Stuart Burke died last Friday in Rochester, New York at around 12:30AM after a prolonged struggle with cancer. As best I can tell his life ended peacefully and without pain thanks to the wonderful people in the hospice where he spent his last three days. He died in the presence of his two sisters and his wife, Janice, who held him close until the very end and even beyond. Stuart’s passing came as no great surprise. There had been hope, of course, that the regimen of chemotherapy treatments would turn the tide but in our heart of hearts those of us with any experience knew what to expect, after the conclusive diagnosis it was just a matter of when.

Stuart is one of my step-husbands; I have two, having been married now three times to three remarkable women. Stuart’s wife Janice was my second wife; we were married for over 20 years. We are all very close, my step-husbands and their wives, me, my wife and all the other relatives. It’s just a different way to develop an extended family and it works for us.

What took place in the final days before Stuart left us and in the immediate aftermath is worth noting. Among other things, I believe it provides an insight into engagement as a human phenomenon that is not well understood or even recognized. That element I am referring to here is CHOICE.

A while back, maybe eight years ago, in one of my older versions of a Webster’s, I found a definition of engagement that has become a standard for me in my work.

• Engagement: the condition of being associated with any activity as a matter of choice.

Where I find power in this definition is in the perspective it provides; from there the level of engagement is always a function of the engager as much or more than the surrounding events or environment.

Sunday morning January 8^th: As I am preparing for my trip from the San Juan Islands in Washington State to Rochester the following day, I check my email and see a notice from CaringBridge.org that informs us all that Stuart’s condition has declined rapidly and he will be moving to a hospice facility on Monday or Tuesday. (Pam, our close friend of 30 years has CHOSEN spontaneously taken over the notifications so Janice can focus all her attention on Stuart.)  It is apparent to me then that I will be directly involved somehow in Stuart’s final days. I have a role to play and am just not yet clear of the expectations.

• I can CHOOSE what is in front of me or RESIST, I cannot change what is happening.

I continue my preparations, originally planned around a two day client workshop they will now include the last days of Stuart’s life.

Sunday afternoon January 8^th: I receive a phone call from my youngest son Jake; he is 24 and lives in Brooklyn. He too has been informed of Stuart’s decline. He is going to take off work for a couple of days, head home, and do what he can for his mother. He asks if I can help with a train ticket to Rochester since he has no internet service yet in his new apartment and cannot make the reservation for the following morning. I CHOOSE to accept his request. I look up the schedules and give him the options, we agree on the best time and I complete the ticket purchase on line.

Sunday evening January 8^th: It occurs to me that I have not notified Janice that I will be in town and I know it will make a difference to her in some way. When I call Stuart and Janice’s number, a voice I immediately recognize answers. It is Betsy and we have not spoken in about ten years. Betsy lives in Orinda, CA and is in the area coincidently to visit her elderly father in Buffalo. She has read the Caring Bridge notification as well and CHOSEN to drive to Rochester to see how she can help. She is now managing the incoming phone calls so Janice can get some sleep.  She will pick Jake up at the train the following day before heading back to Buffalo on Tuesday morning.

Monday January 9^th: I fly to Rochester. When I land, I find an email has arrived from Janice. She is glad I am going to be in town at this important time. She also let’s me know that Jake was planning to gather his furniture while in Rochester, rent a truck and drive it all to Brooklyn when he leaves. Upon hearing this I CHOOSE my role and it is to work with Jake, modify my plans and travel back home from New York City after driving with him to Brooklyn.

I also receive an email from my work partner Laurie telling me that her daughter’s water has broken and she is going into labor with her first child two weeks early. It looks like a C-section is in the offing, Laurie has made a CHOICE and is already on her way to New York City to be with her daughter. It now seems I’ll be doing the workshop by myself, having never led this one before. I make a CHOICE, this can all work and I’ll need to do some intense preparation with Laurie over the phone.  

Tuesday January 10^th: I have a buffer day before the workshop begins, (Lynn, another friend of twenty years calls and says she has heard I am in town and wants me to know that she and her partner Barb, another long time friend would welcome me if I was looking for a place for dinner that evening. She and Barb and a group of others have been running meals daily to Janice and Stuart for the past two weeks. I CHOOSE to decline the offer but let her know that it means a lot). Laurie calls in the afternoon and tells me the baby has arrived in the middle of the night, Mom and baby are doing well and she has decided the work we are doing is too important to linger in NYC. She and her husband have CHOSEN to make the seven hour drive home that night, following a similar drive the night before.

I finish a dinner meeting that evening with a special client/friend and CHOOSE to drive to Janice’s home to see Jake. He is so sick he cannot get off the couch. I suspect a strong emotional response to seeing his step-father in an extremely emaciated condition. Janice later confirms that she shares my suspicion. He’ll be fine in time.

Wednesday January 11^th: Laurie and I successfully conduct the first workshop with our new client. She is brilliant and acknowledges around 2PM that she is fading. I CHOOSE to lead the last three hours of the workshop.

That evening I drop by to see Jake after having dinner with one of my former partners. He tells me that Lynn and Barb CHOSE to come by and took him out to dinner. He was grateful and feeling better.

Thursday January 12^th: The previous day Laurie and I had been notified by our client/sponsor that his mother was in intensive care and he would not attend the morning of second day of our workshop. We had planned to meet with him after the session to look forward to plan the balance of the process. We CHOSE to tell him to let go of the workshop, do what was needed for his mother and we’d catch up this week. That’s what he CHOSE. We have a call set with him for Wednesday afternoon.

After the workshop and some follow up debriefing with Laurie, I head over to help Jake move furniture in preparation for an early morning Friday departure. When I arrived, it was obvious that the house had been thoroughly cleaned. Jake said that Lynn and a couple of other friends had CHOSEN to deal with the house and the aftermath of Stuart’s declining health that had piled up for several weeks.

We packed and went off to dinner. We invited our friend Keating who was arriving back in town from a week of work in Arlington, VA. She CHOSE to accept; she arrived at 8PM and drove from the airport to meet us at a restaurant. Jake had always been a favorite of hers and she hadn’t seen him in over a year. We had a great time; Jake started to unwind a bit by the time we were done.

Friday January 13^th: Upon awaking it was immediately apparent that the expected 2-4 inches of new snow would be much more. I had previously planned to meet Jake at the airport and drop off my rental car. We proceeded with that part of the plan but as the snow continued to fall, I could see that driving to Brooklyn with a truckload of furniture was out of the question. As I waited for, Jake I CHOSE to create a new plan, send Jake back to New York by train so he could work Saturday as was expected and to wait until Saturday morning and to drive the truck myself to Brooklyn. He CHOSE immediately, I didn’t have to ask him twice, he saw the same thing I did and was grateful for the opportunity to return to New York on Friday.

Saturday January 14^th: I drove the truck to Brooklyn and arrived without incident. We unloaded the truck and we CHOSE to order pizza delivered.I also insisted on wings!

Sunday January 15^th: Jake needed to be at work so I walked with him to his subway station. I told him I would get a cab to La Guardia from there. He CHOSE to leave me standing on the corner but not without making me promise to send him a text when I arrived safely at the airport, which I later did.

In retrospect it was a peaceful week, blessedly peaceful. It had its moments but what day, week or month doesn’t? Lot of opportunities to CHOSE or RESIST and little chance of changing anything that was happening; CHOICES made by myself and others, many not mentioned here, to do what was needed when it was needed.

We have Stuart to thank for giving us most of these opportunities. Laurie's new granddaughter gets the rest of the credit  Nice gifts I’d say. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 “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.   

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 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.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 “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? 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 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?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (1)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

                                            “A long journey requires lots of mango.”

  Dan and Chip Heath, ‘Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard’

How many of us have heard these questions:                                           

• "Could you do that training in one day instead of two?"
• "I thought these people had been trained?"
• "Can we get by pushing that training off to the next budget cycle?"
• "Why would I take time to go to an outside development session?"
• "You’re kidding; you think I need a coach? My results are great!"

Have we been discouraged by the attitudes behind these questions? Yes! Will there ever come a day when the rhetoric about employees being valuable assets of any company is matched by the actions when a quarterly objective is in doubt? Maybe! Training budgets have long been among the first things to get sacrificed when the going gets tough. We all know that the mindset enforced by the language of accounting (employees as expense on the balance sheet) continues to hold sway over the reality of employees as assets. For now that is. You can have something to do with how long this view holds its power.

I know a CFO who flatly states that he hates to spend money on anything. I have asked him how he feels about investment. “Investment, why I love investing, it is one of my favorite things to do”, he says. “Nothing makes me happier than seeing an investment grow.” When I follow that question up with another about how he feels about investing in employee development he gets a sour face and says “It’s not the same thing! Employees are an expense of the business.” But I am his coach and he thinks that it is going well.

There is at least one company I know that annually accepts awards because of the percentage of the annual budget that is committed to employee training. If you back out the amount the company spends on new hire training because of high turnover in certain positions and just focused on employee development the same company would be far from award winning. However, the very same company is currently searching for a director of leadership development.

Let me clearly state my own vision: Every employee has the potential to be developed into a more valuable contributor than they are today. I firmly believe that it makes sense to think that any employee’s last day on the job should their most valuable whether they have been with a company one year, ten or even twenty. This is an uncommon view that I have been working to make common for twenty five years.

Today I am more excited about the future of employee development than ever. The very fact of the constant change all our organizations now face gives us the opportunity to realize the fullest value of every employee in ways that the non-global economy never did.

This realization will require a shift in thinking by those of us in leadership positions - especially positions where decisions are made about how best to invest our company’s money.

When we

• ask our trainers to do “hurry up” training,  
• we relate to development like it is something that gets “done” rather than something that gets started and sustained,  
• relate to coaching like a remedial activity,  
• think development is another word for training,
• act as though development is something others might need but exclude ourselves from the need for periodic revitalization,
• or when we decide that training and development budgets can be slashed without consequence,

we are making it clear to our employees that there is still a ways to go before we authentically act like they are the company’s greatest asset. But it is a process we are involved with, one that requires patience and reinforcement when progress is in evidence.

The words in the opening quote to this post refer to a process of animal training described by the authors of “Switch…’. Mango is the treat used by trainers of monkeys learning to ride skateboards. The Heaths are making the point that reinforcement plays a big part in bringing about the learning of complex skills. They could have as easily said “A long journey requires lots of patience” and the quote would have been equally apt but not as intriguing perhaps! Their point, and the point here as well, is that there will be no moment when your company finally recognizes employees as its most valuable asset and begins to habitually invest in development as if this were so. There is a process and those who lead it will need to be persistent and bring along lots of mango.

Where in your company do you see signs that senior managers, especially those responsible for resource allocations, are inclined more towards employee development now than in the past?

Have you told them that you appreciate what they are doing?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

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?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

Let’s say you are a senior project coordinator for Apple in Cupertino,CA and you’re looking for that next opportunity for yourself. Isn’t the obvious choice to open a gourmet cupcake store in Bellingham, WA. ? OK, cupcakes might not be the first possibility you come up with and it wasn’t for Liz Kovacs either, she did make a few stops in between. But..Apple was where she started as a grown up and where has she ended up? With a gourmet cupcake store, Icing on the Cake in Bellingham, WA.     

  What I found when I entered Liz’s store at 314 Champion Street was an experience that is about a lot more than cupcakes. It feels like you are walking into a high end jewelry retailer there in the downtown Arts District. If you ask her Liz will tell you that for her it is about a lot more as well, it is about the qualities of the experience when you are a customer of ‘Icing on the Cake’, among them are the baking and presenting of a cupcake that passes the ultimate test. As it turns out she designed the ultimate test herself but when she shared it made sense to me. “You have to try the cupcakes out on kids, kids will always eat the frosting but if they eat the cake, that’s a great cupcake!” The kids I saw in the store while I was there ate every last bite. Her cupcakes were clearly passing what seemed to me to be a pretty rigorous quality test.

But as Liz said, ‘Icing on the Cake’ and the products offered there are about a lot more than just the cake in the cupcake. When she told me that since she was 5 years old she has been obsessed with out-baking the cake on the Duncan Hines box I knew this endeavor involved passion. You know which cake she is talking about too, the white cake with the gooey vanilla frosting! (Liz loved that look but thinks they probably cheated on the frosting and anyway, she is not about to serve anything that starts in a box.)

But this cupcake business is also about artistry and craftsmanship. When Liz made the commitment to bake as a profession she already knew she was creative.  Baking was an avenue for the expression of her creativity. She also recognized that being creative was not enough, she needed to be skilled as well so she took the initiative to address her skill gap and enrolled in and completed the Wilton Cake Decorating Program at the Wilton School near Chicago. If you don’t know about Wilton you should take a look, pretty amazing stuff!

Passion, Creativity, Initiative , unleashing these qualities in our places of work is the challenge that people like Gary Hamel say lies in front of all organizations. And here is Liz Kovacs, without any management support exercising passion, creativity and initiative like there is no tomorrow. What gives? How do we differentiate between people like Liz Kovacs, the wonderful playful crew at Pike Place Fish Market , and the place where you work?

I write, read and think a lot about engagement. What I read often disappoints me in that it seems to be more of the old “carrot or stick” approach. Employers and managers, despite well developed definitions of employee engagement, still continue to think in terms like Hamel described in The ‘Future Of Management’.

“How do we (meaning management) get more (meaning units of production per hour) out of our people (meaning the individuals who are obliged to follow our orders)?”

                     The operative question for 20^th century managers. Gary Hamel

And we been repeatedly told, by those who reportedly measure such things, that the current state of engagement, of the American work force at least, is dismal, apparently only about 27% of workers report being fully engaged. In my view there are a lot of maybes when it comes to engagement and there will continue to be until we begin to explore the degree to which Choice and Embracing Interdependence factor into this equation.

What gets young men in the prime of their lives to get to bed early every night to participate in a 6AM set up routine that is exactly the same day after day seven days a week? Pull the fish out of the freezer, shovel the ice, stack the fish, and sell the fish; Choice, and a group of co-workers who are counting on them and will hold them to account. They choose this experience, this work and these co-workers each day as though it was their first on the job.

So what does Choice have to do with Liz Kovacs and cupcakes? It is the backdrop against which her whole business takes place. And let’s face it, her routine is pretty much the same every day, even she’ll tell you that. On more than one occasion she has been approached by people who are inspired by her product, at least the idea of it. When she describes to them the actual process behind all the pretty jewels in the case out front, which she calls high production baking, they become almost immediately disenchanted.

And Embracing Interdependence? I would hope it would be obvious that none of us really make it alone in this world but in case the point needs to be made you can take a look at this piece about Liz and her cupcakes from the Bellingham Business Journal back in October of last year. She’s the first to tell you she could not being doing this alone.

 “Her daughters, Emily and Ona, help with baking, decorating and cleaning. Emily also operates the business's booth at the Bellingham Farmers Market...

Kovacs' husband, Steve, has also been instrumental. He helped build her first commercial kitchen, which she used for a small baking business she started in 1998. He was also her guinea pig for the six months she spent refining her recipes."He's a retired taste tester now," Kovacs said

Her brother, Steve Sieler, an independent art director in Santa Cruz, does all the marketing for the business, he designed the logo as well as the retail space.."

 Ultimately Liz is a business person, her focus is the customer experience, as you can readily tell when you spend time with her as I did. Those years at Apple served her well. She is a business person operating a gourmet bakery not a baker operating a business so as she sat in front of me talking she was also working on the business. As we talked she was taking pieces of silverware fresh from the dishwasher and wiping the water spots off with a towel. She does it as a matter of Choice because everything about ‘Icing on the Cake’ is done like it matters. 

    - So where is "what matters" not being attended to in your area?

   - Can you tell if it Choice or Need that keeps your people coming back?

   - Have you fully Embraced the Interdependence and do you make

     sure your supporters experience appreciation?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

The Managers’ Forum

The photo that appears at right is hopefully an iconic image for most of you, *Tom Cruise as he portrays the principle-driven sports agent, Jerry Maguire, (from the movie by the same name) as he is imploring his client, football wide receiver Rod Tidwell to, in his words, "Help me help you!”

 *(Tom personally autographed this shot for me! The only thing better would be his autograph on the image below of Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder. But...you can't always get what you want!)

The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, Spain, Mexico, China, Colombia, The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, India, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong and Romania…and these are the countries I am aware of.

Being fairly new to the blogging world (less than a year) I am gratified that the pieces posted each week have found such a wide following in such a short period of time. When I see where the readers live and work, I am deeply touched by the gift the internet provides us all. What offers a greater possibility is to find a way to leverage the commonality of interest we all share. How can future posts be more relevant and especially relevant to those of you who are mid-level managers?

I have worked for most of my career to distinguish the possibility that mid-level management is a legitimate career destination, not a career cul-de-sac that is often made the butt of jokes.

Managing in the middle requires a unique set of talents and skills. In professional sports, nobody seems surprised that coaches very infrequently become general managers and general managers infrequently have coaching experience. These are two very different talent/skill sets and it is time we brought this awareness to business in general rather than perpetuate the caste system we have tolerated for so long.

The challenges in the middle almost always involve mastering the complexity of a) translating the business strategy into actions while b) getting the work done and c) developing talent for the future. When it is done well middle management is a primary source of employee engagement and retention. Done poorly it often leads to the exit of assets that a company can ill afford to lose.

Those who wind up in senior positions often pass through the mid-levels of management in ritualistic fashion. If we are fortunate, they don’t stay any longer than necessary as their natural strengths are more strategic than operational. Left in place too long in the middle these “Hi Po’s” can do more damage than good as they do not function well in environments calling for putting the interests of others ahead of their own. This is said not in a derisive manner towards senior management but rather to caste a critical eye towards systems that label employees “Hi Po’s” based strictly on their suitability for senior level positions. We are all “Hi Po” for something and it’s not the same for everyone….this is my way of letting those of you currently managing in the middle know that you are both known and appreciated.

As someone whose career has been spent mainly developing mid-level managers, I am asking to know what  you need to hear more about?

Let me know what I can address in the coming weeks and months that would make a difference for you. Help me help you!

Thank you for your attention.  

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

 Today’s headline is intended to provoke you to thought as well as action. Like anything that gets too familiar I fear that there has been a loss of the power in our national/international conversations around employee engagement.

(Yes, that's me in the picture, as I see myself!)

So why would I be concerned? After all, we now have an Employee Engagement Network with over 2600 members internationally. Three years ago this on-line community did not exist. For those who might consider themselves “employee engagement professionals” this news would seem to be immediately exciting. But I wonder?

Is it possible that many of us, far more even than are represented by this rush to join The Employee Engagement Network are much more enamored of our own involvement in the subject of employee engagement then we are at being effective at it, i.e., are we making any difference?

• Who, other than companies selling consulting services is offering to produce employee engagement surveys?
• When Employee Engagement conferences are convened is the audience the choir being preached to?
• How involved are “C” level people in your organization with the topic of employee engagement?
• Have measures of Employee Engagement been adopted by senior management as key leading indicators for your business and the likelihood of its future success?

Yes, I know, I am sounding like a party pooper and my blog title is... The Heart of Engagement. You might think I’d be more chipper !

 Honestly, much of my skepticism at the moment is feigned since I do think a lot of good work is being done by many thousands of committed professional. However, when I see an article like this one, “Employee engagement needs to be high on the agenda when resources are limited” published this month by HR Magazine in the UK I am reminded that it is still much too soon to be patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. If this type of article (just about as basic as you can get) is being published in June of 2010 in a publication of this stature then we are still at the very beginning of the transformation of our places of work.

There is no question in my mind that the transformation of the workplace cannot be left to “the professionals” alone. We need a revolution sooner rather than later. This is an ‘all hands on deck’ scenario and so I have a challenge for each of you reading this week.

Take a look at this link: “The surprising truth about what motivates us”...now

• Share the connected video with your work group. It is about 11 minutes long. Surely you can spare 11 minutes to make a difference in your work group! Well maybe a bit more than 11 minutes, leave room for at least a half hour dialogue after you watch the video. Observe and listen to how your co-workers respond. I don’t think you’ll be surprised, maybe moved by the depth of their passion, including their skepticism. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from your immediate group take the video to the next level of management in your organization. Don’t just email it to them, ask for an audience and watch the video together, stick around for a 20 to 30 minute dialogue. What action are they inspired to take?
• If you get the kind of response I expect from the next level of management and you are emboldened by your experience see if you can get a 30 minute meeting with a senior level manager with the promise to share something that has the potential to effect the bottom line for years to come.

If you get this far I think you'll know what to do next…good luck and let me know how it goes! 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

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?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (3)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

“Disengagement happens, and poor management isn't always the cause. The fact is that being an inspirational leader and an excellent coach aren't always enough.”

Nick Tasler, Business Week, 03/26/2010

‘Help Your Best People Do a Better Job'

 When it comes to a lot of things, technology,fashion, new books or movies, I must admit to being the "100th Monkey" of urban legend fame. You know me, I'm the guy who finally buys the 3.0 version of the I-Phone then runs around the office showing everyone what it can do like he just invented fire! Like for instance, I just discovered while creating this piece that you can edit a JPEG file. Did you know that was possible? Cool stuff!

With most things that would describe me, but not with Job Crafting, no Sireee, with this relatively new concept I was waaaay ahead of the curve.

You see the guy in the picture? That might have been me back in 1976, without the desktop and corn plant of course. ( I think that’s corn!) Sitting in my office in the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 50 company on any afternoon, except Friday, when it was slower! How did we deal with boredom on the job back then with no internet to surf, no texting etc.? I really don’t know about anyone else but I can tell you that one advantage of working in a large building in the center of San Francisco was that you could get lost for hours at a time and the window shopping was terrific. Sad I know, but true I swear.

I didn’t do well with the window shopping for all that long, maybe a couple of months and then I started to make regular trips down the hall to see if my manager had anything with a deadline that he wanted to hand off. When that didn’t work I’d stop in my co-workers offices and ask if they needed any help with anything. Both these tactics were an improvement on the window shopping routine but neither was really a sustainable solution. The big problem I was facing then was that we simply had too many people for the amount of work that needed to be done. What can I say other than to remind you that this was before the globalized economy and all the ensuing competition.

When after two years in the head office my manager made this sideways offer to me; “You wouldn’t want to transfer to Mississippi would you?” I snapped it up. Back in the plant environment it wasn’t like there was an overwhelming amount of work to be done either but I could cross functional lines more easily and there were always operations managers with cool analytical or people problems that they were more than happy to have me dive into. I was Job Craftin baby, and it wasn’t even 1980!

When I started my own organizational development company a few years later I remembered the pain of the experience of having every one of my managers happy with my performance and being bored beyond words. As we built the organization we made a practice of letting people involve themselves in what interested them, as long as they had their assignments covered. We only had two rules regarding working in the company. If you needed to be managed we probably didn’t need you and if you were not entirely happy doing the job you had been assigned you should either get busy and figure out what we were doing you did enjoy or leave and find something suited your interests. We did not want anyone there because they needed a job and for sure I wasn’t about to be the enabler of someone wasting even a day of their life just to pay the bills.

We never got to be more than a fifteen person company but over the 20+ years we had the business we had four employees join us as office administrators, get interested in our consulting practice, train themselves up on the job and eventually become billable consultants, no college degrees, just a big bucket of "I wanna!" Two of these folks now have their own practices, one works as the business manager in her husband’s medical practice and the other has gone back to office administration but with a strong focus on customer service and account management. They all remain close associates. Somewhere in their experience with us these people really got the message that their satisfaction was their responsibility and we meant to partner with them as long as what they were doing was consistent with the needs of the business.

I am pretty sure we had an advantage over many workplaces because I have always been willing to use my company for experimental purposes and wouldn’t ask any client to try out something we had not tested on ourselves. But I think it is also a matter of values and having your practices match your words. Something like, we believed our employees really were our most important asset so we acted like it!

In doing research for this post I ran across a couple of very solid sources you may want to tap yourself. McBassi & Company ran a short piece in their blog  on April 14 (Mike Powers) which hooked me up to Nick Tasler’s piece in Bloomberg/Businessweek (see above) which introduced me to Amy Wrzesniewski and what she has been studying on "job crafting" for more than a decade. Nick’s article looks at the opportunity of “Job Crafting” from the manager’s perspective and offers some tips on trying this out especially if you are concerned about keeping your best people engaged. Another source worth looking at ‘Hate Your Job? Here’s How to Reshape It” authored by Jeremy Caplan appeared in Time last December. Amy W. gets kudos here again and this time the issue gets examined from the employee perspective.

I guess this 'Job Crafting' thing is really heating up huh? Where were all these guys back in 1976 when I was washing the mud off my sweet potato?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

"Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won."

                                        Dr. Suess

Turn back the clock to an April afternoon in Michigan in the spring of 1965. A young man leaves the back door of the high school gymnasium headed for baseball practice. Cleats slung over his shoulder, mitt under his arm, he is hailed by members of the track team and challenged to a footrace in the school parking lot. The young man has developed something of a reputation for being fleet of foot, at least on the baseball field, regularly stealing two and three bases a game. His colleagues on the track team want to see if he can translate his speed on the bases to speed on the track.

The runners gather at a line on the asphalt lot measured 100 yards from a finish near the baseball diamond. The young man was not prepared for this race; he wears low cut canvas sneakers and long pants. His challengers from the track team are dressed for their practice in shorts and running shoes. At the sound of the starter they are off and 10.2 seconds later the young baseball player crosses the finish line several yards ahead of the members of the track team.

The track coach who has been watching the proceedings approaches the baseballer and asks him about joining the track squad. Flattered, the young man expresses interest provided that he can also remain on the baseball team, his first love. In response the coach says that the young man will have to choose between the two sports and points out that he could likely be very successful as a sprinter for the track squad. The young man thanks the coach for the offer but chooses to remain with the baseball team. Later that spring at the all-city track meet the 100-yard dash is won with a time of 10.0, two tenths of a second faster than the young baseball player had run in sneakers and long pants with no warm up that April afternoon.

Fast forward to early 2009, the former young baseball player, now an experienced OD consultant leads a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary initiative on behalf of a client interested in generating innovative thinking and solutions in some critical customer facing areas. Players in this initiative are offered the opportunity to work on one of five suggested projects where major improvements are necessary and desired within a twelve- month period. Each employee involved, chosen because they were identified as “high potential”, is allowed to self-select to work on a project where they feel their talents will be put to good use. These are real projects with real needs and real dollars (in the multi-millions) and real customer relationships at stake.

When the initiative nears completion, four of the five projects have shown solid progress. The fifth project team, working on the most entrenched and critical customer servicing processes, presents a set of ideas for segmenting and servicing customers that stands to revolutionize not only the client’s business model but the industry model as well. Key contributions to this revolutionary set of ideas have come from diverse and unanticipated sources. The project team leader is a woman with less than five years experience in this 40-year-old company. Her most valuable collaborators have been a senior Human Resource analyst who was virtually unknown outside of HR when this initiative began and a finance director who had no experience in the customer facing areas of the business in his fifteen-year career with the client company. Prior to this initiative the only one of these three people who would have been invited to participate on this project was the woman team leader and she would have been given a secondary role because of her limited experience.

The connection between these two stories is of course the baseball player turned OD consultant (me) who never forgot what could have been that spring of 1965 if a different model had been in place. What if the track coach had focused attention on making use of the best available talent, regardless of the source?

Today’s organizations might not be as strapped for talent as they might imagine. Quite possibly their mental models for what it takes to contribute are the true limit to what they are experiencing when it comes to innovative thinking.

• Where is your organization trapped by its adherence to a tradition of finding solutions to current problems from among the available functional knowledge and experience that created them?
• What would it take to allow people with talent, passion, initiative and creativity to become involved regardless of current assignments or functional history?   

ps  If you are one of those employees looking to get your “light out from under the bushel” like to ones described at my client above, take a look at what Paul Herbert has to say over at Fistful of Talent. Check out Paul’s March 2, 2010 post about your responsibility in the matter.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

I was not planning on another post spotlighting the Pike Place Fish Market anytime soon, or for that matter ever again, until last week when I saw the video ‘FISH!’ for the very first time. To put it mildly I was horrified. Never mind that the production value of the video leaves a lot to be desired, the message in the film was what got my blood stirring. Unfortunately, I can now also see why ‘FISH!” is the #1 selling training video of all time.

Having had the opportunity to see first hand what goes on behind the scenes at the market, learning how the crew manages and has managed to create enthusiasm and joy while tossing fish for twenty-three years, the thought that the “philosophy” has been boiled down to four catch phrases seems unfortunately typical of a nation of training companies who want to give you “The Five Best Ways to This” or the “Seven Things you Must do Whenever.” In short, we are suckers for an appeal suggesting that radical change is easy and methodical, something anyone can learn.

So here they are, according to ‘FISH!’, the principles which took a nearly failing business from absolute obscurity to world fame in a little over 12 years.

• Play
• Make Their Day
• Be present
• Choose Your Attitude

Oh yes, and don’t forget to throw the fish, the little stuffed fish. Yes folks, it is really that simple. Yikes!

Please, could anyone have come up with a system that is more paternalistic and less sustainable than what is suggested in the ‘FISH!’ video? Actually, if I had to say what I thought the video was designed to do it would be to make you feel bad about your business but know that the answers were just a few dollars away.

Certainly the film is inspiring, it also tells you nothing about the process that resulted in what you are witnessing when you watch the fishmongers at work, either on film or in person. What it does tell you is how someone described what they were seeing as they watched the fishmongers at work. Much like a spectator who watches a sporting event the video collapses the distinction between what is actually going on in the market and what it looks like is going on. Maybe you have listened to one of those radio “call in shows” where the fan/caller refers to their favorite team’s performance over the weekend using the pronoun “we”. When you hear these calls you must immediately think the caller is delusional, they cannot tell the difference between themselves watching the game and the players who played it. But you see, that is exactly why ‘FISH’ has such appeal, the producers are passing off their interpretation as fact and it is compelling because it touches very deeply into that area of our psyche where we

• Yearn for significance in our work
• Are drawn to a purpose larger than ourselves
• Aspire to belong to something that we have helped create

Unfortunately, the program as it is pitched also appeals to one of our most base instincts and that is the possibility of achieving something remarkable for little or no risk or effort.

What could be easier to sell, especially to control oriented employers desperate for solutions, than the idea that by putting your employees through a few training sessions, adopting a few simple concepts and investing in some trinkets, certificates and stuffed fish you could transform your organization and have it perform like what you see taking place at The Pike Place Fish Market. ‘FISH!’ appeals directly to “lottery mentality”, for just a small investment you can become RICH!

Since the fall of 2008 no less than three bestselling books have come out attempting to account for the principles of world-class individual success,

• Geoff Colvin’s ‘Talent is Overrated: What Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else’ ,
• Daniel Coyle’s ‘The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How
• Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers: The Story of Success

Of these, Gladwell’s book, currently the best selling of all three is probably the most authentic in that it accounts for luck, special circumstances and privilege as factors contributing to success in many cases. None of these publications, anymore than ‘FISH’ accounts for everything that factors in when pursuing exceptional performance. However, all three books point unequivocally to the need to spend literally hours in preparation and practice to turn even exceptional talent into stand out skill and consistent performance.

This for me was one among several things that were missing in ‘FISH.’ What you cannot see in the film and what is no doubt not sexy, maybe even scary, is the hours of work the fishmongers put in before and after the market is open to insure that when the show goes on it is picture perfect. When I sat in on the PPFM staff meeting a few weeks back I commented to the owner John Yokoyama that his group was the highest functioning that I had seen in my twenty-two years of consulting. John remarked with a smile that it was probably because I had not been at it long enough, he and his staff had been pursuing their World Famous vision for twenty three years! In addition to set up and take down on a daily basis without fail the PPFM staff meets as a whole every two weeks with their consultant for two to three hours to clear the air and renew their commitment to their vision and each other. This is not life on Wii™ or Guitar Hero™.  Neither is this PPFM according to ‘FISH!’

I am not saying that ‘FISH!’ and the process it promotes are entirely without merit, I am sure some good comes from the training. I am also sure that when I go to Chinese restaurants, the ones with the pictures of the food in the menu, if they bring me a picture of food on a plate, that wasn’t really what I had in mind.

What would you be willing to give up for performance like they have at The Pike Place Fish Market?

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (3)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

When I created The Heart of Engagement, I was looking for a metaphor to express my passion for distinguishing factors that contribute to establishing intentionally engaging work environments. From the very start, I have assumed that there is no real “heart” of engagement, I thought of the title mainly as a way to designate a direction for an inquiry, not necessarily a destination. Recently I had an experience that has made me reconsider my own assumption; maybe there really is a heart! It happened in of all places the Tai Tung Chinese Restaurant on King Street in Seattle. I wish you could have been there!

Last Thursday evening at the invitation of my friend and colleague Jim Bergquist I attended a staff meeting for everyone who works at his most well known client, the Pike Place Fish Market, a group of around twenty. The market is located in Seattle, though I am sure that fact hardly needs mentioning since it is after all “World Famous.” Jim , who has been consulting with the market’s owner, John Yokoyama, as well as the rest of the staff since 1986 had met with me over lunch that day and happened to mention that I’d be welcome to attend and I jumped at the opportunity. {Certainly hundreds of thousands of people have watched the fishmongers toss the fish over the past twenty years but I imagine the number of outsiders who have sat in on a staff meeting is pretty small.}

I knew of Jim Bergquist more than I knew him when I arrived in Anacortes in late 2006. Some years past, about twenty or so I guess, Jim and I had been volunteers for The Hunger Project. I had read about his work with Pike Place Fish in ‘Catch: A Fishmongers Guide to Greatness and we had both started our consulting practices around the same time. So now, we live about three miles apart and are able to get together on a regular basis. The Pike Place Fish Market is a frequent topic of our conversations, mainly because I am so interested in what took a near bankrupt fish market to a twenty-year run of successes and made it a brand highly recognized in the world of organizational development.

What I saw last Thursday evening came pretty close to answering for me why the truly standout companies are not afraid to share their secrets. Like Toyota, Pike Place Fish Market has been openly sharing the philosophy that led to its sustained success for years and after all this time has very few imitators. Why? I cannot be sure I have the  answer but from my recent experience I certainly now have an informed opinion. It turns out that the folks at Pike Place Fish operate from a central purpose, a commitment to “World Peace and Prosperity for Everyone.” Yea buddy, that is what I said. Nearly every one of the staff members present was wearing either a hoodie or a cap with this purpose prominently stated someplace on the garment and as each staff member shared something that evening it wasn’t more than a minute or two before someone else tied that contribution back to their purpose. As I write this, I have a good idea how it sounds and I can tell you that I have never witnessed anything more authentic in my life. The experience was humbling and inspiring.

The folks at Pike Place Fish Market, with the help of Jim Bergquist, figured out a long time ago that their daily work had to be about something larger than just making money, c’mon, it is fish they are selling! You get the fish in the morning, you stack them up, you sell them, and you go home at night and then do it again the next day. How long can you do that and stay inspired? The guys at Pike Place Fish have figured out how to do it consistently for over twenty years and John Yokoyama  told me Thursday evening that this team is their best ever and they are definitely at the top of their game.

What struck me part way through the meeting was that this was not a special event; they do this every two weeks, without fail, and have been for over twenty years. Jim Bergquist has been a regular contributor for these twenty years and is clearly a revered part of their tradition. The folks at Pike Place Fish do not need Jim Bergquist, they want him there, he is an integral part of their team and philosophy and a source of objectivity when they get tangled up in their shorts, and they do!

As a professional catalyst I couldn’t have been more validated by my experience last Thursday evening. And, like I said, it is clearer for me now that the very best have nothing much to fear from the rest of the companies out there, even in their own industries. Honestly, what makes the Pike Place Fish Market rare is that the owner and employees are up to something a lot more naturally engaging than making money, and not that many companies see the possibility in that.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments (3)
• Trackbacks
• Share Link