalty and job security off the table, today’s workers make frequent, rapid fire "worth-its" decisions in which they decide whether or not to give their manager or the organization the benefit of the doubt, and a morsel of their Discretionary Effort.” The full post itself is concerned with responding to a question from a reader on whether it is legal for a manager to arbitrarily change a work schedule. Bill responds in his usual thoughtful manner, not just to the reader’s question but to the larger issue and lesson available in the background.

The ground Bill did not cover but might have if the question were asked differently was this; where were this manager’s peers and superior in the midst of this situation? Without regard to either the “rightness” or righteousness of this manager’s actions, were they called into question by anyone at the same level? All too often as managers ourselves we witness behavior that at first glance smacks of the “Dumb @ss” and we allow it to pass unchallenged for whatever “Dumb @ss” reason we have. We even aid and abet the “Dumb @ss” behavior before it happens by allowing people we know to be mighty capable of @asshole² behavior to be selected as managers in the first place.   

[ ^1&2  The term “Dumb @ss”  used when referring to behavior is a derived from the terrific work Dr. Bob Sutton has done in alerting us to beware of @ssholes in our midst. His blog, Work Matters is among my favorites. ]

There is no technique or practice in any book or at any conference that will rid us of the damages done by behavior that is thoughtless on a manager’s part. And such behavior will continue as long as we tolerate 1) the elevation of inappropriate people to positions of authority 2) failure to properly orient and support new managers and 3) standing by and watching as our peers or even superiors “act out” patterns of personal behavior that are obviously misaligned with best interests of either company or employees simply to serve personal gratification.

• Where do you currently see an opportunity to intervene with another manager and you’ve been putting it off for some “Dumb @ss” reason?

If you are looking into ways to improve the quality and completing rates of your company's employees try finding solutions with performance appraisal tools from Halogen.

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“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

                                                  Lao Tzu, Chinese Philosopher, 600≈ BC

Alright sissies, listen up! You read and read about Ten Ways to Develop Yourself as a Leader, Eight Sure Fire Ways to Get People to Follow Your Lead, Five Things to Think About Before You Start Your leadership Career, etc. etc. There are any number of articles and books you have on your shelves telling you what a leader DOES and you think maybe if you buy just this one more, especially since it is by Tom Peters, and read it thoroughly, maybe you will finally BE a leader*. The critical factor most of us forget while trying to figure out what to DO, if we ever even realized it before, is that we are playing a game set up by someone else and the odds are stacked in favor of certain outcomes even before we accept the position.

*Alan Keith, as quoted by Kouzes and Posner in 'The Leadership Challenge' stated that, "Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen."

With these words of Alan Keith’s in mind maybe it is legitimate to ask if you are a leader at all or perhaps someone holding a management position being referred to as a leader. There is nothing lacking in being a manager but leadership is a different game. To check this out answer yourself this question: When was the last time people caused something extraordinary to happen on your watch?

If you are working in any formalized organizational structure there are any number of natural leadership challenges that are handled by the system in which your position is embedded before you ever assume your role inside a management hierarchy. To learn about authentic leadership you might want to watch some of the experienced folks in your organization who operate effectively without title or authority.

Better yet, if you want to see an example of leadership that is caused rather than assumed, I’ll call it “Freestyle Leadership”, take a trip to Benton Harbor, Michigan** and visit the offices of the Harbor Shores Transformational Center at 88 West Main Street in the heart of downtown. (Watch some of the videos)

( **Policom Corporation unveiled its 2010 rankings of the economic strength of the top 366 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US in late spring. Benton Harbor made the list at #347. Things could be worse!)

Before you arrive at the offices of The Consortium for Community Development which houses the Harbor Shores Transformation Center you may want to call ahead if you’d like to meet the President, Marcus Robinson. The day I visited, late on a Friday afternoon, Marcus had been expecting me and when I arrived he was on the phone. We are old friends so when he held up five fingers I knew he meant he’d be with me in about five minutes. An hour later I had walked across the street for coffee and given myself a brief walking tour of the downtown area and he was still hard at the conversation. When he finally did emerge from behind his phone he said that he’d been involved with matters related to the Benton Harbor school system. I asked how his role as a Community Developer called for his involvement with schools. His response really didn’t surprise me and it goes to the heart of what I mean when I coin the phrase “Freestyle Leadership.” He said that in a town like Benton Harbor, if you demonstrate that you are someone who can get things to happen you become a ‘go to’ guy.

Clearly the record of accomplishment that Marcus has become associated with since arriving in Benton Harbor in late 2004 has established him in the eyes of many in the local area as a 'go to' guy. Marcus will be the first to admit that many people have contributed to the achievements realized in Benton Harbor since he was hand picked for his role by the now retired CEO of Whirlpool Corporation, Dave Whitwam. These two first met when they were working together to develop Whirlpool as a much more inclusive culture as it continued to globalize in the early 2000's. In Marcus, Dave recognized someone who was already well developed for a role as catalyst for the reinvention of the Benton Harbor area. He is someone who instinctively works to influence, not convince, and his style is much like that described in the earlier opening words from Lao Tzu, he works in the background.

I asked him how he likes to be referred to in the role he plays in Benton Harbor. He said, " It works best for me if people refer to me as Marcus, anything else and I find myself getting painted into a corner and limited in terms of what I can engage with."

No authority, no rules, no limits and no guarantees. Operating from vision and responsibility with an understanding that unless people end up with a sense of what they have done for themselves the real job has not gotten done. I think at some point Lao Tzu, Alan Keith and Marcus Robinson would enjoy having a cup of tea together.

• Where can you free yourself of the shackles of the institution and unleash the human spirit around you?

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For most of his 50+ year film making career, Sean Connery has entertained audiences by repeatedly playing one type of character. Dashing, unpredictable, unmanageable to be sure, we are not quite sure he is a hero, but we are glad he works for our side. Great stuff for the silver screen but not much of a leadership model. Ironically, his greatest professional honor, an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, came while playing the consummate team player, Officer Jimmy Malone in the 1987 movie version of “The Untouchables.”

In this film Connery’s character assumed the role of “leadership coach” for the young, passionate but naïve Elliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner. In what may be Malone’s most memorable scene, he delivers a brief soliloquy on how Ness can best deal with his arch enemy, Al Capone…

“You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital; you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?”

                             Officer Jimmy Malone, The Untouchables, 1987

Throughout the film, Officer Malone offers the younger Ness an ongoing stream of this plain speak on how to deal effectively with his foes. In one instances he delivers his message with the aid of a classic rhetorical question when a gangster draws a knife and attempts to stab Ness and winds up shot dead in the process. “Isn’t that just like a #@&**#?,” he asks, “Brings a knife to a gun fight!”

Could any message be clearer? If indeed we do need a translation, the Urban Dictionary offers this… ‘Bringing a knife to a gun fight- The act of taking an amount of any substance to a gathering which is obviously insufficient.’ (This site also offers to sell you T-Shirts, coffee cups and fridge magnets emblazoned with this saying. I’ll leave decisions on such offers to your judgment!)

Last week I was reminded of this later bit of leadership counsel from Officer Malone in an exchange I was having with officials at my son’s college. It seems that a piece of equipment my son borrowed from the school last spring was noted as damaged upon its return. I was made aware of this situation when I went to pay his fall tuition and was barred from doing so by a flag in his record indicating that the damage needed to be paid for before he would be allowed to register.

I contacted my son who said he was aware of the damage and noticed it when he originally picked up the piece of equipment. Since it did not affect the functionality of the equipment, he didn’t pay any further attention. Unfortunately he should have brought the damage to the attention of the department personnel when he borrowed the equipment. They didn’t see the issue until the equipment was returned and the cost of repair was $120.

Based on my son’s explanation, I did not see that we should bear the full cost but also recognized that the department had nothing to go on either except the testimony of one of their employee’s. I proposed to the supervisor that we split the difference equally since we had on our hands what amounted to a “he said, he said” situation. The supervisor replied by saying he was not authorized to make such an arrangement. This is where Officer Jimmy Malone’s words came back to me in a flash of recognition, “Isn’t that just like a #@&**#? He brings a knife to a gun fight!”

At that moment the supervisor probably felt as though he was standing there naked as I blurted out, “You are kidding right, you cannot make a decision on what amounts to a $60 transaction?” Two levels of management later I was able to conclude the conversation with the department director agreeing to my proposal!

It really doesn’t matter the name of my son’s school and it doesn’t even matter that it was a school, it could just as easily have been a manufacturing company’s service department, and the lesson would have been the same.

We ask our managers to lead, to inspire, to direct others in producing results of all kinds and yet we limit their authority in ways that leave them humiliated in front of their charges or the customer. These very same people, who, in their private lives, can purchase automobiles worth thousands of dollars, enter into mortgage arrangements for hundreds of thousands of dollars; bring children into the world without asking our permission…need our approval for trivial transactions. Why?

Before you get all “Sarbanes Oxley” with me or “but, but, but you don’t understand,” just stop! Whatever you are going to say next…that…that right there that you were going to say…is craaaaaap!

Engagement and power are inseparable. If our managers are dis-empowered how can we expect their engagement at anything other than a compliance level? Why would we ever expect them to inspire or be inspired themselves?

• Where have we 'hog-tied' our managers and are wondering why they under perform?
• If you are a manager; where are you constrained by practices that do not seem to respect your abilities to make sound choices, and you are putting up with it?

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“Can it possibly get any worse?
If you thought Tiger Woods' career was at low ebb, then you were wrong. Last week, the tide not only receded, he got stuck in the primordial muck and produced the most head-turning display on the golf course in his career, finishing 30 strokes behind Hunter Mahan at a course where he had never before finished worse than fourth and had won a tour-record seven titles. Woods is lost.”

 Steve Elling, CBS Sports Senior Writer 8-09-10

“Tiger Woods currently has no coach."

                                  Mike Cook

                                  The Heart of Engagement August 10, 2010

With apologies to William Shakespeare and Richard III…. Is it just me or has it been raining coaches in the business world for about the past fifteen years…and they come with certifications in case you need one, from all sorts of sources:

• Coach U
• Coach Inc.
• Center for Executive Coaching
• International Coach Academy
• Etc.

Some of these programs are several months in duration, some offer ongoing support, some are available on-line and some even offer certification in as little as 16 hours! I guess the familiar saying, “Let the Buyer Beware” pertains no matter what the offering.

Coaches are now available on nearly every street corner and make up a large portion of the attendees at any local ASTD meeting or networking group. The ‘rise of the coaches’ seems to be coincident with the proliferation of large scale downsizings that swept through the country in the mid-1990’s following the first wave of reengineering initiatives, also known as “right sizing” our organizations. It does provide individuals a low cost avenue to get into their own business, provides a valuable service, can be tailored to support just about any lifestyle and it is a rewarding profession.

However, I am less concerned for the proliferation of coaches, though dubious of quality in many cases, than I am in the absence of demand for coaching in general, most dramatically absent among many who profess to be involved in employee development, namely mid-level managers.

I am guessing that when you read the opening scenario reporting on Tiger Woods performance over the weekend at the Firestone Classic (assuming you know who he is) your thoughts immediately jumped to his recently confessed marital transgressions and you may have said to yourself, “I am not surprised with all that going on in his personal life that he cannot concentrate on golf!” I’d agree with that assessment. However, I am more mystified that someone whose career was built in close association with well known coaches, his father Earl Woods, Butch Harman, and Hank Haney among others would now find himself in the midst of the greatest crisis of his life operating without a coach!

There are limits to everything in this world, why lessen the chances for accomplishment by trying to approach tough challenges without support? In America I am afraid it is an affliction of our heritage. We have actually bought hook-line-and-sinker into the mythology of the self-made person or the ‘rugged individual.’ Asking for help, especially in the highly competitive environments of many of our commercial organizations has been/is seen as a sign of weakness or insufficiency. These American myths persist despite the fact that any close examination of what might be interpreted as “individual success” can readily be understood as the talents or vision of any famous business figure being heavily complimented and supplemented by others around them far less visible but nonetheless critical to the success realized. As the English poet John Donne so rightly said several centuries ago “…no man is an island, entire of itself…”

So what does determine the upper limits of accomplishment? There are undoubtedly numerous factors but I’ll venture that among them the foremost is the willingness to be coached, an openness to outside perspective and a recognition that anything truly remarkable or worth attaining will likely result from embracing the principle of interdependency.

For those among you that are up to something and might be ready to take the plunge into a coaching relationship I recommend a baby step to get started. There are today many fine coaches writing and making their insights, experience and wisdom available free of charge in the form of their regular blogs.

Some I like are:

Dan McCarthy- expert on management and leadership development

Steve Roesler – covers a vast array of management concerns

Mary Jo Asmus- a true executive coach

Bret Simmons - research based practical management advice

Jon Ingham – Human Capital Management, it is about the people after all

Sharlyn Lauby – calls herself an HR Bartender, she is a lot more than that!

If you think you can handle more coaching or if you like variety in your messaging try the “buffet” that goes by the name Human Capital League. If you can’t find something worth taking in at this site you are probably beyond help.

• Can you identify your reluctance to asking for help or seeking a personal advocate to keep you at the top of your game? It will be something simple, look for it first as an emotion, then as a statement of fact, a rule you have adopted without reflection.

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Last Friday morning around 6:15AM as I was waiting to check in for my flight in Rochester, New York the lines for boarding passes were moving very slowly for what is normally the busiest time of each day. As I looked at the people standing in front of the self-service kiosks I noticed several who appeared to be frozen in front of the terminal screens.

If you’ve flown in the past couple of years you know that almost all check-in service at most airports is now done without the assistance of airline personnel.

There were at least ten kiosks and two airline attendants shuttling back and forth behind the machines grabbing baggage tags and calling out names. No doubt you’ve seen this show more than once. The airline attendants didn’t seem to notice the four people stuck in front of the terminals or the lines of folks backing up and starting to grumble at how slow things were moving. I stepped up to one of the “frozen” people and asked if I could help. My assistance was welcomed and within a couple of minutes I had helped three other people and the lines started moving again and those folks were on their way. (I am no urban hero, I was stuck behind these people myself so my actions were very self-serving.)

You can probably imagine that if you don’t travel very frequently the routine we now go through at the airports, while necessary, might also be confronting and almost overwhelming for some people. If you are a operating an airline why have a minimum number of people on hand at what is known to be the busiest time of the day and why have those that are there doing the same thing rather than attending to what is needed? No doubt you know the answer, attempts to reduce operating expense. If you’ve flown recently you have also no doubt heard the little speech each airline I fly gives at the end of each flight about how they know we have a choice of who we fly with and they appreciate our businesses, blah, blah, blah. This speech comes of course after having been short changed on the front end of the flying experience and now you are telling me how much you appreciate my business. How does the saying go, “Actions speak louder than words?”

For the infrequent traveler that front end experience can be more than confounding, it can be humiliating. I wonder if the recognition of what people might be going through crosses the minds of the cost cutters at airlines headquarters?

Have you had a frustrating IVR experience recently, you know, Interactive Voice Response limbo, one of those calls where you suddenly realize that if you hit two yet one more time you may arrive at the fifth level of Dante’s Inferno? The thought crosses your mind that maybe the website is a better idea, after all they mentioned the website at the beginning of your call, maybe this cul-de-sac approach is their way of encouraging you to use it?

How about entering a lobby on your first visit to a new or potential client and finding yourself in a locked enclosure? You are greeted by a written message next to a house phone indicating that you need to dial the party you are there to visit and they will come to the lobby to meet you.

I know why all of these things are done and I cannot excuse the absence of leadership behind each action of this type. Somewhere along the line someone I will never meet has decided I am not going to be made to feel welcome or maybe worse, even discouraged from participating with this company, all in the interest of some savings in operating expense. And no one with a customer facing responsibility has stepped up and said there could be a cost to this approach to saving money. Well congratulations, you have saved the money, now figure out how you are going to replace my business! Does this sound harsh? It should, this is the age of choices and I will exercise mine and so will those people who were humiliated while standing confused in front of your kiosk or feeling unwanted while they stumbled through your IVR maze or thumbed through your employee directory looking for the name of their “host.”

•  What expense reduction practices does your organizations employ that may well be driving customers away?

• What practices does your organization employ that might suggest to employees that they are expendable or taken for granted?

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When I look around my natural surroundings in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, or do organizational research as I frequently do by watching Animal Planet or Discovery Channel (more the older programming about bugs,snakes and Wildebeest, not the new stuff like ‘MythBusters’ or ‘Dirty Jobs’), I am constantly reminded of the principals of diversity, interdependency and inclusiveness that underlie the workings of the natural world.

On the other hand, when I consider many of the models employed when evaluating, developing and rewarding employees in our commercial enterprises I am confronted by the focus on internal competition as well as the heavy emphasis on rewarding individual performance, despite exhortations to pull together, be a team, think big picture etc. Does it ever occur to us that these practices may serve more to confuse than to encourage employees and thereby produce a negative impact on engagement?

I am referring here to regular practices of putting individual employees or groups of employees in artificially competitive situations or force ranking employees for compensation purposes, like that ever made any sense! How about the discussions that many of us have participated in where we cull out our “A” players or make lists of High Potential Employees, (Hipos? Hypos? more non-words from the HR/OD vocabulary)  all without much recognition for or questioning of the models that give rise both to the vocabulary we use and the practices we engage in.

To what degree might your own organization routinely and thoughtlessly engage in these and similar practices without questioning whether, 

• the fundamental assumptions on which they were originally based are or ever were valid, 
• the degree to which (validity aside) the practices we employ when evaluating or rewarding employees contribute to or impede the basic level of engagement of the major contingent of our employee base 
• key measurements used to establish the basis for rewards or developmental opportunities are true measures of performance or really “roll-ups”, reports of aggregate outcomes of other measures which if considered separately might be much more meaningful, if not for purposes of reward most certainly for developmental planning,
• there is the slightest recognition of the nature or fundamental motivations of the factions within organizations that insist on the preservation of traditional models , especially compensation models that favor the few over the many?

And all this is to say that possibly the compensation systems we so doggedly cling to are only satisfactory for a minority of employees but that minority is responsible for designing the systems.

In my real life corporate working career as an HR professional I was once “forced ranked” among a group of 97 other professionals, most of whom had highly technical backgrounds. According to my manager I was ranked #15 among the group. Not too bad you say! How about the fact that I could not have performed the work of any of the people ranked above or immediately below me on the list?

When they wrote ‘First Break All the Rules’ back in 1999 Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman gave managers everywhere a collective “big shove” between the shoulder blades and suggested it was time for us to wake up. They offered anecdotal references and data that suggested that there was significant evidence that many of who they considered to be the world’s best managers did not play by the traditional rules. They actually, of their own volition, did what they considered to be in the best interest of each employee, without regard to past practices of existing policies. How far have we come since then? Eleven years after its first publication, Amazon reports ‘First Break…’ among its top ten best selling titles in both Management and Leadership Categories. For me that is pretty compelling information.We're still a'studyin, maybe soon we'll get to more doin!

How do you feel about normal distribution curves, I mean as they relate to human characteristics like IQ, talent etc.? Personally, I am a big believer in the laws of natural distribution. That is one reason why I have never understood the arrogance of highly intelligent people. How do you become arrogant about an accident of nature? Given my beliefs in this regard 

• I do admit to a natural bias on my part towards models that support and reward collaborative performance. 
• I also admit to a bias towards systems of reward that honor individual accomplishment, especially performance that benefits the larger collective of employees and the organization as a whole.
• Finally, I admit to a bias towards developmental practices that originate with both a deep understanding of organizational needs and a deep and comprehensive understanding of individual talents and strengths. I favor having these practices grounded in a commitment to optimize the interests of all parties involved.

Do these biases and beliefs of mine sound contradictory or paradoxical?  They should if they are meant in any way to reflect the true complexity of dealing with human beings in increasingly complex commercial settings.

• Where do you shy away from the complexities of employees?
• Do you embrace simplistic thinking when it comes to employees because it saves time or is just so much easier to understand?
• Do you shoot for practices and policies that encourage collaboration and inclusiveness and build on the strength of diverse perspectives and talents?

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A short time ago while leading a workshop I was asked this question by someone who sounded like an experienced manager. “What do I do with an obviously talented report who just doesn’t seem committed to the work he has been assigned?” The manager and I engaged in a brief dialogue to establish the signs that the employee was not committed. What we rapidly determined was probably not surprising. The manager was not necessarily reporting on the results being produced, she was reporting on her observations of the mannerisms of the employee. She didn’t like his attitude! Though not exceptional, the results were fine, but the employee was often overheard discussing matters related to Fantasy Football with colleagues when time could be used for additional production or education on the finer points of the work.

At first glance this may seem silly to even talk about. However, I am in and around a lot of managers and supervisors, literally thousands over the period of any given year. It is not uncommon for me to hear similar concerns expressed by many who have management responsibility.

{I’ll be the first one to tell any employee that I believe employee engagement is the responsibility of the employee, when I am talking to employees…and in the blink of an eye I’ll be the first one to tell management that employee engagement is the responsibility of management, when I am talking to management. From my perspective the conversation depends on where you are in the relationship and make no mistake about it, engagement is a matter of relationship. Like any other relationship worth being involved with, there is no simply doing your part; you are either in for the whole thing or not at all.}

As the conversation continued with this particular manager I asked an intentionally provocative question. “Have you ever asked this employee what he finds so engaging about fantasy football?” The manager came back quickly with, “Why should I have to do that?” The point of the question was to establish where the manager stood regarding responsibility for this employee’s level of engagement. The question she asked in response to mine quickly established where she stood. She assumed none.

 I went on to ask whether she understood that fantasy football was a fairly complex topic requiring considerable research and attention to detail and nuance. Yes, it was a game that concerned a sport but the skills involved in gaining proficiency called for dedication ,study and analysis of statistics, and a commitment to keeping up to date with an ever changing landscape of information. What if she sat down with this employee and explored his interest in depth, strictly for the purpose of understanding what it was about this game that the employee was so passionate about? Might an exploration like this allow her to understand what it was about the game that captured this employee’s interest and warranted such freely given dedication? Perhaps then she might be able to consider structuring the employee’s work to take advantage of his natural interests and get more of the attitude she was looking for as well as more productivity.

She didn’t buy it! And so it goes.

By now you are probably thinking that this encounter I have described is an exception and managers who follow a compliance-based approach to managing productivity and overall performance are fewer and farther between. I beg to differ and I beg you to consider that to the degree you don’t recognize your own or know your manager’s basic attitudes about employee engagement your employee base, your organization’s working capital, is at risk.

Intuitively I have for a number of years suspected that engagement, productivity, retention and profitability are intertwined like the links of the DNA helix. Mainly I came to this belief this by observing myself in relationship to whatever work was required of me. But now we can all go beyond simple belief or intuition and I think we owe it to our profession as managers to do just that. Thanks to a timely tweet from my associate and colleague Paul Hebert today I received a “heads up” on a newly released posting from Bret Simmons titled appropriately enough, “Employee Engagement and Performance: Finally some Credible Evidence.” Take a look for yourself. Bret’s cites some very sound newly released research evidence on the critical relationship between job engagement and performance. Pay particular attention to the closing words to his post, “If you find yourself lamenting that your employees don’t appear engaged, you are going to have to do something different.”

• The corollary to Bret's closing words of course is that if you are not willing to do something different, you can reduce your suffering by not expecting anything to change!
  

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Working with a group of managers this week we opened what has now become to me a familiar and productive organizational conversation. “How can we learn to need, not just use each other?” The group I was working with was by any standards “high functioning” yet it was obvious upon introduction that they didn’t quite grasp the question they were being asked. So, I tried asking the question in a slightly different way, “OK, what’s the real reason everyone complains about IT?” This proved to be a bit more penetrating as the people in the group began to grasp that what I was pushing them on and what was making them uncomfortable was having to acknowledge something that we have all become familiar with in our organizational lives, avoiding vulnerability. We all do it and we don’t talk about it. But what if we did?

Back in 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge worker’, he then spent a good portion of the next 45 years studying and revamping his theories about knowledge worker productivity and how best to adapt and adjust management practice to account for this new reality. He went so far as to say, “…better knowledge work productivity is our most important economic need.” He further warned that our long term prosperity and even our economic survival depend upon it.

Today more than ever our habitual treatments of Drucker’s ideas as quaint or optional are like “chickens coming home to roost.”

Through observation of this new reality of economic life, the worker as asset not merely resource, Drucker developed some perspectives that the majority of managers are, 5 years after his death, just beginning to grasp. What Drucker saw was the need for managers to simultaneously make their present Enterprise more effective, identify and realize its potential, and create a different Enterprise for a different future. In so doing he suggested that business leaders needed to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas through better knowledge work productivity and innovation.

“ …business leaders need to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas ...”

The implication of this statement is profound and redefines what it means to manage. It is no longer sufficient to think of the role of management in terms of knowing what needs to be done and seeing to it that it gets done. While this definition  remains a portion of what it means to be a manager we must expand the demand on the role to include “knowing” what talent is available at all times and seeing to it that it is put to use for the best advantage of the enterprise. It also means, and this is where the “why we are all afraid of IT” thing keeps coming up; as managers we must be able to recognize what knowledge and skill we need… that we do not have and cannot provide for ourselves… that we will be reliant on others to provide. This last requirement makes us veeerrry uncomfortable. Embracing the interdependency....eeeeeuuuuwwww!

In order to succeed in the manner Drucker is describing we are going to learn to consciously, strategically need the talents, knowledge and skills of not only those people working for us but also of those we will collaborate with. And look at us; we are still struggling with getting our performance reviews done on time, again, this year, for the umpteenth consecutive year. It is time to step up our game or step away from the role!

Tomorrow I’ll go back into my workshop and we will continue to explore this newly introduced distinction between needing people and using them. As the conversations unfolds predictably the managers in the group will begin to see that they

• Need to know a great deal more about themselves in terms of strengths and limitations.
• Need to know much more about the capabilities and interests of people reporting to them, continue to know what needs to be done and now who is best to do it and, what is going to need to get done that we must be preparing for now or we’ll never be ready and who should be doing that and
• Know where they currently have collaborators who are not being related to as assets, what do those assets need from them in order to be able to provide them service and what are they going to need from these collaborators in the future that they need to let them know about now so their expectations stand a chance of being met.

And at some point in the process of becoming fully aware of what is called for now they are going to become overwhelmed with the limitations they have placed on themselves and recognize that they will need to shed some of the protective behavior patterns they have used to avoid vulnerability until now. And they will get a bit panicky, and then they will be fine.

Puff, puff, puff! Whew! The level of complexity is daunting and yet if we (managers) continue as we have with our historical ways of working like we don’t really need as much as we do we are going to get run over by the sheer volume of what we are faced with. Like the man in the commercial said many years ago, “you can pay me now or pay me later.”

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Pretty basic stuff this week but it never hurts to go back to basics.

Assuming that we are all in agreement that engaged employees are preferable to ones who are not, let’s take a brief look at actions we take as managers that actually dis-incent the engagement we say we want.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

                                                                      Upton Sinclair

If I have heard it once I have heard it a hundred times from a potential client in an initial meeting, “Mike, what I am looking for is more leadership from my people!” Notwithstanding that this statement is often made thoughtlessly the first time around, my standard response when I hear it is “Then what we need to do is determine what you and your managers are doing to discourage leadership!” Silence follows.

Once everyone starts breathing again we can begin a fruitful dialogue.

The truth of my experience is that when senior managers strongly suggest they are interested in more leadership, they are muddling leadership with engagement and their real interest is more engaged employees. If it is really more leadership they want, we’ll have a further conversation about how much control they are willing to give up. That is always interesting!

In either case the task becomes one of working with both senior and mid-level managers to distinguish how they may be unwittingly discouraging the very engagement they profess to be seeking.

Much of what managers do to discourage or dis-incent engagement will have a reasonable explanation in the minds of the managers and will look like blatant chicanery in the eyes of employees. Some cases in point:

• “Our manager says she wants us to speak our minds and offer ideas and suggestions. When she holds a meeting she tells us to hold our questions and comments to the end of her presentation. Then as she gathers her things to leave she asks if we have any questions!”
• “Senior managers tell us we can contact them directly; when we do they ask our managers why we are bringing this matter to senior management attention rather than handling it more locally.”
• “The only way for me to make more money in my current position is to create opportunities for overtime. The easiest way to do that is to slow down so my work takes extra time and then I get labeled as a mediocre to poor performer.”
• “I can easily complete my assignments most weeks in 30-35 hours; I am good at what I do. There’s no real incentive to perform at a higher rate cuz every time I finish early my manager adds work from some of the poorer performers.”
• “I’ve offered five suggestions for improvement in the past year and not received a positive response on any of them. Managers promised they would get back in writing on all suggestions within 72 hours of receipt. I’d just be happy with that”

When confronted on this behavior, managers will often respond that it was a one time occurrence, they were pushed for time, it made sense when they took the action, etc. etc.

NOW HEAR THIS…all ye who would manage. The basic employment relationship is predicated on a mutually understood imbalance of power. You have more than the people reporting to you, at least in theory!.

Without question, at this point in time the majority of employees, no matter what the organization, are keenly attuned to this imbalance and on constant alert for any sign that their status in the “royal household” may be in jeopardy. This is to say that if you make a sudden move to scratch your head don’t be surprised when they duck. This underlying and unspoken unholy understanding is only made worse by our failure as managers to acknowledge the truth of it.

In my experience as a manager I have directly said to employees, “I seek your partnership. You are not worth much to me if our relationship is based in fear. Unless I can trust you to speak up when there is something to be said I will be essentially working alone. Whatever we need to do to work through whatever fear you have of me or managers in general, I am prepared to work through with you. I am not prepared to hear after the fact that you knew something and didn’t express it.” Not everyone who received this offer accepted but everyone who accepted has not been disappointed, nor have I.

• Take a look at the bulleted items above and examine yourself not just by reading the examples but by checking yourself against the spirit of the message.
• Can you come up with your own list of unconscious behaviors on your part that may be a dis-incentive to engagement?

In case you are wondering, I am not a "management hater." I do hold managers to a certain standard because of the power balance I speak to here. My highest loyalty is always to what at any point in time I see as the "best interest of the organization."

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Is it too easy to beat on British Petroleum right now? Perhaps, yet the saga unfolding is more than an environmental catastrophe, and it certainly is that. This is not merely the story of one company behaving badly; this is the comeuppance of a context. We might name the context "Management's Apparent Sense of Entitlement." On a larger scale we may even see it as the comeuppance of a national culture of entitlement; our own.It is important to see ourselves in everything taking place in this set of events. 

I know there is a lot of "piling on" taking place right now, most of it well justified, some typically politically motivated, some pre-emptive in an attempt to shed responsibility for the blame which will eventually be spread far and wide. It may be particularly hard to see the lessons to be learned for all the noise and emotion. However, rather than be concerned strictly about and for the actions of BP let's take a look at the similarities between what we are seeing in the public behaviors of this international giant , those of previously similarly embattled corporate "citizens" and our own actions at times as managers. If you are a manager I'd ask that you pay particular attention this week.

In order to get the full benefit (if I can call it that) from the tragedy being played out in front of us in this disaster we need to be able to see ourselves in the behaviors of the BP spokespeople and executives. From the very beginning there has been plenty of evidence that BP was going to spend a lot of energy deflecting and limiting its responsibility in the matter, as did TransOcean and Haliburton, the other major antagonists in this multi-act spectacle. But is what we are seeing so different really from the behavior of Enron executives several years ago? How about in the collapse of Global Crossing?

·         Take a look at this incomplete but fairly comprehensive list of corporate scandals from recent history.

 In the case of each of these events someplace in the back-story there is a justification on someone’s part, an interpretation that allowed otherwise “good” people to behave badly. I am calling this phenomenon Management’s Apparent Sense of Entitlement and I want to stress “apparent” because no matter what the real motivation it sure looks like someone thought they were entitled to act the way they did. And, this behavior, played out repeatedly to a lesser degree daily in our places of work has a withering effect on employee engagement. In the same way that repeated exposure to radiation would poison the body, repeated exposure to a lack of accountability and inauthenticity on the part of our managers poisons the soul. On the grand scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster it has the effect of calling into question our very way of life.

What we are witness to has been played out on a lesser scale countless times before just not so much on the world wide stage. There is a sense of entitlement, a right to not be held to account that has been repeatedly asserted by corporate leadership for many years now.

Whether we are apt to admit it or not, as often as we observe and condemn behavior similar to that we are seeing on the part of BP representatives, we are all infected by the virus that thrives in this context.

Just focus on your work place for the moment. Have you ever participated in an employee meeting where a question to an executive was met with an “I’ll have to get back to you on that” response and you felt the spirit in the room droop as a collective experience of disillusionment took place? There would be no "getting back later". How about the director who is repeatedly late for her own meetings and always arrives with a handy excuse? Or, the manager who routinely schedules last minute meetings expecting their staff to dismiss whatever other commitments have been made to attend? Thankfully these examples are not a Deepwater Horizon equivalent event. However, I assert that they are justified from the very same context, “management has its privileges.” Until we can see ourselves in the BP disaster we are not going to be able to develop either an appropriate response in ourselves or consciously correct our own behavior.  

In no way do I mean to condemn all management or all corporate activities. It is the insidiousness of the assertion of a categorical right to not be held to account by many leaders of larger organizations that fouls the water for all of us.

• Where are you opting to not account for yourself with your reports?

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As a manager, especially a manager of younger employees one thing I encourage you to be on the lookout for are occasions that attack the confidence of the your less experienced reports. No doubt you can remember your own baptism by fire when in your earlier years you innocently asked a question of a superior in an open meeting, with the best of intentions, and got handed your head on a platter following a public flaying that left you questioning yourself, your values, the direction of the poles etc. If you were fortunate you had a manager who took you aside and assured you that you were fine and that what you had done hadn’t warranted the treatment you received and maybe there were better ways or times to make your thoughts or questions known in the future. If you were not so fortunate you were met in the hall after the meeting by a co-worker who cauterized your wound with a glib “Glad that wasn’t me” comment, forever cementing in your mind that you were never going to let anything close to that happen again, and were never heard from there or anyplace else that had a similar look and feel. Or maybe you were passed over for a promotion or “thrown under the bus” by a colleague in a public setting, etc. etc.

If you’ve been around for a while you now know the drill, you know you will survive, as Kenny Rogers says, “You gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em!” And you know there will always be another day and the point is not so much to avoid the impact of life in the workplace as it is to develop the ability to choose your points of high impact and recover quickly. Nothing will make you more ineffective than

·         the inability to confront events when necessary to get things done,

·         the inability to sustain an injustice and return to the field of play quickly or

·          the inability to leave the past in the past

As object lesson let me present a situation very fresh in the minds of many fans of professional sports. In baseball there are two types of actors on the field at all times, those who play the game and those who officiate the games. Theirs is an uneasy interdependency made necessary by the subjective nature of many of the transactions. Kind of like performance reviews! J Anyway, last Wednesday, June 2^nd, the fans in Detroit’s Comerica Park were on the verge of being treated to one of the rarest events in all of sports, the pitching of a perfect game*. Unfortunately the gods of baseball have a weird sense of fate. On a play that would have been the last of the game a veteran umpire made an erroneous call on a fairly routine play, costing the pitcher, the players and the fans the experience of a lifetime.

*The “perfect game” has occurred only 18 times since 1900 out of something like half a million games played in that period.

I am pretty sure you as well as almost everyone at Comerica that evening can readily see the error of the call made by umpire Jim Joyce.

The fans were stunned, the Detroit players were furious, the manager, Jim Leyland, offered strenuous protest, to no avail. Amazingly, the pitcher, Armando Galarraga, calmly returned to the mound, faced the next batter, got him out and completed a one-hit game for the win.

Following the game a chagrinned Jim Joyce faced the press and admitted his mistake to the press and apologized in person to Galarraga. The next day to no one’s surprise there was an appeal to the Baseball Commissioner, Bud Selig, to reverse the call and award the perfect game. (C’mon Bud you know that wasn’t fair, give the kid a break!) To his credit Bud Selig was true to the game and declined to reverse the call.

Just like in any workplace the two protagonists in this drama returned to work the following day. In a gesture most rare and inspirational Armando Galarraga met Jim Joyce at Home Plate with the daily lineup card, (a task normally completed by the team’s manager), gave him a pat on the back and a hug and assured him that he forgave the mistake and affirmed his confidence in Joyce’s ability to proceed to effectively call the balls and strikes that day. Remarkable and rare, a story worth repeating and one I encourage you to share with your younger employees.

In any interdependency, marriage, co-worker or business partner there is room for disappointment. At times we will let each other down. These are the moments that define relationships; these are the moments that define careers. When they occur will we withdraw from the field never to risk again or will we return to play knowing that somewhere in the future we will experience disappointment again? Can we learn to apologize, can we learn to forgive, even when we know the game will never be fair. For those who cannot…there will always be tickets for the game, that’s why they call them spectators.

·         Are you noticing any of your reports becoming spectators?

·         Are there apologies for you to make or forgiveness to grant?

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For the past fifteen years I have greeted business leaders clamoring for more leadership and accountability in their organizations with this challenge, “What are you willing to give up? The question is almost always met first with silence followed by a familiar response, “What exactly do you mean by give up? Then the fun begins.

I have been adamant for some time that employees want to give their employers the best they have to offer and employers behaviors and practices often serve to constrain this from happening. Many employees are not going to give their best for conventional rewards and they certainly are not going to give it for nothing, but they will give it for free. I know this without data to back it up, I just get it in my bones and I bet you do too.

“Thankfully, there are those writers who do like data and they often do the research to make the connection between “hunch” and reality. Every so often a new voice bursts on the management/leadership development scene with an unconventional take on familiar themes and they can back it up with facts and then many of us shout “I knew it!” No author may be as "right now" in this regard as Daniel Pink, author of 'Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

This is not going to be my review of Drive, there are already plenty in circulation, in fact if you are interested I’ll send you right to one written by Andrew O’Connell that appeared in Harvard Business Review earlier this year. Better yet, if you’d like a pretty compelling synopsis of the book by the author himself I recommend setting aside ten minutes or so to watch the video animate created by RSA.org. I am betting that after you watch this piece you’ll buy the book if you haven’t already.

Without the benefit of the research presented in ‘Drive’ my company stumbled on some of Daniel Pink’s fundamental new truth through direct experience back in the mid-1990s while working with our local independent telephone company. (You may recall the 1990s as a time when telephone companies were still relevant!) During that period we were working with this company to bring about a shift in thinking, a transition from seeing the world though the eyes of a regulated utility to seeing the world through the eyes of a player in a competitive marketplace for telephonic services; a tall order at the very least.

Among the many changes that the telephone company was working to bring about at that time was to turn Customer Service from a pure expense center into another of the company’s revenue generating locations. The idea; pretty simple really, since the company could count on a regular inflow of contacts from customers with issues or questions why not address each of these contacts as also a sales opportunity. Calling features were in vogue then, Call Waiting, Three Way Calling etc. and each was available, for a price.

To motivate the customer service representatives who would be involved in making this change the company put in place a financial incentive program knowing full well that the employees would jump at the chance for additional income…they didn’t, and management was confused and perhaps not surprisingly they were angered as well. “Everyone” knew this was a great idea, why couldn’t these employees just buy in and get with the program and "hey, don’t forget the money", the money was a good thing.

We came on the scene about three months after this program had been put in place and the situation was getting very tense. The managers who had first proposed this program had gone on record promising their seniors a big payback and it was not showing up. Knowing that their idea was sound the managers determined that if they could not entice desired behavior with incentive they might as well initiate some negative consequences for not “playing ball.” And so they did and suddenly the union representing the service reps got very involved and then no one was having any fun.

When asked if we had any possible remedy to offer the first of our questions set the stage for a dramatic shift in perspective. We asked, “What made you think that people who had been basically performing the same or similar functions for on average twenty years were suddenly going to care about making more money?” The answer was pretty simple and understandable. The managers assumed that the customer service reps were motivated by the same things that motivated them. Within a short period of time we were able to determine that time off, an afternoon to spend on family issues, a simple recognition luncheon, a book of car wash coupons, or just the time to spend with a customer without worrying about who was next in the queue, all these were more meaningful to the service reps than a chance to make more money. All of these motivators were virtually free but they did mean management would have to change their behaviors, and they did.

It is now fifteen years later. Daniel Pink tells us that autonomy, mastery and purpose are the motivators that matter to much of the current workforce in the conceptual age. You might think this would be good news for many employers. Not necessarily so. Providing these incentives means management will need to give up control of employees’ time and direction to some degree. For many employers, they would still rather let go of money than they would control.

• Where are you struggling to gain employees' 'buy in' but you have failed to offer them any freedom? What are you prepared to give up?
• Can you envision your role without any supervisory or directive aspect? What could you do with the time freed up?

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In recent years I have developed a keen interest in what might be identified as the "elements of a resilient business community." I live in an area of the country, rural/coastal northwest Washington, where the economy is dominated by small business. Truthfully most of the United States is in a similar position as the director of any Chamber of Commerce will readily affirm.

Unlike metropolitan areas where often there are larger enterprises serving to establish "economic thrust," in areas like ours the success of small businesses seem to me to be almost entirely dependent on the support of customers or clients in our local area.

With this much obvious interdependency, local business owners still express constant concern for their visibility and viability when faced with price advantages offered by on-line shopping or "big box" stores a reasonable drive away. Unfortunately I find that all too often these merchants do their fretting in private and hope for the benevolence of local citizens.

The sort of tensions I am describing seem quite normal to me. What I question is whether it is possible to break the cycle of rugged self-reliance on the part of our local business owners without throwing the "baby out with the bath water." As a business owner myself for the past twenty years I share the interest I see in other owners to pursue their own path and express themselves through a commercial venture, sort of test themselves in the open market of perceived value. However, is it possible to begin to harness the aggregate business wisdom in a given local area in service of all participants? Why merely depend on patronizing each others' businesses, why not also be available to advise, coach,critique and most importantly hold each other to account for actions committed to?

So I am asking for your input, and the input of those you know and trust. If you were tasked with developing a total framework that would reliably support a resilient, sustainable commercial community in a defined local area,

• What elements would you make sure were present in the local political environment?
• What measurements and statistics would you use to describe healthy businesses?
• What education, books, programs would you want to have available as part of a basic business owner's curriculum?
• How might you explain to local business owners the possible benefits of taking a collaborative approach to business development?

Personally I am intrigued by the idea of being able to spend time with other business owners reflecting on lessons learned while considering the wisdom gleaned from  newly published works like Jeff Hayzlett's "The Mirror Test" or Michael Gerber's classic, The E Myth. Or, having one of my local colleagues share with me the latest technical application that has proven profitable to install.

What would you recommend/suggest/insist be included in the development of a "community" approach such as the one I am pursuing?

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"How little the public realizes what a girl must go through before she finally appears before the spotlight that is thrown upon the stage."

Florenz Ziegfeld

Now and then, if we are fortunate, there may be presented to us the opportunity to see a master as they perform. Less often and even more fortunate are those occasions when we have a chance to work with a master as they pursue their craft. Last Friday in Seattle at the Green Lake Theater, along with nine other lucky travelers I worked with a master.

I became acquainted with Kimberly Davis back in 2007 shortly after the publication of my first book, THRIVE. Through a series of serendipitous occurrences, me moving near to where she was living in Seattle, she and her husband moving to the Dallas/Fort Worth area and me securing a contract with an agency in Fort Worth, we did wind up working on a project together in the spring and summer of 2008. It was my project and I asked Kimberly to assist and she actually ended up as the co-creator of a wonderful initiative we put together for "at risk" youth in the Fort Worth school district. Unfortunately the funding for that program was canceled shortly after our pilot phase. At that point, sadly,my working relationship with Kimberly ended. I returned to Washington to begin a new phase of my professional life and Kimberly, well she didn't miss a beat.

Shortly after our project in Fort Worth was canceled I started receiving "newsletters from Kimberly letting me know about her knew venture, On Stage Leadership.  The name is probably a dead giveaway, yes it is leadership development wrapped inside the trappings of theater. But rather than give away any further details I'll just tell you that the experience was one I'll draw upon for years to come.

From the time I began receiving Kimberly's newsletters I knew I wanted to participate in her program. Our brief experience working together in Fort Worth had let me know that she is a rare and special talent. While she did a marvelous job assisting me in co-creating the Texas project I knew there was "her work" and I had hoped I would some day get to see her in her element.

Is there such a thing as "ridiculous authenticity?" If there is then Kimberly Davis is guilty of this character surplus. There is of course her theatrical training and I am sure she would be the first to admit to being a "drama queen" but in a way that is so engaging you just want more of whatever that is oozing from her being.

The tag line on the Onstage Leadership logo says "Get Real, Get Real Results" and I cannot think of anything I would like managers (who let's face it we are all hoping will be leaders) to get more than REAL. On Friday that is what we worked on, getting real. On one hand it is sad that being REAL with each other is so challenging and on the other it was literally awesome to see this group of managers awaken to the possibility of power emanating from vulnerability. I could just see shoulders relaxing and tension draining from the faces of my fellow participants as one by one they came to the realization that what others wanted from them was not perfection, it was their humanity, something that over years of organizational life they had learned to keep in check, lest their emotions get the best of them.

During the course of our workshop last Friday Kimberly asked us some very tough questions:

• Is your passion buried or near the surface?
• Can you recall having said something to someone that made a difference?
• Do you know the difference between your purpose and your tactics?
• Who is counting on your for leadership?

Throughout the day we had multiple occasions to reflect on this last question, sort of a self assessment of customer satisfaction. We were all getting square with ourselves on whether we were honoring our positions (manager) or honoring the opportunity it presents us with (leadership) and getting clear that an "either or answer" is not satisfactory. Our organizations grant us our "managerness" and our followers grant us our leadership.

Somewhere during the course of the day I was reminded of something I know that I know. People come to work each day hoping for the opportunity to make a contribution and to be in some way recognized for making it. I say hoping because it is generally not at all clear that an employer is looking for anything more from us than simply doing what is asked. We all know that , day in and day out, simply doing what is expected is not worthy of the time of our lives. When we encounter someone, a leader, a regular human being clear about their purpose and willing to allow others to play at the top of their game we naturally gravitate to that opportunity. We will move obstacles to be near someone who values and validates our contribution. To do that for others, a contribution in itself we as managers must realize we are on stage all the time. The spotlight is a harsh critic, it is also a doorway for us being fully realized as human beings while serving as organizational archetypes.

• What have you said to someone reporting to you that you know made a lasting impression? Consider that it may have been something not positive.
• Who is counting on you for leadership?

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There is much merit in the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Take this picture for instance.In case you don't know this is Mt. Ranier in Washington. This particular shot was taken with my Palm Treo from the window seat during a flight I was taking from Seattle to Fort Worth two summers ago. I think it is pretty great given no time for set up and it sure does a much better job of showing the magnificence of this peak than if I was to tell you how "really big" it is.

 Sometimes though you really do have to hear the story to get the picture.

We go to the gym to stay in shape, we hire a management coach to stay in shape, we go to church on Sunday to stay in shape. Repetition seems to be a fundamental practice for those who would stay sharp, whether it be in body, mind or spirit. And so it goes with those of us who create these periodic blog posts.So again it is time to repeat something we have heard countless times before.

In his March 25th post in All Things Workplace this year Steve Roesler does a great job of outlining the lesson I have mind for us to review today. In his words,

"I've coached executives and conducted workshops on all aspects of presentations for many years. One of the liveliest parts of the discussion emerges when I introduce the fact that influential presentations require at least as much time listening to the audience as speaking to them. For many, that's counter-intuitive to the common notion of influence."

Listening...there it is again...whether we are in the midst of a presentation or a one-on-one conversation, how many times have you heard said that listening is more important than speaking, especially when it comes to gaining respect or establishing influence? If you've heard it once I bet you've heard it a thousand times...and still it bears repeating.

So now that story I promised...

Some thirty years back I held a real job in a real company, actually a Fortune 50 company in the petroleum industry to be as exact as I need for my purposes here. One of my favorite assignments during this period of my career involved a two year stay on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in a large refinery.

On one particular morning my manager showed up at my office early asking of I had time for a special assignment. He had in mind for me to do a comparative analysis of the healthcare plan we offered our employees and one offered by a local chemical company. The assignment seemed pretty straight forward so I took it on and within a short time was waist deep in charts and tables.

What I noticed fairly quickly was that on virtually every feature the plan offered by my employer was equal to or superior to the plan I had been asked to analyze comparatively. After about an hour I sat back and pondered the assignment for a few moments and just as I concluded it was a waste of time I headed upstairs to see my manager. He was someone I respected a great deal and if he had asked me to do this he had a good reason; I needed to know what that was before proceeding.

When I asked my manager how it was that he came to make the request of me to do the analysis the picture began to take shape. Late in the afternoon the day before one of the more vocal plant workers, a man who seemed to have a certain following, had stopped in to see my manager. He spent about half an hour complaining to my manager about how much better the medical plan offered by “so and so company” was and wondering aloud why we couldn’t get a better plan, to the point where my manager finally said he would arrange for an analysis and see what might be done.

I told my manager of my preliminary findings and he said maybe I should continue my analysis because the company was committed to doing whatever could be done within reason to keep the plant employees from thinking they needed union representation. Now I grew suspicious.

An interesting feature of this particular refinery was the fact that it was not unionized, like virtually all other refineries in the United States and the company management took great pains to make sure that was the way things remained.

I asked my manager if he minded whether I arranged a visit with the employee who had stopped by to see him and he said that if I thought it would help I could go ahead. Later that day I had the employee stop by and we began talking about his issues, and of course all the other employees who agreed with him. Within a short period of time listening to him I could not get a clear understanding of the problem, just the vague sense that something more was going on than the simple complaint. Finally I just said to him point blank that if he could not be more specific it would not be possible for me to determine whether we should or shouldn’t consider a different medical plan and I made it clear that I wanted to help if at all possible. The employee was silent for a few moments and then said that the employees at the other plant had this plastic membership card they could show at the doctor’s office or drug store and that was all they had to do to make a claim for coverage. Our plan required the employees to complete a form, attach a receipt, mail it in and wait for reimbursement. So that was it; that was what all the fuss was about, the claims process? Well, that was almost all of it!

We talked for a while longer and it became apparent that there was a cultural factor involved. This was some years back and this was a culture where the moms in a family stayed home to raise the children and take care of the family business. Virtually all the refinery employees then were male and most worked rotating shifts so they were only on a 9-5 schedule once out of every three weeks and their wives handled the household affairs. Many of women at home didn’t understand the claims forms and since the men were used to them handling everything they were embarrassed by giving them something that was hard to understand. So this was the real problem, we had placed our male employees in a position where they were letting their spouses down and those very same spouses talked with other women who’s husbands worked at the chemical plant with the plastic card and…you get the picture. This was an emotional issue not rational but if you were not listening you would never have heard it.

We got it all worked out. I offered to set up classes for or take phone calls from the wives to help them understand the claims process. I also promised to work with our health plan administrator to simplify the claims process. The issue of considering another plan never came up again while I was there and not since as far as I know. My manager was stunned,; he realized that he was so tuned to listening for anything that might lead to unionization that he could not have heard the employee’s real request no matter how many times they talked. I was new so my biases had yet to be established.

So there’s your 1000+ words, did you get the picture?

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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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I have only been a part of and  the following the on-line world of  workplace engagement for a few months. Call me a late adopter, OK, call me a troglodyte! I have been busy with other things.

What I have seen in my short period of exposure and study is that when it comes to "workplace engagement" there is no lack of passion, no lack of commitment and no lack of what always seems to happen when a subject becomes popular or mainstream; we now have self proclaimed workplace engagement experts, best practices and of course rules.

Nothing seems to shut down a conversation faster than unsolicited expertise but that doesn't stop the chirping and given the current state of things I am already wondering whether the best work in this field may have already been done? Should I Stay or Should I Go?  (C'mon now, you have to click this!)

What gives me hope are the FEW among the writers I have been reading. There are some long time players who keep coming up with fresh ideas. There are some new faces too. What they have in common is that they address workplace engagement from very consistent  perspectives, bringing unique insight to the conversation and they are pretty good at not taking themselves too seriously.

Here are a couple of folks doing "what I consider to be good work" in this field of exploration and they are not occupying the same space or trying to establish the rightness of their views. These are not necessarily “the best” or “the leading” voices in workplace engagement, they are just two who I resonate with and I’ll be introducing others in the weeks ahead.

Pam Slim offers a consistent message (Escape from Cubicle Nation) to anyone who may have 'had enough' of the corporate environment, Pam being one of those people herself. Back in 2006 she wrote a remarkably authentic KISS OFF to corporate life and she did it in a way that opened a door for anyone else to follow. If you are feeling a bit downtrodden and under appreciated, thinking about leaving where you are these days, a thorough reading of her 'Open Letter to CEO's...' is a tasty treat. Like a fine wine this piece continues to improve with age.

Why I like Pam's work, she is not anti-corporate, she is pro-person and she is also anti-phony, stupid, mean, selfish and cruel. (So as you can see, she can’t be half bad.) She just happened to notice that some of any company's highest paid people are guilty of pretty stupid behavior that they wouldn't put up with if it was aimed their way. I find all this to be a refreshing combination. In my mind she qualifies as a real pioneer in this field.

Another pioneer, a guy taking things in an entirely different direction, is David Zenger. A couple of years back David established an on-line community, The Employee Engagement Network. As a 'labor of love' David handles whatever administration is required to keep this community up and running. With over 2200 members joining in just over two years this self-organizing community of practitioners seems to be thriving and a demonstration of the passion that does exist for further opportunities to address the ongoing issue of under-humanized workplaces.

Back in September of 2008 David himself went on a bit of a rant about rules when it comes to the practitioners of  workplace engagement consulting

"No more rules of engagement. I am tired of people writing rules of engagement. The rules of engagement are about war and work needs to stop being war and we need to stop telling people there are 5, 8 or 10 simple rules they must follow for successful engagement.

Yet, he remains a “glass half full” guy and prolific contributor to the study of the topic. His posting of March 22nd this year, to his own blog site, echoes Pam Slim's sentiments from four years back.

The message from both these sources seems very similar to me; ‘the jig is up’ on paying lip service to or turning a blind eye to engagement issues in our places of work. Whether we are employers, executives, managers or employees the world we live in now requires that this matter be addressed honestly. From the company perspective it is a matter of competitive viability. From the point of view of the individual there are no longer the excuses about needing a job. ( A quick scan of the membership of my local Chamber of Commerce showed me that 40% of the membership were sole practitioners working out of their homes!)

• Have you authentically assessed your own level of workplace engagement?
• Do you have a plan to address any deficiencies you've noticed?
• What are your ideal working conditions and how close are you to them?

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Do you ever wish you were the one who said that, I mean something that is frequently referenced, like the saying above,"It is a poor craftsman..."  Well, this is a case where whoever said it doesn't seem to be getting any credit. After a semi-exhaustive, OK not really that much, search I have come to the conclusion that no one is getting credit for this beauty and it is used all the time. I have decided to assign it to Poor Richard, he of almanac fame. Did he play basketball?

This is a great time of year if you are a basketball fan. It is a great time of year to pretend you are a basketball fan! March Madness has come to be the most participatory event in all of college athletics, maybe all of sports, from a fan standpoint. With men's and women's tournaments being played right along side each other there seems to be something for everyone and the outcomes are almost always unpredictable. Even the most casual of fan might win the office pool this year what with all the upsets.

In this year’s tournaments it seems like the eventual outcome, except maybe everyone being dumbstruck if the U Conn women don’t win, is up for grabs. What is not in doubt is that the players involved will give everything they have physically and emotionally. Some will play through pain and injury, many will suffer disappointment over what could have been and the vast majority will go home empty handed save for the experience, which is of course priceless.

What is not so much in doubt is the way the coaches will handle the outcomes. One thing you will be able to count on and one reason these players are willing to give so much and do whatever they are asked is that if they win the coaches will give them all the credit and if they don’t they will share the responsibility for the loss.

Is this so very different from where you work, from where any of us work? I am guessing that the responses are mixed. But why should it be any different at all?

I have noticed, and maybe so have you that in business there is this assumption in the background that everything is supposed to work out, all the time! We hire people and they don’t work out, we promote people and they don’t work out. We are poorly prepared for these all too frequent occurrences yet we know they are coming. It seems that maybe after four gazillion years of running companies maybe we would see this coming and yet when the truth of the failure is finally recognized (often getting there is like pulling teeth) we seem either incredulous or betrayed.

Deirdre Honner recently posted a wonderful piece on her site that I think sheds a powerful light on all this ugly history. In her HR Maven posting of March 19th titled simply, Training and Development, she unlocks the mystery of dealing powerfully with performance failures for all managers, if you are brave enough to face it. Using the current experience of her dog in “good dog school” she offers that the difference between a previous failure and this time around is marked by recognizing that she needs to play the game not just watch it, she has a responsible role.

“This time is different.  Cameras stay home.  I am fully committed and invested to do my part, pay attention and work with Samson.  We work together on our taskings.  When he misses, it's MY fault.   He can only deliver when he understands exactly what I want him to do.  When he misses, I must examine where I am failing - by sending wrong or conflicting messages, not clear in my instructions, where I am confusing him.  That's humbling.  Really. Because Samson is a very, very smart dog.  His mistake is my fault. This time, I own it.”

Deirdre is the Associate Director of HR at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. As a former HR manager myself I take great comfort in knowing that there are professionals like Deirdre out there counseling managers, young and old, to realize their responsibility when it comes to the people reporting to them. Deidre clearly recognizes that her pal Samson is an asset to be treasured and developed, so are your reports. It is humbling I know, to see yourself as responsible when they fail. If you can’t do this you should step down from the post to make room for someone who can.

As the coaches in March Madness will repeat time and again during the tournament, yes it is about winning, and it’s also about how the game is played. There is tomorrow to get ready for, set it up to win.

• Where are you spectating your people's performance?
• What's the roll you could be playing?
• Are you willing to step up and engage with the game today?

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This week it is time to get “touchy/feely!” Well…at least feely, specifically those feelings we call fear and its close friend anger.

Fear…most managers I have worked with do not know how to proceed effectively in the presence of this strong emotion. What they see or sense they

• Often misidentify as disagreement or failure to buy in, or
• Think that something must be wrong and they have to fix it

Some time back I was working with a group of engineers who had committed to producing a breakthrough in the production in their plant. As the project unfolded I met regularly with the Program Manager (PM). A very short time after the project was initiated the PM began complaining about one of his key reports on the team, a guy who was in charge of a critical piece of innovation that held the key to the breakthrough the team was seeking. If this guy and his sub-team did not come through the project had no chance of succeeding.

After hearing the PM's complaints about this key player once I was quick to respond when I heard similar comments in a subsequent meeting. I asked the PM to describe exactly what his problem was with this player’s behavior. He responded by letting me know that this key player had made several promises which he had already failed to meet and he, the PM, was rapidly losing confidence that this guy was going to get the job done. I could see that the PM was angry and yet I knew these two men had worked together for years and had a positive history together. So I asked the PM what he thought was going on, suspecting that the he had already formed a pretty strong opinion that was shaping his interactions with this team member. “I don’t think he is committed to this project being successful, I think he is just going through the motions”, was the response I received and by his tone I assumed that he was pretty angry about this as well.

Passion, initiative, creativity…aren’t these traits what we all want from our team members? When that is not what we experience or observe, especially when the stakes are high and we are counting on each other there is a tendency to conclude something like what this PM had done. "The guy is just not committed, if he was we’d see flames shooting out of his pants and sparks flying off his head, not his door closed and our phone calls and emails not returned."

This was not the first such project I had worked on so I asked the PM if he would be willing to consider another possible explanation for the behaviors he was seeing. “Would you be willing to consider that what you are seeing are symptoms of fear?” is exactly what I asked. The PM seemed stunned at this prospect but then I went on to suggest that he himself was afraid and masking his fear with anger at his colleague. That comment brought on a prolonged silence. After a couple of moments of looking out the window the PM turned to me and said that yes, he had not recognized it but he was afraid, afraid that his goals would not be met and the anger was his way of expressing that he did not like being afraid. So I asked him further whether he was willing to just be fearful that the objective was not going to be met and take actions as if it were (This was a little trick I had learned when making my first parachute jump! If I had waited until I was not afraid that jump would never have happened.)

From this point on the PM and I were able to talk openly about both his fear and the anger that was covering it up. I pointed out that as long as he did not choose being afraid his fear was choosing him. Yes, there was all the baggage that is associated with our culture, men, fear etc. but the bottom line was that if he was fearful that is what he was, and no point pretending otherwise and no need to apologize. This was a big project with high stakes and as I told him, if he wasn’t afraid I’d be concerned.

Once we got through with our conversation he was able to approach his delinquent teammate and ask him about being fearful using the failed commitments as an entry point to the conversation rather than a club.

You can imagine how the rest of the story goes because otherwise why would I share it with you! That conversation opened the gates for all members of the team to talk openly about both their fears and their commitment to making the objective. No more excuses, the team moved ahead, the objective was met.

 As managers we’d do well to recognize that

• Fear in the face of uncertainty is normal and it can be seen as information and not a problem
• Fear is often disguised as pushback or inaction due to cultural taboos
• Anger is often another cover up for fear. When we are afraid we are not going to get what we want, we frequently get angry
• Until people are free to choose their fear as OK they are held hostage by this strong emotion

Where are you fearful at work and either pretending not to be or masking it with anger? 

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 When a wife yells at her husband, who has his eyes glued to his desktop screen, "You are not listening to me!" she is dead on, he's not. But does that mean he's not engaged?

Actually, he is very engaged, with what is in front of him on the screen. People are always engaged, it just may not be with what we consider to be important and that is a critical element that managers may be missing.

As managers, what we often don't seem to get is that our role is not so much to create engagement, as it is to direct it. If this sounds counter to what you have been reading, told or imagined yourself I offer no apologies but I do ask that you seriously consider what I am proposing.

Recently, a manager in a class I was delivering asked what she could do about the attitude of one of the younger workers reporting to her, he just didn’t seem as committed to his work as she would have liked. I asked about the quality of his work, she indicated that it was OK but just OK.

'OK but just OK' is an indication that the young employee is sufficiently engaged to comply with what is expected of him. I asked the manager if just OK was a problem, her response was telling. “Yes, I’d like to see more enthusiasm from him.” All right, now we were getting somewhere, the manager was confused. I mentioned to her that what she wanted was a personal preference not a legitimate requirement of the job. She didn’t seem to like this very much so we continued. I asked her if there was anything he did seem committed to and she responded sharply, “Well, fantasy football!” So I proceeded to ask whether she had ever looked into what he found so engaging about fantasy football? I could tell by the look on her face that she was shocked and maybe even offended by my question and her response matched her facial expression, “Why should I have to do that?”

I am a very pragmatic guy, you tell me you have a problem I begin looking for a solution, I don’t worry about who is right or wrong or what should be happening. Actually, I think this may be most manager’s problem with engagement, they approach it like a problem to be solved rather than an asset and a resource to be leveraged and understood.

My response to the manager rocked her back even further. “Look” I said, “You brought up the issue, you are apparently the one with the problem. I am looking at the situation and seeing whether we can uncover a way to get in communication with this young guy and leverage what he is fully engaged with since telling him he needs to be more committed does not seem to be getting the job done. Would you agree with that?” She then nodded her head yes. “So now”, I said, “You have an option available that wasn’t there before, you can give up your agenda and explore his interests or you can continue being right about his attitude. Which approach looks like it might have more promise?”

Honestly I don’t know how this turned out since that was the last time I saw that particular manager. Based on the conversation I’d say she stuck with her agenda, at least a little while longer.

This engagement stuff is nasty business; if you are serious you need to face the reality of getting up close and personal with the people who report to you. Are you up to the challenge? Are you ready for the level of vulnerability required?

• When faced with the need/desire to redirect an employee's focus of engagement ask yourself if you are willing to discover what's in it for them? If nothing comes immediately to mind you may want to hold off until you can get interested in 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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Last Friday night my wife and I had occasion to meet and have dinner with four people I may never see again, yet my life would be poorer had the experience not taken place. Each of the four, is a good deal younger than I am, a fact which itself was a source of inspiration since they have more years in front of them to make their contribution than I likely do. They were as a group and individually quite remarkable and what I’d call “leaders in the process of becoming.” Each, already accomplished in their own right, will likely be recognized as a leader on a broader stage sometime in the future.

I expect as I mention these folks by name they are recognizable among their existing audiences as “already leaders”, an assertion I will not dispute because each one has achieved in their chosen field and is undoubtedly well known. My thesis as regards each is that they will eventually be well recognized outside their immediate field as social as well as business leaders and it is purely a function of their engagement with their own vision that this possibility exists. They are agents for their vision.

Our hostess for the evening and the ringleader of this group was Christen Lien. An independent musician, viola is her primary instrument though she is rapidly mastering the harmonica as well. As her website offers, “Christen Lien’s unique fusion of East and West, classical and postmodern, acoustic and electronic, has created an entirely new sound that is both uncannily ancient and reassuringly contemporary.” She has also recently discovered her inner eco-activist and is preparing herself for a full frontal assault in support of the needs of the Amazon’s indigenous peoples.

Danielle Barnett, a photographer who lives in San Francisco’s Mission District, has combined her passion for photography, love of city life and the counter culture to take her into the heart of the hip hop world. Her natural passion now supports her as she serves as advocate for young aspiring hip-hop artists as they tumble their way through a business structure that would have them sign away their artistic rights without batting an eye.

When David McConville introduced himself Friday evening he said his firm specialized in Immersive Projection Design. Hello! For those of us from the “nuts and bolts” business world this expression did not register cognitively so I went with the intuitive and that turned out to be on the money. Short version, he does projector shows in domed environments. Longer and more accurate version, better a question than an explanation; how would you like to take a ride to the edge of the universe and back without leaving the room? David also sits as a member of the Board of Directors of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and through BFI he collaborates with numerous community initiatives to develop systems-oriented solutions to energy, environmental, and educational challenges.

Monica Niess is President of The Write Choice Network, a full-service social change organization that brings to bear broad expertise in resource development, strategic communication, organizational development, and social enterprise. Shorthand; if you are a not-for-profit and in need of funding these guys will find it or raise it for you. In November 2009 Monica had the great good fortune to meet up with Christen Lien in the Ecuadorian rain forest on a trip sponsored by the Pachamama Alliance. Not that Monica needed any inspiration, now she has new partners and the fun can really begin.

There can of course be events that intervene and you’ll never hear of any of these people again after this post but that is always true in this life, nothing and no one is guaranteed an outcome. However, it was a privilege to meet each of them even if briefly as they paused along their journeys to share an evening with my wife and me. By the way, none of these people needs a leader; they have their vision to guide them.

When I meet people like these four, I am certain that we know very little in the business world about how to cause leaders. How could we when we are so focused on what we want done rather than on what might be possible?

 Based on everything I have read, heard or experienced over the past twenty years I think it fair to say that what we know about leaders in the business environment starts after they either have success or have followers. This may seem obvious and like a lot of topics I bring up it raises the question, "Why are you talking about this?" Honestly, I find the field of leadership studies to be  limited by its focus on success, numbers and prescription and I think it is time to expose the shortcomings we all recognize are there in current modeling practices. How about we barbecue a few sacred cows forthwith? Let’s start with the following and you are welcome to add your own favorites:

• Addressing managers as though they are de facto leaders is irresponsible organizational behavior.
• Putting anyone through a one week "leadership intensive" and expecting "leaders" to emerge mirrors the wisdom of "spitting into the wind" and is tantamount to saying that when it comes to causing leaders for our organization doing something is better than doing nothing, and hey, who knows we might get lucky!
• Some of any organizations best leadership takes place in middle management and the people involved should not be promoted just because they are solid in the middle.

I can of course go on and so can you. The point I am pursuing here is that leadership is likely studied more effectively before the fact as an emergent phenomenon spawned by vision rather than afterwards as a behavioral pattern.

What is it like in your organization; are you searching for people with passion and imagination or just for those who produce results?

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“The Dude!”, “El Duderino”, “His Dudeness”, of course there is only one man who answers to all these titles and he is Jeffrey Lebowski, central character of the Coen brothers film classic of 1998, The Big Lebowski. This week I offer “The Dude” as one of the more unlikely yet profound mentors for those of us involved with the workplace environmental factors that contribute to employee engagement.

Sometimes the muse eludes me and sometimes she literally slaps me in the forehead. Last week was a “slap in the forehead” kind of week. Wednesday as I eagerly checked the mail I found that my copy of ‘The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies’ had finally arrived from Amazon. (You know something is up when you go to place an order for this type of publication and it is on Back Order) Then Saturday evening as my wife and I sat having dinner in a Mt. Vernon public house the restaurant was suddenly flooded by a cadre of men in blue bathrobes, shorts, flip-flops and dark glasses, and it is January in northern Washington! (The local classic film theatre had just shown The Big Lebowski and in apt homage this crowd had attended in costume) Finally, Sunday morning as I sat in services at my church of preference listening to harrowing stories of women around the world overcoming cultural oppression it was no longer possible for me to ignore the obvious signs I have been receiving. It is time for a post on authenticity* and there is no one who had a keener sense of the truly authentic than Jeffrey Lebowski aka “The Dude”.

As Victor Hugo asserted many years back, “Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” If I had wondered further whether or not this post would be timely I had only to do a quick blog search on Sunday evening on “The Dude” to be informed that ‘The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski’ will open this spring off-Broadway in NYC with an initial six week schedule. Yes, the signs favoring a focus on authenticity are many and like yellow Volkswagen Beetles, now that I am looking for them I can clearly see they are everywhere.

When he first came into our lives, “The Dude” was not well received either by critics or at the box office, and even to this day he suffers what might be considered an image problem, he is not a mainstream character. Many of us, upstanding, solid character types might have considerable difficulty admitting our identification with a man who at first exposure seems at best the classic “slacker” our parents raised us not to be. And so this prophet of our times has languished in something of a cinematic obscurity slowly gathering what is known as a cult following that now conducts an annual conclave in Louisville, Kentucky known as Lebowski Fest, currently heading into its 9^th annual renewal from austere beginnings in 2002. What stronger endorsement can there be for authenticity and efficacy than sustainability?

Jeffrey Lebowski, everything about the man serves as an outright rejection of that in us and our organizations which is not authentic. His personification may be somewhat easier to address if we consider him not literally but as an extreme expression of every employee, if they did not fear retribution for their honesty. “The Dude” eliminates the oppression of this fear by staying gainfully unemployed and simply not giving a crap. For many of us this is just too much honesty! Absent his respect “The Dude”, like many of our employees, is not above using us for his own purposes thereby perpetuating the notion that in fact the best we can expect from that relationship called employment is a sort of sad, smirking conspiracy where "I’ll use you and you’ll use me" and mediocre is what we’ll settle for, as long as we make our numbers.

If we cannot take our guidance from man who shops for milk at midnight in his bathrobe then maybe we’ll listen to legitimate types, James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II. These are the authors of ‘Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want’** (And is it such a big leap to also say further, what employees really want?) Gilmore and Pine go to great pains in their book to expose us to what “The Dude” simply lived as a matter of personal expression. “His Dudeness” stated an unequivocal rejection of the inauthentic as an outright form of violence with the memorable words “This aggression will not stand Man!” As academics and researchers, Gilmore and Pine seem compelled to verbosity and taxonomy (‘Authenticity’ is nearly 300 pages and gives us five genres of Authenticity to consider) but they do provide legitimacy to the conversation;

• Natural authenticity- raw, of-the-earth, rustic, stripped down and best of all sustainable
• Original authenticity- the first of its kind
• Exceptional authenticity- stresses uniqueness, the aesthetic appeal, not like anything else
• Referential authenticity- evokes an iconic time, person, group or place
• Influential authenticity-implies or provokes change

If your place of work does not have the appeal of one or more of these categories you can be sure neither Gilmore, Pine nor “The Dude” would be found there, at least not for very long.

* Many thanks to Dwight Garner, book critic for the New York Times. His piece on November 29th, 2009 was the original inspiration for this post.

** If you are interested in an executive summary of 'Authenticity' send me an e mail to theheart.amj@gmail.com

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"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" a remark often attributed to Peter Drucker, is one of those statements that so clearly frames a truth that among others things you wish you had been the one who said it!

These words are so rightly on the mark. Why does it seem that business leaders will to do almost anything BUT heed the reality described in Drucker’s words? The data, the data, the data… over the years the data makes an unequivocal case for the fact that ignoring the gravitational force of culture almost always brings change initiatives to their knees and smothers or slows the ones that do manage to succeed.

 In my post of December 28th I spoke to the issue of control (command culture) as a damper on engagement. Shortly after that post a friend sent me a note suggesting that it was one thing for me to talk about the concept of senior leaders giving up control to get more leadership and engagement throughout an organization and another to provide real examples of how this might all work out if tried.

OK then, let's talk about examples! In the December 09 issue of the Harvard Business Review on-line magazine an article appears that speaks right to my friend's suggestion. What could be a more on point title for the article than To Be a Better Leader, Give Up Authority ? The authors, Amar, Hentrich and Hlupic begin with what I believe is a very authentic statement, based on their research,

"Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control—establishing non-hierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company’s decisions—guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare.”

Maybe you are like me, maybe not, but I have wondered for years about the pace of the democratization of our places of work or more accurately the non-pace. We, the self-proclaimed democracy loving-est people on the planet seem to enjoy talking about democratic principles in our matters of government but when it comes to our places of work we prefer, put up with, or settle for top-down, functionally oriented, command and control type organizations. Freedom of speech in the workplace, not so much; freedom to act, not unless you run it by the boss first. I do not know a company that I have worked with over the past twenty plus years where within hours of my arrival and encouragement of communication someone hasn’t piped up with the quote of quotes, “If I said that I’d be fired!” In these very same companies, I have heard senior managers lament the lack of passion and innovation from the ranks of non-managers and never make the connection between their complaint and the web of constraints they insist on.

Good for our three guys from the HBR article above. They do provide anecdotal and factual information about two companies they have worked closely with and from their experience; they have concluded this about leadership;

       “Furthermore, we’ve found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business.”

Kudos to the authors for pointing out that this definition of leadership applies mainly to knowledge organizations. This acknowledgment lends itself to the idea that any credible definition of leadership must make accommodations for situation, circumstances, and context.

While this type of research and analysis provides credence to the idea that applications of democratic principles are legitimate and successful in a management context there is still the question of numbers. As the authors state, “…. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare.” True enough, but what about when the company is a tech giant like Cisco? Maybe this one counts for a lot?

In the not too distant past John Chambers, renowned CEO of a company with a $20+ Billion cash cushion observed that the organizational structure and culture that had gotten Cisco to its prominence would very likely not take it to where it wanted to go, among other places the leadership position in Telepresence video.

The move by Chambers to turn over operational control of Cisco to a community of internal leaders using a structure of commitments to mutual success and committees has not necessarily drawn cheers from all quarters (20% of senior leadership has exited since this transition began) but it has drawn a lot of attention and much of it from various media concerns. A November, 2008 article by Ellen McGirt in Fast Company, 'How Cisco's CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist' provides a very comprehensive view of the makeover John Chambers seems to have in mind. The article title, using the term "Socialist" is likely a bit inflammatory. However, given the limited experience we have in America of using any participatory management approach I am not surprised that only terms with which we are immediately familiar would be used to describe something we do not know a great deal about.

What I do know is that the Fast Company article continues to draw comment, as recently as January 11, 2010. I find this unusual, there is something very psychologically provocative going on at Cisco. This change is obviously about a lot more than just economics. I also know from perusing various blog sites and reading the business pundits that the jury is still out on whether John Chambers is going to eventually be viewed as this generations Jack Welch. Has Cisco, under the direction of John Chambers found a way to not only keep culture from eating strategy for breakfast but maybe now serve its realization? At the time the article appeared in Fast Company Cisco stock was trading at just over $17/share, last Friday it closed at just over $24. In our copy cat business culture you can bet that if this trend continues John Chambers will have plenty of imitators.

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"Creating a great place to work is one of the best things a company can do for its bottom line. It’s no accident that the organizations consistently identified as winners also happen to be some of the best places on earth to work.  This occurs not as an afterthought, but as a vital, premeditated element of business strategy."

        Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden, The Contented Cows Partners

I have been associated with Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden since early 2000, just about the time they self-published their first book 'Contented Cows Give Better Milk.' Since that time Bill and Richard have remained among the vanguard of voices providing fact based reasoning for why it is a sound business practice to take good care to see that employees have an environment to work in that fosters productivity.; appreciation, training, tools and technology etc. For them and for me it isn't simply a matter of values,it isn't just "nice to be nice to the nice", this is dog doo practical stuff and the facts back it up.

As practical but perhaps not as easy to swallow is the notion that leaders/managers must be willing to consider themselves among the environmental factors that affect overall levels of engagement. Much is made of the idea that customers will vote with their feet, highly mobile employees, usually the most highly prized, will do the same thing but maybe faster when faced with disengaged managers.

When it comes to answering the question of whether I am pro-management or pro-employee my answer is always "Yes!" If I am anti anything, I am anti-stupid where by stupid I mean to distinguish thoughtless action, driven by force of habit and justified in some fashion by past success or privilege of position. So no, in case you are wondering, I do not mean to imply or assert that employee engagement is the sole responsibility of leadership or management, as you prefer. Engagement, what it takes to be sufficiently involved to be highly productive is everyone's responsibility. However, it falls to leaders to recognize, i.e., not be stupid about the fundamental condition in the workplace. There is at worst an imbalance of power in the workplace and at best a perceived imbalance of power. While I would be quick to say to an employee that their engagement is first and foremost their responsibility I would also hurriedly add that perception is fundamentally, in the absence of trans-formative thinking, reality, and leaders who ignore this truth are, for lack of a better phrase, acting stupidly. Oh yes, and as a manager, since your value is added through the actions of those reporting to you...

Is there evidence for this assertion, for I am certainly making one here? Of course there is, you do not ask a question like this unless you already know the answer! Gary Hamel, in a recent posting to his blog in the Wall Street Journal blog “Management’s Dirty Little Secret” cites the recently published Global Workforce Survey from Towers Perrin showing that of the 90,000 people surveyed 21% reported that they are truly engaged with their work! If I am not mistaken this number is lower than that initially reported in the early Gallup surveys similar in nature some years back.

Hamel chides managers in a more polite way than I do. He suggests that managers are heedless of the issue of engagement where I say stupid about. OK, potato/pototo, tomato/tomoto, he has better  street cred than I do, let’s go with heedless for now. Net, net, after Hamel dismisses the possibility that the heedlessness might result from 1) Ignorance-not realizing that employees are emotionally disconnected. (He uses the Dilbert strip as essentially exhibit “A” for the Prosecution in this instance.) He then goes on to check off 2) Impotence- meaning mindless, uninspiring work as a possible source of the disengagement (surprisingly 86% of those participating in the Towers Perrin survey indicated that they loved or liked their work) and finally he arrives at 3) Indifference – managers see engagement as a nice-to-have but not financially important. In his words,

“…if we’re going to improve engagement, we have to start by admitting that the real problem isn’t irksome, monotonous work, but stony-hearted, spirit-deflating managers.”

While he does not say this, I will; by stony hearted, spirit-deflating managers he means at all levels and most importantly, the top where the privileges provide the greatest disconnect between head and heart.

Hamel, like Drucker in his later years, has clearly made a connection that makes him dangerous to the management establishment. He is “the man” when it comes to the “X’s and O’s” of business so he cannot be waved off. In addition, he has come to understand that while the applications in business may be economic, the operating system is social.

As we roll along here, in future postings we will tackle just what an individual manager can do about this sad state we all find ourselves in, among other things.

Thank you for your attention.

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